worm

I’ve been able to get more reading done lately. One book I’ve read is Upping the Anti- by Tom Gillis, this was given to us by one of our Cisco vendors upon request. The book itself isn’t bad, it covers the basics of spam, virus and spyware happenings in the last few years. If you don’t know much about these topics and are looking for a primer this is a good book.  As someone that’s worked with these items for awhile I didn’t find anything new here, it was just a rehash of what I already know.  Many times there are tidbits in books like this that I find interesting or happen to fill gaps in knowledge that I have, but this book didn’t have any of those. If your are someone who’s been working in tech for awhile and had any remote dealings with these things this is not the book for you, it might be good to get someone you know who gets that blank look on their face when you mention updating a virus database or delve into why dealing with spam is such a pain in the ass. It does jump into ideas about solving the problems of the internet, though the ideas aren’t anything I imagine two tech savy people, dealing with this stuff on a regular basis, haven’t came up with on their own while chatting over a cup of coffee.

The other book I’ve been reading is First, Break All the Rules on recommendation from a fellow geek. At this point I’m about two thirds of the way through the book and it will probably be the most influential book I’ve read in the past few years.  It’s not a new book, copyright 1999, but what I’m reading in there seems revolutionary. In truth it’s not really that revolutionary it’s just that the ideas make sense, but conventional wisdom in the management and human resources don’t follow this track. I like that this book is founded on a vast research study done by Gallup, which being a Nebraskan is a company I’ve always had respect for. The authors do a good job of presenting ideas and following those up with real world applications to illustrate the point. I would suggest this book to anyone in a corporate environment and even more strongly to managers and HR people.

It’s been a long time since I directly managed people, the advice that I recall being given at the time ran along the same path as what “everyone is doing” and to which this book points out has obvious pitfalls.  In fact in many instances I was told I was doing things incorrectly, in this book these things are pointed to as attributes of what they called “great managers”. In no way shape or form would I refer to myself as a great manager. What I can say, is during that time period we had a small group of people that did a tremendous amount of work and had fun while we were doing it.