Matt Burgess

The One Thing You Need to Know: ...About Great Managing, Great Leading and Sustained Individual Success (2005), Marcus Buckingham

I think the title of Marcus Buckingham's bestseller should be changed.  It would more appropriately be called the "90 Some Odd Things You Need to Know: ...About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success" or "The 5 Things About Great Managing, 10 Things About Great Leading and 4.5 Things About Sustained Individual Success You Need to Know".  The title of the book is marketing genius.  It sounds so simple yet so neccessary for everyone.  However, the subtitle is the real meat and potatoes and not all of them.

As much as I was misled by the lack of my own emphasis on the subtitle of Buckingham's book, it turned out to be a solid read.  Throughout each chapter he provided a balanced combination of interpreted research related to Oprah-style personal stories.  More importantly the book makes you rethink our natural inklings about management, leadership and success and attempts to uncover the realities.  And I couldn't agree with his accessments more.  All too often I've worked for or with people that had traditional views about management and personal success, and while reading this book I caught myself saying "yes, yes, yes" to the descriptions perpetuated of these views.

Even though the title is a sore point for me, I will still highly recommend Marcus Buckingham's The One Thing You Need to Know.  Even if you aren't interested in all three topics, skip them and read what he has compiled about the topic of your choosing.

wikiPlants started as an experiment with the Screwturn Wiki engine, an opensource wiki based on the C#.net programming language.  Unfortunately, Screwturn could not handle the original amount of data stored in SQL Server 2005.

Now, the same information from the United States Department of Agriculture is served from TikiWiki.  The TikiWiki engine runs on an Apache server via the PHP programming language with data stored in a MySql database.  TikiWiki is far superior to Screwturn although additional functionality is constantly coming through the pipe of opensource contributions.

To see wikiPlants in action please click here.