InfoQ’s Deborah Hartmann reviews the book The Responsibility Virus: How Control Freaks, Shrinking Violets and the Rest of Us Can H Arness the Power of True Partnership, which was published about a year after my own Teamwork Is An Individual Skill: Getting Your Work Done When Sharing Responsibility.

I haven’t read the book cover-to-cover though I’m well aware of it. Why? Mostly because I think I completely get it. And because I generally read for difference (newness) rather than for sameness (confirmation). And I wrote a similar book. So it remains on my backlog.

That doesn’t mean it should remain on your backlog. I would think this book by Roger Martin makes a good companion to mine. And I would welcome the opportunity to share a classroom, podium, or change project with Roger Martin (then I would surely read his book!). I think Roger Martin offers a lot of useful tools and metaphors, and I bet we could spin up some really powerful learning experiences together.

What I am striving to do though is more than link responsibility to performance as so many authors and experts have done. I’m striving to fundamentally alter the very way we think about responsibility. My vision is to see Responsibility Redefined worldwide as an observable, learnable, and teachable mental process, the Responsibility Process™ that works in each of us exactly the same way, and which can be systematically studied and mastered, and which can be successfully developed in teams and cultures.

My readers know this well. Readers of Deborah’s post at InfoQ might check out a recent article by one of the commenters there, Amr Elssamadisy. It’s called Personal Agility for Potent Agile Adoption.