This week, Dan Oswald reviews the book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us and shares the questions the book made him ask about management style and the insights into the necessity of trusting employees to consider a new way of managing employees.

Read Dan’s review

Before I headed to the airport today, the president of our company, Bob Brady, handed me a book and said something like, “This is a quick read and I really think you’ll enjoy it.” The book he gave me was The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed, by Adam Bryant.

Boy, was Bob right.

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The other day, a colleague sent me the results of a survey that says Americans would like to have Vince Lombardi or Oprah Winfrey as their coach. That got me thinking. It got me thinking about whom I would choose as my coach. Who should be in the running? What makes each an appealing choice?

I started my list with the two mentioned in the survey results and moved on from there.

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This week, instead of posting on his own blog, Dan wrote a book review of The Checklist Manifesto for the Resources for Humans blog.  Here’s an excerpt.

“I had been thinking recently about the importance of a good “to do” list, so when I stumbled upon the Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. I decided it was fate and bought a copy. Now I must admit, I had not heard anything about the book despite the fact that it was a New York Times bestseller and had won “Best Book of the Month” from Amazon back in December 2009.”

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I hope I don’t disappoint when I tell you that what you’re about to read isn’t about Tiger Woods, the OctoMom, or anything remotely salacious. Instead, this is about you.

Let me share with you a story that Jim Stovall tells in his book You Don’t Have to Be Blind to See. It’s about two tribes that lived in the Andes Mountains and were constantly at war. One tribe lived in the lowlands and the other high in the mountains. The mountain people invaded the lowlanders one day and, as part of their plundering, kidnapped a baby of one of the lowlander families. They took the infant with them back up into the mountains.

The lowlanders didn’t know how to climb the mountain. They didn’t know any of the trails that the mountain people used. They didn’t know where to find the mountain people or how to track them in the steep terrain.

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