Rumsfeld’s Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Lifeby Donald Rumsfeld

(Broadside, $28)

“There’s some obvious, Jay Leno–level joke to be made about Donald Rumsfeld writing a book about decisions,” said Adam Sternbergh in Bloomberg Businessweek. No matter what else the two-time U.S. defense secretary has accomplished in his long career, “your most recent memory of him” surely is as “the publicly prickly advocate of the now-by-nearly-all-accounts-disastrous invasion of Iraq.” The man has been compiling nuggets of leadership wisdom since he was a boy stuffing notecards in a shoebox, though, and his greatest-hits collection does provide some interesting reading. One of his aphorisms—“If you’re working from your in-box, you’re working on other people’s priorities”—is now posted above my computer screen.

The accompanying anecdotes are often “the most compelling parts of the book,” said Mark Tapson in FrontPageMag.com. Rumsfeld was elected to Congress at 30, served in high posts for five presidents, and led two Fortune 500 companies, so he has plenty to draw from. But there’s a problem with every bit of wisdom Rumsfeld doles out: “It’s a little thing called Google,” said Dean Obeidallah in TheDailyBeast.com. Search the Web and you’ll find examples galore of Rumsfeld ignoring his own advice. “Learn to say, ‘I don’t know’” is his theme on page 52. Shouldn’t that thought have crossed his mind when he was telling us that the U.S. knew where Iraq was hiding its weapons of mass destruction?

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But “Rumsfeld didn’t screw up everything,” said Spencer Ackerman in Wired.com. He pioneered data-enhanced warfare, which has proved to be “a huge battlefield advantage.” And his reluctance to engage in nation-building in Afghanistan might have allowed the Taliban to regroup, “but can anyone really argue in 2013 that Rumsfeld’s instincts there were wrong?” Besides, he offers many legitimate kernels of wisdom, such as this: “Rules cannot be a substitute for judgment.” Never, in fact, “has an author’s life more precisely demonstrated that point.”