Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Failures of Leadership Author: Tim Irwin Publisher: NelsonFree
I was genuinely excited when I saw “Derailed” on the list of books I could get from BookSneeze to read, review and blog about. Unfortunately it’s a book that produces high expectations but ultimately fails to deliver.
The concept of this book is sound. Look at the derailment of some very high profile people and draw conclusions on how derailment happens to highly competent people based on any common denominators he could find. The chapters and stories told about the derailment of Robert Nardelli, Carly Fiorina, Durk Jager, Steve Heyer, Frank Raines, and Dick Fuld were well told and very entertaining.
The problem is entertainment doesn’t make for an in-depth critique of what really went wrong. It also tends to mean that the examples are looked at with less then objective eyes. In this case it really did appear that the writer knew what he was looking for and highlighted pretty much only those things that fitted the outcome he wanted.
The second half of the book is basically about general platitudes on leadership. No one could argue with what he is saying but he takes far too many words to say it.
Michael Hyatt of Thomas Nelson, the publishers of this book has stated in a blog post that one shouldn’t be scared to stop reading a book partway through if it isn’t interesting enough. This would have happened was this book had it not been for the fact that as I promised to read it fully to write the review (ironically for Thomas Nelson’s BookSneeze).
On the positive side it did remind me, as do many books, to look at the flaws in my character that could derail me. So it certainly wasn’t a complete waste of time!
Unfortunately I can only give this one a rating of two stars.
Tags: Book Review, BookSneeze, Carly Fiorina, Derailed, Dick Fuld, Durk Jager, Frank Raines, Leadership, Robert Nardelli, Steve Heyer, Tim Irwin
