The Three Signs of a Miserable Job
written by Patrick Lencioni

Over the past ten years, Patrick Lencioni has been a prolific writer on a number of business topics near and dear to the hearts of small business owners. His past books have included "Five Dysfunctions of a Team", "Death by Meeting", and "Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars". Each book tells a fable with a critical business prescription embedded into the story.

His newest book, "The Three Signs of a Miserable Job" follows this same model. It tells a story of a successful CEO struggling to determine how to prevent his employees from being miserable. The CEO goes from running a large equipment manufacturing company to a small pizza restaurant and than back to a large regional chain of retail sporting goods stores. In each case, he faces a dysfunctional, demotivated, miserable work force. As expected, in each situation he is able to turn around the employees using a relatively simple set of three human capital strategies.

The strategies Lencioni prescribes are not new. In fact he shares the following with the reader, "The remedy I propose here is going to seem ridiculously simple and obvious at first glance." He goes on to say that the challenge for managers today is not the ability to understand these basic principles of people management, but to put these ideas into practice. The evidence of this exists in nearly every business in America. There are millions of employees who are absolutely miserable in their work. The cost of this collective malaise is billions of dollars to companies in lost productivity and under-performance.

I won’t give away Lencioni’s "Three Signs". I highly recommend this book to every small business owner. It is an easy read with a powerful set of employee-friendly strategies. I believe that if you begin practicing these strategies, the impact on your workforce will be quick and most significant. There may even be an application of these practices beyond your employees with your customers, your vendors, and maybe even family members.

Raving Fans
written by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

This is my favorite all-time book written on customer service. Ken Blanchard is the co-author of the best-selling book The One Minute Manager and a host of other One Minute books. Like he does in his other books, in Raving Fans Blanchard tells a story to get across his powerful message about customer service. It is a story about an Area Manager with a rotten service problem and Charlie, his golf-playing Good Fairy, who teaches him how to turn customers into Raving Fans.

• Describe What You Want (for your customers)
• Determine What The Customer Wants (from you)
• Deliver Plus 1% (to every customer)

As simple as these ideas are, the implementation of them is terribly difficult. Blanchard provides us with numerous excellent examples of each secret in his book.

Why does your business need Raving Fans? Simple. Satisfied customers are not enough. Satisfied customers are not loyal customers. They will leave you the minute they find a better deal. Ravings Fans on the other hand are very loyal customers and will remain customers even if you make a mistake or don’t offer the lowest price. As Raving Fans of your business, they also have a tendency to tell all of their friends and neighbors about how wonderful your business is.

How many Raving Fans do you have of your business?

I strongly recommend this book.