I trust the Holidays have been good to you and yours.  Thanks to all of the well-wishers for your e-mails on my new career path – it is humbling and rewarding to receive such wonderful feedback.  It makes a difference – thank you so very much!

So – how has your ‘Continuing Education’ been going?  No, not your required trade CE, but your personal CE?  As someone told me years ago, there are two ways to grow once your formal schooling is complete – the people you meet and the books you read.  Remember – you become like who you hang around, both personally and literally.  Do yourself a favor:  Make ’08 the year you decide to seek out someone you can look to as a mentor.  Then, commit to read at least four (4) leadership books this year.  That’s one a quarter – surely you can make the time for that.  You’ll find your first book of ’08 here… 

Judgment – How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls by Noel Tichy and Warren Bennis (©2007 Portfolio/Penguin Press).  I was traveling on business when I saw this book in an airport bookstore and said, “I have to get it.”  Of course, I waited until I got home and ordered it from Amazon (two-day shipping free with an Amazon Prime membership) and waited for the book to arrive.  I’m actually breaking a bit of a rule in that I haven’t actually completed the book yet;  HHH owever, I’ve read enough to say that this is a ‘must-read’ book for ’08.  Tichy (books reviewed in this column in October of ’04 and January of ’05) and Bennis (who along with Drucker, Maxwell and Peters is virtually leadership deity) tap into a vein of leadership that has previously gone unrecognized and certainly not put under the microscope of scientific research.  Using recent, real world examples from GE, HP, Boeing and others, the authors posit that making the correct judgment calls separate winning leaders from losing leaders.  While this might seem like a big ‘duh!’ to most of us, they take it a significant step further:  The key isn’t in the number of correct calls, but in making the critical calls when it really matters.  This evaluation takes place within a matrix across three domains:  People, Strategy and Times of Crisis.  The Matrix then evaluates those three domains in light of four areas of knowledge:  Self, Social Network, Organizational and Contextual.  Then authors then fill out the concepts using ‘pulled from the headlines’ business stories of winners and losers.  And, as in every Tichy book I’ve read, the last 90 pages contain a ‘Handbook for Leadership Judgment’ (co-written by Chris DeRose) giving you practical worksheets and exercises for developing your own successful Judgment Matrix.

It has been said that adversity doesn’t build character, but rather reveals it.  This book will demonstrate that truth, but will also give you practical advice on developing (as Tichy calls it) your own “Teachable Point of View” and how to develop these traits within yourself and your organization.  5 Stars