In Chapter 11 Marquet uses his new playbook to reimagine how the El Faro could have been saved. This is the last chapter in Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say – and What You Don’t. The author could have just as easily reimagined the outcomes of the Pinto design or the Deepwater Horizon disasters. The theme throughout the book is that Industrial-age thinking fails more often in the age of Knowledge Work. Work in the 21st Century requires an admission that a supervisor and their managers can’t direct every minute action, nor can they be the smartest or most knowledgeable person in every situation. Given my perspective of knowledge work, the rate of technical change begins to degrade your skills as soon as you stop learning and using them.
Marquet’s first book Turn the Ship Around, changed how many who read it thought about leadership. It was important. Language is Leadership does not present that grand sweep of a new philosophy, but rather continues to build on the foundation of the first book. What makes it more important is that it presents the reader with a set of ideas on how to implement the Author’s vision. It is tactically a more useful and important book. I would certainly suggest reading Turn The Ship Around, but if Language is Leadership doesn’t follow that I believe you will struggle with implementing a more effective approach to leadership.
I use several of the ideas described in the book. For example, I now always program in pauses with steps for reflecting and re-committing for almost all of my activities. While these steps were part of Scrum and Kanban, until I read this book it was easy to trivialize these activities as just part of the process or decide they were not needed if I was working alone. Language is Leadership reminds us why these activities are not only important but in some cases, critical for human life and safety. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is Marquet’s most important book yet.
Next week we begin the READ (my first time) of Actionable Agile Metrics Volume II, Advanced Topics in Predictability; which is available at LeanPub. We re-read Volume I in 2018 (link to the first installment) that book was life changing…I am looking forward to Volume II.
Previous installments of our re-read of Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say – and What You Don’t (buy a copy)!
Week 1: Logistics, Introduction, Foreword – https://bit.ly/3sTqyu3
Week 2: El Faro – https://bit.ly/3RnkUue
Week 3: The New Playbook – https://bit.ly/3Llgmki
Week 4: Control the Clock – https://bit.ly/45UFp5Z
Week 5: Collaborate – https://bit.ly/3PzFiXI
Week 6: Commit – https://bit.ly/46DMmsF
Week 7: Complete – https://bit.ly/47aTDQe
Week 8: Improve – https://bit.ly/3FMT1Vw
Week 9: Connect – https://bit.ly/3QW05Wj
Week 10: Applying – https://bit.ly/3ufAq1K
Week 11: Red-Blue Operating System – https://bit.ly/3SQLuNb
