Unruly by Lauren Wittenberg Wiener is a business leadership book that explores a unique industry experience and broadens it into a solid set of rules for professional growth. Wiener, a woman who has been successful in male-dominated spaces, offers insights on how to work with rules and when to challenge them. The book is presented as a toolkit with real-world strategies and focuses on soft skills, research, and moving beyond one’s own experience. It also touches on timely topics such as DEI, racism, and discrimination, making it a well-rounded and thought-provoking read.

While I found the book to be a fresh and engaging resource that they plan to revisit, the repetitive structure and the recurring points are not that appealing. The book has been described as a solid example of how to take a unique industry experience and apply it to a broader audience. It is recommended for entrepreneurs, leaders, parents, and anyone looking to navigate their own career or life path.

Unfortunately, Unruly didn’t really hold my interest. While I appreciated the author’s perspective and her journey, I found the writing and ideas repetitive and a bit too drawn out. I was hoping for more fresh insight or practical takeaways but ended up feeling bored halfway through.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this one.

Lauren Wittenberg Wiener is a woman who has been extremely successful in male dominated spaces, especially around contracting with the DOD. Her book Unruly offers her insights into how to work with rules, and when appropriate bend or challenge rules for the good of yourself and your clients. Like many self-help books this is one that gave me some good points to think about, but is mostly the best practices of successful people (and there is value in collecting and documenting those practices.)

What struck me the most in this book, is that most of what Wittenberg Wiener recommends are skills the American society instills in women. The use of soft skills, research, and focusing beyond one’s own experience are all tenets of surviving in a patriarchal society. Many of her menties listed are men, so I wonder if she wrote this book with that audience in mind.

I’m not a huge fan of business self-help… I mean leadership, books, but this one is a solid example of how to take an industry experience that is pretty unique and broaden into a solid set of rules to be unruly. I am using some of the lens’ listed in this book as I move forward with my own work.

“Just because the mountain is in front of you doesn’t mean you need to climb it.”

I loved this book and I have genuinely never said that about a nonfiction read.

I found myself engaged with the writing and storytelling throughout the entirety of the book and I recommended it to two people in my circle (or at my kitchen table, if you will) before I even finished it.

The book drives the importance of sticking to your moral compass while seeking ways to effectively grow and shake the status quo. It also touches on important and timely topics such as racism and DEI, same sex marriage, disabilities and discrimination.

I foresee this being a book that I revisit many times in the future to help me navigate the things that I want to accomplish in life.

I highly recommend this book for entrepreneurs, leaders, parents, and growth minded humans.

DNF. Got 40% through and it never got beyond self congratulation and platitudes. I even looked up the publisher, certain it was a vanity press but apparently they’re legitimate. I tried to give it a little more of a chance but the audio file stopped working so I figured that was fate having mercy on me!