A short professional vent, followed by a reading recommendation.

I work for an American government Agency, which in our hierarchy, is under a parent government Department. After the change in administrations, our department head changed, as is the custom, and at some point, our Agency head will change as well. Our new Department head is a retired four star, and as such he is very familiar with the Service Chief’s reading lists. He may have contributed a few himself over the years. So, when he reached out to all hands in his welcome aboard, and said he was willing to hear from us, I sent a request for his reading list recommendations for his new crew in his new job. We have, and he has, a different mission than his last assignment, but leadership development has a lot of similarities across job descriptions (good article in the weekend WSJ on 5/13/17 about leadership traits in sports team captains).

Foolish me. Weeks later, I get a registered mail envelope at the office (because WTF, it’s only money and we don’t all have company e-mail accounts), from the CCHCO in our Agency’s OCCHCO (head of HR in plain English), referring me to the agency reading list links, and telling me in polite but very firm terms, DO NOT send such a request directly to a senior manager. I am probably radioactive in some circles now.

Two thoughts and one memory came to mind. The thoughts were, that I had figured out on my own initiative two years ago that my employer had internal reading lists, because certainly nobody was going to publicize it to me. It required a lot of digging through links on my lunch hours and breaks. And, that I had gone over the lists, self-commented that far too many of the citations were from the self-help-leadership sections of Barns & Noble and Amazon, and that of the remaining ones, I had already read many, had saved hard copies of a few in my own library, and that some of them were written by people I’m connected with here on LinkedIn (so yeah people, I do read your stuff). This letter, and the implication that I didn’t know there was a reading list, and wasn’t smart enough to have found it by myself, and hadn’t used it for self-development, impacted my feelings about my senior management, and not in a positive way.

The memory, is of a different four star (same branch, same time period), who I served under as a civilian DoD employee, in beautiful Ramadi on the shores of the Historic Euphrates river in 04-05 at FOB Blue-D. One day, the Chaplin and I were in the snack area at the entrance to the CIC talking about Hammes’s “Sling and a Stone”, and our four star walks up and we all chat for a moment. I offered my copy to him, but he said he was familiar with it. While he didn’t push any particular book, he was open to, and encouraged our discussing reading, and has a reputation for turning a few pages himself (though you can discount Duffel Blog’s story about him issuing a 6,000 book reading list). What’s with the different vibe, I ask myself?

So, Brian’s reading list for today follows. It’s just two, and both are collections of shorter articles, and, both publishers vigorously look for and purposely present opposing, thoughtful, reasoned, articulate viewpoints. I absolutely love it, when I’m forced to think about exactly why I disagree with something or someone.

Suggestion one, is the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs, a lot of great articles, from different perspectives, for the new administration, and our legislators and executive branch senior managers (including the one who wrote me the letter) to read, ponder, discuss amongst peers, and then re-ponder.

And suggestion two, in the same spirit, is from NDU Press (National Defense University), “Charting a Course, Strategic Choices for a New Administration”, which is a collection of seventeen essays “… represent[ing] a year-long effort by some of the best scholars at the National Defense University …”, one of whom, first essay in the book in fact, was written by the same T.X. Hammes I mentioned above.

The second part of last week, I was at a “train the State and counties” roll out of a new program my Agency has adopted, and then a day of train the trainer (so I can hopefully present in the future). I handed out, as is my habit, some peer awards to our state partners afterwards. Not six color pdf’s telling then what great public servants they were, I gave the four of them four different books to read and share.

I will never have the platform to encourage reading for personal and professional development that James Stavridis or James Mattis has, but I don’t need to. What I need to do, is to be able to convince the people around me, my crews and the partners of my crews, in the benefits of continual process improvement, starting with ourselves.