The companion volume to roundtable-on-project-management-2001, this 2002 Dorset House collection applies the same shape-forum dialogue format to technical leadership questions. Co-edited again with James Bullock and Marie Benesh, it captures the kinds of conversations that technical leaders actually need to have but rarely find in management literature.
Technical leadership — leading through influence and expertise rather than authority, translating between technical and organizational realities, maintaining integrity under pressure — was Weinberg's subject in becoming-a-technical-leader-1986. This dialogue volume extends that work by showing how practitioners wrestle with the concepts in concrete situations.
The moi-model appears throughout: technical leadership fails most often not from lack of ideas or technical skills but from motivational or organizational obstacles that the leader hasn't diagnosed clearly. The forum format lets those diagnoses emerge through exchange rather than didactic instruction.
The two SHAPE Forum volumes together represent Weinberg's belief that practitioner communities could generate genuine knowledge — not just share tips, but collectively reason about difficult situations. The editorial role was one of curation and light framing, preserving the messiness of real dialogue while making it navigable.