I’m backed up on my reading and reviews, so I thought I’d cover two today, one with my own brief review and the other linked to a review by Jim Stroup.
First off is a new offering from Stanford’s Bob Sutton whose first book, The No Asshole Rule, loudly and publicly said what we all know—the workplace is no place for assholes (AKA jerks). Sutton’s new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss loudly proclaims another truth—boss quality matters or, as Sutton says, “people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses.” Jim already said everything in my mind, so read his excellent review and then read the book, you won’t be disappointed.
The Orange Revolution is about the power of teams, but instead of typically anecdotal evidence, it’s based on a 350,000-person study done by the Best Places to Work folks and other global studies, as well as their own experience over 20 years.
They found six traits that all successful teams share, sharing a dream or a vision, believing in your ability to realize that dream, willingness to take prudent risks, appropriate metrics, perseverance, and a narrative or story-line that captures people’s imaginations and drives extraordinary efforts.
You may have heard this before, but solid research and good presentation makes a big difference. The book isn’t geared just to managers and positional leaders, if you work with a group, even a dysfunctional one, reading the book will benefit you.
I think both these books belong in your personal library and they would make great presents to friends—or anonymously to bosses who need them.
I am a fan of Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton; I reviewed both The Carrot Principle and The Levity Effect and highly recommend them. The books feel like fast reads, but digesting and using the (unconventional to some) wisdom found in each takes a bit longer.
The Daily Carrot Principle is the size of a desk calendar and offers much of that wisdom in bite-sized pieces by addressing one idea each day of the year, explaining it and providing a short description of the action needed to implement it.
I highly recommend The Daily Carrot Principle for yourself and for a gift—unlike a desk calendar you won’t want to get rid of it any time soon.
Recommendations
Many articles and books have/are being written about the Madoff scandal and dozens of other Ponzi schemes born of loose money and a wholesale ignoring of the old adage, “if it seems too good to be true it probably is.”
The most compelling book I’ve come across regarding Madoff is the inside look from Harry Markopolos detailing the eight years he spent trying to expose him and how the SEC refused to listen. Read this excerpt from How I Got the Goods on Madoff, and Why No One Would Listen to decide if it’s your cup of tea.
The message was practically the same in every one of those 14 meetings: “We have a special relationship with Mr. Madoff. He’s closed to new investors and he takes money only from us.”
When I heard that said the first time I accepted it. When I heard it the second time I began to get suspicious. And when I heard it 14 times in less than two weeks, I knew it was a Ponzi scheme. I didn’t say anything about the fact that I heard the same claim of exclusivity from several other funds. If I had, or if I had tried to warn anyone, they would have responded by dumping on me. Who was I to attack their god?
Another excerpt served up by Bloomberg Business Week offers a fascinating peek into Roger Lowenstein’s new book The End of Wall Street. Not that it is going away, but that its laissez-faire attitude may be.
The crash of 2008 put to rest the intellectual model that inspired, and to a large degree facilitated, the bubble. It spelled the end of the immodest faith in Wall Street’s ability to forecast.
The first Monday of the month is the signal for another Leadership Development Carnival, but don’t be fooled, it covers management and other associated topics. It is hosted this month by Sharlyn Lauby at HR Bartender and written by some of the most talented folks in the blogsphere.
It’s an extensive selection, enough to keep you going all month.
In putting together today’s carnival, I thought it might be fun to ask how long people have been blogging – their blogging “anniversary” if you will. It was interesting to hear their answers. On one hand, blogging has been around for a long time. Dave Winer, author of Scripting News, has one of the oldest weblogs and it was established in 1997. But notice the number of posts from bloggers who have been writing two years or less. It’s very cool to see engagement from people who have been blogging for years along with the excitement of people who have been blogging for months.
10+ YearsEven if you’re not a woman or managing a non-profit, there are some classic management tips in Wild Woman Fundraising’s post Advanced Fundraising: Managing Others.
Over at Ep!c Living blog, Eric Pennington says It’s Almost Never About You and describes the dangers of making clients second and the importance of leaving “self” behind.
Miki Saxon at MAPping Company Success explains in her post, Leadership’s Future: To Hire and Hold (Millennials), that if you want a happy workforce, you need to provide the same things that make for a happy family.
At Joe and Wanda on Management, we learn the three most important words in business and how to create and environment of mutual support in the post, Checking Six.
Persistence pays! is the message by Leader Business blog. Author Karl Marlantes endeavored for 32 years to get his book published. Blogger Tom Magness asks us how hard we are willing to work toward achieving our goals.
Instead of squeezing more stuff into the day, the Monevator shares with us a new killer method for better time management in the post, Personal Time Management for Fun and Profit.
Music plays a critical role in jumping folk’s spirits. Check out EzineArticles.com’s Coping with Colleague’s Stress at Work to find out how background music can increase workplace productivity.
The very dapper host of HR Happy Hour, Steve Boese, shares with us how the best leaders are not afraid to coach and mentor their top performers in The Wisdom of Jeff Van Gundy – Part II. If you didn’t catch Part I of this post, you can check it out here.
The i4cp blog suggests succession planning is not just a flawed term but a flawed paradigm. They recommend to organizations Don’t Plan Succession, Manage It.
Michael Lee Stallard at E Pluribus Partners explains that task excellence along isn’t enough. The answer lies in The Science of Employee Engagement.
Forbes said good leaders recognize when patterns change. Anne Perschel over at Germane Insights Blog writes they were wrong. Good leaders SEE INTO the FUTURE.
In order to understand ourselves, we need to Explore Life Purpose. Mike King at Learn This takes us on the journey.
Bob Lieberman talks about organizational survival in his post The Need for Nerve.
Being a good project manager is an important skill for the future. Take a look at the Project Management Interview Questions and Answers to see if you have what it takes to manage the important task of making sure projects are on-time, within quality standards and at budget.
A key skill for any leader is public speaking. Matt Eventoff at Communications 3.0 coaches us on effective speeches in Clash of the Titans, Public Speaking and Chris Christie. Good tips for anyone who presents information.
1 Year
Jennifer V. Miller of The People Equation cautions organizations about encouraging “fearlessness”. See how leaders can stay on the “light side” of the force in her post the Boundaries of Fearlessness.
Over at The Bloom Blog, Lisa Ann Edwards explains leadership in terms such as Gemstones and Spark and shares wonderful stories of people who possess those qualities.
Mike Henry at Lead Change Group reminds us that our friends and the people we associate with set the boundaries of our future. He suggests socializing with high-caliber leaders to become one in his post, Your Friends and Your Future.
Confronting someone is never a favorite task, but sometimes necessary to manage performance. The Thriving Small Business blog shows us How to Confront Negative Employee Behaviors.
David Burkus from The Leader Lab explains Situational Leadership theory and why you should care about it in the post Path-Goal Theory.
According to The SALT & Pepper Group, there are seven core leadership styles. In their series wrap up, titled The 8th Leader, they share a specific classification system of leadership.
Timeless?
Some of our contributors have either been blogging so long they’ve forgotten or not long enough to keep track. Regardless, their posts are worthy of a visit.
Utilizing an outside-in approach means focusing on delivering something of value to customers, as opposed to focusing on products and sales.
Gulati discusses 5 key levers from both “why” and “how”:
Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.
Cooperation: Align all employees around the shared goal of customer solutions.
Clout: Redistribute power to “bridge builders” and customer champions.
Capability: Develop employees’ skills at tackling changing customer needs.
Connection: Blend partners’ offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.
Gulati is blunt and his approach isn’t for those who prefer incremental change to revolutionary, but it is MAP that will stop many leaders from embracingReorganize for Resilience—because you can’t implement that in which you don’t sincerely believe.
Since the advice to be customer-centric isn’t new, following it isn’t easy and may actually require difficult, even painful changes to your MAP, so why bother with Reorganize for Resilience?
Because it carries the biggest bottom-line payoff, both short and long-term, in any economy and for any company—from Fortune 50 to the neighborhood copy shop.
I have a stack of books waiting to be read, some I buy and some are sent by publicists for me to review.
Then there is the constantly growing list of books I hear about or see a review and want to read.
But I have only so much reading time and it’s shrinking as we get closer to the launch of our new product (stay tuned).
So I created a new category called Reviews and Recommendations and included MAPping Company Success’ ‘Book Reviews’ and Leadership Turn’s ‘Reading Recommendations’. I hope you find it useful.
Today, I have some interesting recommendations for you.
The first is from Jeffrey Krames, a literary agent who tells the fascinating story of a self-published book that sells for nearly $50 with an unwieldy title that instantly became a top Amazon seller. Whether or not you want to tackle the book you’ll enjoy its story.
Two European authors—Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur—spent years putting together a stunning book on business models entitled BUSINESS MODEL GENERATION. The two authors had a great deal of help with the design and content of the book, as it was co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries…Within 48 hours the book ranked as high as #74 on Amazon, an amazing feat for most any business book and especially this one. Since then, the two versions of the book have occupied two of the top 25 slots on Amazon’s list of bestselling management books every single day.
After reading dozens of day-by-day articles and commentary on the financial meltdown, none of the myriad of books written about it really grabbed me. However, when I read a review of Henry Paulson’s newly published On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System in Business Week I was intrigued.
What got my attention (and made me ill) was the following quote.
“All were concerned with excessive risk taking in the markets and appalled by the erosion of underwriting standards,” he writes in his penetrating memoir, On the Brink. Yet they felt forced by competitive pressure to make loans they didn’t like, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary says.
“Isn’t there something you can do to order us not to take all of these risks?” was the gist of a question posed by Chuck Prince, who was still running Citigroup as the bank bumbled toward disaster.
This from some of the most powerful business “leaders” in the country.
I just finished Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir. Hers is a name you see everywhere, books, TV movies and on the big screen. The memoir is a fast read, a fascinating peek into the world that shaped this master storyteller and some excellent insights on just plain living.
“When a child comes to you wanting to share something he or she has written of sketched, be generous with our praise. If it’s a written piece, don’t talk about the spelling or the penmanship; look for creativity and applaud it. The flame of inspiration needs to be encouraged. Put a glass around that small candle and protect it from discouragement or ridicule.
I wonder if any adult—parent or teacher—realizes that young people never forgive or forget being humiliated.”
This really hit home. In high school I took a creative writing class; one assignment was to write a short screenplay from which our teacher would choose a few to critique in class.
He started with the one he thought was best and proceeded through the others. Mine was among those chosen and he tore it to pieces, not professionally, but with sarcasm and zingers. He ended the critique by asking how any student could be so arrogant as to think that the writing had any value whatsoever.
Needless to say, the so-called anonymity was a joke and everyone knew who the authors were and my humiliation was extreme. It was 35 years before I creatively wrote again, but never stories—that desire was totally dead and buried.
Higgins Clark shares two old definitions of happiness that should resonate with everyone and if they don’t then you need to take a hard look at your values.
“If you want to be happy for a year, win the lottery. If you want to be happy for life, love what you do.”and“Something to have, someone to love, and something to hope for.”
Definitely food for thought as you start gearing up for the holidays.
Finally, following up thread I started Friday and have decided to continue tomorrow, “It is not always how we act, but how we react that tells the story of our lives.”
I hope you will join me tomorrow to see why, in many cases, coping is a far more productive activity than fixing, both at work and in life.
In their new book they spell out with great examples why lightening up boosts all the metrics you want to go up—productivity, creativity, innovation, retention and happiness.
Understand that ‘levity’ is not about telling jokes any more than ‘happy’ and ‘fun’ are about goofing off. That’s especially true about jokes that start with ‘Now, don’t be offended…’ or end with ‘just kidding’. As one manager, who is deep into levity as a management tool, said to me, “If they want jokes they should watch Leno or Letterman.”
Levity is about lightening up and recognizing that trust, communication, and creativity are all increased when people spend their time with people whose company they enjoy.
It is about having fun because you are challenged, encouraged to grow and given multiple opportunities to make a difference.
The information in the book is the product of ten years of extensive research proving that traditional ‘wipe that smile off your face’ attitudes are counterproductive. The research is backed up with case studies of recognized leading companies whose numbers can’t be argued with and whose top brass are vocal in their belief that a happy workforce produces happy customers—and that levity is a major component of happy.
Of course, the problem with a book such as The Levity Effect is that the people who will be quick to ‘get it’ are the ones who already believe in the basic concept, whereas the ones who really need it will be resistant—it’s always questionable how well any book can sell a foreign concept to what may be a hostile buyer.
We’ll talk more about how to do that this week, as well as things you can do no matter your level in an organization and how to incorporate levity into your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) to make life better for you and those around you.
When discussing or reading about leadership you hear a lot about EQ, AKA, emotional intelligence and SQ, AKA, social intelligence, but what do they really mean?
Social intelligence refers to your knowledge and understanding of other people’s MAP.
To learn more, watch this interview with Daniel Goleman, prolific author and renowned psychologist. Start learning how to use emotional and social intelligence to improve your team’s performance as well as your own, both professionally and professionally.
I lived more than 25 years in and around Silicon Valley. There have been many books written about the area, people and happenings (one of my all time favorites is The Nudist On The Nightshift), with many focused on those who start companies—the famous and infamous Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Contrary to much of what you may read in the media none of it is dead; not the VCs, who are raising new funds, or the angels, who invest their own money, and certainly not the entrepreneurs.
Nor are the folks who write about them; some write from the halls of academia, some from the heights of punditship and a few who have actually been there/done that.
One such is Sramana Mitra, a tech entrepreneur who founded three companies, consults with Silicon Valley VCs, writes a column for Forbes and has a MS in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.
Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction is the second book in her Entrepreneur’s Journeys series and it’s a great read.
As opposed to a series of lessons to be taught, the book is a series of interviews with entrepreneurs highlighting their fascinating histories, the different paths they took and the difficulties they overcame.
It’s about the need for solid management skill—a book about implementers with vision as opposed to visionaries who depend on others to make it happen.
What you learn from them is up to you, but whether you plan to start a business or not you would have to work very hard not to benefit from their experiences.
The book’s focus is on companies that started and progressed without venture investment. Mitra does an excellent job of pointing out that even without IPOs, M&A and VCs throwing money like beads at Mardi Gras starting a company in your garage with a few friends is not only a solid approach—but a better one.
“If the next Google is to emerge and bring with it thousands of new jobs, it must first start over some kitchen table where not only hope but opportunity is readily available. Where entrepreneurs not only start businesses at a higher rate, but also survive and thrive at a higher rate.”
She points that many businesses fail for lack of funding, but if you don’t look for funding that roadblock ceases to exist.
“Through much discussion, writing, and brainstorming on each topic, I arrived at one core thesis: Not just entrepreneurship, but bootstrapped entrepreneurship is the true weapon of mass reconstruction.”
Having lived through the dot com bubble I know that this is true. Too much available investment makes trust fund babies of companies that need to grow up hungry, tough and scrappy.
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
You bring in a CEO who has a passionate belief that the interaction between customers and frontline associates has the greatest influence on success and that the greatest impact on that is the way their leaders/managers treat them.
In other words, employees at every level do unto customers as their bosses do unto them.
Jack Rooney is as far from a rock star CEO as you can get, but he understands that real leadership must permeate the entire company and knows that while true cultural change is neither fast nor cheap it works and therefore is worth the effort.
Rooney calls his approach the Dynamic Organization; he developed it under challenging conditions at Ameritech and brought it to full fruition at US Cellular, which he joined in 1999.
The Pursuit of Something Better tells both stories, Rooney’s and US Cellular’s; they are told by Dave Esler and Myra Kruger, the culture consultants who worked with him at USC and his previous company.
Both stories are the culmination of a man who believed in doing the right thing and a company that was changed accordingly.
“Jack Rooney and his slowly-expanding team of believers challenged the long-prevailing assumptions that business is a blood sport, that the advantage inevitably goes to the ruthless and the greed, that the only way to win is to hold your nose and leave your values at the door. He has proved beyond question, once and for all, regardless of what happens from her on, that a values-based model works, that it can raids both a company and the individuals who are part of it to undreamed-of-heights, to peak experiences that will last a lifetime and change the way those lives are lived.”
And while the authors do a great job of telling the story, the real leadership that Rooney provided, along with his concept of the Dynamic Organization, aren’t broken down or spelled out as a set of lessons and how-to’s separated for you to memorize.
It’s your responsibility to learn from what was done, drawing out those lessons that are most in synch with your MAP, because if they aren’t in synch there’s no way you’ll be able to implement them.
And in case you’re tempted to shrug it off as a fluke, I suggest that you give some long hard thought to Zappos and its ilk.
I highly recommend The Pursuit of Something Better. It’s fun, it’s fascinating. You might even start to believe that you don’t have to leave your ethics at the door; at the very least you’ll know what to look for in your next interview.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
First off is a new offering from Stanford’s Bob Sutton whose first book, The No Asshole Rule, loudly and publicly said what we all know—the workplace is no place for assholes (AKA jerks). Sutton’s new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss loudly proclaims another truth—boss quality matters or, as Sutton says, “people do not quit organizations, they quit bad bosses.” Jim already said everything in my mind, so read his excellent review and then read the book, you won’t be disappointed.
evidence, it’s based on a 350,000-person study done by the Best Places to Work folks and other global studies, as well as their own experience over 20 years.
The Daily Carrot Principle is the size of a desk calendar and offers much of that wisdom in bite-sized pieces by addressing one idea each day of the year, explaining it and providing a short description of the action needed to implement it.
In putting together today’s carnival, I thought it might be fun to ask how long people have been blogging – their blogging “anniversary” if you will. It was interesting to hear their answers. On one hand, blogging has been around for a long time. 
Enter 
I have a stack of books waiting to be read, some I buy and some are sent by publicists for me to review.
I just finished Mary Higgins Clark’s memoir. Hers is a name you see everywhere, books, TV movies and on the big screen. The memoir is a fast read, a fascinating peek into the world that shaped this master storyteller and some excellent insights on just plain living.
As I said 
What do you do with a slightly-below-mediocre company that keeps its business going by staying in small markets where its dominance is assured by an almost total lack of competition; a company with little regard for its employees and less for the communities in which it operates?
