Sarah Morris faces a problem: After working for decades with one publishing company, she’s reassigned to work with lesser responsibilities. Instead of editing books, she’s merely tagging them – boring, repetitive work. Unfortunately, this reassignment corresponds to a weakening of the country’s economy and of the wider publishing industry. She has no way to go; she’s trapped. Her friends with whom she has labored in the trenches for years are now losing their jobs. Most…
This book is known as a classics on strategic planning and the role of strategy in business. It speaks from the point of view of leadership over Procter & Gamble’s (P&G) numerous businesses. The company identified its organization to be weak in understanding strategy, and it sought to inculcate strategic thinking into its leadership. Although this book references a few other corporations, it consists largely of case studies around how P&G succeeded using strategy. The…
A pipe dream in college students is that your boss will always agree with your professional direction as you free yourself from teachers. The realities of the workplace often shatter this puerile dream. A boss’s personality quirks can sometimes drive their direct reports crazy. Mary Abbajay seeks to identify these personality traits and suggest adjustment strategies so that workers can get on with succeeding at their careers. I fully support the concept of managing up.…
Communications form an essential skill of leadership. To be a leader, people have to follow you. For people to follow you, they first must appreciate your vision, articulated in words, and then see them followed up with actions. This is true both in the workplace and in social life. In this book, Jay Sullivan aims to provide practical and simple insights to help us achieve these goals. In the first half of the book, Sullivan’s…
In the years following this 2009 book, the central place of information technology (IT) in the business world has only become recognized more and more. The COVID pandemic accelerated trends whereby IT plays a critical role in global business culture. Peter High’s book fixed the paradigm for how successful IT might be leveraged for business success. Almost 15 years later, the question then becomes: Is it still relevant? Yes, I argue. This classic helps us…
Email is a staple of the modern business workplace. A new employee can find that it’s easy to make dozens of simple mistakes. An experienced employee can find that they aren’t as effective or efficient as their job requires them to be. The trouble is that all of these rules of communication are unwritten and seemingly inaccessible. To help us raise our email “game,” Chris Fenning provides this concise guide to realize our best intentions…
In recent years, the world, empowered by computer technologies and advanced data collection, has experienced an explosion of information. Instead of focusing on a few fixed principles, decision-making increasingly takes place in light of ever-changing data points. How are business folk supposed to develop, deploy, and use these systems? In this book, Tumin and Want provide a series of case studies that illustrate how leaders across many domains have accomplished this. They then extract guidelines…
Tony Fadell assumes that the reader knew of his career by virtue of picking up this book. That was not the case with me. I develop software and implement technology solutions for a living and found the title intriguing. Fadell led iPod and iPhone hardware teams at Apple and pioneered the Nest “connected home” technology company (now Google Nest). So as an author, he brings some “street cred” to the topic of building technology companies.…
Simple, popular, “arm chair” psychology says that life is full of “rational” choices that guide our lives. However, reasoning from human experience and psychological research, we’ve learned that habits guide most of our lives and prevent us from “choice fatigue.” How are we then to make use of habitual practices? In this book, Charles Duhigg analyzes how this impacts our business lives, our personal lives, and our society. He seeks to identify specific ways that…
I write this review a full decade after this book was published. Further, I am a software developer in a large organization and, though quite happy, will likely never become a CIO at that company. Therefore, I don’t reside in the intended audience in this book. However, I notice many of these paradoxes in my work. I have to master the technical aspects of my job yet be adept enough to communicate to end-users. I…