Here's a passage from the excerpt:

It's easy to break a promise. It's even easier to forget the price of breaking it. After all, who can measure that price? Few would deny that a broken promise lowers the morale of your employees, but what's the real dollar cost--the bottom line impact? Or what is the payoff of keeping a promise? It should be simple to align your words and actions in a way that employees can see. But if it's so simple why do most employees say their managers do not do it? Maybe it is not so simple.

Consider how two executives described to me the benefit of an impeccable word--and the cost of lacking one:

Good leadership is, 'Whatever I say I'm going to do, I'm going to do.' That means I have to know what my limitations are and what I'm capable of delivering. As a leader if you don't fulfill your commitments, I can't think of anything that can hurt you more than that.

--Frank Guidara, President and CEO, Uno's Chicago Grill

If your staff see you cutting corners, then they're not going to take you seriously. And then they're not going to take the values that you're trying to instill seriously. Because you're not taking the values seriously.

--Deirdre Wallace, President, The Ambrose Group

Like these successful executives, you, too, most likely want be an honest and respected leader. But this book is about more than being respected. As its title says, it's about The Integrity Dividend--and why and how keeping your word as a leader pays off on the bottom line. One thing that sets this book apart from others that discuss the importance of integrity is that it tells how I have been able to accurately measure its positive dollar impact. As you will see more in later chapters, successful executives I talk to recognize the dividend, too, but until now it has not been well measured.

I am not asking you to be motivated by any intrinsic payoff, though I think there are several. Integrity, for me, is about being more effective, because people see you as consistently following through on your word and demonstrating the values you profess: more effective as a leader, because you more readily capture the hearts of your followers; as a communicator, because people know you mean what you say; as a partner, because you can be counted on; as a customer because you complete business transactions more efficiently; as a supplier, because buyers can know what they will get; and as a brand, because you keep your promises--and promises are all that a brand is. Integrity contributes hugely to executive effectiveness.

Check out the full excerpt here: 800ceoread.com/excerpts/archives/008504.html

In a post titled "A Must Read", Kelly Carr starts with two titles from other business journalists meant to help reporters write stories: Michelle Leder's "Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value" and Chris Roush's "Show Me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication"

In an effort to further prep interns, Carr gathered up a set of recommended from practicing business journalists. These suggestions will look a little more familiar (thought I just ordered the third rec):

• "Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco," by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
• "24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America," by Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller
• "200% of Nothing: An Eye Opening Tour Through the Twists and Turns of Math Abuse and Innumeracy," by A.K. Dewdney

On the extended list, you'll find even more of what we normally recommend, but Good To Great is the only true "business book to solve problems" book on the list.

• "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," by Robert A. Caro
• "Liar's Poker" and "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis
• "Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner," by Alec Klein
• "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," by Steven Greenhouse
• "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America," by Barbara Ehrenreich
• "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron," by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
• "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don't," by Jim Collins

[hat tip: DataJoe and Addictomatic]

Jeffreys, author of Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug, details the journey this once highly esteemed company took once it made a deal with the devil. Part corporate biography, part history, and part moral tale, Hell's Cartel is, as the reviewer puts it, "not a pretty history. But it is gripping, full of warnings about the potential of corporations to mutate into criminal enterprises."

Here's a snippet from the review:

"IG Farben and Hitler: A Fateful Chemistry
How a company whose Nobel-winning scientists discovered vital medicines became a Nazi collaborator"

IG Farben traced its origins to the efforts of men such as Carl Bosch of BASF Group, who led the effort to mass-produce synthetic ammonia. The work was crucial to solving a worldwide shortage of fertilizer and preventing mass starvation. He and other scientist-managers made Germany the dominant producer of drugs and chemicals in the years before World War I. Bosch was a man of conscience but also deeply patriotic. During World War I he became a national hero after leading a crash effort to develop synthetic nitric acid, essential to producing explosives. Most notoriously, BASF chemist Fritz Haber, who had developed the processes used to make ammonia, came up with the idea of using chlorine gas as a weapon.

Read the entire article here: businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_34/b4097098922518.htm?chan=magazine+channel_opinion

If you like books in this vein, also check out The Demon Under the Microscope: From Battlefield Hospitals to Nazi Labs, One Doctor's Heroic Search for the World's First Miracle Drug by Thomas Hager.

It was revealed that at least 17 universities had accepted $1 million from a wealthy donor under the condition that they make Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged required reading in a course on capitalism from a moral perspective.

If you're a Rand fan, Atlas Shrugged is now up on the book vote site.

From Peter Navarro's op-ed in the LA Times. Peter's the author of The Coming China Wars.

Jack and Todd are doing what Steve Harrison refers to as "decencies" in The Manager's Book of Decencies: How Small Gestures Build Great Companies. In describing his father's role as a psychiatrist, he says "My father's job was to listen--perhaps the ultimate decency of all." As most managers know, there are even more decencies a company can extend to its employees--small decencies like a coffee cart, a work-at-home day, introductions at meetings, and the freedom to choose projects that interest them. And then there are large decencies like company-wide mentoring programs, flexible schedules/shifts, defined employee rights, gestures of gratitude, and inviting employees to voice their opinions and concerns.

This book provides a list of these decencies, categorized under chapter titles like Consideration Decencies, Recognition Decencies, and Executive Humility Decencies, that can lead to workplaces where people are excited to come to work and happy to do their jobs. Harrison profiles a number of decency-extending companies like Lee Hecht Harrison, Disney, HP, Nabisco, Starbucks...the list goes on. Here's a brief excerpt on building great companies:

"Creating environments that employees describe as "a great place to work" and in which employees are free to speak their minds relies on the practice of decencies on a regular basis by everyone in the organization. It also takes leadership at the top to start the process, reinforce the efforts along the way, and communicate the long-term benefits of creating and sustaining an organization culture based on trust. These practices go beyond the leaders at the top to become common acts among people throughout the organization."

What I love about our workplace is our culture of extending decencies--of shutting up when someone's taking an important call, helping tip letters into a thousand books, toasting an important event in one of our lives, and taking the time to meet every two weeks and talk about the things we're working on. And the employee lunches haven't been half bad.

If extraordinary confidence is grounded in the best available data, it is authentic, and a positive force for advancement. It is when when our confidence is false, when we are confident for the wrong reasons, that two serious problems arise. First, we are more suspectible to being overconfident than if our confidence were authentic. Second, such overconfidence is more likely to translate into actions and decisions that will damage others. Hubris refers to the damaging consequences that arise from the decisions and actions that reflect false confidence and the resulting overconfidence. As you'll learn in this book, I have determined that there are four sources of false confidence:

1. Getting too full of ourselves. Excessive pride leads to a contrived view of who we are and an inflated view of our achievements and capabilities, one which often depends on external validation.
2. Getting in our own way. Our pride can lead us to tackle singlehandedly decisions or actions that could be better addressed by or in conjunction with trusted advisors or a foil.
3. Kidding ourselves about our situation. We indulge in false confidence when we fail to see, seek, share, and use full and balanced feedback to gain a more grounded assessment of our situation. We need accurate, pertinent, timely, and clear feedback, whether positive or negative, to ground our knowledge about what's going on around us.
4. Discounting the need to manage tomorrow today. Because we may not know whether we're acting with unhealthy confidence, we need to manage the consequences of our decisions ahead of time. This is a question of playing out, rather than planning out, the consequences of our decisions. Whereas experimenting and probing allow us to see the consequences of our decisions firsthand, planning can increase our confidence without increasing our ability to complete the tasks at hand.

False confidence is to hubris what bad cholesterol is to heart disease. Just as the cure for heart disease is to reduce bad cholesterol rather than all cholesterol, the cure for hubris is to fight the sources of false confidence, rather than to reduce confidence altogether.

"JPMorgan Chase, the third largest bank in the United States, has a lot of ancestors--and now it's making amends for two of them.

Between 1831 and 1865, two predecessor banks, Citizens Bank and Canal Bank, both operating in Louisiana, apparently made loans with some 13,000 slaves as collateral. When planation owners defaulted on the loans, the banks took possession of 1,250 slaves. When this history came to light, JPMorgan Chase apologized on its Web site and established a $5 million scholarship fund for African-American college students.

The information orginally surfaced as a result of a regulation established in 2002 by the Chicago City Council requiring companies doing business with the city to disclose whether they profited from slavery. After looking at records stored at Tulane University, 12 historians spent more than 3,500 hours researching property and bank records in 39 Louisiana parishes, where the incriminating evidence was discovered."

The must-read intro to Yunus' autobiography.

He extoles:

"The five most dangerous words in business may be “Everybody else is doing it.

My guess is that a great many of the people involved would not have behaved in the manner they did except for the fact that they felt others were doing so as well.�

So, at Berkshire, let’s start with what is legal, but always go on to what we would feel comfortable about being printed on the front page of our local newspaper, and never precede forward simply on the basis of the fact that other people are doing it.�

She will be on 60 Minutes this Sunday.

She will be in Milwaukee on 10-27. Check out the event here

I think they did a great job with it. There really is an amazing story to the rise and fall of this company. There is greed, politics, and even natural disasters. If you never paid attention, it is the perfect way to get caught up now that the trial of Kenneth Lay and Jeff Skilling is underway.

It is rated R which surprised me a little. They have audio of traders on conference calls using some coarse language, but I think the true reason for the rating is some scenes of topless dancing in a strip club. Believe it or not, it has relevance in one of the characters to the Enron story. I think they could have made the plot point as just strongly without the awkward nudity.

You can find out more about the book in these places:

• In November, Publisher's Weekly picked it in their Big Expectation for Small Press Books piece.
• Business 2.0 wrote short blurb in their Feb. 2006 issue:
  

  Making stuff for babies is big business and increasingly , so is making the actual babies...The U.S. market for fertility treatments, she estimates, hit $2.9 billion in 2004. Parents are also paying to make babies better: A fertility firm recently offered $100,000 for an egg donor with "college-level athletic ability." Another burgeoning field is preimplantation genetic diagnosis, which allows parents to screens for hereditary diseases. The innovation could eventually create a genetic gap between haves and have-nots. But the most pressing issue, Spar says, is sorting out the thorny legal questions in a society where designer babies may soon be as common as designer baby strollers.

• HBS Working Knowledge has a piece called The Business of Babies.
• Harvard Business Review has an extensive piece by Spar that is based on the book.
  

  Persistent demand from people who have been denied the blessings of parenthood has created an assisted-reproduction market that stretches around the globe and encompasses hundreds of thousands of people. In the United States alone, nearly 41,000 children were born via in vitro fertilization (IVF) in 2001. Roughly 6,000 came from donated eggs, and almost 600 were carried by surrogate mothers. U.S. legislators have been reluctant to regulate this market. As a result, there are no national policies for IVF, which requires creating--and often discarding--embryos, or for many other technologies. State laws vary widely, and many states have no legislation on these subjects whatsoever. Although fertility specialists generally seem delighted to practice in an unregulated gray area, a modicum of regulation and the establishment of agreed-upon norms could lead to substantially lower prices, wider access, and an expansion of the market to the millions who have not yet sought out assisted reproduction. Among those millions are fertile individuals seeking to ensure that they'll be able to produce offspring in the future. For example, the technology already permits young women to freeze their eggs, thus preserving their fertility (in case, for instance, they marry late in life). The fertility trade is in some ways analogous to the markets for personal computers and DVD players, which were initially considered luxury items but migrated to the mass market, earning manufacturers the revenues to finance further innovation. A widening of availability and the introduction of property rights, rules, and institutional policies would make the marketplace more sensitive to the social, medical, and ethical issues that are emerging from the science. For example: Should there be age limits on infertility treatment? Should new procedures be subject to rigorous testing? It is time for U.S. society to begin discussion of these complex questions.

This book's release day is February 14 - Valentine's Day.

We are really getting into the full swing of the fall season. We'll point you to some more titles this week.

On the Excerpt Blog, we will be running a piece from Steve Cone's Steal These Ideas.

We will also have Doug Lennick and Fred Kiel, authors of Moral Intelligence, guest hosting the blog on Thursday.

To round things out, I will also see if I can find something for the Audio Blog.

Have a great week!