The Discipline of Market Leaders
written by Michael Treacy & Fred Wiersema

Have you ever had a book that you have not read before but you have heard so much about it that you feel that you have read it? This was the case for me with this month’s book, "The Discipline of Market Leaders". For many years I heard many people refer to this book and read many articles that referenced the book. I felt like I had already read it myself. I finally decided to read the book this month and am very glad that I did. I believe that this book is one of the business management classics of our time.

"The Discipline of Market Leaders "was written in 1995. The authors of the book, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema are both highly regarded business consultants. The book was based on the research and experience of both authors working with both Fortune 500 companies and small businesses as well.

The simple but powerfully important message of this book is that no company can succeed today by trying to be all things to all people. The book suggests that instead companies must find the unique value that it alone can deliver in a target market. The authors identify in the book three distinct value disciplines that each delivers a different kind of customer value. The three disciplines are Operational Excellence, Product Leadership, and Customer Intimacy. Ideally, a company chooses one of these unique disciplines and stakes it’s market reputation squarely on top of it.

Operational Excellence means providing average products at the lowest overall cost to the consumer. Examples of companies that exemplify this value discipline are Wal-Mart, McDonalds, and Southwest Air. For each of these companies it is all about lowering their own cost of doing business through being operationally superior to the competition which than results in offering the consumer the lowest prices and hassle-free service.

Practitioners of Product Leadership concentrate on offering the best products in the market. In addition, these companies are committed to innovating their products on a continual basis. Competition is not about price here but about product performance. Examples of these companies include 3M, Apple Computers, and Nike.

Customer Intimacy focuses on delivering whatever the customer desires. It’s about cultivating lifetime partnerships with clients. It means understanding the unique needs of the customer and doing whatever it takes to exceed the expectations of that customer. I think of companies such as Nordstrom’s department stores, Ritz Carlton hotels, and Lands End mail order in this area.

Which value discipline have you chosen for your company? My experience is that most small businesses try to be all three. They promote themselves as being customer-centric, they position themselves as being innovative, and they compete on price. According to the authors of the book, this is a formula for business failure. One can’t be everything to everybody. Instead, they prescribe that the business leader choose one value discipline and invest resources there to carve out a unique market position. This does not mean that we ignore the other two disciplines. Instead we look to maintain a competitive position in these areas as well.

My own experience as small business owner and consultant is that Customer Intimacy may be the easiest and most powerful value discipline for the small business. It is very hard for a small business to compete with larger businesses on price. Being the Innovator typically requires significant financial resources for research and development, which most small businesses don’t have.

I strongly recommend this book.

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.

'Small Giants' written by Bo Burlingham
review by Tim Fulton

As a young entrepreneur fresh out of college I was focused on one goal in managing my small business: growth. Growth in revenues. Growth in profits. Growth in employee headcount. Growth in market share. It felt like I was in some kind of race. Who was I racing against? Competitors? Insolvency?

Every once in a while I would stop to catch a breath and ask myself, 'Why growth?' Seemed like a reasonable question. I could never reach a good answer, and hence would resume my race for growth not ever sure of my ultimate destination.

As I have worked with many like-minded small business owners over the past decade, I have found that I was not the only one obsessed with growth. It seems to be a very common condition of many entrepreneurs. And like me, few are able to answer the question of 'Why growth?'

Author Bo Burlingham has recently written a book, Small Giants, that profiles fourteen companies that addressed the 'Growth' question head on and proactively decided to resist growth in favor of becoming 'Great'. They became great employers. They provide great customer service. They make great contributions to their community. The lead great lives outside of work.

Just as Jim Collins best-selling book, 'Good To Great', describes how big companies become great, Burlingham describes in his book how small companies become great. For each company, the author writes in great detail how the organization created their own unique 'mojo' and the lessons other business owners can learn from their experience. Each of the businesses had opportunities to grow fast whether it was thru an IPO or a merger or an acquisition. Each business after careful consideration chose to reject the opportunity for hyper growth and instead focus on becoming great.

I strongly recommend this book to every business owner. At the very least, it will cause you to address the 'why growth?' question. I look forward to working with more 'small giants' in the future.

Book Review, by Therese Padilla

I eagerly awaited the delivery of my pre-ordered copy of "Tough Choices” by Carly Fiorina. Within moments of its arrival, I was reading the memoir of what will arguably be a very hot topic in the coming weeks. I wasn't disappointed. This book is her turn to talk, and from my perspective she does a fine job of framing the past and the effect she had on HP. Even more importantly she shows the importance of being earnest.

To many readers, this book will be dismissed as simply an opportunity for Fiorina to take undue credit for the positive financial results at HP since her firing. In baseball, the relief pitcher gets credited with the save if, by the prescribed ending of the game, they erased the deficit. In business, there isn't a prescribed ending. Companies, if they manage to avoid bankruptcy, don't have endings. They have curves, ups and downs mixed with flat line steady years. When Fiorina, the relief pitcher, came in the team was in a deficit. Under Fiorina, a number of initiatives drove the steady rise of HP stock since mid-2004. It’s been up to Mark Hurd, current CEO to continue the winning streak.

The press and investors like to talk about leadership but in reality many don't like what it really means. Leadership means saying no as well as yes. Critics can remember every time a leader said no to an idea. Fiorina recounts a number of instances where she was told, not asked, to make a choice she didn't agree with, but she held her ground and said no. The real lesson in her book is how people reacted to her saying no. And I think it was all her "nos" that ultimately got her fired. But she also said yes. For example, the Compaq acquisition which interestingly was not her idea. She embraced it only after much discussion with the board.

In her own words (she insisted on no editing of her memoir) the values that comprise Carly Fiorina are revealed. Her recollections of college paint the picture of an over-achiever who was always unsure of herself. - directionless at first then a moment of sheer clarity in the midst of angst. In one particular instance, while in the shower, Fiorina made the decision to drop out of law school. She felt that a career in law was too confining because it always relied on the past for decisions. A prophetic sign of her actions to come at HP.

Fiorina and I are the same age. We both read Camus' “The Stranger” in High School and were affected by it. However, we both came away with different meanings. Fiorina’s interpretation was that it was “about a big idea and how a philosophy can motivate action”. And I understood it to be about the absurd -that life, science and religion have no meaning and that meaning is assigned by the assignor.

One of the reasons for this disparity of understanding between Fiorina and I might be the fact that she read the book in French, and I read the English translation. But I don't think that is the reason. What I think it is that it reveals Fiorina is clearly an optimist. How else can you explain that she found this quintessential book on the meaninglessness of life to be "difficult, absorbing and rewarding" especially when the Stranger ends like this:

"As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself - so like a brother, really - I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate." (Excerpt from Matthew Ward's translation)

Again, oddly prophetic. Weren't the cries after her departure from HP cries of hate? Weren't the actions of the board to decide to fire her a blind-sided execution? But just as Fiorina chooses to revere Camus, she ultimately reveres the actions of everyone at HP. She looks at the entire process of the rise to being CEO of HP as a series of choices. Tough ones. Smart ones. Bad ones. Easy ones. And ultimately a gift.

Speaking of choices, it’s apparent that Fiorina chose the role of CEO of HP despite some serious warning signals in order to ultimately fulfill the prophecy of her dying mother. This turns out to be one of the more touching parts of the book, actually. Her mother was a couple of months away from death and casually mentioned the idea that Carly might move back to California and assume the helm of HP. It was an idea that came from nowhere because they had never spoken of the company and Fiorina was firmly entrenched at Lucent in New Jersey.

The chapter on the HP hiring process points to a number of the "dysfunctional" aspects of the HP Board of Directors. The story of her CEO candidacy interview with board member, Richard Hackborn, sheds the first light on the ultimate insight into the problems at HP. In that interview, Richard admits that the board was willing to go along with ousted CEO, Lew Platt's restructuring plan out of sheer exhaustion. They were tired of trying to “out-argue” Platt on the matter. They figured, he would be gone soon anyway, so let him do it. "..If we have to, we will fix it later," Hackborn told her. Interesting corporate strategy, and in a manner, the new HP Way. Rather than allow leaders to lead, the board of directors often second guess from the cheap seats. Hindsight is the only measure here.

Besides the personal story of the book, this is a business advice book. Fiorina doesn't directly give advice, but the stories of colleagues and events certainly left my book with yellow highlighted one-liners. The rise through AT&T then Lucent and ultimately HP are filled with conversations and specific insight into the strategy behind several key decisions at these companies.

The biggest impression I got from this book was that product managers have to work like CEOs. It isn’t new to say product managers are the CEOs of their products, but it is a tough job for product managers to have to work with so many conflicting departments. Even if the CEO can fire everyone who drags their feet when given direction, it isn’t going to happen. Despite being called “Chainsaw Carly”, Fiorina outlines some of the agonizing she did when trying to figure out how to motivate people to get things done. The product manager’s bane in life.

This book is timely in regards to the criminal charges that have been levied against Patricia Dunn and the other three involved in the HP scandal. It is clear in Fiorina’s book that the Boardroom meeting leakers were known at the time of her firing, and the leakers used the press to usurp Fiorina's authority. It's as much a business advice book as it is a primer on corporate espionage and tale of modern day Machiavellianism.

Book Review, by Tim Fulton

One of the most common issues I discuss with my TEC members is how much financial information they should share with their employees. Some members are very hesitant to share any financial data with their people and others are very open and share just about everything they know with their team. Most small business owners, I believe, are somewhere in between and share certain numbers with their employees and choose not to expose them to all of their financial records.

The first book that really opened my eyes to the benefits of sharing financials with employees was The Great Game of Business written by Jack Stack in the early 1990?s. Stack was the CEO at Springfield Remanufacturing Corp in the early 1980?s and his company was in trouble. He chose to employ "open-book management" and it was wildly successful. The company?s annual sales went from $16 million to $83 million. As a result, a number of companies including Federal Express, Allstate Insurance, and Exxon adapted his ideas to their business. Since the publication of his book, Stack has gained worldwide notoriety as the guru of open-book management.

Stack?s premise in implementing open-book management and turning around Springfield Remanufacturing was simple. Turn the business into a simple game that everyone can understand. Create work rules that make sense to each employee. Let everyone in on financial decisions by first teaching them how to read financials and then sharing financial results regularly. Give every employee a stake in the business and a vote on company matters.

By sharing financials with his employees, Stack was able to help them understand how the Game was played. For example, a worker on the assembly line understood the impact that wasted materials, equipment downtime, and absenteeism had on the financial performance of his/her operating unit and the company as a whole. Hence, that same worker developed over time an "ownership" mentality that hopefully caused him to make better, more informed work decisions.

According to author Stack, a key starting point for the Game is to pick a Critical Number to track and manage. "If you know your critical number and can come up with a Game to go after it, you can develop a lot of momentum very quickly." At Springfield Remanufacturing Corp, the critical number was cost of goods sold (COGS). This was, at the time, the one number that Stack and his management team believed would drive their economic engine. This number was posted publicly where all employees could see it and was updated regularly. It became the way they scored their respective Game. If the number went down, the team was winning and if it moved upward that was bad news. What is your company?s Critical Number?

Open Book Management may not be for every business owner. I know the thought of sharing financial results with employees scares the daylights out of most small business owners. "What if they see that we are losing money? What if they see how much profit we are making? What if they see how much I am paying myself? What if they see how much money I am taking out of the company to pay for my boat, lake house, vacations, etc?"

My experience has been that if we don?t share this information with key stakeholders within the firm their only choice is to guess how the company is performing. Typically, they guess wrong. They assume we are wildly profitable or that we are earning seven figure salaries. They also wrongly assume that their work (or lack of) does not impact the bottom line.

I loved this book when I first read it in 1994 and continue to promote its message today. At the very least a Game sounds a lot more fun than work.

AIPMM Rating


Buy from Powells

Book Review: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
by Patrick Lencioni (Jossey-Bass, March 19, 2002)
Reviewed By:
Tim Fulton, Managing Partner, TCF Business Development

You Call This a Team?

Consider the following scenario:

A small high-tech company stands on the edge of the precipice. On one side lies market leadership and assured financial rewards. On the other, dismal failure awaits. Well-funded and well staffed, the firm has the products, financial resources, technical know-how and marketing savvy to outdistance its competitors. Yet, sales constantly lag behind projections, and despite the company's best efforts, it continues to lose market share at an alarming rate. To make matters worse, ongoing service problems alienate prospects, irritate current customers and inhibit the firm's growth.

Despite the gravity of the situation, the management team can't agree on the problem, much less the solution. One week it's marketing's fault. The next week, R&D takes the heat. The next time around, customer service becomes the fall guy. Everyone has a different prescription for what ails the firm, but their solution always involves someone else. The players on this "team" have elevated finger-pointing, accountability-dodging and "not my fault-ism" to a fine art.

Not surprisingly, the weekly management meetings have become a joke. Martin, the chief technologist, answers e-mail on his laptop while others (including the CEO) are talking. Jan, the chief financial officer, constantly whines that nobody understands her role on the team or appreciates her contributions. Jeff, the CEO, cares more about starting and ending the meetings on time than creating any meaningful action items. Mikey, the head of marketing, sits smugly above it all, chiming in only when she has a chance to prove herself right and somebody else wrong.

Week after week, the team rehashes the same issues, but no decisions are made and nothing ever seems to get done. As a result, the company falls farther and farther behind in the battle for market share, and the prospects for survival -- much less success -- look increasingly bleak.

Welcome to best-selling author Patrick Lencioni's latest management fable, "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."

The Five Dysfunctions

Fortunately for the struggling firm, the chairman of the board understands the need for immediate action and brings in a hired gun to turn things around. Enter Kathryn, a veteran CEO and experienced manager who understands the real problem and has her own prescription for what ails the company. Her mission? To turn this highly dysfunctional group of individuals into a cohesive, well-oiled team with everyone in alignment with and working toward achieving the same goals. How? By focusing on five fundamental principles that lay the foundation for all great teams.

In his previous books, "The Five Temptations of a CEO" and "The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive," Lencioni employed a narrative style to deliver a modern parable of leadership gone awry. Using fictional but true-to-life characters, he identified some of the most compelling personal challenges business leaders face and offered practical, workable solutions for overcoming these inherently human leadership flaws. Lencioni takes the same approach in "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team," only this time he applies his leadership principles in a team rather than an individual setting.

Lencioni's core message is that all teams suffer from five basic dysfunctions:

Absence of trust
Fear of conflict
Lack of commitment
Avoidance of accountability
Inattention to results

These dysfunctions may seem like old news to some. After all, you don't have to attend too many meetings to experience some or all of these symptoms. So what separates Lencioni's book from all the other teambuilding tomes on the market? The way he goes about attacking these common problems.

According to Lencioni, the team's ability to perform at high levels is a direct result of its willingness and ability to confront these dysfunctions before trying to work on the "real stuff" of the business. In fact, he argues, teams can't make any real headway with the business of running the business until they first overcome these five barriers. Accordingly, much of the book deals with Kathryn's struggles to get the team to acknowledge that to have any hope of success, they must first work on themselves. Once they learn to trust each other, engage in productive conflict, hold each other accountable and focus on results, then they can set their sights on turning the rest of the company around.

A Simple (but Difficult) Solution

How do you fix a dysfunctional team? First, acknowledge the problem. Then look closely at where your team stands in regards to each dysfunction and take specific action to counteract any problems. In particular, Lencioni recommends the following:

� Begin to build trust. It all starts with trust. If people can't be open and vulnerable with each other, you will never be able to take on the real issues. If you can't deal with the real issues, the company will never get anywhere.

� Encourage conflict. Dysfunctional teams avoid conflict, good teams revel in it. The key is to focus on productive conflict, meaning that you argue and debate the issues, not people or personalities.

� Gain commitment. Let go of the need for consensus and certainty. Instead, focus on achieving clarity around the goals and gaining buy-in on how to get there. "Great teams," says Lencioni, "make clear and timely decisions and move forward with complete buy-in from every member of the team, even those who voted against the decision."

� Enforce accountability. Nothing kills a team quicker than the failure to hold people accountable for their performance. Publish standards for each member of the team, regularly review each member's performance, and provide consequences/rewards to reinforce those standards. Never let people off the hook just because they perform well in their functional areas.

� Pay attention to results. Monitor and track progress, focusing on team rather than individual accomplishments. Tie rewards to team-based results.

In the book, Lencioni explains in detail how each of the five dysfunctions gets in the way of effective teamwork. More important, he provides specific tools, techniques and exercises to help teams discard their dysfunctional behaviors and develop new and more effective ways of interacting with each other.

Lencioni believes that building great teams involves a simple but difficult process. It requires hard work, patience, dedication and strong commitment from the top. If you go looking for the quick fix, you'll end up with quick frustration and disappointment. The key to success, he argues, lies not in mastering complex, sophisticated theory but in diligently practicing a small set of principles over a long period of time.

Publisher�s note: Buy this book today and watch your team�s performance go from dysfunctional to high-performing.

Review by Tim Fulton, TEC Chair

Being a CEO is not an easy job. There is enormous pressure to maximize return on investment for all the company's key stakeholders including the owners, customers, and employees. The CEO must achieve these results with limited capital, intense global competition, and a �free agent� labor force. While there are CEOs that rise above these challenges and lead successful enterprises, there are also even more business executives that don�t. What separates these two groups?

Best-selling author Patrick Lencioni has written a very good book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, which helps to explain why many CEOs fail to achieve the levels of success they expect. Lencioni explains to the reader that many CEOs complicate their work by succumbing to one or more of the �temptations� he describes in the book. Once that happens, no matter how hard the CEO works to rise above this leadership flaw, he or she is almost certain to fail.

The book is written as a fable as it seems so many business books are these days. The focus of the book is a young, ambitious, and overwhelmed CEO by the name of Andy. As a result of a dream the night before his big annual board of directors meeting, Andy discovers that he has fallen victim to all five of the �temptations� and resolves to turn himself around. Like all good fables the book has a happy ending and Andy keeps his job while leading the company through a turnaround.

As a TEC Chair working with two groups of CEOs, I see evidence of each of the �Five Temptations� almost on a daily basis. They represent a safe haven for CEOs who chose not to want to lead their respective enterprises forward. One example of a �temptation� from the book is the desire to be popular. Being at the top of an organization can be very lonely. You feel isolated. As a result, some CEOs reach out to their direct reports and develop friendships. Others just hire their friends to be their direct reports. In either case, these relationships can significantly undermine the CEO�s ability to hold these friends accountable for their work and to provide the type of leadership necessary to manage their performance.

Many CEOs also struggle in their decision-making. Before making a tough decision, they want more information�better information�different information. They than begin to drown in their own data. Lencioni refers to this �temptation� as the desire to make �correct� decisions, to achieve certainty. The most successful CEOs rely more on their gut than their brain to make decisions. They learn to trust their instincts rather than worry about making intellectually sound decisions. Yet it is very tempting to accumulate mounds of information and data before making a tough decision.

I enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to any CEO or consultant who works with CEOs. As a business owner, a parent, and a coach; I have fallen prey to each of the �Five Temptations� more often than I care to remember. I caught myself looking in the mirror several times as I read the book. The author, Patrick Lencioni, has also written several other best-selling business books including �The Five Dysfunctions of a Team�. The temptation to read this book is not one to avoid.

Death By Meeting written by Patrick Lencioni
Reviewed By: , Managing Partner, TCF Business Development

Picture this. You are sitting at a large table with other adult-like figures at a meeting that seems to have been going on for days at a time. You are so frustrated by the lack of any relative substance in the meeting that you begin to bang your head on the table furiously. Because everyone else at the meeting is paralyzed in a state of boredom, your frantic fit of rage has gone completely unnoticed. You have wasted an entire morning at a meeting that has only resulted in the planning of a half dozen additional meetings. You rush for a nearby window, open it just enough to see 10 floors below you and scream,�I am mad as hell andc an�t take it any more.�

Has this ever happened to you? Maybe not to this extent but I am sure that every business owner has been tortured by bad meetings. They may very well have been your own meetings. You called the meeting. It�s your agenda. Halfway through the meeting you realize that the majority of the attendees will require shock treatment before resuming their workday. They are comatose. What went wrong?

Author Patrick Lencioni has written a very good book just for you. Your picture is on the inside cover. The business world today is plagued by bad meetings. �Death By Meeting� is written in the form of a parable and it tells the story of a CEO who is on the verge of losing his job as a result of hosting very bad weekly management meetings. Fortunately for him, he has recently hired a new assistant that helps him recover from this situation and restructure his meetings in a much better way just in the nick of time. His job and the company are saved.

Why are most meetings bad? Lencioni cites two reasons. First, they are boring. Why are they boring? Interestingly enough it is because they typically lack drama or any conflict according to the author. In fact, most meeting leaders go out of their way to avoid any conflict in a meeting. Why is it that we can sit through a two hour movie or a sixty minute television show, but not a thirty minute business meeting? Lencioni points out that what makes most movies or your favorite television show enjoyable is some amount of drama or conflict. Why not build that same element into your meetings?

The second reason most meetings fail is because they are ineffective. This is a result of a lack of contextual structure according to Lencioni. Attendees are not sure what topics are appropriate for a meeting and which topics require discussion. In the book, this is referred to as a �meeting stew� where one meeting is called to address every possible issue, large and small, the organization faces. The result is a bad case of indigestion.

Lencioni�s solution to this problem is to consider having not one regular meeting, but four meetings instead. They include a 5-10 minute daily check-in, a weekly tactical meeting, a monthly strategic meeting, and a quarterly off-site business review. Initially, one would think that instead of making the problem better, having four meetings would make the problem worse. The reality, according to the book, is that you end of making better use of your time in meetings and outside of meetings as well.

I really liked this book and recommend it anyone involved in the planning of any type meetings. Don�t wait until you begin to scream�

Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life.

In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch.

�How could my life have unraveled so quickly?� he wondered.

In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn�t know how to solve. And he doesn�t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can�t help him; they�re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings.

Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey�s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen.

As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion

MONEYBALL

written by Michael Lewis
Review by Tim Fulton

It's not often that you read a book that addresses not one but two of your passions in life. That is exactly the case with Michael Lewis's best-selling book MONEYBALL. This is a great book about baseball and business.

In MONEYBALL, Lewis write about one of the most successful baseball teams in the major Leagues, The Oakland Athletics, and their general manager Billy Beane. Over the last five years the A�s have been able to do something that many experts in baseball said could not be done. They have been a consistent winner while having one of the lowest player payrolls in the league. While many teams such as the Yankees, Braves, and Rangers have pushed their payrolls up towards $200 million, the A�s have achieved better results with just over $40 million in salaries.

How have they achieved this feat? Lewis takes the reader behind the curtain of a major league baseball team to see how the A�s led by general manager Billy Beane have revolutionized the management of a sports franchise. Beane saw that the game of baseball was broken and in order to achieve success he had to change the rules of engagement as it came to the selection, training, and management of his ballplayers. His owners expected the team to not only achieve success on the field but off the field as well. The A�s are one of few professional baseball teams that actually make money.

This book could just as easily be textbook for small business owners. The strategies successfully employed by Beane can work just as well for any organization, large or small. Here are just a few examples:

It�s okay to break the rules. When Billy Beane first took the job with Oakland, other general managers in the league thought he was doomed for failure. He let go of most of his player scouts. He cut loose a number of his highest-performing and highest-paid players. He told the manager that he no longer wanted to see the team steal bases or bunt. He made a number of player trades that looked to be disastrous. Eventually, each of these moves contributed to the team�s success despite the fact that they were contrary to the way the game was supposed to be played.

Measure performance. Beane believes in measuring just about every aspect of a player�s performance. He hired a Harvard-trained economist to be his assistant general manager and they turned the world of baseball statistics upside down. Historically, baseball hitters are measured in terms of batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. In contrast, Beane believes that the most important statistic for a hitter is on-base percentage. This would include not only hits but walks, getting hit by the ball, and reaching base by error. He found that there is direct correlation between a team�s on-base percentage and it�s win-loss record.

It�s a �free agent nation�. Beane realized that the days of baseball players playing their entire career with one team was over. He also realized that he could not afford to pay huge contracts to superstar players. Instead he decided to leverage the economic inefficiencies of the league. He looked for players that were emerging stars or players who had been undervalued in the league for whatever reason. He than planned on keeping those players as long as he could afford them and then fill their respective positions when their market value exceeded his respective payroll restraints.

Whether you are a baseball or not, I believe you will find this book very interesting. If you are a baseball fan, you will love this book.

I have avoided reading Fish! for over a year despite rave book reviews and the recommendations of many peers and clients. How could such difficult issues as employee retention, customer service, and organizational performance all be addressed in such a simple and short (107 pages) book? I have also grown tired of books being written in the form of parable. There�s very little mystery here. Always a happy ending. No made-for television movies to be found in these stories.

This month I caved in, bought and read the book. I was pleasantly surprised. This is a story of a fictional manager responsible for turning around a very low performing operations department that had been nicknamed a �toxic waste dump� by her management peers at the company. Not far from her office in Seattle is the now world famous (and real) Pike Place Fish Market. Pike�s is famous not only for it�s amazing array of fresh fish, but more for the fun, bustling, and joyful atmosphere they have created for the employees to work in and customers to buy from. One day our operations manager takes a walk down to Pikes and meets one of the employees at the fish market who decides to share the story of Pikes with her. She then goes about employing the Fish ways in her own malperforming department and the results are staggering.

The core message of this book is that there are four ingredients to developing a high performing work place. The are as follows:

1. Choose Your Attitude: Employees choose their attitudes. The book poses the following question, �When you are doing what you are doing, who are you being?� The employees at Pikes decided they were going to be �world famous� before they had earned that distinction. This conscious choice of attitudes than directly contributed to their actual achievement of that label.

   
   Many employees make poor and seemingly unintentional choices for their daily attitudes. These choices may include feelings of unhappiness, guilt, abuse, and boredom. None of these attitudes are conducive to high employee performance. What if your employees chose to act as if they were �world famous�? What impact would that have on organizational performance? Employee retention? Customer service?
   

2. Play: The fish guys �played� all day. They joked and laughed. They threw fish to each other and sometimes to unexpecting customers. They made a conscious effort to turn what could be very tedious and boring work a lot of fun. The operations manager built a small �play room� into her third-floor office for employees to take time to relax and have fun in during the day. I know of businesses that have frequent celebrations for achieving business milestones, birthdays, employment anniversaries etc... These events help make the office environment more fun. This ingredient acknowledges the fact that inside of each of us is a small child clamoring for more play time. How are you infusing your workplace with �fun�?
   

3. Make Their Day: The fish guys at Pikes made a very conscious effort to involve the customers in their good times. They invited customers to hold and pass the fish. They frequently gave tours of the market. In doing so, the fish market created a shopping experience for their customers and not just sold fish like many of their competitors. This created a lot of energy in the market and goodwill with their customers.
   

   This ingredient is equally applicable to our internal customers: our employees. The book discusses different ways that managers can help �make the day� for employees as well. This activity than becomes contagious within organizations.
   

4. Be Present: Have you ever been in a position of being helped by a customer service representative or possibly a fellow employee and you could just sense that person was not �present� in that conversation? Their mind was somewhere else? The book talks about the importance of �being present� with others. Employees at the fish market were very attentive to the needs of their customers and gave their undivided attention to each customer they served. This sometimes means having to ignore that last urgent phone call from home, or that beeper in our pocket, or the to-do list in front of us to make sure that we are fully present for the customer in front of us. This is equally true when we attend meetings or taking phone calls.
   

   Which of these ingredients is most important? The authors tell us that it is the first one: Choosing Our Behavior. If we don�t choose the right behavior, it is almost impossible to execute any of the other three ingredients successfully.

I enjoyed reading this book. It is a good story with a happy ending (naturally). More importantly, the book prescribes a number of key ingredients that will insure a more productive work environment and a more successful small business. Buy Fish! today .

Product Details

Hardcover: 115 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.53 x 8.70 x 5.66 Publisher: Hyperion Press; (March 8, 2000)

Review by Tim Fulton, Publisher SMALL BUSINESS MATTERS

I am convinced that the success or failure of a small business owner hinges on the relationships that individual has with his key stakeholders including customers, vendors, employees, investors, and family. The cornerstone of those relationships is the conversations that do or don't take place between the owner and these individuals. I wish I had a nickel for every conversation I know that I needed to have with an employee or customer and avoided or conversations that did happen that failed miserably.

Susan Scott's book, Fierce Conversations, addresses this very issue. Scott ran think tanks for executives through TEC International for fourteen years. TEC is a CEO membership organization dedicated to increasing the effectiveness and enhancing the lives of CEOs worldwide. She conducted over 12,000 conversations with CEOs over this time period. Her book is based on this experience.

What are Fierce Conversations? According to Scott, "a Fierce Conversation is one in which we come out from behind ourselves, into the conversation, and make it real."

Her book is based on "3 Big Ideas". First, she tells her readers that "our lives will succeed or fail one conversation at a time. While no single conversation may change a relationship, or a company, or a person; it's possible that it can". I can think of conversations that I have had over the years that have had a dramatic impact on my relationship with that person in either a positive or negative way.

The second "Big Idea" in Fierce Conversations is "The conversation is the relationship". This makes a great deal of sense to me as I consider relationships I have had with customers over time. My best customers were individuals that I had on-going and open conversations with. Customers that I lost were ones that I did not have timely conversations with or the conversations were not open and honest.

Scott's third Big Idea is my favorite: "All conversations are with myself and sometimes they involve other people." This statement can be interpreted in a variety of different ways. For me, it relates to the conversations I am having with myself all the time every minute of the day. Sometimes I choose to share these conversations with others. More often, I keep them to myself. I am having these mental conversations as I am also conversing verbally with someone else. These conversations shape the way that we see ourselves, those around us, and the world as a whole.

My job as a consultant is often times to get my clients to verbalize the critical conversations they are having with themselves so that I can help them better understand the realities of those thoughts, the implications of those ideas, and a process for moving forward with them.

In Fierce Conversations, Susan Scott shares her "7 Principles of Fierce Conversations". My two favorites are "take responsibility for your emotional wake" and "let silence do the heavy lifting". We tend to forget that everything we say has the potential to cause "emotional wake". Scott suggests that we need to take responsibility for that occurrence in each conversation that we have. Silence in a conversation seems to be very rare these days yet so very powerful. Instead, we often have two or more people talking at the same time instead of taking a moment to digest what is being said and to carefully consider our own response.

The backbone of Fierce Conversations are Susan Scott's prescriptions for having such conversations on a one-to-one basis and in groups. She also provides a model for when you may need to confront an individual relative to their behavior or a situation. This model will come in very handy the next time I need to have such a conversation with one of my sons. I am now armed and dangerous!

I continue to highly recommend this book.

Book Description

ISBN: 0425193373 Paperback: 320 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.84 x 9.12 x 6.20
Publisher: Berkley Pub Group; Reprint edition (January 6, 2004)

Richly illustrated with cartoons and reproductions of many of the actual campaigns used at the time marketing wizard Richard Chapman takes readers on a hilarious ride through the last twenty years. Filled with personal anecdotes spanning Chapman's remarkable career (he was present at many now famous meetings and events) "In Search of Stupidity" takes a no holds barred look at the uncreative and hopeless marketing ideas surrounding the technology industry. It offers clear, detailed analysis of what happened, why, and what you can do to avoid acting stupidly in the future.