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Posted Feb. 4, 2001 8:15 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
In this new book, Honold postulates that all organizations need to have a workforce that is not just willing to learn but one that embraces learning. Her premise is that employees that want to learn can develop new skills, add creativity and welcome changeall essential ingredients for a successful organization. Let me share this an example with you:
Chaparral Steel needed to increase the yield on a specific lathe in order to meet the needs of its customers. A manager asked the machinist who operated the lathe to investigate the purchase of another one in order to meet the need. The operator visited companies that used the lathe in the US as well as in Japan. He selected a used machine rather than a brand new one and saved the company $300,000. Had the manager done the same investigation and come to the same conclusion, it is likely the machine operator would have grumbled about being given secondhand equipment. Instead, the lathe operator not only learned a great deal about the equipments cost and operation but also gained a stake in making the machine function effectively.
It seems that every page in part 1 and 2 contains motivating examples like this that you can adapt to fit the people in your organization. Part 3 offers ninety tools for managers and HR people to help guide them through the process of adding learning to their employees day-to-day routine. Included in this section is everything from informally looking at customer contact to formally looking at Instruments for understanding perceptions and tendencies using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other personal assessment instruments.
Deep down, we all know that our workforce and our work-life require constant learning in order to engender growth, but we also know that it is difficult to create an environment where learning is second nature. This book will guide you on how to promote learning opportunities, but more importantly, the book is flexible enough to complement any training programs that may already be in place.
Posted Feb. 2001 9:52 a.m. by katie
I love this book! Why? Because I love to learn, and I love to keep current on business trends and the changing culture. In the process of learning, however, I more often than not acquire just enough knowledge to be, as my wife says, dangerous. Not so with this book. What you will learn through reading Commanding Communications will bring you up to date with an industry that just may determine the future of business.
Bonocore has written a book that looks at an industry that is changing so much and so rapidly, I am surprised that he wrote a book, not a magazine article. He acknowledges this dilemma in the preface saying I was more determined to write a booknot a technical abstract or marketing tome or statistical survey, but a comprehensive and comprehensible bookthat would examine and interpret the explosive world of communications in a completely fresh and, hopefully, enlightening way. He does it. This is the book that I have been looking for that explains the new technology of wireless and wireline communications. This is the book that will explain acronyms like VOIPVoice Over Internet Protocol, and many more that you have heard, but didnt understand. Bonocore begins his tale with the breakup of the Bell System, and then follows the various telecommunication acts that opened the market to aggressive enterprises like MCI and McCaw. Then, he lays out the demolition-rebuilding process, defining the five building blocks to that process: 1) Voice Consolidation; 2) cable-telephony consolidation; 3) network integration; 4) content versus conduit; and 5) computing-communications integration.
If we want to be an learned participant in the future of telecommunications, this is the book that we all need to read so we can understand how this industry got to where it is now and what it will be like in three years.
Posted Feb. 2001 5:53 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Ram Charan is the co-author of our best-selling Every Business is a Growth Business and has written the perfect book for people like me who have worked themselves into a management or supervisory position without the "booklearning" many of our peers have. As the title implies, this is a book that explains everything from margins to 'Return on Investment', and much more. Charan uses the street merchant and the CEO of a multinational company to show that everybody in business cares about the same things, such as cash, inventory, velocity and growth. I especially loved that Chapter 1 is titled "Why Jack Welch thinks and talks like a street merchant." While the chapter doesn't talk about the soon-to-be ex-leader of GE directly, it explains in very easy to understand terms what it means to run either a one horse operation "street merchant" or a multinational "GE." They both need to understand the simple and not-so-simple concepts of making money.
This book can change your business, because your people will have that business knowledge that they didn't get when they were getting that English Lit degree in college. Also to be noted, the book is very short and written in unbelievably simple terminology so that even a non-reader in your organization can get value from it. This is the absolutely perfect book to use to start "open book management" program in your company. Think about it: everybody in your organization understanding how business is done and all pulling on the same oar at the right time. Good stuff!
