Rating: 
Summary: Timeless message
Review: This book was handed to me when I signed in to the 82d Airborne Division, 12 years ago. I plan to give it out to my junior personnel. A comment: my grandfather, a Cuban who lived through the events described, said that finding Garcia was no big deal, because he was well known. Doesn't matter, the message still holds. Enough said.
Rating:
Summary: This brief story tells you exactly how to be excellent!
Review: This is a lament that people cannot be counted on to get a job done. One man could; and he did deliver a message to Garcia, no matter what. The whole book was written in a matter of an hour or so and has sold tens of millions of copies. I have used it to inspire a weak employee and am considering giving it as a present to my best 150 clients.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but outdated
Review: This is an interesting story, but times have changed since it was written. My manager at work gave this to all his employees a few years ago. As soon as I finished reading it, I decided to start looking for another job. When that manager gave us that book, whether he realized it or not, he was sending the message that he wanted us to just do what we were told and to stop thinking about what we were doing. That's not why I went to school.Any reputable company should hire people who think for themselves, who ask questions and try to find ways to do more than what is expected of them. There are too many mindless automatons in this world already. Doing only what you're told without thinking about what you're doing is not the way to achieve success in life.
Rating:
Summary: A petulant diatribe
Review: This piece, which Hubbard dashed off hurriedly one night a hundred years ago, when he needed something to fill the magazine he edited, is not what it appears. You open it thinking it will be an inspiring "can do" tale of how one man overcame great odds to win. He introduces the story of how an American soldier in the Spanish American War was told to penetrate enemy territory, at night, through mountain and jungle, to take a message to an insurgent leader, Garcia. The soldier succeeded. But that's all she wrote. We are given no details, which the author dismisses as unimportant, and which one wonders if he even knew. He never really "tells" the story, only alludes to it as a point of departure for the rest of the article, which basically consists of a rant about how employees today are no good. Really! That's it. This book, sold under a "self-help"-sounding title, really consists of what a manager might have said if he was venting to other managers. The tone is one of suspicion and contempt toward employees in general, as if the author suspected that most, if not all, of them were lazy and unmotivated, unless they proved otherwise. Astonishingly, the pamphlet was wildly popular in its day--among managers, of course, who printed it in the thousands, and in many languages, and distributed it to those under them, apparently as a "motivational" tool, though what emotion it could elicit besides resentment is hard to imagine. Nevertheless, the piece's circulation was so widespread that it was found in the backpacks of Japanese soldiers killed in the Russo-Japanese War, in 1904. Indeed, for all we know, copies might have been among the possessions of the U-boat crew that sank the Lusitania in 1915, which is how its pompous windbag of an author, Elbert Hubbard, met his tragic death. Yes, there are employees like the substandard ones that Hubbard describes. But "Message to Garcia" is not likely to encourage them to improve, only to confirm their managers in their resentment of them. Moreover, Hubbard's piece reeks of the authoritarian and paternalizing attitude of the management of that day, an attitude that one hopes would embarrass the most committed CEO of today's corporate culture. One of the book's best known passages says (I am quoting from memory): "If you're going to work for a man, for heaven's sake, WORK for him!...If you must continually complain and criticize, you will find, when the winds of crisis begin to blow, your ties to his organization are loosened..." It never seems to occur to Hubbard that it could be possible to both work hard AND identify critical issues that needed to be addressed, in an organization. His attitude is, "Show up, do your work, keep quiet except to say 'Yes Sir,' collect your paycheck, and go home." In other words, Hubbard was an uncritical propagandist for the retrograde attitudes of his day. Don't read this book for inspiration, but as a relic of earlier American culture, much as you might watch D.W. Griffith's 1915 movie, "Birth of a Nation," which actually glorifies the Klan.
Rating:
Summary: Timeless essay on getting the job done
Review: This timeless essay describes the rare individual who has the ability to get a job done, rather than think about reasons why he can't or question his instructions...
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