Leadership

I seem to collect a number of books each year.  A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems.  Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library.  The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn

"An objective without strategy, or a strategy without execution remains a dream."

- Dries Buytaert, Drupal, Acquia, and Mollom, "Contributing back to Drupal", Buytaert.net.

Those that have read my blog know that I do get on my soapbox from time to time about the state of education in the United States.  I can't help but be concerned about the future for America's young adults.  Too many students are not opting to stay in school to continue their education. If U.S. students continue their lack of motivation in pursuing an education, I can't help but be gloomy on America's place in the 21st century as a world leader.

I'm hoping that later today the American version of ComputerWorld will carry the Dries Buytaert article I came across on their Australian site.  The article is an interview with Dries and titled, "Drupal: from a drop in the ocean to a big fish in the CMS World".  Yes, it's a catchy title for the interview, but I like sub-heading even more.

I am a loyal reader of Andrew McAfee's articles which he posts on his Harvard Business School blog, The Impact of IT on Business and their Leaders.  Andrew McAfee is an associate professor at Harvard and spends a great deal of time on his blog discussing and defining Enterprise 2.0.

"If you think you need filtering technologies to be sure your employees aren't damaging your reputation, that's a management problem, not a technology one.  If employees can't be trusted, technology is the least of your problems."

- Tim Bray, Director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems Inc., "Keeping Secrets in a WikiBlogTubeSpace World", ComputerWorld, March 19, 2007

On Planet Drupal, there have been a number of posts lately about the difficulty project leaders and developers have in  saying "no" while working on a project.  As much as Project leaders want to please both their client and their team members, real leaders understand the responsibilities they have in saying "no".  More specifically, I'm talking about Boris Mann's post, "Susan Mernit on the role of "no" in product development" as well as Laura Scott's own post You've got to know when to 'no' them.

"Leadership. Communication. Strategy. Diplomacy. Money. Technology. Industry. These are the things IT leaders must master."

- Frank Hayes, "Frankly Speaking: IT Unleashed", Computerworld, December 11, 2006

"The best IT execs I've run across are the ones who skip the complaining about management and go in and do a job that seemed impossible in the face of immature technology, indifferent management and throttled budgets."

- Eric Lundquist, "IT success knows no boundaries", eWeek, September 4, 2006

As you may have noticed, we have changed our "IT Quotes of the Week" to "Quoting IT". I found that I do not always come across a good quote worthy of posting here at CMS Report. Also, there are times I just don't have the time to catch up on my trade magazines and the quotes are not really valid this week.