<aside> ℹ️ These chapter summaries reflect my own interpretation of the key arguments and insights in the book – other people might get a lot more out of reading each chapter (and they’re fun reads). There is nuance, story and special language in many of the chapters that I have omitted in the summaries.

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Review (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ on Goodreads)

I found The Art of Leadership more entertaining than it was dense with insights. Lopp uses stories, metaphors and a casual, humorous narrative to make the chapters fun to read. But as I was taking notes from the book, I often found myself traversing a lot of narrative to get to the key message.

Metaphors and homebrewed concepts sometimes got in the way of the key message or argument of a given chapter. I'd get drawn in to the chapter called "Anti-Flow" to realize it was just saying to leave some unstructured time to have shower thoughts. My key takeaway from "Spidey-Sense" was that you should trust your intuition, and use the intuitions of other people when there's not enough data. And a chapter called "Kobayashi Maru Management" used an elaborate Star Trek narrative to describe how to use avoid mistakes in change management through gradually broadening feedback and communication circles.

If you appreciate a creative narrative with a sense of humor, you'll love this format. If you're here for density of insights or advice, this might not be the best resource.

My favorite chapters talk about a few things that happen at companies but we don’t talk about enough:

• Chapter 12 talks about how we often neglect the engineering part of the hiring funnel, missing opportunities to optimize, but crucially leaving the candidate with too many gaps to visualize themselves at the company.
• Chapter 19 talks suggests that executives gather context and avoid acting in the first 90 days. And how when they start acting, they often fall into the trap of trying to build consensus for everything even in situations where they could act quickly based on experience.
• Chapter 20 acknowledges the split that tends to form between the new guard and the old guard in growing companies, and suggests some ways to begin to address that split.

I loved the author’s humility and sense of humor throughout. Overall, I’d recommend this book as an audiobook to read casually rather than something to read cover to cover.

Notes

Manager

Chapter 1: when it’s boring, get curious

You’ll encounter lots of repetitive and even boring situations. Lots of meetings. Figure out how you can get value from everything you do, which might involve using a meeting you find pointless to try to learn something.

Chapter 2: don’t take on too much

Do what you commit to and set a tone for sticking to your commitments.