Archive for the ‘Book Reviews’ Category

Taming the Abrasive Manager

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Have you ever worked for a tyrannical boss? Have you ever worked with someone brilliant in their field but also gifted at demoralizing employees and pissing off peers?

Help is here!

Taming the Abrasive Manager is a quick read and a should be a mandatory read for anyone who works for (or even near) one of those “challenged” managers. Dr. Laura Crawshaw aka The Boss Whisperer shows you in fun, easy to read stories and brilliant instructions based in 25 years of real-world experience taming misguided leaders who terrorized their workplace.  What I enjoyed most about this book is that the author doesn’t stoop to cheap caricatures; she succinctly and precisely nails the core driver of “bad” boss behavior – FEAR BASED TRIGGERS – and shows you how you can help yourself and help a boss see the light.

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Book Review: More Than A Minute

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Amazon.com Link to More Than A MinuteHolly is a friend of mine and a talented strategy faciliator. She is a highly qualified authority on management techniques after serving for many years as a consultant to major corporations around the world.

Holly reprises and enhances the original tools for supervisors and executives explored in The One Minute Manager more than 25 years ago by Ken Blanchard.  As president of The Ken Blanchard Companies, Holly was able to work closely with Ken on a broad range of business challenges and she saw first hand what works and what doesn’t.

Holly applied her considerable experience into writing this book and offers both techniques and practices useful in today’s complex and highly volatile business environment.

Get the book at amazon   More Than A Minute

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Book Reviews for Inspiring Excellence

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Book: Inspiring Excellence

This new take on leadership as a learned behavior is now available on amazon.com  They have it online and it is fully searchable.  So far, the book has received strong endorsements.

Jeff Seely CEO  Recruiting.com

I’ve read a number of management science/behavior books (many!) and I found Schutzler’s book to be a useful, refreshing and insightful read. He captures aspects of leadership in a clear and direct voice, and he uses great real-life vignettes to make his points in a fun and easily understandable way. This is a quick read, and unlike so many of the business books I start, I finished this one, and with a smile on my face. I recommend it to any business professional looking to refine his or her style of leadership.

Jim Wiggett, CEO Jackson Hole Group

Michael Schutzler takes you through a journey of experience and a broad range of leadership dimensions. Inspiring Excellence is both comprehensive and insightful. I highly recommend the book for leaders who want to up their game.

Sandy Gould, VP Human Resources Linden Lab – creators of SecondLife

Inspiring Excellence is a lightning strike of clarity and simplicity. Michael Schutzler distills the profound principles of great leadership into basic and clear precepts of action and relationship. His model
draws from what we all experience and know but can’t seem to pin down. He does!

Paul Goodrich, Managing Director Madrona Venture Group

This well-organized, thoughtful book distills a broad topic down to very specific, actionable, and practical tools for sharpening leadership skills. I intend to keep a copy in the top drawer of my desk for handy reference and as a periodic reminder of the blueprint for effective leadership.

Aaron Finn, CEO AdReady.com

Michael Schutzler has done a great job explaining leadership skills and practice in a way that applies to any situation, including the way a person leads his or her life. Inspiring Excellence is filled with great
examples of applying real leadership skills in real situations.

Brett Thompson, SVP Human Resources Classmates Online

Michael Schutzler took his many years of real world experience and learning and translated it into a compelling must-read. I am recommending this book to everyone in my professional network.

Tom Donlea, Executive Director Merchant Risk Council

Inspiring Excellence presents an approach to leadership that works even in the “double bottom line” setting of a non-profit organization.

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A Whole New Mind – Dan Pink

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Amazon Listing: A Whole New Mind

This is a fun yet profound read that you can easily finish on a cross-country flight and that you will probably not forget. It will deeply interest most people faced with challenges in leading a growing organization. The author’s main premise is that the forces of “automation, abundance, and asia” have combined to make speed to market, efficient production, and technical prowess mere table stakes in a global marketplace.  Left brain prowess is not enough – you need to also sharpen your right brain.

He asserts that just as our societies and economies moved from agriculture to industrial to information ages, we are now poised on the next transition – to the conceptual age.  In the past 50 years or so, he explains how our schools and workplaces honed and rewarded those with strong analytic skills and those adept at creating and manipulating functional technologies.  Mr. Pink shows us how these are no longer enough and that there are six “senses” that need to be honed to win in a more complex and global environment: design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.  If you doubt this, witness the ridiculous success of the ipod and iphone.  Fortunately, he gives us more than theory; he tells stories about each of these six topics, provides exercises, and suggests additional reading to help us hone them.

Dan Pink is a best-selling author [Free Agent Nation, 2001] and was a chief speechwriter for former vice-president Al Gore.

(c) 2008 BlueSeven Partners LLC

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The Black Swan – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

Amazon Listing: The Black Swan

Overview
For hundreds of years, the commonly held truth in Europe was that all swans are white. All the evidence “proved” this. Then one day a European explorer in Australia discovered a black swan. The theory of white swan exclusivity died suddenly. The black swan metaphor serves as the label for a series of examples in which absence of evidence is confused with evidence of absence in this intriguing book. A Black Swan is defined as an unlikely event with three parts: it is unpredictable, it has significant impact, and when we look back at the event, we perceive an obvious explanation that makes it appear predictable when in fact it wasn’t. The author asserts that Google’s sudden economic prowess was a Black Swan and that 9/11 was a Black Swan. He makes a compelling argument in this book that Black Swans underlie almost everything about our world, from the rise of religions to events in our own personal lives.

According to Taleb, we not only miss the forest for the trees, we tend to see the grass and miss the trees as well. We concentrate on variations of things we already know and fail to consider what we don’t know. As a result, we are unable to estimate very well. Fortunately, the author doesn’t just pose the challenge. He does offer some simple techniques for turning black swans into grey swans and then benefiting from them.

The Author
Nassim Nicholas Taleb was a successful quant-trader working on Wall Street. He is a highly educated man and was until recently Professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a polymath with a strong grasp of history and mathematics, and most importantly in a book like this, a sense of humor.

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