THE ART OF RONIN LEADERSHIP

Leadership tips drawn from a lifetime of diverse encounters in the professional world.

In this compact business book, Howard looks over his own history of working for 16 years as chief security officer for Microsoft and 22 years before that working for the CIA, and pulls together all the most important lessons he learned along the way. He’s added many insights and precepts over the years to what he calls his “leadership toolkit.” Over the course of this book, he recounts specific incidents in his professional life—encounters with micromanagers, inspiring leaders, and a variety of challenges—and derives a series of lessons from them to pass along to his readers. Throughout, he seeks to stress the difference between managers and genuine leaders; managers “get things done” and “do not care if they leave dead bodies in their wake,” he contends, and thus don’t inspire those around them. Leaders, he asserts, are different; they can also get things done but are far more invested in creating a teaching culture and generating loyalty and cooperation. Howard’s stories from his colorful career history are often diverting, particularly when he recalls troubleshooting at Microsoft; when he started, he notes, he “went from having a few direct reports to 19!” The persistent disappointment of the book, however, is that the lessons that he conveys are so bland and predictable: “Never be satisfied with the status quo,” he writes at one point, for instance. “As a leader, you need to pursue things outside of your comfort zone and contribute where you can,” he writes at another. He also solemnly informs his readers that there should be coordination between the various parts of an organization. After encountering several such chestnuts, readers will start to wonder if the author’s impressively varied experience will yield greater insights; by the time they reach the end, in which Howard notes that “you should always be preparing for the future,” they may lose hope.

A friendly but highly derivative series of management lessons.