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Posted April 13, 2012 5:53 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Sales is complicated. No one seems to like it, whether they’re doing the selling or being sold to, yet it is one of the most common positions in the world and many sales gurus preach, “everyone is in sales.” Its ubiquity would seem to make it very clear to people, but it remains a slippery topic to understand.
Philip Delves Broughton’s new book, The Art of the Sale: Learning from the Masters About the Business of Life, examines this enigma in great detail. From high-level insurance sales, customer-focused antiques retail, and intense info-marketing to the nearly religious world of sales consulting, Delves Broughton reveals some of the fundamentals of this tricky business: storytelling, failure, persistence and, in essence, the human experience.
As Mrs. Shibata, one of Delves Broughton’s case studies and the most successful insurance sales person in Japan states:
Selling is very hard to teach, because it’s about what exists in your head and what goes on in your whole life. If you keep your friends and respect your parents, the benefits of that come back to you in this life. It comes back as income you can see. The objective in sales becomes the same as that in the rest of your life, to respect others and do the best for them. Then you don’t have to be a salesperson about what you do. Selling becomes an activity consistent with who you are.
Clearly, not only is sales complicated, but salespeople also have to have a complex range of skills and intuition. They must have enough empathy to connect with people, but not so much that they cannot close a sale. Delves Broughton’s analysis of the process smoothly translates into his analysis of the people involved, where the most successful are often the most complex, all while exhibiting a patterned, learned, and simplistic message on the surface.
If sales, and salespeople, are complicated, it’s also all very fascinating, and this book is as entertaining as it is educational. There are incredible stories within it, from PT Barnum, Jeffrey Gitomer, and Donald Trump, to everyday people and products you might have never heard of… yet
Posted April 13, 2012 3:56 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
This is a book many people may have been waiting for. Although Patrick Lencioni has established himself as an elite business book writer, he writes parables, and for some, fictional stories just don’t get to the point quickly enough or clearly detail the important steps, data, and analysis of a situation in order to change and improve it.
If that sounds like you, then you’ll appreciate The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business. The book is pure non-fiction, and begins by identifying the difference between smart and healthy companies. According to Lencioni, in order to be successful you have to be both, but many leaders focus only on the smart side of business—the clear, quantifiable data that can be adjusted to make improvements. What if that alone doesn’t work?
Organizational health is more qualitative. Take culture, for instance. Funky furniture or company yoga classes don’t make the culture. A company might say, “We’re a great place to work because we have these things.” Meanwhile, behind those things might be employees who don’t feel aligned with the company’s mission, connected to their coworkers, or passionate about their role. Those are the points that help develop and shape the culture, and this book describes in clear detail how to create better alignment throughout an organization. Soft? Hardly.
Here, Lencioni describes how an aligned team functions within a healthy organization:
Members of cohesive teams spend many hours working together on issues and topics that often don’t fall directly within their formal areas of responsibility. They go to meetings to help their team members solve problems even when those problems have nothing to do with their departments. And perhaps most challenging of all, they enter into difficult, uncomfortable discussions, even bringing up thorny issues with colleagues about their shortcomings, in order to solve problems that might prevent the team from achieving its objectives. They do this even when they’re tempted to avoid it all and go back to the relative safety of their offices to do what I refer to as their “day jobs,” that is, the work of their department.
Over the course of the book, Lencioni shows how this direction of focus creates an advantage over companies who focus on it less, or not at all. There are no characters in this book, no fictional situations about company ABC and the problems they face, but the lessons Lencioni is now famous for are still here. In fact, as you’re reading, you might even develop your own characters and apply your own situations as you realize that Lencioni is fueling a script for your own story. The Advantage is another powerful book by a masterful writer that understands the importance and value of the human element within business.
Posted April 13, 2012 3:45 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
With so much of the conversation in America today about the decline, decay, and descent of our power, the rise of others’, and the coming competition that that dynamic will create, Philip Auerswald’s new book, The Coming Prosperity, reminds us that life on Earth is not a zero-sum game.
The first part of the book tackles the larger picture, the “macro-story line of the coming prosperity.” The author details a vision of the future in which an insurgency of entrepreneurs challenge scarcity and create prosperity all over the world
[T]he vast majority of alleged threats to humanity are, in fact, dwarfed by the magnitude of opportunities that exist in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, if anything is more naïve than an unquestioning belief in the transformative power of entrepreneurs, it is an unquestioning belief in the power of national governments, international organizations, and multinational corporations to address complex twenty-first-century challenges.
Auerswald doesn’t sugarcoat the problems we face as a nation or a planet—pandemics, climate change and water scarcity among them. In fact, he describes them in more detail and color than many of the doom-and-gloom books that are solely devoted to them. But he shows us a way forward, a way for each of us to contribute and get involved, a way “to think of the three billion people who will join the global economy in the next quarter century as partners rather than competitors, as sources rather than sinks.”
In the second section of the book, the human-scale part of the narrative, Auerswald brilliantly charts the economic subtext of the twentieth century, “the rise and partial fall of large scale, centralized production” that got us to where we are today, and explores the prospects for an ever-brighter future. You will meet individuals like Karim Khoja, who brought cell phone service to Afghanistan, and get unexpected management advice from folks like C.P. McCormick, who saved a spice company from oblivion at the height of the Great Depression by increasing wages across the board and cutting working hours from fifty-six to forty-five per week. You will see the genesis of people moving through economies being built, big ideas becoming simple reality, the sweeping arc of history in his writing.
One of the finest insights in the book comes from Auerswald’s young daughter. Reacting to his frustration over rush-hour traffic, she piped up from the backseat: “There’s no reason to get angry about the traffic, Daddy, because we’re part of the traffic.”
Posted March 9, 2012 4:26 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
We all have habits. Some are good, like brushing our teeth, and others are generally classified as bad, such as smoking, drinking to excess, or overeating. But our lives are surprisingly filled with habits beyond remembering to wash our hands before dinner, and those habits often dictate the course of our lives because we become deeply entrenched in their ruts. Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, gives us the lowdown on how habits are formed, how habits can be used against us, and how habits can be broken.
Duhigg, an award-winning investigative reporter with The New York Times, first takes us on visits to laboratories where the brain is studied. Of course we meet mice with electrodes attached to their heads, but we also meet H.M and Eugene, two men who have experienced traumatic brain trauma and lost the ability to remember even something that happened two minutes prior. Yet, Duhigg reveals, these men with no memory still learn habits.
Eugene for example, was able to create “habit loops” that included a cue, then a routine, and finally a reward. No memory required.
The experiments demonstrated that Eugene had the ability to form new habits, even when they involved tasks or objects he couldn’t remember for more than a few seconds. This explained how Eugene managed to go for a walk every morning. The cues—certain trees on corners or the placement of particular mailboxes—were consistent every time he went outside, so though he couldn’t recognize his house, his habits always guided him back to his front door.
Understanding how habits are created leads to a better understanding of how habits can be broken. “The evidence is clear: If you want to change a habit, find an alternative routine, and your odds of success go up dramatically when you commit to changing as part of a group.” Not only that, but belief is the key. AA’s twelve-step program isn’t for everyone, but the lesson learned from its success is important:
AA trains people in how to believe in something until they believe in the program and themselves. It lets people practice believing that things will eventually get better, until they actually do.
The application of this understanding of habits to business is significant. Duhigg includes a section on “The Habits of Successful Organizations,” and within it examples of how Paul O’Neill transformed ALCOA into being the top performer in the Dow Jones by establishing Keystone habits, how Starbucks teaches willpower, how Target uses data to divine customers’ habits, and how “good leaders seize crises to remake organizational habits.” In sum, this book is an important addition to the library of any businessperson who wants and needs to learn more about the habits of themselves and others, and how they can change them for the better.
Posted March 9, 2012 4:19 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
One of my favorite books of 2011 was Once Upon a Car by Bill Vlasic. In it we met the whole cast of characters involved in the auto industry crisis and subsequent government bailouts of Detroit. One of the standouts in Vlasic’s book was Ford CEO Alan Mulally, who turned that company around and whose leadership style I’ve wanted to read more about ever since. Luckily, our friends at Crown Business have published this excellent history of the Ford side of the crisis with Alan Mulally at the helm, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Previously CEO of Boeing, Mulally arrived at Ford in 2006 into a culture that was more than a little resistant to change, a brand that had lost all its cache, and a company on the brink of financial disaster. His first task was realigning the corporate culture, and he immediately replaced the full week of corporate meetings usually held each month with a weekly meeting of all the executives to review the progress of various projects. “There are too many meetings,” he told them. “When do you have time to think about the customer?”
Mulally encouraged total candor in his new weekly meetings. Still, when a quality issue was discovered on a major new product line and the executive responsible admitted that the launch was going to have to be delayed, the room went quiet awaiting Mulally’s reaction.
Suddenly, someone started clapping. It was Mulally … he beamed. “Who can help Mark with this?”
The people in the room pulled together and the product shipped without a flaw. More importantly, this incident encouraged others to put their fears aside and admit their own problems, which in turn helped Mulally see the extent of the trouble the entire company was in and begin to address it.
Mulally’s approach to strategy was just as direct and distinct. Ford had made grievous errors in strategy in the past, well illustrated by the story of the Ford Taurus:
It introduced an upgraded version of the Taurus in 1992 that … became the bestselling car in America, … But Ford’s investment in the popular sedan soon petered out. In 1997, Toyota’s Camry claimed its crown, and the Taurus was soon relegated to rental car fleets. When production finally stopped in 2006, few even noticed.
By 2009, just three years after he took over the helm of the company, Mulally—against all advice, expectations, and odds—had resurrected the Taurus.
I was reading the Isaacson bio of Steve Jobs at the same time as reading an advanced copy of this book, and found myself preferring this one. Everybody loved the Jobs book, but his interpersonal style left me a bit cold. Genius sure, but I don’t know that I would have liked working with him. Alan Mulally is a person I would love to work for, and this book will help you become that kind of leader while telling a riveting American success story at the same time.
