Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
In Orson Scott Card’s science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, we meet Ender Wiggins, a talented little boy who has the fate of the world on his shoulders.
After an extensive period of monitoring, Ender attends a school for gifted children, training to learn the techniques to battle the buggers, an alien lifeform.
When I started my career, I worked at an automotive company where I can only describe the environment as ideal. Our leader, we will call him King Arthur, was always looking out for his team. If you were only there for two weeks, he would come by your desk and let you know he thought of you for this amazing assignment.
When lunch came around, the entire group would make eye contact and go down to lunch together. No one forced us. We genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. In fact, one gentleman even won the lottery and came back to work!
Now, a few years later, I returned to work for this company. King Arthur had retired, and in his place was The Witch. The Witch required that you worked until 4 am. She would not work during the day (instead went to the gym) so she worked late at night, expecting everyone else to work the day and night. She would call meetings and then just never show up for them, wasting an entire roomful of people’s time without so much as an “I’m sorry.”
If anything was wrong, The Witch would blame you. If the work product was great, The Witch took the credit for herself.
So what makes these leaders? Open Ender’s Game.
The brilliance of Ender’s Game is not necessarily the plot but the emotional intelligence and the symbolism. If you have worked in Corporate America, you know that life isn’t always fair. Some people are out to get you. But what can you say to motivate your team? Does your team need breaks to thrive? Open Ender’s Game.
This book also brilliantly captured what it is like being at the top. Do you feel like quitting at times? You bet. Are things changing rapidly? Certainly.
And Ender’s Game depicts how the most talented are also working harder than most. When Ender had secret techniques, he “told them freely, confident that few of them would know how to train their soldiers and toon leaders to duplicate what his could do.”
Last, but certainly not least, the science fiction aspect of this book is a little unsettling. Portions of Ender’s Game were initially published in 1977. In the book, Ender and his team have a messaging system that sounds incredibly similar to today’s email or Team messaging.
Overall, this book is well worth the read. I would say that it felt like a mashup of Dune and Ready Player One. Highly recommend.
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