Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees Review

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Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees Review"This book is concerned with energizing people for performance and the different successful paths to that end". Jon R. Katzenbach writes, "It describes how each path concentrates management attention on worker fulfillment to harness the emotions of many people in sustaining a higher-performing workforce. This is a different challenge than simply motivating people to meet demanding financial performance objectives. The latter is what most companies do, and it implies setting unambiguous goals, establishing clear measures, and holding people individually accountable for results (consequence management). Logical, rational motivation is certainly a good thing, but it is no match for engaged, emotional commitment...Energizing people for performance elevates the game significantly, to the point that many employees go well beyond leaders' expectations, individual accountabilities, financial resuts, and short-term market objectives. This book describes how to unleash the full individual and collectve potential of people to achieve and sustain higher levels of performance than the workers themselves thought possible, than management or customers expected, and than competitors can realistically achieve. Unleashing the full potential of people is undeniably a tall order; few institutions have managed to do it consistently. This book explores the approaches of those who apparently have gone far beyond any conventional notions of managing solely to meet ambitious financial objectives. It looks at how such institutions tap into worker fulfillment to develop the extra quotient of emotional commitment that deeply energizes many people to perform well beyond conventional norms".
In this context, Jon R. Katzenbach introduces five paths (balanced paths) that explain all the higher-performing workforce situations. As argued by Katzenbach, "each path constitutes a clearly different approach for energizing a workforce for higher performance. Certainly, there are overlaps and similarities among the paths, but the primary focus and value proposition of each is quite distinct". Hence, throughout this invaluable study, he explores these five paths as the overarching concept or framework for this book. And he defines (1) top management philosophy, and (2) characteristics of the five balanced paths as follows:
I- Mission, Values, and Pride:
(1). Employees will feel truly proud of what this enterprise stands for, what their specific work group can accomplish, and what they can contribute, both collectively and individually; their pride will be continually reinforced with external and internal recognition.
(2). a. Noble purpose
b. Rich history
c. Strong values
d. Group cohesion
II- Process and Metrics:
(1). Employees who consistently meet and exceed their metrics and adhere to the critical process requirements will be recognized and respected by their peers and conspicuously recognized and rewarded by management.
(2). a. Clear measures and standards
b. Focused processes
c. Performance transparency
d. Collaborative and collective effort
III- Entrepreneurial Spirit:
(1). Employees will be rewarded directly in proportion to what they create and the personal risk they incur; those rewards have virtually unlimited upside financial and ownership potential.
(2). a. High earning opportunity
b. Strong ownership interests
c. Personel risk
IV- Individual Achievement:
(1). Employees will be recognized and rewarded directly in proportion to their personal accomplishments. They will be paid and advanced based on those contributions, and they will work alongside talented individuals in the field.
(2). a. Lots of opportunity
b. Individuals given freedom to act
c. Focus on individual performance
d. Performance-based advancement
e. Healty competitiveness
V- Recognition and Celebration:
(1). Employees will be recognized, rewarded, and celebrated in dozens of ways-by supervisors and colleagues as well as top management-for their collective and individual contributions. As a result, they will work in an environment alive with enthusiasm, excitement, and fun and wherein formal compensation is of secondary importance.
(2). a. Widespread recognition/reward
b. Lots of specific events
c. Visible high energy
d. Social interaction and fun
Strongly recommended.Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees OverviewThis book outperforms the competition with employees' positive emotional energy. It takes a fired-up workforce to deliver consistently higher levels of performance than its competition. What fuels the fire? Emotional commitment to company success, says Jon Katzenbach. Drawing on an in-depth study of twenty-five enterprises - including Marriott International, The Home Depot, Hewlett-Packard, Southwest Airlines, and the U.S. Marine Corps - the author found distinct patterns in how companies engage their employees to capitalize on emotional energy.At the heart of "Peak Performance" lies Katzenbach's identification of five balanced motivational paths: the Mission, Values, and Pride Path, the Process and Metrics Path, the Entrepreneurial Spirit Path, the Individual Achievement Path, and the Recognition and Celebration Path. He contends that these paths create a framework of options for managers about where and how to generate emotional energy and how to channel that energy to achieve higher performance. Essential to each path is leadership's commitment to strike a balance between enterprise performance and worker fulfillment.Through its detailed case studies, "Peak Performance" highlights the various sources of emotional energy unique to each organization and the discipline companies need to follow their chosen paths. The book concludes with guidelines for managers seeking to reshape their practices to achieve better performance from their own workforces and gain the resulting competitive edge.

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Survival of the Savvy: High-Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success Review

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Survival of the Savvy: High-Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success ReviewThe Four Star rating indicates my respect for what Brandon and Seldman accomplish in this volume. However, I wish they had developed several of their core concepts in much greater depth and with tone and diction worthy of those insights. I groaned when encountering clunkers such as "Get off that river in Egypt -- De-Nile!" because Brandon and Seldman are not "teaching synchronized swimming in a shark tank!" Then "Merge into the Savvy Zone" while recognizing the importance of "Different Strokes for Different Folks." (I'm not making this stuff up. It's in the book.) That said, Brandon and Seldman generally succeed when recommending and then explaining "high integrity political tactics for career and company success."
When reflecting on his career, President Harry S Truman proudly described himself as a politician, reputedly claiming that politics "is the art of the possible." It should be added that throughout Truman's public service, his personal integrity was impeccable. Brandon and Seldman make two obvious but important points: Like it or not, politics are inevitable when two or more -- and especially when three or more -- people are involved, and, it is nonetheless possible to be (as was Truman) an effective politician without compromising one's integrity. In fact, as Jim O'Toole asserts in The Executive's Compass: Business and the Good Society as does David Maister in Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture, those whose lives are guided and informed by admirable values (e.g. honesty, loyalty, decency, trustworthiness) will achieve much greater success than will those whose lives aren't. Therefore, the "savvy" executive is one who combines high principles with street smarts. No news there.
What gives substantial value to this book is Brandon and Seldman's clever use of various devices with which their reader can conduct a self-audit. Long ago, after a substantial increase of tuition at Harvard, hostile parents confronted then president Derek Bok. His response: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." I thought of that comment as I examined the various self-diagnostic elements in this book. Two of the most damaging forms of ignorance are (a) not knowing what you need to know and (b) assuming what you think you know...but don't. To their credit, Brandon and Seldman make a rigorous effort to help their reader to reduce (if not eliminate) both forms of ignorance. Politicking, gossip, self-serving motives, back-stabbing, betrayals of confidence, etc. are harsh realities in almost any organization. Brandon and Seldman can help principled people to cope effectively with those realities. To me, that is this book's greatest benefit. Also, I strongly recommend that readers complete the comprehensive, self-scoring assessment tool and interpretative guide which Brandon and Seldman offer. How to obtain one? The authors explain on page 277.
As indicated earlier, I think the quality of thinking and (especially) the quality of writing in this book are too often a distraction from the quite important convictions and counsel which the authors share. Over-heated diction and under-developed ideas in combination with clichés prevent me from giving this book a higher rating.Survival of the Savvy: High-Integrity Political Tactics for Career and Company Success Overview

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Now, Discover Your Strengths Review

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Now, Discover Your Strengths ReviewTrying to overcome your weaknesses is a waste of time, according to Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton, Ph.D., of the Gallup Organization, and authors of the book NOW, DISCOVER YOUR STRENGTHS (Free Press, 2001).
"Casting a critical eye on our weaknesses . . . will only help us prevent failure. It will not help us reach excellence," they write in their thought-provoking book, the follow-up to the outstanding and best-selling Gallup work, FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES (Simon & Schuster, 1999).
Most organizations fail to achieve excellence, the authors contend, because they also fall into the "overcome your weaknesses" trap. Companies do a poor job of tapping the potential already present on their payroll because they try to make employees into something they're not-at the expense of exploiting individuals' innate talents.
Furthermore, Gallup researchers conclude that most of the energy, time, and money that organizations place on trying to hire, train, and develop well-rounded employees is wasted. "When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well-rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp," the authors quip.
Internet Connection. To actually discover your strengths, you cannot rely on the book's pages. You must go online to complete an innovative web-based assessment that identifies your top five individual talent-strengths (and provides you with a brief custom report that you can print or email to someone, like your spouse or boss).
Oddly, if you like the assessment, you cannot purchase additional assessments for your staff, spouse, kids, or anyone else. For them to access the assessment, they must each buy another book.
Other Weaknesses. The book encourages managers to review and become familiar with their direct reports' strength analyses (so as to manage to each individual uniquely). But the authors provide neither a mechanism nor a process to do this.
You are told to consult the book for suggestions on managing your employees who each embody unique mixes of some 34 different strengths. Dauntingly, the authors tell us there are "over thirty-three million possible combinations of the top five strengths." A well-intending manager apparently has a lot of customizing to do. The book provides scant help for that.
Putting the Strengths concept to work more broadly in the organization is even more complex and overwhelming. Selecting and promoting people, as suggested in the book's "Practical Guide," requires profiling at least 100 employees who are all working in the same job (50 top achievers and 50 clunkers). Then you build a database of statistically significant trait patterns. Then you buy every candidate a book, give them a web connection... Then you try to do pattern matching...
The so-called Practical Guide quickly appears all but practical to all but the largest operations.
Target: HR Folk. The authors also take a swing at their firm's consulting customers-HR departments. They assail broad competency training efforts and write: "Many human resources departments have an inferiority complex. With the best of intentions they do everything they can to highlight the importance of people, but when sitting around the boardroom table, they suspect that they don't get the same respect as finance, marketing, or operations. In many instances they are right, but, unfortunately, in many instances they don't deserve to. Why? Because they don't have any data."
Unfortunately, this book does NOT provide them with meaningful solutions for closing that gap (other than, presumably, hiring Gallup consultants for large scale projects).
My Motivation. Gallup's StrengthFinder report tells me that my top personal strengths include the Maximizer tendency-which compels me to "transform something strong into something superb." And the Command strength--characterized as feeling "compelled to present the facts or the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be."
The truth is this: One can't help but think that the well-constructed concept advanced in this enlightening and occasionally entertaining book might have gone from strong to superb. But instead, it seems to have been rushed to market to quickly capitalize on the success of FIRST, BREAK ALL THE RULES. And that's too bad. Because this worthwhile book, as is true of many of the people it intends to help, has considerable strengths undermined by what are otherwise correctable weaknesses.Now, Discover Your Strengths Overview

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The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. Review

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The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. ReviewThe title and cover draws people in. 4 Hour Work Week, it's too good to be true. Then we read the first couple of pages, maybe the first couple of chapters. The first chapters are the typical motivational, "you can do it" montage. I'm not going to lie, I felt motivated to give this book a try after reading the first part of the book without even knowing what this book is all about. But as I began to get out of the fluff, and actually found myself reading the core subject of the book, I was utterly disappointed. D is for Definition
In this section Ferriss tells us to do an important task: define what you want. And I agree that most of us live through life not knowing what we want; just following the crowd like a herd of sheep. This section was the motivational, make you feel good section. This wasn't the how, it was the why, and it downright made me pumped.
E is for Elimination
Okay, so he basically says to eliminate all the junk in your life. For example: watch less TV, don't check your e-mail 50 times a day, don't look at your phone 100 times a day, don't surf the web 3 hours a day, etc. It's all good advice, nothing too fancy, or new, just plain old, "don't waste your time" advice. So far so good.
A is for automation
This is where I ran in to problems with Tim's method of creating a "4 hour workweek". First he tells us to outsource a big chunk of our lives using a VA (virtual assistant) from India or Shanghai or wherever. Basically a virtual assistant is a person who assist you in everyday task (checking emails, making reservations, doing research for your job that you got hired to do,set up appointments, etc) so basically an online-personal assistant you hire for dirt cheap. So if you are okay with some guy in India knowing your personal information (SSN, bank account number, phobias, any illnesses you might have, problems in life, and many more as Ferriss states) go ahead and outsource the things you can already do yourself to a guy in India you never met. But Ferris says that misuses of sensitive information are rare; well there could be bias behind that statement, but I'm not willing to find out if it's true or not. The irony of oustourcing your life is that you become dependent on your VA. You no longer have the urge to take control of your own life when it comes to paying bills, making reservations, or doing research for your job because your VA does it for you. So that's the paradox: out source your life, but become more dependent on a foreigner. And Ferriss quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson throughout his book as a motivational spice. But it's apparent that he never read "Self Reliance", the cornerstone of Emerson's philosophy. (Tim if you're going to use Emerson's words, how about not making a book that totally contradicts the philosophy of Emerson? Thanks).
A is for automation Pt. 2
Ferriss then goes on to tell us how we can make up to 40,000 dollars a month of automated income (little work). Basically you create a product and sell it. Plain and simple. He tells you to find a market, find the demographics of your product, make a product and sell it. Yup, your average entrepreneurship. It's nothing new, and Ferris is not an expert entrepreneur. He did have a company BrainQuicken which sells "Neural Accelerator" supplements. The site is 99% advertising and 1% scientific: It sells because it's precisely that. And the product that Ferriss started is not something revolutionary, I'll take my 200mg of caffeine before a workout any day than pay 50.00 dollars plus shipping for BrainQuicken. So if you want to make your own product, market it, sell it and make millions of dollars go ahead. Tim tells you exactly how, but what Tim doesn't tell you is that it takes a lot of work in the beginning, a lot more than 4 hours a week.
L is for Liberation
More like L is for not showing up to work, and being cynical. Now I'm against the 9-5 hours of work. I think that human beings are more efficient enough to get things done in a short period of time, and I believe that society is slowly catching on. But here's Tim's idea of "liberation". Escaping the office: not doing your job or worse, not showing up. Killing your job: quit your job. Mini retirement: take a month vacation every 2 months of work (or pattern that works best for you). Filling the Void: filling in the emptiness and the boredom you feel with fun stuff like becoming a horse archer, learning tango, and winning a fight championship by cheating.
So okay, let's say everything goes well: you are making 40,000 dollars a month, you are working no more than 4 hours a week... now what. Even Ferriss says that you will feel a void... well that sucks doesn't it? Why don't you go and talk to your VA about your problems?
Now obviously I'm against Tim's advertising methods, it's misleading. The book only sells because of the hope it gives 9-5 workers that it's possible. Oh, it's possible but unlikely. Tim is no Bil Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, or Clint Eastwood he is nowhere close to them. You see great testimonials from people from Yahoo!, Wired, Silicon Valley, and hell, from Jack Canfield about Tim's book, but not from people like Gates, Jobs, Buffett, Eastwood, or any other highly successful people, why? Because those four know that true success comes from years of hard work, and building lasting relationships with people. Those four know that decreasing your work hours, outsourcing your life, and making a tons of money is not the road to true happiness. Those four people, even if they read this book, will probably throw it in the fire. But for the cynical, "how do I work little and make tons of money" people out there (which is most of the population) this book will initially look like the next Bible. The fact that this book sold well says a lot about our society.
This is a misleading book, there are tons of other great books you can read for true success: Talent is Overrated (no BS way how people become great at what they do), 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (classic), and How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People... to name a few. Very few will read this review before buying, and more copies of this book will sell due to the cynical and lazy nature of people. Don't be one of those people, don't buy this book.The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Expanded and Updated, With Over 100 New Pages of Cutting-Edge Content. OverviewMore than 100 pages of new, cutting-edge content. Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint. This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: •How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week•How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want•How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs•How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist•How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent "mini-retirements"The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss' The 4-Hour Workweek includes:•More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point•Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal•How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times•The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either

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