(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.
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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.”