The Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf

It's like my own little book club.

Welcome to the Ars Pandemonium Bookshelf. 

I read a fair amount of mainstream management and business literature and I tend to take a lot of notes while I do. I often write these up for myself, just to help my rickety old brain integrate the information. So I figured maybe I’d condense and clean them up a little, and share them in a somewhat more accessible form.

These writeups are not at all intended to be “reviews” of the books. I read as an enthusiast and a curious learner, not an expert or a critic. Which is not to say I don’t note problematic elements or content I disagree with, but my goal is not to make purchase recommendations, nor to assess the literary value or even the writing quality. This project is more about my personal experience of the content. Take that for what it’s worth.

Once Upon a Time…

I first assumed “official” people-manager duties sometime in 1999. In typical fashion for me at that age, I figured, hey, how hard could it be? I’m a creative professional and I’ve had managers. I’ve seen others manage creative teams. Heck, I grew up hearing stories from my dad about managing creative professionals in his architecture firm. I can manage a creative team! 

Well, I tried. I hired some truly great folks and navigated some complex work in an industry that was moving at (what seemed at the time) a breakneck pace. Looking back, I made some truly boneheaded decisions, fought losing battles and died on ridiculous hills; I caused far more frustration and discomfort in those around me than was in any way reasonable. 

But I wasn’t the worst! And we did some good work, had some meaningful success, and, in my humble defense, I did try to learn.

The whole industry was, for want of a better word, professionalizing. I wanted to be a part of that. I had some opportunity to study project management (my employer offered a little formal training and I took advantage), but there wasn’t that much about people management.

In addition, corporate culture, big-picture business decisions, industry relations, HR, finance, and other similar subjects had, to me, always borne that stink of filthy lucre — vis-à-vis my haughty artistic pretensions, anyway. But as a manager, they started to become very interesting to me. 

I even briefly entertained going back to school to get an MBA, which I…didn’t do. The technical, academic side held less appeal to me. Nonetheless, I began to realize that my future was in leadership and management and I wanted to learn more about it.

This era of my career coincided with a flood of mainstream business literature, arguably kicked off by 1994’s Built to Last. Interestingly, I think that’s the first one that I read, probably because it was faced-out at the bookstore (it was a huge bestseller), or maybe someone had recommended it. But in any event, it was a bit of a revelation. 

In fact, it’s shocking to me how foundational certain concepts from that book have been to my thinking about management. The advantages of “building a clock” over “telling time” or recognizing “the power of the AND” against the “tyranny of the OR” have essentially wafted into the realm of cliché at this point, but wow did they have an effect on me at the dawn of the millennium. 

I finished that book right around the time its putative follow-up Good to Great came out. Also incredibly influential in my thinking, if somewhat less profoundly so than Built to Last, notions like the “Stockdale paradox,” the “hedgehog” concept, and the “Stop Doing list” have lingered, lo these many decades. 

I became a bit of a nerd (ha! became!) and over the next several years read tons of this kind of stuff: Execution, Made to Stick, The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, Hidden Value, What the CEO Wants You To Know, Seven Habits, on and on. They all blur together a bit at this point, though I did take fairly extensive notes at the time and, surprisingly, I still have some of those notes.

Eventually, I grew somewhat inured to what this literature had to offer (and, frankly, I think it all got a little same-y), and I stopped reading it.

In the last couple of years, I decided to dive back into mainstream business literature. I figured it’d been twenty years since I began reading it, and I’d been away a while, there must be some new stuff to read.

Back To the Present Day…

And, wow, is there ever some new stuff. For one thing, I wanted to focus my reading to the extent that I could on women authors and authors of color. In the early 2000s this kind of work by that kind of author was vanishingly rare, and, while clearly still underrepresented, there is so much to take in. 

I’ve also been drawn by the emerging thread of late-stage capitalism critique that I’ve seen in some of the post-pandemic books (Work Won’t Love You Back, The Good Job, etc.). The older books just took it as given that growth was a primary goal, that “success” meant making more money and little else. That might be changing, and I’m intrigued. Or maybe it was there all along and it is I who have changed? Nah.

Finally, please note that the Bookshelf feature is somewhat irregular in its editorial calendar: some books just take me longer to read than others! Bookshelf essays are labeled as such on the channel. Enjoy.