I brought along an interesting book on my trip to Rome last weekend, and thought I’d recommend it to those of you who have the good luck, or bad luck (depending on your perspective) of managing geeks. The book is Leading Geeks, by Paul Glen; it’s about 250 pages of straightforward reading, and qualifies reasonably well as “airplane reading” as long as your flight is at least a couple of hours long.

You can get a pretty good sense of the topics and coverage by looking at the chapter titles:

1. Geeks, Leadership, and Geek Leadership
2. The Essential Geek
3. Groups of Geeks
4. The Nature of Geekwork
5. Performing Geekwork
6. Nurturing Motivation
7. Providing Internal Facilitation
8. Furnishing External Representation
9. Managing Ambiguity
10. Selecting and Organizing Geekwork
11. Uniting Geeks and Geekwork
12. How Geek Leaders Lead

If you are a geek, I don’t think you’ll find any surprises, though it’s possible that you haven’t given much thought to how the rest of the world views your habits, quirks, and motivations. And if your manager (or several levels of managers above you) is a non-geek, then Leading Geeks may provide some useful suggestions on how to improve communications and reduce conflict. You may even want to provide a few copies as anonymous Christmas presents to some of the more clueless managers in your organization.

But it’s important to realize that Mr. Glen — though a self-professed geek himself — appears to have aimed the book at a non-geek audience. And if you’re a non-geek, it may not have occurred to you that geeks are different. Or perhaps you knew that they are different, but couldn’t quite figure out why and how. Glen’s suggestions aren’t deep or mystical; his advice isn’t rocket science, but just straightforward common sense. Still, if it hasn’t occurred to you that geeks are motivated by different things than you are, and if you haven’t figured out that the react to politics, efforts to “control” their behavior, and business goals (along with other aspects of what Glen calls the “external representation” of their work), then this common-sense advice will be quite helpful.

I wonder if Leading Geeks would provide us with any insight to the behavior we might expect if a geek became President in 2008. Well, who cares … it will never happen, right? Not unless Google continues to grow exponentially, and becomes the most valuable company in America. According to recent reports, it’s now #5 (in the U.S.), with only Exxon, General Electric, Microsoft, and AT&T ahead of it. With its stock price closing at $711 today, who knows where we’ll be in 2008? And if Larry Page and Sergey Brin decide to buy the U.S. and put themselves in charge, maybe we’ll all be reading Leading Geeks as a matter of survival…