Sunday, June 6, 2010

Book Review: Lead Like Ike

Geoff Loftus' recent book Lead Like Ike interested me when I first saw it. I thought that the leadership of Dwight Eisenhower was a good topic for a book. The book sought to take the leadership that Eisenhower gave for the D-Day operation and apply it to business. The author gave numerous business principles and strategies from the strategy of the Allied assault on Normandy. The message of the book was simple, take the strategies of Eisenhower and apply them to a business stetting. The difficulty I had with this book was that it gave business principles from a war metaphor. War as a metaphor for anything falls terribly short because the motives and objects of war are unique. Thus trying to take business principles from a situation where resources are supplied virtually without limits and the motivation for the strategy is one of just cause, rarely the case in business. The author wrote like a historian not as a businessman, which would be great if it wasn't a book with the direct purpose of giving guidance to business principles. In the end the book seemed like a cheesy attempt to meet a possible market group, businessmen who like history and biographies.

**Thomas Nelson Publishers provided this book to me for free in order for me to review it.

Movin' on Up and Out of Dallas

A broken window and a trashed house void of most of what was there awaited my roommates. They had not been robbed it just looked like they had. As I left I took most of the furniture and entertainment, and the window which had always been broken was no longer my problem. As I moved off of Belmont Avenue and back to Nashville I though of what it meant that I had left Dallas.

A part of me never like Dallas much, the side that likes nice scenery, cooler weather, and less arrogant citizens. However as I look back now I realize that in many ways Dallas was a great place for a season of my life. While in one sense I am definitely gone, physically absent from the city I called home for nearly four years. In another sense a part of me remains, as long as my friends with whom I fought through four grueling years of Seminary remain. The bond that was forged through exegeticals, paradigms, colossal amounts of reading, and an altered perspective will continue forever. These men and the many friends I made through church, ultimate, and work brought joy and grace into my life which I will not soon forget.

The new city (well the proper term would be renew city but I don't think the word works that way), new job, new house, and new opportunities bring excitement and anxiety. Today I started visiting patients as a Chaplain for the first time, the first man had just been diagnosed with cancer. It is a different world to sit in a room with the hurting and dying, when I spent four years sitting in rooms with piles of books.

As I once again say hello to Nashville, I don't know that I ever said goodbye to Dallas, because a part of my heart is still there. (With people, if they move too, I will no longer have heartiness in Dallas.)