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An Honest Review for ‘EntreLeadership: 20 Years of Practical Business Wisdom from the Trenches’

The Lowest Price we could find is $26.00 $11.99

Your company is only as strong as your leaders. These are the men and women doing battle daily beneath the banner that is your brand. Are they courageous or indecisive? Are they serving a motivated team or managing employees? Are they valued?

Your team will never grow beyond you, so heres another question to consider. Are you growing? Whether youre sitting at the CEOs desk, the middle managers cubicle, or a card table in your living-room-based startup, EntreLeadership provides the practical, step-by-step guidance to grow your business where you want it to go. Dave opens up his championship playbook for business to show you how to:

Inspire your team to take ownership and love what they do

Unify your team and get rid of all gossip

Handle money to set your business up for success

Reach every goal you set

And much, much more!

Review:

Even though I’m not a businessman, I’m very interested in leadership and have read a lot of works on leadership. I’ve also learned so much from Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University that I thought surely Dave’s newest work, “EntreLeadership” would be worth my money.

“EntreLeadership,” is a good book on leadership in business. But I don’t feel it’s a great one. He has, as always, a lot of good practical knowledge that he’s willing to share with us. But it’s usually not something I haven’t read elsewhere in books on leadership or related literature. So, yes, the book’s probably worth buying, but it didn’t seem to be as excellent in its genre as is Dave’s “Financial Peace.” There is a lot of excellent basic material here on leadership, goals, organization, working with people, etc. But it’s not especially original or compelling. And it’s not very in-depth, largely because Dave deals with so many topics all in one book. Still, “EntreLeadership” is a good, one-stop place for good, basic advice on many subjects related to leadership and business. Almost everyone will find something of value in it, especially businessmen looking for a proven, practical vision with integrity.

What Dave shares in this book is his “playbook” for business success, divided up into 15 topics.

Dave sets out first to define what an “EntreLeader” is. It’s kind of an ugly word, but Dave feels that what he wanted in business from himself and others was people who had the good characteristics of both leaders and entrepreneurs. So what is an EntreLeader? I’m glad you asked! According to Dave, they’re people who can be:
Passionately serving
Mavericks who have integrity
Disciplined risk takers
Courageous while humble
Motivated visionaries
Driven while loyal
Influential learners

Dave concludes Chapter 1 by discussing some of the characteristics of leaders, such as power, the need to be servants, and passion. There’s some good stuff here, but it’s not really original or uniquely compelling.

In Chapter 2, Dave walks us from Dreams to Visions to Mission Statements and Goals. Again, there’s good wisdom here, but it’s not really unique, and he doesn’t spend a lot of time on each. He spends the most time on goals (I won’t rehearse what he says here), and it’s good material that almost anyone will benefit from. But once again, it’s not groundbreaking or original stuff you can’t get elsewhere.

Chapter 3 deals with time management and organization. This is something I’m naturally good enough at but not nearly as good as I ought to be. So I learned some new tricks in this chapter – or, more accurately – was motivated to make a better effort to apply what I already know.

The rest of the chapters follow suit in giving good and even excellent advice, but possibly material you’ve heard before. I have less experience with business than with leading or dreaming, so I can’t speak as specifically to the parts that deal specifically with business (such as Chapters 7, 13, and 14). But from what I can tell, they’re good solid material for running a business, if that’s what I did. I particularly like the chapter on selling (such as Chapters 7, 8, 11, and 12) because in these chapters Dave shows how business can be done with integrity. I like as well the way that throughout he demonstrates a genuine interest in the people who work for him (this especially came out in a touching story in Chapter 7 about someone Dave hired who couldn’t live off the salary he could afford to pay her) and those he is serving. These chapters, dealing with people, are probably his strongest chapters because he highlights the need to serve the people around you and not exalt yourself at their expense.

A lot of what Dave says applies, even if you’re not in business. For example, any leader can benefit from Dave’s philosophy in Chapter 11 that as leaders we must put people first and that the way to judge this is by the Golden Rule. It’s good advice to remember, as he teaches in Chapter 12, that we should remember to recognize people. I know that personally, I thrive on appropriate and deserved recognition. In Chapter 12, Dave provides a list of various ways we can actually do this for others. Most of these, such as casting a vision, storytelling, passion, and example, are ways of recognizing others that you could use outside of business, too.

There’s much more I could say, but by now you’ve gotten an idea of the value of the book.

The remainder of the book is organized this way (I’m giving the gist of each chapter, and not the fancy titles):

Chapter 4 – Making Decisions
Chapter 5 – Great Marketing
Chapter 6 – Launching Your Dream
Chapter 7 – Hiring and Firing
Chapter 8 – Selling by Serving
Chapter 9 – Financial Peace for Business
Chapter 10 – Great Communication and Great Companies
Chapter 11 – People Matter Most
Chapter 12 – Recognizing and Inspiring Employees
Chapter 13 – Contracts, Vendors, and Collections
Chapter 14 – Compensation Plans
Chapter 15 – Delegating

I recommend “EntreLeadership” as a good, big picture, book that will help leaders and businessman lead and innovate with greater integrity and skill.

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Honest Review – Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

The Lowest Price we could find is $29.99 $19.25

The new question
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.

The new study
Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collinss prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatnessbeating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen yearsin environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these 10X companies to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.

The new findings
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:

• The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
• Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
• Following the belief that leading in a fast world always requires fast decisions and fast action is a good way to get killed.
• The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.

The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe.

Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck.

This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not chance.

Review:

Jim Collins is at it again. Collins, along with co-author Morten Hansen and a team of over 20 researchers, spent roughly nine years trying to determine why some companies thrive during chaotic, uncertain and unstable times while other companies do not. If you have read some of Collins’ earlier books, the theme in “Great by Choice” certainly won’t surprise you. In “Built to Last,” published in 1994, Collins, co-author Jerry Porras and their research team wrote about what makes for a “visionary” company, comparing a group of objectively and subjectively defined visionary companies with comparison companies that weren’t so visionary. The authors would argue that their company selections were much more objectively chosen, and I wouldn’t argue much with that claim. In “Good to Great,” published in 2001, Collins and his research team analyzed a number of good companies that took the next step to achieve greatness, while a comparison group of similar companies did not.

In both of these two earlier books, as well in the current one (I’ll get to “Great by Choice” presently), the authors conspicuously note how much better the subject companies performed, stock market wise, compared to the comparison companies. However, it is important to realize that Collins and his co-authors are not suggesting that you run out and invest in their subject companies. If you did that for the “Built to Last” companies, your investments would have included Citigroup, Ford, Sony and other companies that subsequently didn’t set the world on fire. Similarly, from the “Good to Great” focus companies, Circuit City eventually filled for bankruptcy and Fannie Mae proved to be a major disappointment, in more ways than one. The point is that the reader can learn from what these companies did during their periods of success, regardless of whether some of the companies lost their way later on. Interestingly, one company, Wells Fargo, actually went from the comparison list in “Built to Last” to the focus list in “Good to Great.” Okay, forewarned is forearmed regarding investing in the subject companies.

A couple of years ago Collins wrote another book, “How the Mighty Fall,” which is a study of leadership failure, not success. This short book is a very enjoyable and informative read, but somewhat different from the books I mentioned above. All of Collins’ books are interesting, hard to put down, and written with a passion for understanding the mechanisms of corporate success. When it comes to writing, I think of him as the Michael Lewis of management gurus. Collins is also an exceptional speaker, if you ever have the chance to hear him.

In “Great by Choice,” Collins and Hansen select just seven companies (out of an initial list of over 20,000) as examples of those that have thrived during chaotic times. The companies are Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines and Stryker. These companies are called “10X” companies, given that their stock prices outdistanced the comparison companies by roughly an order of magnitude during the study period. Consider, for example, Southwest Airlines. During the study period (1970s through 2002), Southwest faced fuel price jumps, deregulation, labor problems in the airline industry, competitors moving through the revolving door of bankruptcy, and an absence of flyers in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Still, the company consistently grew and prospered. During this time, comparison company Pacific Southwest Airlines had an entirely different experience.

So how does Collins explain the different fortunes between the subject companies and the comparison companies? Simplistically put, the great-by-choice companies were much better able to differentiate between situations and factors they could control and those they couldn’t. Also, they exemplified “fanatic discipline, empirical creativity and productive paranoia.” If you have read Collins’ other works, these terms have a certain familiar ring to them.

This wouldn’t be a Jim Collins book if it didn’t coin some new expressions, like the “big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG)” from “Built to Last” and “Level 5 leadership” from “Good to Great.” This time one of the main new expressions is the “20-mile march,” which Collins uses to describe the very steady progress, through good times and bad, of the companies that thrive best during chaotic times, versus those companies that make exceptional progress during better times, but perform more poorly during tough times.

There is no such thing as a management guru with perfect insight or analysis, so I am not holding Collins to that standard. The real measure of a book such as this is more in its ability to raise important questions and through sound (even passionate) discussion help stimulate the reader to come to grips with important concepts. That’s how people grow. If you have read and enjoyed Collins earlier books, chance are good you will like this one, too. If you are new to Collins, but have an interest in what makes companies tick, this book–along with his earlier works–are worth your consideration.

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A Review for – The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law 2011

The Lowest Price we could find is $19.99 $11.43

Review:

As someone who is familiar with a number of other style guides, I thought the AP Stylebook was good, but nothing special.

Most decent guides, such as “The Yahoo! Style Guide,” give writing-style tips–the AP Stylebook does not. As far as writing is concerned, the AP guide simply lists certain words with their proper capitalization and usage.

On the other hand, the guide does include sections on common legal issues that reporters might run into. These issues vary from copyright law to explanations of legal trouble that could result from going undercover to get a story.

Like I said, overall it’s not a fantastic style guide, but I would recommend it to anyone in the media or press field.

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