Book of the Week: Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky

Whew, that was a good week when it comes to reading, knocked off 2 books and I’m on my way to starting (and probably finishing in a few days) the third. All of that aside, let’s get into it.

It was quite interesting to put down The Defining Decade and pick this one, they deal with very different themes but in the end both served the same purpose to me. When I first read the prologue I didn’t think I would like the book all that much, it felt a little too politically inclined, too revolutionary, which normally wouldn’t be too big of a problem, but it rubbed me off the wrong way. I’m glad I persisted because after a couple of pages in the first “real” chapter I could see what the book was really about. At least what it would mean to me.

To me, it was a book about leadership. About making change and about the best way to start a small revolution. As he says, change needs friction, the status quo needs to be challenged for anything to happen and when one sets out to do that, he is bound to find a few obstacles. The most interesting part is that everything is done through communication, about which the author writes quite well, if I may say.

According to him, you can only communicate on the level that someone has already experienced, and it is important to differentiate happenings from experiences. An experience is a happening someone went through and already reflected upon, internalized. Now he can receive messages and act based on that. In order to be an effective communicator, a leader would need to know how to manipulate other people’s experiences so he can communicate what he needs to and if someone hasn’t been through a similar experience to the one the leader needs, he must create one.