Book Review: Haunting The CEO

Posted by Elliot Ross on February 28, 2011 Leave a comment (2) Go to comments

Haunting the CEO, A tale of true leadership in an era of IT failure

John D. Hughes ISBN 978-0-615-35600-6

Full disclosure, I was having a hard time finding this book in Canada, the author heard my lament on twitter and most graciously sent me a copy (signed no less!)

There are many books about leadership, and also about leadership within the technology field. These leadership texts are often written by academics based on myriads of statistics and research studies. There is nothing implicitly wrong with these statistics and studies, but it can leave the content a little text bookish, clinical, and dry for some people.

In this book, Mr. Hughes takes us down a different track.

He chose to use the format of a fictional novel, and within its storyline he applies real world leadership lessons that follow a failing CIO on the journey of improving his own leadership and performance. The author paints a vivid picture of a new CEO taking the helm of a struggling business and demanding improvements, or else.

As an executive in the small to medium enterprise, what keeps you up at night?

Answering that question is the purpose of this book. The thing that haunts the CEO and keeps him up at night is the IT function in his business that not successfully improving business results.

Just as a little sugar helps get the medicine down, couching real life, real world, leadership lessons in in this fictional story form makes an engaging read, while providing much to think about in our own leadership situations.

I highly recommend this book to all SME executives. If you are outside of IT, to see that you do not need to be a techie to demand the most from your IT leadership, and definitely to all IT leadership. (or aspiring technology professionals) It clearly demonstrates that the technology leadership function must grow beyond plugging in computers and writing some software code.