Feb
27
Book review
Filed Under Book Reviews, Business Builders | Leave a Comment
Getting ahead by helping others
by SARA COMITO
Associate editor
Do you make people’s lives easier? Rather than an altruistic notion, it’s an essential way to get ahead in business, whether you work for yourself or someone else.
Are you the one people go to when they need mastery in a certain area? As important as technical skill is, however, it is useless without the application of emotional intelligence.
That is, according to “Be a Shortcut: The Secret Fast Track to Business Success” by Scott G. Halford.
Ironically, there is no shortcut to becoming a Shortcut. But if you can help others do their job well, you will be valued and achieve influence, the holy grail.
If you can’t, then you are a bottleneck, and will be phased out.
Jul
4
Tipping the Totem Pole
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BOOK REVIEW
by SARA FITZPATRICK
Associate Editor
Great Business Teams: 
Cracking the Code for Standout Performance
by Howard M. Guttman
Wiley: June 2008
Hardcover, 256 pages
List price: $24.95
Is your business like a ladder? If you’re at the top, who’s stabilizing it at the bottom? Have they really got your back? Or, as they hold it, are they entertaining visions of taking your place? Whoa! Feels a little shaky.
Put that ladder flat on the ground. It’s more stable that way. It distributes your weight, making it possible to cross a muddy patch without sinking. Stand on it, sit down, lie across it. It doesn’t move. Instead of needing to hold it steady, your people can stand on it with you. Any possibility of falling from a great height has been removed.
In his book “Great Business Teams: Cracking the Code for Standout Performance,” Howard M. Guttman makes the case for making your organization “flat,” or horizontal. He does not suggest stripping people of their titles as a warm-and-fuzzy display of egalitarianism. Rather, he advocates streamlining corporate operations by maximizing the efficiency of team units, standardizing protocols for their functioning and distributing power to their members.
Jun
6
‘Okay is unacceptable’
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BOOK REVIEW
By SARA FITZPATRICK
Associate Editor
What’s the Secret: To Providing
a World-Class Customer Experience
by John R. DiJulius
Wiley: May 2008
Hardcover, 320 pages
List price: $27.95
A satisfied customer is a loyal customer, right? Think again, says John R. DiJulius III.
“Think about what ’satisfied’ really means to us as consumers,” he writes. “It means that the company we are doing business with hasn’t done anything wrong yet to make us feel the need to go elsewhere; similarly, the company has yet to do anything significant to make us loyal.”
Customer satisfaction, therefore, is a benchmark of mediocrity, and one that companies lately are having a difficult time reaching. It’s also a blind spot, as most companies tend to overestimate their prowess in the customer service arena. Read more
May
9
Ending poverty on just pennies a day
Filed Under Book Reviews, Economic Development | Leave a Comment
BOOK REVIEW
by SARA FITZPATRICK
Associate Editor
Small Loans, Big Dreams:
How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus
and Microfinance are Changing the World
by Alex Counts
Wiley: April 2008
Hardcover, 410 pages
List price: $29.95
The basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, credit. If the social studies texts stop at the first three, professor Muhammad Yunus would have them revised and reprinted. Better yet, replace those dusty tomes with a more practical approach to cultural science – one that promotes credit as a fundamental human right.
Alex Counts’ “Small Loans, Big Dreams” is a good place to start. This new edition to his work, originally published in 1996 as “Give us Credit,” chronicles the successes and challenges of Yunus’ pioneering strategies of poverty elimination through lending to the poor. Read more
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