I Have the Watch: Becoming a Leader Worth Following by Jon Rennie

I Have the Watch: Becoming a Leader Worth Following by Jon Rennie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a review copy of this from the publisher through BookSirens. The title caught my eye, then the cover. As it turns out, Mr. Rennie and I have a coupe of things in common. He was a Navy nuclear officer on a submarine in charge of the Reactor Controls Division and I was a nuclear reactor operator (reactor controls was our division) before becoming an officer myself, another, if different, commonality. Now he was on submarines and while I grew up around subs – maternal grandfather, father, younger brother – and was a sub volunteer the day I enlisted, I saw the light while in hands-on training at a reactor prototype and realized that reactor operators on submarines had less than no life (even the officers got to go home, but the reactor, operating or shut down, always had to have a reactor operator on watch), so I moved up, so to speak, and was assigned to a couple of nuclear aircraft carriers. And Rennie and I are both mechanical engineers. He left the Navy after five years (it’s not for everyone, and a nuke life is harder than most) and parlayed his experience into design and manufacturing; I became an officer in the Civil Engineer Corps, finished a 20 year career and parlayed my experience into facilities construction management and operations. So, the title spoke to me – those words carry a strong meaning – and the cover definitely attracted.

To use a term I learned in the Navy, the BLUF*: This book is not about the Navy. Not even Navy leadership, save for a couple of anecdotes. But it is about leadership, and is a pretty good capsule of many of the traits and methods I’ve adopted over the years. I am always looking to add to the toolbox on that subject, for ways to improve myself, and for good sources to recommend to aspiring leaders. The book is short, and the sections short for the leader who claims to have little time to read – an excuse in my vocabulary because a good leader always makes time to read. There is some overlap and repetition, but that’s because Rennie composed this from “a curated collection of articles [he had] written over the past five years.” The articles are to the point, which is good and I appreciate that. They are conversational, even if there are some statistics peppered throughout – but no citations in case you go looking. There is nothing new here that any good student of leadership hasn’t already seen; any good leader hasn’t tried, implemented. But it is in a compact, easily digested form. There are stories, and they are real, not parable-ized like the Blanchard or Johnson of Lencioni books usually assigned that I am not fond of. What I am fond of is people first, and Rennie nails that.

Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past by Sarah Parcak

Archaeology from Space: How the Future Shapes Our Past by Sarah Parcak

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I requested an advance review copy of this last year but I wasn’t selected. As I only request books I am interested in (novel concept, I know, but some people just like to get lots of books and shotgun their requests…I’m judicious with the reading time I have left!), I filed it away for some day in the future to look for after it was published. So it’s someday. Actually, last month was someday. I finished this at the end of January, but have had a hard time taking the time to write reviews. Call it “reviewer’s block”. Anyway…

The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders

The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve had this on my professional shelf at work for a few years and took time to dig into it. In Anders’ Introduction, he bemoans the ability to identify great people as having deteriorated. My margin note was “we all want ‘great’ people, but not everyone is great. Not by a long shot (90% of all Navy officers used to be in the top 10%)”. The parenthetical aside recalled the old evaluating system, where if someone was not in the top 10%, it was a career killer, so everybody was – except the ones who needed a new career. The Introduction is littered with superlatives like “crucial new terms”, and definitive pronouncements like [a notion] “will show”…yes, I understand if you’re selling a concept, you have to guarantee something, but that’s a mental eye-roll for me when I see stuff like that.

Anyway, there are nuggets to be found in here for the “regular” hiring supervisor/manager, but they are hidden in plain sight among a lot of anecdotes that really don’t apply to that regular world. Fortunately, some of those nuggets are bolded. Not all of Anders’ bold choices are usable, but I’m sure some will be for some readers. I’ll share here a few I flagged.

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips

Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up by Tom Phillips

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Okay, the title grabbed me and Smith’s writing kept me.

He says, “There are lots of books about humanity’s finest achievements— the great leaders, the genius inventors, the indomitable human spirit. There are also lots of books about mistakes we’ve made: both individual screw-ups and society-wide errors. But there aren’t quite so many about how we manage to get things profoundly, catastrophically wrong over and over again.” Yep.

First chapter nails it with the root of all the upf*cking…our brains. From availability heuristics to pareidolia to confirmations biases, Smith condenses a host of our problems into an informative and sardonic yet still funny package.

He’ll probably be dismissed by many for his cavalier relation of the topics, but the source material is there under, around and over his wonderful sense of humor. On pareidolia, he says he used to think confirmation bias was the real culprit, and everything he’d read, uh … confirmed that. (See where he’s going with that?)