Side note: click here if you missed John’s first, second , third , fourth , fifth and sixth entries.

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There are a whole bunch of innovators out there, thats for sure. What I tried to do was give a good cross-section of the trailblazers from all walks of business and success: a winning NFL football coach, a Commander in the U.S. Navy, a CIA analyst, a guy who builds roller-coasters, plenty of consultants, some top business professors, a few designers, The Human Victory cigar Dr. Doug Newburg, many others. What I tried to do was stay away from people who are always in the news and whose insights you can read about any day of the week in any number of publications. The Google founders are certainly innovators and are very successful but if you want to know about them you can pick up any business magazine or newspaper. Not so for Frances Hesselbein, Former CEO of the Girl Scouts of America and winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I felt that she has some very insightful things to say that you couldnt read anywhere else. In the best of all possible worlds, Im hopeful that the insights in The Success Effect with emerge and resonate with avid business book readers. Thanks for having me. Its been a blast.

Side note: click here if you missed John’s first, second , third , fourth and fifth entries.

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Probably the most important factor for the success effect has nothing to do with business and everything to do with business. I think it all starts in the crib. Loving parents in a stable household creates people who tend to be nurturers. Ask Kenneth W. Lowe or basket mogul Tami Longaberger about their favorite meals and theyll answer their mothers fried chicken. Longaberger and Lowe are not being cloying in their answers but instead offer an honest window into what makes them tick. People who were loved and nurtured at an early age in turn develop loving and nurturing capabilities among people or employees within an organization. Those traits will then be directed by the employees and managers toward their job, clients, and back to the company. Deepak Chopra insists that investor, client, and employee satisfaction are irrevocably linked. But that unless your employees have cause to care, that is, are happy and willing to do a good job, revenues and profits will assuredly suffer. By nurturing and showing concern for people in a company, an executive is practicing what he was taught at a very early age and those are usually lessons he or she learned from a parent.

Side note: click here if you missed John’s first, second , third and fourth entries.

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Ive been fascinated, too, by the topic of performance, particularly in sports and probably because I live in Cincinnati where baseball is still accessible and affordable. At each game I go to I experiment with praise and criticism, that is, I always heckle one guy throughout the game but only when that guy steps into the on-deck circle or when hes not looking in the field. I want to plant a seed of failure in the opposing teams best player and a seed of success among one or two of the Reds best players. Professional athletes – and professionals in business, I think – will usually respond in one of two ways: they excel or they fold. One evening I told Albert Puljols that Its an accident that Im sitting here in late August and youre hitting .340 because you are not a .340 hitter, pal. Best hitter in baseball. Send him to the plate with a negative thought. Guy goes 0-4 that night with me counting down all the way.

But criticism can also focus achieving individuals.

One game I asked Yankees left fielder Floyd what he was gonna do with the ball because I knew that Freel, on first at the time, was for sure gonna run on his weak arm. Next inning Floyd comes up homer. Back out on the field, I told him it was good he watched that for a long time because he wasnt going to see another one for about 30 days. I try to say these things when their backs are turned for full Everyman impact. And, after all, heckling a pro leftfielder at a baseball game in Cincinnati is a tradition that dates to the Civil War. Next at bat Floyd hits another one out. Back to back dingers! I bet hes never done it before or since. My friends beg me not to heckle at the games though I am never profane, just sort of sneery because theyve seen opposing players go three for four with about three RBIs. I have an endless list of stories like those. These days I tend not to criticize the opposing team because it can make individuals angry and they almost single-handedly blow out the Reds.

Ive always believed that performance in athletics was not much different than performance at work – back in the office for these thousands in the stands. People achieve through diligence, practice of good habits, personal goal-setting and praise and/or criticism is a large part of it all. If performance was the common thread between baseball and, say, the factory floor then why not create a book that look to those who have achieved to talk about how they did it. So I interviewed experts on work and approaches to work.

All achieving companies, groups, teams, divisions and individuals at some point have to deal with outside influences. And though managers praise and criticism work on individuals and groups, its better to offer regular and genuine praise because criticism can backfire as Floyd the left fielder for the Yankees proved on one sticky afternoon in Cincinnati.

Side note: click here if you missed John’s first, second and third entries.

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It takes only one or two cocktail parties for a reporter to realize that he or she has an incredibly interesting job: You interviewed the CEO of Procter & Gamble? You talked with P. Diddy? Whats Donald Trump like? Business reporters and business columnists speak with hundreds of executives or consultants every year and the topics can be wide-ranging or intensely focused on just one or two areas of commerce. Theres an Everyman aspect to the job, too: interviews with owners of small but extremely successful companies are sometimes the best way to get to the essence of entrepreneurship: how did Dead Butler dream up Eyeglasses-in-An-Hour? What was the board of directors of E.W. Scripps thinking as its new Scripps Networks division piled up tens of millions in losses quarter after quarter after quarter before turning the corner on blank ink and now generating hundreds of millions of dollars in profit year after year after year. Why did David Pelz walk away from NASA to start his own golf school? Births of companies are almost always the most interesting part of my job. Also, an interview is a fleeting and capricious thing. Reporters are usually going for one or two insights, at best, to fill out a story on one topic or another. Other interviews occur in crowded press conferences. As the interviews in my life began to pile up with the years, one day it came to me Im a journalist, why not journalize my professional life? Show the breadth and depth of American commerce and let any insights about achievement, excellence, entrepreneurship or ambition emerge from those conversations. Thats what Ive tried to do.

Side note: If you missed John’s first two entries of the day, check them out here and here.

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I think any growing organization or career-achiever will have an inherent advantage, but they did not necessarily start off with itthough they may have developed it along the way as one success leads to another. Clearly, aggressive opportunists will find an edge on the competition. And smart leaders attract smart subordinates, if only out of curiosity to see where this guy is headed. Make no small plans, advises real estate mogul Sam Zell, a billionaire who typifies the aggressive opportunist and has owned or controlled companies across a broad variety of sectors. But I would say almost all achievers have this advantage: they believe in themselves and in what theyre doing. The fact is that most people arent going to wake up some day and be the chief executive of an international company or own millions of square feet of real estate in 20 American cities. But we can all pursue our goals with confidence, and confidence is something that these people all have in abundance. You dont always need a ton of money to get things donethough usually it helpsand you dont have to have established connections or an Ivy League education or flowing locks of silver hair. But if you have the confidence in yourself and what youre doing and where youre headed, you can and will succeed. WE can all work on our confidence, so several interviews explore how that can happen.

If you didn’t see John’s first post of the day, check it out.

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One of the pertinent points that Bengals Coach Marvin Lewis made in an interview that looked at leadership but soon spread to other topics was this: its too hard to be successful in the NFLor in any businessif youre always putting good money after bad. To him, thats what do-overs, screw ups, are about and plenty of sayings come to mind, like my mistake, for instance. Well, all that is, is people allowing mediocrity to happen, he said. In business the shelf life, the window of opportunity is too short and you have to focus your people on that. Theres not an opportunity to get many chances back. If you dont do it right the first time, you dont really have time to do it again.

And when asked what trait most annoyed him as a leader, his answer was swift: jealousy. Not lack of effort, not unpreparedness, not alibis – but jealousy. I would not have guessed that answer in a thousand years.

Shout out and thanks to Jack and Todd for this opportunity. As a business reporter for about a decade at a major American newspaper, Ive heard and told a lot of stories. After a while, it becomes clear that certain strategies toward life, work and the challenges of the journey to and through a career would be more likely to lead to success than other approaches. Lets face it. Newspaper business sections do not dwell on failure. Stories almost always try to get at the essence of profit, that timeless gauge of excellence, and the best stories do it, too. Why not, then, a book about work, careers, company creation and customer satisfaction in the words of people who had been there and done it?

Good morning!

Today John Eckberg author of The Success Effect will be hosting our blog.

Keep reading throughout the day as more posts go up and feel free to shoot some questions his way.

Have a great Thursday!