But you can get that from other books on this list and avoid the has-beens and Hollywood blather in this one. I wanted to love this huge-selling book. Like the author, I think leadership is often a balancing act between paradoxes. Unfortunately, the author, a longtime psychologist and former CEO, ignores such real-world conundrums and contrives paradoxes that are mostly artificial, insipid, or just plain incorrect. Praise, he insists, demotivates.
Technology invariably backfires.
We learn from success, not failure. There may be glimmers of truth lurking in these assertions, but the author's platitudes leave no room for nuance. Piling up so many sweeping generalizations also invariably leads to repeated self-contradiction. Also, never trust a business book without an index. There is some value here.