This book should be required reading for anyone in any type of leadership position, regardless of how many people for whom you are responsible. This book gives some great characteristics of great leaders and the means to develop these characteristics in our daily lives. Noel Tichy has researched the leaders of such companies as General Electric, Ameritech, PepsiCo, Intel, Compact Computers, and Focus Hope, for profit business as well as non-profit organizations. From the leaders of these businesses and others, Noel Tichy has found that great leaders have five common characteristics.

As technology planners, we will be looked to uphold the majority of the technical knowledge needed for our district. That is fine, but we must also be preparing our district to grow in other ways as well. We all must work to develop new leaders. These should be understood as a critical mission of every leader. Many great business leaders take training new leaders as a serious part of their daily responsibilities. We all should understand that just having a good superintendent or CEO does not ensure success. We all have to be good leaders.

Good ideas are what separate good leaders from the mediocre leaders. Ideas of how to improve a business or another way to use a technology in order to teach better is what makes a business or school district a leader. To paraphrase Noel Tichy, "the test for a school district is not whether they have the best test scores today, but whether or not they will have top scores tomorrow . . . "

To be a great leader, you must have energy and enthusiasm! Our attitudes are infectious; if we are not confident and excited about our mission and direction, then neither will be the people around us. We must show everyone that we know we're a great district. We must know that technology will help our students learn and problem solve better. Energy and enthusiasm can be caught by those around us. To develop a great technology plan for our organization, we must infect our committee members with our energy and enthusiasm for the plan and the process.

Great leaders must have what the author calls "Edge." I believe the author means that we must have courage in our convictions. We must be sure this is the right technology or teaching method to recommend. We must know where we want this plan to go and lead our committee in that direction.

The final trait this author sees in great leaders is the ability to engender others with leadership. Give others an opportunity to lead and help them to improve their own leadership traits. In technology planning, we would want our committee members to take an active part in developing plans, projects and objectives for the technology plan. This should be the very people that will use these plans, the teachers. Teachers are leaders every day of their work-lives and should know this and do what it takes to be leaders to their students. One of the great quotes I liked from this book was "if you aren't teaching, you aren't leading."