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Posts by month in 2012: Jan.
Posted Jan. 12, 2012 9:42 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Chip Conley bares his soul in his second book, Emotional Equations, and in doing so helps us understand our own. It is painful at times, as he recounts his own doubts and darker moments in life and business, tells us of four friends that took their own lives in one economically depressed summer, and relates the story of when his own heart literally stopped after a business presentation, landing him in the hospital.
But, as Conley discovered, what doesn’t kill us does indeed make us stronger.
As Winston Churchill advised during World War II, “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Today, too, we all need to come to understand that we can use our seasons of darkness as a means to find new reservoirs of strength—strength we didn’t know we had.
One man who went through hell during WWII and made his way through it was psychologist Viktor Frankl, who made it through a Nazi concentration camp and would eventually write Man’s Search for Meaning, a work that greatly influenced Conley and this book. It is from Frankl’s work that Conley distilled the equation that began the journey that resulted in this project: Despair = Suffering – Meaning.
There are six parts of this book, on such issues as Dealing With Difficult Times, Getting the Most Out of Your Work Life, Defining Who You Are, and Finding Contentment. Within those sections are chapters broken up into individual emotional equations, such as Disappointment = Expectations – Reality, Calling = Pleasure/Pain, and Joy = Love – Fear. What the author does in the process is take us beyond the sometimes touchy/feely world of emotional literacy and into a simple emotional mathematics you can flip through like flashcards when your emotions begin to get the best of you. At the end of the book, he even guides you through how to create and use your own equations.
Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, a book we named as one of The 100 Business Books of All Time, showed that emotional intelligence (EQ) accounts for two-thirds of the success of business executives. Developing a true understanding of the people you’re working with or leading is critical for not only your business success, but for your personal happiness. Developing and maintaining a true understanding of your self is an important part of doing so.
This book, the equations it provides, and the ability it gives you to develop your own shorthand will help a great deal toward that end. I can’t sum it up any better than the author: “Emotional Equations provide a new, visual lexicon for mastering our age of uncertainty.”
Posted Jan. 12, 2012 9:32 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Change often isn’t pretty and Jeffrey Hayzlett should know. In his second book, Running the Gauntlet, written in collaboration with business writer Jim Eber (as was his first, the best-selling The Mirror Test), he provides vivid detail of his adventures as a corporate change agent. Hayzlett isn’t prone to holding back, either. He lays it all out, warts and all: the resistance, the corporate infighting, the messy clean-up.
Hayzlett sets the tone of the book, and the attitude needed to change your corporate direction and/or culture, early with this dedication: “To all the naysayers, opportunists, and obstructionists who do their best to stop the progress of change in an organization. Note: We will beat you.”
Not too much farther in the book, he tells an anecdote about how he had been meeting regularly with a group in a conference room that had a wall clock that perpetually displayed the wrong time:
This time, after one too many discussions about why the clock was off, how to approach it, and how to go about requisitioning a change from Building Services, I had had enough. I challenged them. “Who has the guts to change it? Why doesn’t one of you just get up there and change the clock and get it done rather than talking and waiting for someone else in the company to fix it?”
Finally, one of them said, “You’re right.” She pulled a chair over, climbed up, and moved the hands. Done.
That’s how change in business gets started: someone sees a need, takes the challenge personally, and acts.
Hayzlett shares plenty of ideas on how to change attitudes and create momentum. One of his most important ideas has become his business mantra: “Repeat after me: no one is ever going to die from the changes you make in business. Say it: “No. One. Is. Going. To. Die.” He also advises you to Make It Personal! Get as Close To Your Customers as You Possibly Can, and Then Get Closer Still So You Can Give Them A Squeeze; and warns that Stampedes Lead to Fast Results, But They’re Expensive and Exhausting, so Create Scalable Plans That Unfold As You Grow. Hayzlett closes the book with twenty questions to ask yourself before you begin and four social media essentials for getting the word out.
It’s this kind of realism and action-oriented material that makes Running the Gauntlet so refreshing and motivating. His writing is high-energy, entertaining and insightful, and this is a great read to get you thinking about and implementing change in the New Year.
Posted Jan. 12, 2012 9:27 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
The key thing to know about this book is apparent in the title: Hannibal and Me (emphasis mine). Andreas Kluth, a writer for The Economist, presents the biography of the great Roman military leader, Hannibal, then weaves in a parallel line of stories about other types of heroes, artists, writers, inventors and revolutionists, all the while developing insight about human behavior.
But the main vein in the book remains the remarkable story of Hannibal, and as we follow his life, the author discusses modern questions such as:
Do you need to have a goal in life as clear as Hannibal’s in order to achieve success? Hannibal, though young, knew (or thought he knew) exactly what success was: he defined it as the conquest of Rome. Everything else followed from that. … He had complete focus.
As he does throughout the book, he pulls it back to you:
Later in life, you may have to reappraise your dream and adjust it in a more mature and complex life context, perhaps even drop it all together if it no longer works. But at the beginning of the journey, it helps to start with something.
A well-written book about an interesting historical figure or event can give us hours of enjoyment. We marvel at the courage displayed or how a seemingly small event could have changed our world. Kluth explains that his book “is about those moments of impact, when triumph or disaster strikes, and about the aftermath, when the shock fades and lives change forever and character reveals itself.” And he does a fine job turning this adventure book into a personal development guide of sorts.
Take Kluth’s Chapter Two: on “The Influence of Parents.” He begins by recounting Hannibal’s childhood and his relationship with his father, Hamilcar, and the war for Carthage’s future. Added into this story, Kluth includes research on the psychology of adolescence.
To understand your life, you have to begin with your parents—just as you need to know about Hamilcar to understand why Hannibal made the decisions that led to his successes and failures.
Then, Barack Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amy Tan all arrive into the chapter, and Kluth tells a bit of his own story, as well. This is the general structure of each of the chapters, with the goal of showing readers a way toward improving oneself by learning from others.
As Dan Pink said of the book, it is “full of lessons both profound and practical.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. But, what makes or breaks a book like this, with its uncommon structure and sometimes lofty subject matter, is the storytelling, and this book is one of the best in that regard that I have read in a long time.
