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.