10) I know you’re all excited about this topic, so I’ll be going past our scheduled time by about an hour.

9) This morning’s session has been changed to “The Inevitability of Four-letter Acronyms: Have All the Three-letter Acronyms Been Used.”

Las Vegas is a weird town. If you haven’t visited, you don’t even have an inkling. Atlantic City is just a pale comparison. Indian gaming is something else entirely. Monaco — well, I really don’t know, but I can’t imagine it holds a candle to the strangeness that is daily life everywhere in Vegas.

As soon as I say there are no good books, I stumble across one that I want to share. But before I provide any endorsements, go back and read my latest post on leadership books. First, you will note a number of suggestions from others. Obviously, I can’t speak to whether they are any good or not, but others have gotten something from them, and that’s always a good place to start. But that leads to my primary warning. Anyone who recommends a book is only trying to share the epiphany he or she got from reading the book. So it is with the comments that follow. Maybe it was the medium used for delivery, maybe it was because of certain things occurring in the work environment, or maybe it was because I was tired of listening to sports radio. But this book worked, and following are some of my thoughts.

In my almost 20 years of attending conferences, I’ve gleaned a few tips that help make things go more successfully. Things such as always get there early for the seat you really want, never miss a meal/break/reception, and drink enough coffee to stay awake but not so much you can’t make it through the session. You know, nice, common sense approaches to attending any event.

But here is the most important thing: Do not spend time in time-wasting sessions.

As you may recall, we left off with the following question, "So those are all the bad kinds of leadership books, what are the good ones?"

Bad news on that one. There isn’t necessarily a “good” type of leadership book. You see, the make or break for any leadership book is really the reader.

I’ve decided that great books on leadership are like unicorns: a beautiful idea, but — nope, nada, ain’t gonna happen, they just don’t exist. And this is an interesting confession because nothing will make me more likely to pick up a book than the word leadership in the title. (Just to put it in perspective, my daughter gave me the college texts she couldn’t sell back so I could take them to the used book store. I snapped up the two leadership books before they even hit the stack.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately, and I’ll have quite an involved post on the subject in the next couple of days. (Honest, really…) But, related to that, here’s a quick thought about failure. You always hear “celebrate failure” and “you have to let people fail.” But there are different kinds of failure.