An Elegant Review

Here's one reason why Managing Leadership is such an enjoyable blog. This excerpt is from what is a genuinely positive book review:

It must be said, however, that while there is much more of real value in this book, there is a price to pay. The presentation is simultaneously ingratiating and overweening. It is riddled with (among some pertinent ones) irrelevant and falsely profound quotes from trivial sources (such as rock stars). It ineptly and inexplicably attempts to render “regular guy” vernacular, and even cringingly out-of-touch efforts to appear in touch with the attitudes of younger generations. There is the always annoying habit of adopting (in this case) Japanese terminology on the incorrect assumption that it conveys – or somehow imparts – deeper meaning than its American English counterparts (he even uses “dojo” in place of “training room”).

There is too much of the insufferable “awful/perfect” contrasting of the supposedly single-minded incompetence of much current managerial practice with the methods promoted in the book, combined with irritating and simplistic imputations of these failures to Western or American culture. And a cultish “way of” this or “path of” that manner appears all-too-often, together with the frequently unavoidable suspicion that the book is really just a propaganda tool for Toyota.