Reviews and Comments

The chapter on Europe is also a mish mash of opinion and observation untethered from serious analysis. Not exactly wrong, but unprovable.

Best when it covers the basic nuts & bolts of conducting 1-1s, reviews, etc.

Gets very hand-wavy when it covers office politics or networking.

This was a book that was recommended on Rands Leadership Slack, and I don't know why.

Russia is sorta a prisoner of it's geography on that it lacks warm water ports. But China, the subject of chapter 2 is hardly trapped. Nothing particularly insightful about geography in this chapter. The important part is that Chona is expanding its navy, but that's more industrial and military policy, not really geography.

Author Peter Marshall attempts to explain the geo politics of Russia by going over how it's flat to the west, and therefore it was forced to occupy Crimea when the Ukrainian people overthrew the pro-Russian Yanukovich in 2014.

And while it's true that Russia is hard-pressed to have a workable warm water port and the land is flat, the statement that Russia is forced to do anything is not backed up by any kind of analysis in the book that takes into account other ways of existing.

Particularly telling of the lack of analysis is the author's statement that Russia would have no difficulty occupying and holding Ukrainian territory to the Dnieper river. Just a few years after being written, Marshall really underestimated Ukrainian nationalism.

This might end up being too "academic" for me, but I'm giving it a go. Because I work in satellites, i want to better understand complex systems. Air traffic control has been a very successful complex system.

However, this thing is 1700 pages by my e-reader 's count. The introduction was 45 pages. We'll see how well I manage.

Enjoying this a bunch now. Hoping nothing goes sideways!

Giving up on this one too. I suspect there's dome good stuff here, but the author relates multiple examples that are just exhausting to contemplate.

Shitty person says something ("stigma of illegitimacy would be a good thing") Second person then guesses as to why the person might have expressed that. But has to express it in the form of a non judgemental question. Then shitty person and decent person go through a series of guessing game answers and questions.

Because we have to express ourselves nonviolently and seek to understand the good reasoning behind shitty people utterances and actions.

And... No.

So far, Rosenberg is advocating for communicating in a way i find generally useful and positive.

Generally.

There's two things I'm going to find irritating if he doesn't address them tho:

1. There's a thread running through that if we just express ourselves with this nonviolent method, that we'll solve many interpersonal problems. I suspect this won't go as far as proffered. If we just be nice, we get better results. It feels like a form of respectability politics in comms. People will stop hurting us if we just communicate in a non judgemental nonviolent way.

2. We're supposed to avoid moral judgement, the idea that people we disagree with are bad. More like they do bad things that upset us. But i see no other way of viewing people who consistently do bad things. At a certain point I'm going to make a judgement regarding their character.

More philosophy and tips than coherent practices. Some absolute bullshit as well. Not recommended.

I give up on this thing. Aside from the bullshit I've already highlighted, i would rather a bunch of exercises or methods not a hodge-podge of tips and philosophy (if they're good).

Radical Candor does a thing that a lot of other business books do and that does not help most of them. The author liberally sprinkles in anecdotal stories from her own experience and that of various famous leaders. These theoretically reinforce the correctness of her philosophy but such cherry-picking is very dubious.

We have a work thing at 11:47 pm tonight, so I'm going to kill a bit of time seeing if I can pick this book up again.