Sidewalk Book Review: “dare to lead”

When I saw the copy of Brené Brown’s dare to lead in the sidewalk library, I immediately grabbed it from behind the glass door.  

Brown, a university research professor and quasi-corporate coach, was famous for a 2010 Ted talk she’d given on “The Power of Vulnerability.”  I’d heard about her talk but never saw it myself. 

When I opened the book to find its publication date (2018), I saw I was holding a first edition.  Sold!  Into my backpack it went.

Once home and relaxed, I skimmed the introduction where Brown spells out her book’s “deceptively simple and somewhat selfish goal,” which is to share everything she’s learned in the past two decades about working with and within “hundreds of organizations,” explaining in 300 pages “what it takes to be a daring leader.”

Already, she was losing me.

In her forward note, Brown shares an anecdote about feeling nervous one day before giving a speech to a large audience of dark-suited corporate officers.  She shares, as well, about feeling nervous in front of similarly large audiences of military brass and non-profit administrators. She shares how she overcame her fears – or at least how she got used to them.

While Brown’s book is likely full of sparkling anecdotes, witty and pithy discoveries, and may indeed provide a path for someone seeking the courage and vulnerability to succeed in the swirling eddies of corporate corruption, folks like me, those who have already sacrificed part of their lives to and escaped from the high-dollar lure of organizational obesity, may prefer to follow my lead – if they dare – and close Brown’s book, take a deep breath, then go outside to check on the plants in the garden.

Sidewalk Rating:  0 Cracks.   Returned!

Sidewalk Book Review: “The Big Four”

Around my neighbor-hood in San Francisco are small community libraries, just boxes set up on single posts with swinging glass doors. 

You can take a book or leave a book.  As many as you like, really.

That’s where I found Oscar Lewis’ The Big Four, his 1938 epic tale of the Central Pacific Railroad’s 19^th-century control over California.  

As America rebuilt after the Civil War, the eponymous big four – Charles Crocker, big in body and ego; Leland Stanford, lucky and terribly not; Mark Hopkins, modestly meek and meticulous; and Collis P Huntington, the quiet mind behind it all – operated like big-tech barons today:  corrupting Congress, controlling communications, constricting the growth of the people. 

After several colorful bios – including Theodore Judah, the enthusiastic engineer whose early death could not quash his transcontinental dream – Lewis, starting in Omaha, takes the reader on a five-day ride along the rails, across the hot and dusty Midwest summer, up and over two steep mountain ranges, through an eye-itching salt-squinched desert.    

Lewis’ closing depiction of the Central Pacific’s monopoly, of its economic choke on California, perfectly predicts the modern-day global powers of Facebook, Google and Twitter — three modern railroads, each enjoying its own internet monopoly, each growing fat as the world grows thin.

Sidewalk Rating: 5 Cracks. Loved It!