State Legistlative Leaders Foundation

Books for Leaders

Welcome to our book recommendation page. Our aim here is to alert leaders, their staffs, and the business community to books and ideas that we hope could be of some practical significance towards addressing the many problems that we face today in our communities, our states, and country-wide. These books may not necessarily have obvious significance to leadership or reflect a clear path towards new policy or legislation. However, in the spirit that luck comes to the prepared, we note that innovation and new solutions to old problems can rarely be planned for in advance and are often the result of the serendipitious meeting of the right idea with the right person at the right time.

If you have a recommendation of your own, or a constructive comment, please email Ken Morton at kmorton@sllf.org.

February, 2010

The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA* Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs
*Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
By Michael Belfiore

A government program that works!

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the federal agency founded by President Eisenhower as a response to the Soviet launch of Sputnik, has succeeded beyond its expectations. Its primary mission is to give the United States a technological edge over everyone else and to ensure that the U.S. is never surprised by the technological innovations of other nations. It is also a spectacular model for research and development and has proven many times over that world-changing technical developments do not require enormous investments and large bureaucracies.

DARPA researchers and contractors can take much of the credit for inventing the internet, for beginning to develop robots that can provide emergency care to soldiers in the field, for developing vehicles that can navigate without human intervention, and to one of its current objectives to develop complete energy self-sufficiency through a variety of possibilities from solar panels of unprecedented efficiency to portable hydroelectric generators that could be installed in the field wherever there is running water.

DARPA’s focus continues to be military, but as an agency it is open both to ideas from any source and to applications of its research to any practical purpose. Its management style is hands off and it often inspires innovation by running contests and awarding prizes. All its directors are term limited so that trying to keep their jobs can never be a priority and they have a strong incentive to accomplish their missions within the two to six year period that they will remain at DARPA.

 
James Michael Curley: A Short Biography with Personal Reminiscences
by William M. Bulger

William M. Bulger, former President of the Massachusetts Senate and long time friend of the SLLF, has written a brief but lively biography of one of his heroes: James Michael Curley, the U.S. Congressman, Mayor of Boston, jailbird twice over, and Governor of Massachusetts, who lived from 1874 to 1958. We follow Curley’s life from his first neighborhood campaigns to the heights of success in politics and leadership and to his eventual descent as the game of politics changed, fortunes sank, and new leaders and constituencies arose.

Curley's strength was the personal touch. In troubled times, he met with individual constituents on a nearly continuous basis. He found them jobs, gave them money, and otherwise earned the love and trust of those he served. When he was convicted and sentenced to jail for defrauding the government for taking a civil service exam for someone else, he defended himself by saying "I helped a friend" and used "I did it for a friend" as his slogan.

In this intimate account, we learn nearly as much about Bulger’s view of politics and politicians as we do about Curley’s life and views. And we also acquire a nice portrait of Boston and its politics from the early 20th century.

Bulger ends by stating that Curley’s life “affirms the idea that the political struggle is worth undertaking.”

March / April 2009
Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average, by Joseph T. Hallinan

How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

These two books cover similar territory and are both well written and pleasant to read. The overriding point of the first book, Why We Make Mistakes, is that we allow overconfidence in our knowledge and abilities to lead us into error - almost all of us think that we're better than we are or know more than we actually do.

In How We Decide, the concluding observation is that we need to strike a balance between our higher reasoning skills and the unconscious knowledge that is revealed to us through our emotions. An appropriate dose of rationality can bring us back from the brink of a bad decision, but the flip side is that we ought to listen to (though not necessarily always obey) our emotional response to a situation. Reason and emotion are not in conflict, but rather are complementary and mutually supportive. Experience - thinking about thinking, in this case - can be a guide to better decision making.

Both titles are filled with illuminating anecdotes and sound advice that all of us, but especially leaders who have to make judgments on issues about which they may not know as much as they'd like, will find valuable.

February 2009
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely

We're all aware that we humans often behave irrationally. But it hasn't been obvious until now that we are often irrational in predictable ways. And once we know this fact, we can adjust our selves, our opinions, and our policy preferences.

From Amazon:"A marvelous book that is both thought-provoking and highly entertaining, ranging from the power of placebos to the pleasures of Pepsi. Ariely unmasks the subtle but powerful tricks that our minds play on us, and shows us how we can prevent being fooled."
-- Jerome Groopman, Recanati Chair of Medicine, Harvard Medical School,and New York Times bestselling author of How Doctors Think

January 2009
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

Noted New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell's third book examines the power of being in the right place at the right time in determining eventual success in a person's life and career. Bill Gates' good fortune to be attending one of the few schools in the world that had a computer at the time is a main example.

We also recommend Gladwell's other books - The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

December 2008
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein

The basic thesis behind Nudge is that there are simple, often cost free ways of encouraging people to make decisions that are better for themselves and their communities. The authors target what they call the "decision architecture" that is always implicit in the decisions we make about our health, our savings and investments, the environment, our schools, and other areas of importance to a well run civil society.

One approach is that of setting the best defaults in a given situation. The authors use organ donation as straightforward example. Currently, the default is that a person's organs will not be donated unless a person has specifically opted in. The authors propose the expediency of making organ donation the default so that people have to opt out if they do not wish to participate. In this case, no one is coerced, no one is less free, but because we are often victims of inertia, the organ donor rate will go up without anybody having to do anything other than switch the default.

Thaler and Sunstein cover many policy areas in detail including employee savings programs (they suggest that employees should be automatically enrolled in a savings program, with the option to opt out), environmental issues, health plans and prescription drug coverage, school choice, and others.