Tuesday, September 06, 2011

The Elephant in the Room

Hurricane Irene put a damper in my plans this week. I ended up stranded for a few days and could not return to NY. Not a big deal - I count that as "found time". Most of my spare time on the long weekend was spent clearing debris and gardening. Irene did a number on much of the gardens.

I read a lot and posted reviews on Amazon. One of the great books I read was "Capturing New Markets" by Steve Wunker. Rather than redo the review here, click on the link if you care to read it. I also would love to increase my reviewer rank so feel free to vote if you like it.

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Another book I read was by Diana McLain Smith called The Elephant in the Room- How Relationships Make or Break Success of Leaders in Organizations.

One of the reasons it’s a great book is because it attacks a soft problem that most business books fail to attack. Of course it’s easy to attack numbers and statistical problems, but something as soft as relationships tend to be more difficult.

One thing I liked about the book is that at the end of every chapter there’s a section on key points. Seems like a best practice for a business book.

The book has three parts and ten different chapters. The first part is on understanding relationships. I particularly like the third chapter that talked about perspective in relationships.

The second part talks about strength in relationships. It discusses how to invest in relationships to make them work better.

Part three was about transforming relationships and how to change them over time and how to reframe them.

Although the book is over three hundred pages, the appendix takes 70 pages of those, so it’s actually not an overly long book.

The second appendix talks about the ladder of reflection and it’s definitely worth reading. (Ladder of reflection includes evaluate, predict, explain, describe, select)

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According to Right Management, 1/3 of employees eat lunch at their desk. I have been guilty of this but no longer think this is a good idea. Just food for thought (no pun intended)

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