What’s New in Business

Step up to Success in Business and in Life: You Can Achieve Your Dreams

by Nido Qubein, Recorded Books, 2007. (Available in CD Book only)

Sometimes the starting to plan where you want to end up in the future is difficult. Nido Qubein shares the steps necessary to become the success in life that you want to be. The first thing you must do is determine what you want to do and have a passion for it.

Once you have determined this using the following outline of questions will help you achieve your dreams. The six steps needed are:

1. Decision
2. Commitment
3. Planning
4. Preparation
5. Execution
6. Re-commitment

This is not a process you use once in your life and forget about. Each time you want to make a step forward toward your ultimate goal you must follow these steps. Breaking down your dreams into manageable steps will let you celebrate victories along the way and allow you to make adjustments as needed.

Once you have made a decision, such as, to obtain a college degree, you must break down the steps necessary to make it happen. Maybe the career you have decided is the one you want to pursue requires higher education, you can decide if you will go to school full-time or take classes towards a degree after working at a full or part-time job. There are many questions that must be answered before you can start this process including: a degree for what, where to get it, how long will it take, financing to obtain it and also live at the same time, and who in your life will be impacted by pursuing this. To make a commitment to get it you must first visualize it and then embrace the changes needed to obtain it.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance

by Marcus Buckingham, Free Press or Recorded Books, 2007.

If we can play to our strengths in our jobs we can be a lot more effective and happier than if we are doing tasks that play to our weaknesses. A strength is defined as an activity that energizes or invigorates us. A weakness is an activity that drains or depletes us.

Marcus Buckingham helps us determine our three strongest strengths and our three strongest weaknesses and then helps us to find ways to incorporate our strengths into our daily activities and either get rid of or mitigate our weaknesses.

He uses the FREE method to determine where our strengths and weaknesses are. With FREE we take a strength week to determine our daily activities and their effect on us. We Focus, Release, Educate and Expand on these to learn how to get those around us to support us in developing our strengths and putting them to better use on a daily basis. He teaches us how to work with others where our weaknesses are their strengths to trade off tasks and responsibilities or learn how and when to do them so that they are not as heavy a drain on us.

We can learn to apply the strengths test to every task or activity in our job to determine what it means to us. We can look for signs of strength and weakness. They are defined as Success, Instinct, Growth and Needs. If we have them they are a strength and if we don’t they are a weakness. Through examples we learn how others have successfully incorporated the information gained to make them more effective and much more satisfied with work.

Also available as a book.

The Anatomy of Problem-Solving

by Tim Hobbs, Hobbs Technical Consulting, 2007.

Problem solving seems to be a skill that is becoming harder to find in employees today.

The costs of doing business can be greatly increased if problem solving is not applied correctly when things go wrong in the workplace. Tim Hobbs shares with us the process he has successfully used to problem solve in all aspects of his life. He walks through the steps necessary to make sure that you address and fix the cause of the problem and not just apply a band-aid to the symptom currently causing problems for you and your company. Besides providing a step-by-step process and showing how each works and their benefits he uses true stories to illustrate each step. Seeing how these steps were applied in various environments makes it easier to visualize how we can apply them in our lives.

Much of the book focuses on the high tech arena, but the true stories come from the Navy, various jobs Tim held and his personal life (when the gas heater fails to work properly at home.) Each step is illustrated by using the story of the gas heater to apply all of the steps in sequence and to show the value of taking each step in order to make sure all aspects of the problem are considered before trying to “fix” things only to have them breakdown again at a more inopportune time. The additional true stories in each step help show the various environments where these steps have been successfully applied as well. The seven steps include:

problem recognition
problem observation
problem analysis
develop solution
validate solution
sustain solution
problem evaluation.

The Anatomy of Problem Solving is a quick read and an extremely useful tool in helping to develop problem-solving skills in you. Learning to do this at a higher level will make you a much more valuable employee (and partner.)

The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One that Isn’t by Robert Sutton, Warner Business, (Recorded Books) 2007.

Everyone has a bad day and is an asshole at some point in their life. Robert Sutton defines the twelve behaviors that make someone an asshole. The No Asshole Rule is not aimed at working with someone who is having a bad day, but with what Robert Sutton refers to as flaming assholes. These are people who make it their business to demean, humiliate and denigrate others on a daily basis. The cost of doing business goes way up if you allow your employees to be jerks, bullies and assholes. This book details the ways that these individuals drain resources, decrease productivity and negatively impact the bottom line.

Stories told in the book are backed up by studies and give real life examples of lost business and lost credibility of a company when they employ these individuals and enable these behaviors. You can’t just say you don’t allow harassment or bullying you must actually fire people who exhibit these behaviors. One story tells of a company that kept on an employee because he brought in the most sales. However, when they did a cost analysis of this employee in having to train new people to work with him as assistants and lost business from customers that left because of him they found that the cost was not worth it. Firing him allowed others who had been intimidated by him to bring in more money than he ever had and the customer relations went way up. Some companies try to promote the asshole away from complaining co-workers, but this can just add to the headaches as when they get into a position to hire others, they hire others like themselves and the negativity is increased and it just compounds the company problems.

Sometimes, because of circumstances, we must work in a company that has people who constantly demean and humiliate us and Sutton shares some ways to deal with this on a specific basis until management fixes the situation or you choose to move on. Learn ways to identify and excise people who provide only meanness and negativity and nothing of ultimate value. You will be surprised at how quickly morale and productivity of all others improves when a person who is an asshole is fired or chooses to move on.

You Want Me to Work with Who? Eleven Keys to a Stress-free Satisfying and Successful Work Life…No Matter Who You Work with

by Julie Jansen, Penguin Books, 2006

Everyone must learn to work with people from all walks of life. This book will help you determine whom you are dealing with and give insights on how to work with them.

There are eleven keys to get results when working with others:

Confidence
Curiosity
Decisiveness
Empathy
Flexibility
Humor
Intelligence
Optimism
Perseverance
Respect
Self-awareness.

Although most of us think that people exhibit different personalities like: the bully, the rigid, the rude or the disorganized; among other personalities, what people are really doing is suffering from the lack of or overabundance of one of these eleven keys.

Each chapter is a different key and gives a definition, other keys important to the use of this key, pointers for working with people who are lacking in or have an excessive amount of this key, assessment quizzes to determine you own level of this key, and tips and techniques for improving this key in yourself and others you work with.

The pointers include stories of people who exhibit this key and how it was dealt with in their particular situation. It includes how to deal with people if you are the peer, the manager of, or less senior to the person lacking in or with an over abundance of this key.
These sections are extremely helpful in identifying what you can deal with and ways to learn to live with it if you can’t change it.

The assessment section gives questions to answer to find out where you fit in the grading scale for this key, explains how to score the assessment and then explains where the most effective range is and why. It includes a section to create an action plan to improve in this area. It also gives activities to strengthen the key.

Sometimes we can succeed in making people around us change to enable us to work better with them and sometimes we need to learn to accept and work with the personalities and issues that the person brings to the work environment. Awareness of what we can actually impact is key to our success in the workplace.