Jerry Colonna
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
ISBN: 978-0-06-274953-6
The act of writing is therapeutic – it least it is for me. Sometimes, you can work out some of your biggest problems just by putting pen to paper or fingers to a keyboard. Perhaps you have a major problem in your life, and you want to try to figure out the root. Other times, you might just be stuck in a rut, and activating the creative part of your brain can shake things free. Jerry Colonna, the author of Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up seemed to use his writing as a tool to help work through his past traumas, while trying to help the leaders of today and tomorrow work through theirs.
Colonna works with corporate and startup leaders as an executive coach, the latest stop on his career path that has taken him through a number of fields. He uses his own experiences to help others work through current problems by focusing on healing from past issues. This book was meant to help people through the process of “rebooting” through the use of examples from the author’s life, especially focusing on the issues from his childhood in New York City. He works through familial troubles, issues with bullying, and coping with the fallout from a broken home in the book.
I really felt for the author as he talked through a lot of his problems. His writing style really pulls on the heartstrings. However, I got the feeling as the stories went along that he seems to have a deep-seeded fear of success in his own life. He seemed to burn out relatively easily and bail out when things got tough. I understand the feeling of burnout – it’s happened to me a couple of times in my life and has led to changes in direction. However, my experience with burnout is to take a few weeks off and start a new job, not travel to the desert and perform a cleansing ritual. To each his own, I guess.
There wasn’t really a ton of substance to the book beyond a few points to ponder at the end of each chapter. Those bullet points were one of the few redeeming factors of a book – I spent some time reflecting when I got to the end of each chapter, and if you read the book, you should too. I assume that these questions are the type of experience one would receive if being personally coached by Colonna. Along with these questions, there were a few other tidbits of useful information scattered among the pages of Reboot, but most of the text was autobiographical rather than a guide to rebooting your life.
If you do decide to pick up a copy of this book, it’s a relatively quick read. The writing style isn’t terribly dense, and the chapters are of moderate length. I sat down a read a couple of chapters each evening before bed for a week or so, maybe spending an hour or so each night. You could probably knock out most of this book on a cross-country flight, finishing off the text on the flight home. Again, the only part of the book that you really should spend extra time doing are those points to ponder at the end of each chapter. Take some notes and look back over them at a future date.
Overall, 5/10, would slightly recommend for people who want to hear a story of struggle and redemption, or who have had trauma in the past and are looking for a way out from under that trauma. It’s a great autobiography, but it really tends to drift and ramble as it goes on. It’s one of the few books I’ve reviewed that I don’t plan to read again or reference in the future. I’m sure Colonna is great one-on-one with his executive clients, but the book just didn’t do it for me.