©2002 Tim Parker

Dean’s Pick:
BENJAMIN AKANDE, Dean
e-mail: akandeb@webster.edu

“Good to Great” by Jim Collins

I found the book to be a remarkable recipe book for leaders who are not content with being good, but are striving for greatness. Collins addressed three simple truths:

1. If you begin with the who rather than the what you can more easily adapt to a changing world.
2. Having the right people on the bus is crucial because the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away.
3. If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction—you still won’t have a great company.

The verdict is clear: Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

WIL MILES, Professor, Business Department, Webster Groves Main Campus
e-mail: mileswg@webster.edu

“Fooled by Randomness”
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is the best book that I have read recently, or in a long time, actually. Taleb is an options trader in New York and must think in probabilistic terms to succeed in this very tough business. He has thought long and hard about how we can use an understanding of randomness to help us understand the world we live in, a probabilistic as opposed to a deterministic one, without falling into the traps that a superficial understanding of randomness sets for us. He ties randomness nicely to some broad schools of philosophy without beating the ties to death.

I have never read anything of this quality about randomness before. It is a very good, but not easily mastered book.

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DOUG O'BANNON, Associate Professor, Business Department, Webster Groves Main Campus
e-mail: dobannon@webster.edu

“Strategy” by Liddell Hart

Although I teach business strategy, I read this classic work on military strategy to broaden my understanding of the nature of strategy in general and indirect strategy in particular. Hart emphasizes the indirect attack, or the line of least resistance. The indirect strategy applies equally well to the military as it does to business. I see parallels, for example, with Hewlett-Packard’s indirect attack on the computer industry, which avoided its rivals’ superior strength in PCs, and instead attacked at the periphery in the printer market, where the rivals were weak and caught by surprise. Overall, a very interesting book.

PAT DURYEA, Adjunct Instructor, Luke AFB, Arizona Campus
e-mail: pduryea@webster.edu

“Developing the Leader Within You”
by John C. Maxwell

As an instructor at Luke AFB, teaching “military” students about leadership is sometimes a challenge. However, as a Human Resources program instructor, I teach “humanness,” which happens to be at the core of Maxwell’s book. Maxwell professes that leaders must be people developers in order to be successful. He accomplishes his mission as he takes the reader through a variety of self-awareness exercises—planting leadership seeds. The finished product that emerges from reading this “easy-read” book, is a changed individual—a leader.

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