Embarking

I just finished reading the book Obstacles Welcome: turn adversity to advantage in business and life.  This book by Ralph de la Vega is part autobiography, part leadership history, part leadership principles, part self-help, and part personal development.   de la Vega, President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets has been responsible and overseen everything from the move to mobile to the proliferation of the iPhone.  The book starts out, though, with stories from de la Vega’s youth in which he emigrated to the United States without his parents through a last minute glitch at the airport.  At the age of 10, he began his life in the United States without his parents.

I really enjoyed reading Obstacles Welcome.  It was a really accessible and easy read, and de la Vega takes the complexity of managing a huge corporation and a gives simple but not simplistic look into how he does it.  I also appreciated the type of leadership de la Vegan seems to exhibit.  He appears to be a person who values people, virtue, integrity, hard work, and determination.  After reading this book, I thought to myself, “de la Vega would make a good mentor” and that is exactly what he does through this book, becoming  a personal and leadership mentor.  If you’re in a leadership position, it’s worth a read.

Buy		Read

It’s been a long time since I’ve read a Max Lucado book.  Lucado’s new book, Fearless, is a book about the fears that are so prevalent in our lives and how they affect us.  Lucado takes these fears on head on and matches fear with courage, and fright with faith, with heavy doses of mercy, grace, and generous love.  It’s an uplifting book that en-courages by giving you a dose of an alternative, biblical reality of a God in control.

What I like about Lucado is his ability to use Scripture, prayer, stories, examples, and easy to read, engaging and creative writing.  In this book, Lucado looks past fear and into the heart of the pain behind and inflicted by so many of our fears.  He is engaging in stories and metaphors, and then is a straight shooter with the clarity of biblical truth.

The promise of Christ and the contention of this book are simple: we can fear less tomorrow than we do today. [p. 13]

Destructive anxiety subtracts God from the future, faces uncertainties with no faith, tallies up the challenges of the day without entering God into the equation. [p. 46]