Ep. 10: Are you a manager or a leader? / To the lands of milk and honey

Have you noticed that the market for self-help and how to succeed at business is so incredibly massive? According to a piece in the Washington Post from January 2025, I kid you not, 15000 self-help books are published each year. Some thousands likely have the terms “manager” or “leader” in the title. I'm only talking about the English language. Maybe even just North America.

Why so many?

Well, fundamentally, management and leadership do not come naturally to most of us. But if you get a bunch of people together to accomplish a task, and if you don't want to have a Tower of Babel scenario, and have the whole thing collapse under you, you need to work out how to get to the end successfully.

At one time or another, people who I have worked with in companies of various sizes have made the statement: "I want to advance in my career, I need to become a manager." In today's world where we are struggling with understanding how AI will impact our individual contributor roles in companies, I can understand that more than ever before are thinking "I guess I need to figure out this management thing."

Today, I would like to talk about the perils of management vs leadership. Remember in Episode 8, I said, don't take my advice. Now, I want to repeat that mantra, don't take my advice. Instead I will tell you some stories along with context and reasoning behind them so you can decide for yourself how my experiences and observations could impact you.

But first, I want to spin you a short fiction story. The wonder of the human imagination is to be able to inhabit and walk in the skin of anyone and anything. With this unique and otherworldly ability we are able to examine problems in ways we might not have otherwise.

The story I wrote for today is called "To the lands of milk and honey".

Read: To the lands of milk and honey

Read: On the perils of management vs. leadership – which are you?

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