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Unmanageable: Leadership Lessons from an Impossible Year
Everything about work changed in 2020.
Billions of people were sent home from the office, unsure of what they'd be coming back to, or when. Organizations crammed decades of transformation into weeks. And every leader was asked for the same, impossible clarity.
Bestselling authors and management experts Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale capture a year of leadership lessons, from the first COVID lockdowns to the first anniversary. Unmanageable is the definitive read on how it felt to adapt, reinvent, and lead during the most tumultuous time in a generation.
From the early chaos, to unending burnout, and the unprecedented turnover that followed, the pandemic laid bare the cracks in the old rules of work. Unmanageable introduces the new rules, and offers a practical and essential guide for what comes next.
If you want to understand the future of work, start here.
Billions of people were sent home from the office, unsure of what they'd be coming back to, or when. Organizations crammed decades of transformation into weeks. And every leader was asked for the same, impossible clarity.
Bestselling authors and management experts Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale capture a year of leadership lessons, from the first COVID lockdowns to the first anniversary. Unmanageable is the definitive read on how it felt to adapt, reinvent, and lead during the most tumultuous time in a generation.
From the early chaos, to unending burnout, and the unprecedented turnover that followed, the pandemic laid bare the cracks in the old rules of work. Unmanageable introduces the new rules, and offers a practical and essential guide for what comes next.
If you want to understand the future of work, start here.
230 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 6, 2021
13 people are currently reading
169 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 30, 2021
I'm a devotee of Anne Helen Peterson who praised this book in one of her newsletters. Perhaps I should have looked into this further before I purchased it on my Kindle, but buyer beware: this book is just a year's worth of newsletters the authors sent to their subscribers during the pandemic, month by month. This made it an enjoyable read in a sort of morbid way, mostly in that they foresaw a number of things that would happen to the workforce as the pandemic continued on. Leadership lessons they unpacked felt very of the moment, but sure, they can be applied now that we're beyond that point. It was just kind of frustrating to know I was reading a series of newsletters (I subscribe to enough of them, e.g. the aforementioned AHP, and I go to books expecting a different sort of depth, is that so wrong?). I'm sure if I knew this going in I wouldn't have cared, but to get a few pages in and realize it was repackaged content made me feel like I'd been had somehow. A better subtitle would be: Leadership Lessons from Our Popular Substack Newsletter. In the end, it felt like I read through a diary of America and Canada's first year of the pandemic, and does anyone feel ready to do that right now? As a leadership book, it's just OK.
March 7, 2022
DNF @ 57% on 3/7/22.
I don’t normally rate books I don’t finish, but this is a short book and I read a good chunk of it.
What purpose does this book serve? I found this author duo through Anne Helen Petersen and while I generally like their work after reading their newsletter, this book confused me and felt like a cash grab, because the contents don’t benefit the readers much at all.
This book collects past newsletter articles from early pandemic into one place and almost none of it is relevant anymore. Some broad ideas are evergreen, I guess, but for all that the authors say that you have to be adaptable and change to the circumstances, they didn’t listen to their own advice when working with a publisher on this. The second their newsletters went out, the playbook for management and work in the time of pandemic already changed because of some new COVID development — NEVER MIND publishing this a year and some months after those initial newsletters went out.
I’m completely baffled by the decision to publish this one.
I don’t normally rate books I don’t finish, but this is a short book and I read a good chunk of it.
What purpose does this book serve? I found this author duo through Anne Helen Petersen and while I generally like their work after reading their newsletter, this book confused me and felt like a cash grab, because the contents don’t benefit the readers much at all.
This book collects past newsletter articles from early pandemic into one place and almost none of it is relevant anymore. Some broad ideas are evergreen, I guess, but for all that the authors say that you have to be adaptable and change to the circumstances, they didn’t listen to their own advice when working with a publisher on this. The second their newsletters went out, the playbook for management and work in the time of pandemic already changed because of some new COVID development — NEVER MIND publishing this a year and some months after those initial newsletters went out.
I’m completely baffled by the decision to publish this one.
January 3, 2022
I was surprised to find that the book is a compilation of their newsletters - as a subscriber who really enjoys Melissa and Jonathan’s perspectives and insights it was nice to have in a different package, but wish that was made more clear.
September 6, 2023
This is a challenging review to write since I experienced nearly all of this book’s content directly as it was being written and as I was living and managing through the events described.
Let me attempt it anyway.
Melissa and Jonathan Nightingale are cofounders of Raw Signal Group, a company that builds better bosses. I subscribe to their newsletter, a year of which is captured in this book. When the editions were coming out, I was a VP in a tech company at the time and caring for young children. During that year, our home became our everything: hotel, restaurant, hair cutting salon, workplace, gaming studio, writing retreat, and play room.
It was a lot.
I found the original newsletters (now chapters in this book) so timely: they nearly always touched the thing I was sensing and not yet articulating for myself. Work issue clairvoyance isn’t taught in any MBA program I know of, but the Nightingales possess it in spades. Waiting for each edition to arrive every other Wednesday morning became part of my weekly ritual. I can say honestly that it was a lifeline.
Reading the essays now, some nearly two years later, is an exercise in bizarre reflection. We’ve been in and out of lockdown three times. My kids are back at school. My husband commutes in person to his same workplace two to three times a week. I’m the only one still working from home, in a completely different context. We are vaccinated, but the world and we are not the same.
A lot of Unmanageable’s commentary about hybrid workplaces, the great resignation, equality and social justice rings as true in 2022 as it did in 2020/2021. At the same time, we’re collectively no closer to resolution on many topics the book discusses. There were many times during my re-read when I frowned in disappointment, aware of the hope I felt during that first year that everything would be clear or “normal” by now.
So, should you read this book?
Unmanageable isn’t as universal in its context as How F*cked Up Is Your Management?, the authors’ first book about how to be a better boss. If you’re looking for an introduction to RSG or a primer on bossing in general, that book is probably a better place to start.
At the same time, Unmanageable’s on the ground look into how work and bossing changed week-by-week gives as good an explanation for how work shifted, and how we got to where we are now, as you are likely to find.
I imagine it will be invaluable to new managers wanting to understand how the ground rules have changed and (someday) to historians wanting to know what this nightmare was like for middle management everywhere.
Let me attempt it anyway.
Melissa and Jonathan Nightingale are cofounders of Raw Signal Group, a company that builds better bosses. I subscribe to their newsletter, a year of which is captured in this book. When the editions were coming out, I was a VP in a tech company at the time and caring for young children. During that year, our home became our everything: hotel, restaurant, hair cutting salon, workplace, gaming studio, writing retreat, and play room.
It was a lot.
I found the original newsletters (now chapters in this book) so timely: they nearly always touched the thing I was sensing and not yet articulating for myself. Work issue clairvoyance isn’t taught in any MBA program I know of, but the Nightingales possess it in spades. Waiting for each edition to arrive every other Wednesday morning became part of my weekly ritual. I can say honestly that it was a lifeline.
Reading the essays now, some nearly two years later, is an exercise in bizarre reflection. We’ve been in and out of lockdown three times. My kids are back at school. My husband commutes in person to his same workplace two to three times a week. I’m the only one still working from home, in a completely different context. We are vaccinated, but the world and we are not the same.
A lot of Unmanageable’s commentary about hybrid workplaces, the great resignation, equality and social justice rings as true in 2022 as it did in 2020/2021. At the same time, we’re collectively no closer to resolution on many topics the book discusses. There were many times during my re-read when I frowned in disappointment, aware of the hope I felt during that first year that everything would be clear or “normal” by now.
So, should you read this book?
Unmanageable isn’t as universal in its context as How F*cked Up Is Your Management?, the authors’ first book about how to be a better boss. If you’re looking for an introduction to RSG or a primer on bossing in general, that book is probably a better place to start.
At the same time, Unmanageable’s on the ground look into how work and bossing changed week-by-week gives as good an explanation for how work shifted, and how we got to where we are now, as you are likely to find.
I imagine it will be invaluable to new managers wanting to understand how the ground rules have changed and (someday) to historians wanting to know what this nightmare was like for middle management everywhere.
March 10, 2023
The Nightengales are the only auto-buy authors for me in non-fiction. This book is no exception.
October 12, 2021
This book is a must-read for anyone trying to lead a team during the pandemic. It's full of compassionate, practical tips and is easy to digest. Highly recommended.
November 6, 2021
This book is awful. Unprofessional, trite, complaining, pandering, and disconnected.
March 8, 2022
As someone who received the newsletter it was a bit repetitive and boy was it tough reliving those first few months of pandemic, but there are so many messages and quotes that still ring true.
Read
October 11, 2025authors run that site.. should reread, don't recall much
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews