Just read "Adventures of an IT Leader"

Adventures of an IT Leader

Another one of those chose your own adventure style management books.  Not quite as entertaining as The Phoenix Project , but that is mainly because I didn't find Jim Barton to be quite as sympathetic a character.  Honestly the guy is a bit of a jerk. 

OK so as to the content, generally pretty good.  The basis of the book is that one reason that IT is so hard to manage and causes so many problems for so many companies is that good management principles generally are not followed or not used effectively.In part because IT is still a relatively young field.  In response the authors have identified 7 areas that they believe are critical to IT management success (Candidate Areas for IT management Systems as they call them)

1.  Communication
2.  People management
3.  Cost and value
4. Project management and implementation
5. Vendor management
6. Infrastructure management
7. Emerging technologies

Valid enough I would say although I don't know if I would categorize things exactly the same way, but then again my general management skills are probably deficient and I could be completely wrong.

In general I would say that this book is a good 30,000 foot view of an CIO / IT leads job but and worth the read for that reason but it is not an in-depth guide to IT management.

**Oh, the kid in the bar with the cryptic geek remarks was a little annoying too.