Book Reviews « 800 CEO Read

January 9, 2012

From Values to Action

Filed under: Book Reviews,Leadership — dylan @ 6:42 pm

“The National Leadership Index 2010, compiled by the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, showed that American’s confidence in their leaders was ‘significantly below average’ for a third year in a row.” From Values to Action, page 3.

“Significantly below average” probably significantly overstates the confidence we have in our leaders at the moment. But that statement, from the introduction to Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr.’s From Values to Action, touches upon why this book is critical. As a business executive who worked his way up a multibillion-dollar health care corporation to become its chairman and CEO, Kraemer’s approach to leadership was naturally developed and tested in the real world for over 20 years—at no time more so than when a dialysis filter manufactured by his company in Sweden was blamed for the death of over 50 patients in Europe, an episode recounted in a 2002 Fast Company article entitled Harry Kraemer’s Moment of Truth. From that article:

What did Harry Kraemer do? He did something that feels unusual—subversive, almost—in light of the air of mistrust and criminality that pervades big business. “When in the past nine months have you ever heard a corporate executive apologize?” marvels William W. George,* the recently retired CEO of medical-instrument maker Medtronic Inc. The answer: almost never.

*You may know Bill George from his own leadership books Authentic Leadership, True North and Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis.

Baxter’s response to its filter crisis wasn’t perfect. But Baxter’s CEO owned up to the situation. He told the truth. He took responsibility when it would have been easy not to. His company took a $189 million hit, and he recommended that the board reduce his bonus. In other words, Kraemer did the right thing.

Now, being involved in any way in the deaths of over 50 people is certainly nothing to be proud of—quite the contrary. But acting with dignity, doing the right thing, accepting responsibility and making things right (as much as possible) in the midst of tragic events is something a company can take pride in. Contrast it to the shameful responses by BP, Halliburton and Transocean to the ecological disaster in the Gulf after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, where absolutely no one would take responsibility and their are still fingers pointing and lawsuits flying in every direction.

And Harry Kraemer not only did the right thing in response to the tragic events in Europe, Kraemer did the right thing with regards to the company he led, recommending that his bonus and the bonuses of other company executives be reduced in response to the incident. Imagine for a minute Wall Street executives stepping up to take responsibility for the financial crisis and suggesting their bonuses be cut to to help re-capitalize the banks and repay the American taxpayer, or Congress asking for their pay to be docked until they could find a way to break through their legislative gridlock and put America back to work. The mere idea of our leaders sacrificing their pay, position or power, of their taking a hit for the greater good or taking a firm stand for what seems so obviously right, is so nearly unfathomable that it has been the realm of Hollywood since Mr. Smith went to Washington. Mr. Kraemer suggests, and has proven, that we can lead with our values and a sense of decency in the everyday—even if the day rarely has a Hollywood ending.

Since leaving Baxter in 2004, Kraemer has refined this values-based approach to leadership into a teachable formula as part of the staff at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and From Values to Action outlines that approach for the rest of us. He has boiled it down to four very human and close-to-the-ground principles: Self-Reflection, Balance, True Self-Confidence, and Genuine Humility. These are seemingly simple principles, but they can be hard to live. It amounts to “doing the right thing rather than being right,” which means setting aside one’s ego, questioning and considering all approaches and angles even if they seem antithetical to you, and still having enough sense of self to make a determined decision and stand behind it.

It also means taking responsibility if that decision doesn’t lead to the desired outcome or when something goes wrong, even if you can sweep it easily under the rug or find someone else to blame. It is during these difficulties—what Kraemer labels the three 3C’s of Change, Controversy and Crisis—that your leadership becomes most important, that doing the right thing matters most. Even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard, those around you—whether they be family members, teammates, co-workers, employees or constituents—need you take up the mantle of responsibility rather than shirk it, to address problems head-on instead of covering them up or deflecting blame. It is in those times, times like these, that it is especially important hold your head high and maybe even stick your neck out a little, to do the right thing not only for your own integrity, but for the integrity of the entire organization and everyone in it. As Harry Kraemer said way back in 2002 when he was interviewed by Fast Company:

Leadership is a delicate blend of self-confidence and humility. You have to have the self-confidence … But self-confidence without humility becomes a problem. I may be the CEO. But part of that was having a few skills, and part of it was luck. Part of it was the man upstairs. So I’m no better than anyone else. Self-confidence and humility: Blend those two together, and you have someone who has a good chance of leading effectively.

Ninety-nine percent of people want to do the right thing. I’ve got 48,000 employees, most of whom care about the environment, or they have parents, or they are parents. I’m representing them. I’ve got 48,000 people who assume that we’re going to do the right thing.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all of our leaders felt the same way? I’m not as naive to think that “the right thing” is always an easy thing to find, but I am naive enough to think that we can at least try.

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November 18, 2011

Desperate Times, Different Measures

Filed under: Book Reviews,Careers — Sally @ 1:42 pm

Of course the saying goes, “Desperate times call for desperate measures.” With our depressed economy, it can certainly seem like desperate times filled with risk on a daily basis. Perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night remembering a deadline that passed without you noticing just a few hours before, and you suddenly worry that one mistake might be the last straw. Or you rehearse a pitch for a raise over and over in your head, worried that even the most valid argument might seem greedy at this time. Perhaps when the alarm goes off and starts your day, you feel a little more on edge than you ever recall feeling about a regular day on the job. We tell ourselves not to worry. And we tell ourselves that we are lucky to have a job when we have one, and maybe shouldn’t complain. And we tell ourselves that things will get better. So for the most part, we don’t so much act in the face of this uncertainty; instead, we sit quietly and hope desperation passes us by.

Yet, there is one thing that we can control: our performance. So perhaps desperate times call for different measures. And there are two books that we can recommend to help you do that: Joel Garfinkle’s new Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level by Joel A. Garfinkle and Jodi Glickman’s Great on the Job: What to Say, How to Say It, the Secrets of Getting Ahead.

Garfinkle divides Getting Ahead into three sections enumerating the “[t]hree significant and important aspects of leadership–perception, visibility, and influence.”

1) Improve Your Perception–Take Control of How Others See You addresses
2) Increase Your Visibility–Stand Out and Get Noticed by the People Who Matter Most
3) Exert Your Influence–Lead Situations, People, and Events

The advice is practical, from his Four-Step Perception Management Process…

Step 1 – How you think you are perceived.
Step 2 – How you actually are perceived.
Step 3 – How you want to be perceived.
Step 4 – How you change that perception.

to his Seven Ways to Gain Visibility…

1. Seek out projects.
2. Leverage you manager.
3. Gain face time with top executives.
4. Find cross-departmental opportunities.
5. Become involved outside your job.
6. Speak up share.
7. Become known and recognized.

All manageable changes to your regular work routine that will aid you in getting ahead. To close the book, Garfinkle presents a quick chapter on “The PVI Model in Action,” relating the story of Ken Kutaragi, the creator of the Sony Playstation, who had earlier had his dreams and reputation crushed when Nintendo partnered with Phillips rather than Sony to create its first game system. This short anecdote does an excellent job of showing how you can turn your fortunes around.

Jodi Glickman’s Great on the Job advertises itself as a “people skills primer” focusing on ways you can sharpen your communication skills in order to better succeed in the workplace. Why this focus? Because, Glickman says, the basics of interpersonal communication aren’t something being taught in any B-school or crash course. She “launched the consulting firm Great on the Job to meet an unmet and, as of then, unidentified need in the marketplace: to teach people to talk to one another at work, every day, in every situation, in all stages of their careers, whether they are on the top of their game or have no idea what the #$% is going on.”

She presents a methodology that, she says, “takes a ‘soft’ skill and turns it into a ‘hard’ or technical skill.” The book overall is a series of conversations that Glickman then breaks down using the following series of steps:

1. Situational Analysis
2. Action Strategy
3. Example Language
4. Troubleshooting

The four key themes, or high-level concepts, as she calls them, that underlie the more pragmatic material are GIFT, or:

Generosity
Initiative
Forward Momentum
Transparency

Glickman says that when “you start integrating these four concepts into your everyday actions, you’ll find yourself better able to communicate, get people on your side when you need them, and avoid mishaps and miscommunications.” From chapters on how to “Master the Hello and Good-Bye” to developing “Your Personal Elevator Pitch”, Glickman illuminates just how powerful the right words can be.

***

Both books, Getting Ahead and Great on the Job, offer you useable advice on the skills needed to improve your standing at work, and, when your performance improves, so might your security during these desperate times.

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October 31, 2011

Halloween, Zombies and the Devil’s Derivatives

Filed under: Book Reviews,Finance and Economics — dylan @ 2:20 pm

This may be a ghost story. It happened on a dark night mistaken for morning in America, a night that would descend over the entire financial world.

Nicholas Dunbar sets the scene in his book, The Devil’s Derivatives:

For most of it’s history, our financial system was built by on the stolid, cautious decisions of bankers, the men who hate to lose. This cautious investment mind-set drove the creation of socially useful financial institutions over the last few hundred years. … People like that did not drive the kind of astronomical growth seen in the last two decades.

So who did create that astronomical growth? Dunbar tells of encountering them one evening while they were “celebrating their annual bacchanal, which is also known as “bonus season.’”

I knew bout some of them: there was the head of the financial institutions derivatives marketing who forgot which of his Italian supercars had been towed off to the car pound. There was the head of credit structuring notorious for preying on female staff and having his corporate credit cards stolen by prostitutes. These young men—and almost all of them were young, some shockingly so—were the avant-garde of the credit derivatives boom, enjoying the first, fifth, or tenth million. … There are many sobriquets for these young lions, but I like to think of them as the men who love to win.

So the stage is set for a battle between the men who love to win, for whom “any uncertain bet is a chance to become unbelievably happy, and the misery of losing barely merits a moment’s consideration,” and the men who hate to lose, who “are attached to the idea of certainty and stability” (you can think of them as vampires and werewolves). But the battle never happened. The moon was just right that night.

[T]he love-to-win mindset spread like a virus. With all that pixie dust—or was it filthy lucre?—these bankers sprinkled across London and New York, who could be surprised that their influence spread? First, it infected the traditional bankers (and their hate-to-lose cousins at insurance companies, municipalities, and pension funds). Men and women who had been pillars of the communities from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Seattle shrugged off their time-honored—boring!—roles of prudently taking deposits and offering loans and started wanting to make “real” money. Regional bankers in turn spread it to consumers, who were encouraged to drop their “antiquated,” risk-averse attitudes toward borrowing and home ownership. And thus was born the greatest wealth-generating machine the world had ever seen. It was truly awe inspiring in its raw power and avarice, and truly horrifying when it came crashing down.

Dunbar traces this all to a new emphasis on shareholder value among banks in the late ’80s and the rise of new derivatives that would help banks increase that value, sparking “the innovation race between two ways of transferring credit risk: the old-fashioned ‘letter of credit’ versus a recent invention, the credit default swap.” Perhaps it’s a good idea to briefly define exactly what a derivative is (to the best of my limited knowledge). A derivative is essentially a forward contract on a future transaction that allows each side to reduce uncertainty and “square up logistics.” The largest derivatives market in the world is in interest rates, with the most common being the interest rate swap. The most destructive derivative has been the credit default swap:

Rather than being linked to currency markets, interest rates, stocks, or commodities, these derivatives were linked to unmitigated financial disaster: the default of loans or bonds. I found it hard to imagine who might be interested in buying such a derivative from a bank. The nonfinancial companies whose activities in the globalized economy exposed them to financial uncertainty didn’t seem interested. The derivatives that were useful to them—futures, options, and swaps linked to commodities, currencies, and interest rates—had already been invented. It seemed to me as if the credit default swap as an invention searching for a real purpose. As it happened, the kind of companies that found credit default swaps most relevant were those that had lots of default risk on their books: the banks [themselves].

This allowed money to flow much more freely as institutions could make loans they weren’t responsible for recovering, loans could be bundled into credit default obligations (CDOs), and you could speculate on that bundle of loans with credit default swaps. It was, essentially, creating money out of thin air, loaning it to whoever would take it and then buying insurance on it just to turn a buck. The problem is that there are a finite number of applicants out there qualified to take out loans the banks could bundle, and invented money is infinite. So they started loaning money to folks who they knew wouldn’t be able to pay it back, and this is where the zombies come into the story.

Having flooded the market with seemingly safe investments larded with subprime money, the traders created zombie banks to buy them. Brick-and-mortar banks liked these zombies, because they evaded accounting rules and regulations, and increased profits. Hungry for higher fees, ratings agencies encouraged the growth of this new market and undermined governance. Wall Street saw the zombie structured investment vehicles (SIVs) as ideal “dumb money” customers for buying subprime CDOs and began setting them up specifically for this purpose. But at first whiff of in 2007, investors fled this market, causing the zombies to collapse almost overnight. Banks were forced to bail them out, which increased their subprime problems

And that’s when it all came crashing down, when the banks realized that they didn’t even know how much risk they were carrying, and when the government stepped in to essentially insure an unknown and bail out the banks.

Well, at least the men who love to win “got theirs” for awhile, even if the rest of us largely lost out when it all came crashing down. But here’s my question: Was all that wealth, all those profits they created and moved around during those boom years really, truly growth? Or was it just a ghost?

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October 25, 2011

Liespotting

Filed under: Book Reviews,Communication — Jon @ 3:21 pm

Oftentimes, when someone lies to us, we think, “I knew that wasn’t true.” Yet, for a moment, we trusted them, and we believed they were being honest. We then wonder how we could have been more certain up front, and not have been fooled. We’ll be more careful next time, we tell ourselves. Then, one day, it happens again.

But now, the process can stop.

Pamela Meyer’s book Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception has been reissued in paperback, and is packed with information on exactly what the title describes – identifying lies, and how to respond to them.

But it’s not all about calling people out on dishonesty, it’s about how to get to the truth and build better and stronger relationships.

Check out the author’s recent TED talk which reveals more about the book and the ideas within:

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October 24, 2011

Doing the Right Thing

Filed under: Big Ideas,Book Reviews — Sally @ 5:29 pm

In 2007, we chose a book called Responsibility at Work as the winner of the Personal Development category for that year’s Business Book of the Year Awards. It was the first time I’d been exposed to Howard Gardner’s work–he is prolific*, so the book we featured was only a small part of his overall catalog–, and I became quite interested in his Theory of Multiple Intelligences. I don’t recall if I’ve ever taken an official IQ test but I can tell you I wouldn’t have done well on it. I’m one of those people with test anxiety which impairs my ability to perform well on tests. It’s a bit like an athlete who doesn’t compete well, I suppose. Some athletes are able to turn anxiousness into energy while others get distracted by it. That’s how I am in any kind of test that needs a right or wrong answer: is it any wonder why I oriented toward the fine arts and Blue Book tests that I could fill out to my heart’s content? So naturally I am drawn to other ways of measuring intelligence. Not only for my own ego, but because most people know full well that human performance is complicated despite our desire to place people in pigeon-holes.

Wikipedia, as always, sums the theory up handily for us, describing the Theory of Multiple Intelligences as “a model of intelligence that differentiates intelligence into various specific (primarily sensory) modalities, rather than seeing it as dominated by a single general ability.” Gardner proposed the following as meeting his criteria for what is an intelligence.

Spatial
Linguistic
Logical-mathematical
Bodily-kinesthetic
Musical
Interpersonal
Intrapersonal
Naturalistic

Not everyone agrees with Gardner on this list, or even sees a point to the exercise, but Gardner acknowledges that this is truly just a theory, a theory that over time will prove true and/or valuable.

“I’ve put forth a candidate set of intelligences that are said to have their own characteristic processes and to be reasonably independent of one another. Over time, the particular intelligences nominated, and their degree of dependence or independence of one another, will be more firmly established.” HowardGardner.com/FAQ

There are two new books out this month that posit, if indirectly, additions to the above list of intelligences.

Ethical Intelligence: Five Principles for Untangling Your Toughest Problems at Work and Beyond by Bruce Weinstein, aka “The Ethics Guy” on Bloomberg’s Businessweek Online.

Many of us are familiar with Daniel Goleman’s popular book, Emotional Intelligence which focused on “the ability to discern how others are feeling, which can be quite different from the ways they present themselves to the world.” Here Bruce Weinstein draws a distinction between emotional intelligence and ethical intelligence, saying that it is not only important to process the world and its varied situations emotionally, but, then, when you actually have to do something in response, that requires ethical intelligence. “Emotional intelligence alone won’t–and can’t–tell you what you ought to do. That’s because emotional intelligence is a psychological mattter, but the question “What’s the right thing to do?” is an ethical one.

Weinstein’s five principles of ethical intelligence are:

Do No Harm
Make Things Better
Respect Others
Be Fair
Be Loving

And this new book will show you how to identify and improve your Ethical Intelligence and “imbue your life with meaning and enrich all of your relationships” by doing the right thing.

Intuitive Compass: Why the Best Decisions Balance Reason and Instinct by Francis Cholle, an international business consultant with a hefty and diverse vitae, including study in theater and clinical psychology.

In The Intuitive Compass, Cholle introduces us to Intuitive Intelligence, and defends our use of it vigorously. “Intuitive Intelligence is a set of skills I designed that uses intuition to get to the instinctual and nonconscious parts of our minds. It can be learned and developed, but because instinct does not operate in the same way as reason, Intuitive Intelligence requires unusual forms of learning and thinking.” The benefit of understanding instinct is then that we are able to alter our decision-making process to find balance and reason.

Cholle begins his book with an Intuitive Compass to help you determine how you make decisions, and then, surprisingly, he leads us into the field of play. There is a lot of good material that extends past play in this book, including how intuition allows agility and creativity, how intuition enables innovation, how you can use your intuitive intelligence; but one of my favorite lines is: “Play open us up to the possibility that we don’t need more of anything–time, money, knowledge, and so on–in order to produce more. It is a radical idea, especially in business, where we often hear the argument that budgets are limited and therefore the ability to innovate is limited.”

In the case of both books, as well as Gardner’s work, the compelling aspect is that the more information we learn about the way we think, the better we get at doing the right thing.

*Perhaps Gardner’s top business book is Five Minds for the Future. And for information about his GoodWork Project, visit www.goodworkproject.org.

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October 6, 2011

Practical Genius

Filed under: Blog,Book Reviews — Jon @ 8:00 am

Geniuses are people on a higher level. We imagine them as gurus and experts whose every word seems like the perfect articulation of whatever it is they speak of. And certainly, those people do exist. We see them all the time (I mean, some of the books I review…sheesh!).

But what about us? Can we be geniuses too?

Before you laugh too hard, take a look at Gina Amaro Rudan’s book Practical Genius: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Passions and Talents Working For You.

She states, “The problem with the commonly accepted concept of “genius” is that it’s a quality – like creativity – that has a magical, elusive connotation. Most people consider genius to be a gift, a lightning bolt from the gods that strikes a lucky few like Mozart or Einstein, but not the rest of us. I’m here to tell you that this is simply not true. Every one of us has the capacity for genius. Any one of us could achieve or discuss or express something so extraordinary that it could change the world. More important, it could change your world.”

From there, she offers the steps to discover and develop the genius qualities we each have, from understanding skills and insights, to communication skills and methods, to associating with other geniuses and genius qualities, and building a group of ambassadors (quality over quantity) that are struck by what you say and do.

Forewarded by Kevin Carroll and endorsed by Seth Godin, this book isn’t fluff, but applicable, street-level practicality for real personal development.

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October 4, 2011

The Coming Jobs War

Filed under: Big Ideas,Blog,Book Reviews,Current Events — Jon @ 8:00 am

Right now, some of us are sitting in positions we’ve held for years, and looking forward to staying that way. Others are scrambling to prove their worth in a highly competitive market. Yet others still may have given up, after years of trying to find work, with no hope in site.

The new Gallup book The Coming Jobs War, by Jim Clifton, says the situation is going to get more intense for each of those groups. And while an entrepreneurial spirit is certainly important for individuals during this time, the book’s aim focuses on cities’ business leaders and philanthropists as the solution to the crisis.

In this case, Clifton argues, a war, as severe as it sounds, is warranted. “He states, “I don’t use the term ‘war’ lightly. This really has to be a war on job loss, on low workplace energy, on healthcare costs, on low graduation rates, on brain drain, and on community disengagement. Those things destroy cities, destroy job growth, and destroy city GDP. Every city requires its own master plan that is as serious as planning for war.”

While his research seems dire, his urgency and passion are an inspiring look at what America can and should do to turn around the marketplace, the economy, and our own personal survival. A compelling and important read.

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October 3, 2011

Talk Normal

Filed under: Book Reviews,Communication — dylan @ 2:57 pm

Jack reviewed a great book a few years ago called The Management Myth: Why the “Experts” Keep Getting It Wrong. It is a serious book critiquing what the author calls “the pseudoscience of management theory,” a call for us to look at management theory not as a science, but as a philosophy.

A question at the heart of that book is the efficacy of business jargon—that is, does the language we invent around business topics really produce a better understanding of those topics, or simply make the speaker of that language sound more clever, studied and imbued with expertise. The author begins the book with the story of how he, with just one “miserable summer at a fast-food restaurant” and a doctorate in nineteenth-century German philosophy under his belt, decided to try for a job in consulting. To prepare for his interview, he read the Financial Times every day for two weeks and devoured In Search of Excellence to master what he called “management speak.” And, despite his total lack of management experience or business expertise, he left that interview with a job as a management consultant. Soon he was being billed out to clients at a rate of half a million dollars per year—not because he was an expert on management, but because he could talk like one.

Now there comes a book that tackles the topic of business jargon from another, much more satirical angle, Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak, Jargon and Waffle by Tim Phillips. This is a book for those in the trenches of the jargon war, those just trying to get through and make sense of yet another indecipherable email or memo. Phillips is the author of two previous books, Fit to Bust: How Great Companies Fail and Knockoff: The Deadly Trade in Counterfeit Goods. But why did Tim Phillips write this book? As he writes in the forward:

Talk Normal facilitates information delivery through mutilpe media formats and monetises eyeballs.

London, UK, Mar 30, 2011/TalkNormalWire — Talk Normal (http://talknormal.co.uk), the leading solution for information clarity optimisation and humour-based jargon mitigation strategies, has announced that it will henceforth facilitate information delivery through multiple media formats.

The expanded service offering encompasses a paper-based added-value offering which leverages content originated in the pre-exosting electronic service delivery method. Utilising multiple delivery channels matches eyeballs to content in an optimised and diversified platform: while retaining unity of purpose, the paper-based variant can reach Talk Normal partners who face electirical or data-access challenges, and additionally it interfaces with partners who want to make proactive moves to Talknormalise the jargon portfolios. It will also expedite the creation of enhanced revenue streams by monetising Talk Normal’s attention endowment.

Talk Normal’s chief solution advocate, Tim Phillips, commented that ‘Many people ask me what this means to me. It means that I’ve written a book about my blog so I can earn some money.’

As you can probably tell, this book has a lot of humor (and British spelling) in it. But it’s also deadly serious, providing real answers to a real problem in offices all over the world. On the one hand, if you’re in business, you had better learn the language of business if you want to survive and thrive. But, on the other hand, so much of that language adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation and obscures the issues for those involved in the process and/or just trying to figure out what the heck is actually going on. It’s similar to the idea that artists must learn the rules of art before they can break them, except that the rules of art (composition, perspective, etc.) were put in place to better represent reality, whereas the rules of business jargon… well, there don’t appear to be any real rules to business jargon. The author has come up with three guidelines to help:

Try to be understood by everyone who’s listening.
Stop trying to sound clever for no reason.
It’s about attitude, not rules.

The first two are rather obvious, but the third may need a bit more explanation. Phillips write of rule three:

I’m constantly contacted by amateur grammarians who want me to post something about the abuse of dangling modifiers. I don’t do this because I don’t really know what a dangling modifier is. I could look it up on Wikipedia and pretend that I know what I’m talking about but that would mean I was trying to sound clever for no reason (see above).

We need to think clearly to write clearly, not swallow a book about grammar. I edit some terrible articles. The first thought is that there’s a problem with the grammar: then when you fix the grammar you often find that there isn’t a clear train of thought underlying what they wrote. That’s the problem, not the dangling modifier.

As a reviewer of business books and the managing editor of ChangeThis, I couldn’t agree more.
Talk Normal is both a lot of fun and extremely practical at the same time. It will leave you laughing and thinking more clearly. And it will be released by Kogan Page later this month. Be sure to check it out

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September 21, 2011

It’s Not About You

Filed under: Book Reviews,InBubbleWrap — Sally @ 2:51 pm

In 2008, a little book called The Go-Giver took the business book world by storm, and still is a perennial favorite. Bob Burg and John David Mann’s The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea is a parable that showed how giving could actually increase profits, rather than diminish them. More than that, it showed that those who don’t give, actually struggle more, and are likely in a position to fail.

In 2010, Burg and Mann released Go-Givers Sell More, which was not a parable or story, but a straight-up guide about the values of giving. This proves these guys aren’t just good story tellers (they are that, too) but provides clear details on how to apply The Go-Giver principles to your business; with examples and further insights.

Now, in 2011 Burg and Mann return to the parable format with their thought-provoking new book, It’s Not About You. Burg and Mann’s story unties some of the knotty myths about what makes a good leader. Wisdom cannot be forced. People cannot be forced. Even if you think your way is the only way, intimidation and manipulation won’t get you very far. Instead, the authors present a number of intriguing and atypical leadership ideas that include a few lessons in linguistics (choose the right words and understanding what they really mean matters), attention to detail (don’t lead from above, experience what it is to work below), what’s important (your employees are people, and when you show your human side, those people respond), and so on. With the ultimate message being, as the title says, leading is “not about you.”

With It’s Not About You, Bob Burg and John David Mann once again succeed in breathing new energy into the business parable, and really, It’s Not About You is a life lesson for everyone. The good news is that we are giving away 20 copies of the book over on inBubbleWrap this week!

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September 20, 2011

The Future of Value

Filed under: Blog,Book Reviews — Jon @ 4:02 pm

According to Eric Lowitt, author of the new book, The Future of Value, sustainability and outperforming your competition at the same time, is a choice, not an impossibility.

The first part of the book describes how sustainability creates value. And in this case, sustainability refers to “a continuous, unwavering commitment that companies make to balance their financial returns with environmental impact and social equity investments.” By making decisions in this regard, a company gains advantages that it’s competition hasn’t prepared for, whether short, mid, or long-term.

The second part of the book addresses ways to create value within an organization, discussing ways to implement sustainability into management, performance analysis, and the value chain.

In both cases, Lowitt’s theories are mapped out, stated clearly, and otherwise detailed in step-by-step fashion. This is straight writing that’s highly actionable. Here’s an example:

This book is based on a clear premise. Companies that embrace sustainability sharpen their strategies and strengthen their ability to execute, leading to value creation for stakeholders. That is, integrating sustainability into strategic-planning exercises helps companies identify new growth opportunities while reducing their exposure to legal, resource, and sociopolitical risk. In turn, sustainability leads companies to cast an even more critical eye toward both the efficacy and long-term viability of their value chain activities. This is how Sustainable Market Leaders create increased top-line (revenue and brand value) and bottom-line (reduced expenses and reduced risks) value for their stakeholders.

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