Subscribe to the Three Star Leadership Blog

The Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check Wally's Three Star Leadership Letter

Find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.

Find out more about Wally's coaching services.

From out of the past comes "Summertime" by the Jamies, an eminently forgettable doo-wop group.

"It's summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime
Summertime summertime sum sum summertime summertime..."

The next line is: "Well shut them books and throw 'em away." Not this year.

It's time for summertime reading lists of all sorts. Mine is a "Summertime Re-Reading List." There are lots of books out there that deserve to be read more than once. Every book on this list was first published at least five years ago.

One more thing. This isn't a "best of" reading list. There are lots of other great books to read, but these are worth another look, or a first reading if you've never cracked them.

Let's begin with a couple of classics.

I think of them as "The Drucker Duo," two books that I really see as two parts of the same work. The Effective Executive is Peter Drucker's classic on personal productivity. Managing for Results covers company effectiveness.

Here's another pair to read and compare. You know In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman. It changed the nature of our dialogue about management. It was written at a time when Japanese companies would never stop winning because of their culture.

The other book in this pair is a marvelous work by Richard Pascale and Tony Athos titled The Art of Japanese Management. It came out the year before In Search of Excellence. It, too, showed that American companies could be productive. It used the same 7-S Framework that Peters and Waterman used.

Tom Peters thought that The Art of Japanese Management would be a bigger seller than his and Waterman's book because it came out first. Instead it seemed to set the stage for In Search of Excellence.

A great book from the early 90s is Charles Handy's The Age of Unreason. Besides being a great book itself, it's a fine introduction to Handy who is vastly under-known in the US.

I love books by people with big brains and wide interests that show us how the tributaries of history converge in the river of today. The first of those that I ever read is Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.

I love essays. I think of them as bright people musing aloud. I close this list with pointers to two volumes of essays.

Lewis Thomas was the Dean of the Yale Medical School when he was invited to write regular essays for the New England Journal of Medicine. My favorite of his collections is Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.

Victor Davis Hansen comes from a very different direction. He writes as a classical scholar and farmer. I love his collection The Land was Everything.

There you have it, some reading suggestions to enrich your summer and your life. What books can you recommend for summer re-reading?

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.

Request your free copy of "Meeting the Challenges of the Boomer Brain Drain: An integrated approach."

Wally Bock has helped people learn to be great bosses for more than a quarter century. His latest book, Performance Talk: The One-on-One Part of Leadership, makes learning key leadership principles almost effortless by teaching through a story and providing lists of resources for further growth.

Click here to find out more about Wally's coaching services.

For weekly tips and resources pointers, check our Wally Bock's Three Star Leadership Letter.

Click here to find out more about having Wally speak to your company or convention.