Top Shelf Reading Picks:

While we’re on the topic of leadership, I thought I would share this Book Review by guest blogger Nancy Loderick, VP of Networks at the Downtown Women’s Club.

This week I read Marilyn Carlson Nelson’s book, “How We Lead Matters: Reflections on a Life of Leadership.” Marilyn Carlson Nelson is chairman and CEO of Carlson, a global group of companies for travel, hotel, cruise and restaurants. Forbes magazine regularly lists her as one of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women. This book tells her story, in her own words, on what makes her tick and how she leads.

It’s not your typical CEO autobiography, which usually relay the “rags to riches” story of how a poor boy/girl works hard and becomes very successful. This book is a collection of vignettes from Marilyn’s life that show her leadership philosophy and practice. It is a refreshing way to learn about a business icon.

Marilyn’s premise is that one’s legacy is built one day at a time, through everyday actions. Marilyn is a successful businesswoman; she is also a devoted family person and humanitarian. All these facets are shown in her stories. David Gergen, director of the Harvard Kennedy Center for Public Leadership, writes in the book’s foreword, “[Marilyn is] a passionate champion of people at all levels.”

I got the sense of Marilyn as a “real” person from reading her story. Her personality clearly showed in most of the vignettes. Some of the more poignant and telling ones:

• The Sunday School Lesson
  As a young student, Marilyn didn’t like the way the classes were run. So she presented her ideas to the Sunday school superintendent. She went on to say that, “together they fixed the school.”
• The Signature
  Marilyn got the call that every parent dreads, learning that her daughter Juliet, a freshman at Smith College, had been killed in a car accident. She grieved, went into a major depression and started to doubt her faith. She finally came to grips with this by devoting herself to “making every day count and to live the rich, full life that was denied [her daughter.]” She shows firsthand how to have courage and hope in the face of adversity.
• Gerbils for Sale
  This story was my favorite. Thanks to Marilyn’s youngest daughter, Wendy, her household “won” the privilege of taking care of the third grade’s gerbil family over the summer. Well, very soon a few gerbils became very many gerbils, and the household was overrun with gerbils! Marilyn wanted to deal with this humanely, so she offered the gerbils to the local pet store. She admits she was not as upfront as she could have been about their health, for fear the pet store owner wouldn’t take the gerbils. Marilyn also didn’t want to give the gerbils away for free. She admits that her actions were in a gray zone here and, to this day, she doesn’t feel good about it. She delivers this morality lesson with humor and honesty.

I wasn’t sure why some of the stories were included. I didn’t see any correlation between the stories and Marilyn’s leadership style. Here are some of those stories:

• Imagine
  Marilyn asks the reader to imagine what it would be like to be the first little African-American girl walking into a desegregated school among the armed marshals. Or being the woman who refused to give up her seat on the bus in Montgomery. I’m not sure what this has to do with Marilyn; perhaps it is supposed to show her empathy with minorities?
• Security Alarm
  Marilyn talks about the tragedy of child slavery and how the World Childhood Foundation cares for the world’s street children. Marilyn is the co-founder of this foundation. This section read more like an advertisement than a personal story.
• Special Delivery
  Marilyn writes about the joy she felt each time she found out she was going to be a grandmother. Again, this is nice to hear, but I’m not sure how this relates to leadership.

My conclusion:
This book gives a good, accurate picture of what inspires and what drives Marilyn Carlson Nelson. Marilyn is a multifaceted person and is not afraid to show her human side, which–for her–is what makes a good leader.

This book also gave me pause to stop and think about my life, its everyday events and what I could learn from them. Any book that makes me think beyond the actual story is a worthwhile one for me.

I would have liked a bit more advice, particularly around fulfilling multiple roles. She says quite candidly that for CEOs there is no such thing as work-life balance. She likens being a CEO to being an Olympic athlete. She goes on to say that you have to be working constantly to stay on top of your game, but since you’re following your goal, you don’t mind it. Women today, particularly young women, are hungry for concrete advice on how to handle work and family. In any case, this book was inspiring.

This post is cross posted from The Women’s DISH blog.

Robin Gerber is the author of the book, Leadership the Eleanor Roosevelt Way, which I reviewed last month. I love it when authors write in–as Gerber did–after I run a review, because then I get to ask them to recommend some of their favorite business books.

Robin sent me the following list, which is recommended reading for the seminar she teaches for the Institute for Management Studies called “Authentic Leadership for Women.” It’s pretty thorough. I haven’t read most of these, so feel free to include your own reviews in the comments below.

I waited all summer for Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions to come to my library, but it didn’t happen and I ended up picking up a copy in the airport. Glad I did. While it didn’t totally grab me as I was reading it in a way that Freakonomics or The Tipping Point did, my husband and I keep referring to bits and pieces of it even a week or two after we both read it. Hence, I’m upgrading my initial reaction from interesting to somewhat significant.

The premise of the book is: We are all irrational beings. However, our irrationality happens again and again, thereby making us “predictably irrational.” So, I guess this is like me encouraging my friends to date against type because their type hasn’t ever seemed to work out. (On a side note–the hubby I mentioned? Definitely wasn’t my “type.” But he is now!) But let’s talk about how we all make irrational choices.

Ariely opens the book with a description of an online ad for The Economist magazine, which has tiered pricing:

1. $59.99 for a one-year subscription just to the website.
2. $125 for a one-year subscription to the print magazine.
3. $125 for a one-year subscription to the print magazine plus website.

Looking at this, it’s clear that option 2 is not that appealing–so, why put it in? Ariely’s theory is that people might have a hard time choosing between options 1 and 3 if there were no number 2. By including option 2, it’s clear that 3 is a much better deal because it gives potential subscribers a “relativity point.” Giving people a relativity point, regardless of its value, allows you to manipulate people to buy what you want them to.

Along this line was a later discussion where he talks about how people are swayed by getting something for ““free.” (Speaking of “swaying,” I have Sway on my library request list . . .  anyone read it yet?) But, back to Predictably Irrational and why we are suckers for “free.”

One example he uses is when Amazon began offering free shipping if you spend more than a certain dollar amount. I confess I’m always adding in something I didn’t necessarily need or want in order to get that free shipping. (Of course I try to find the item that is the closest to hitting the mark without going over–which generally means a children’s paperback book.) This was a great revenue generator for Amazon except in France, where it noticed no increase–because in France Amazon was offering shipping for one franc (rather than free), which is only about 20 cents (or probably less now). That’s not a huge difference from “free,” but when Amazon changed France to free shipping, revenue increased.

So what is the pull of the word “free”? It’s that we have nothing to lose. Even paying 20 cents is losing something, even if insignificant. I’ll be testing some of this out later this fall on www.DowntownWomensClub.com. It should be interesting.

Entrepreneurial lesson: Create relativity in your pricing to encourage people to purchase the one you want, and give away something for free.

I also found the discussion in Chapter 4 about the problems with mixing social norms and business norms interesting. Basically, it’s why you should never offer to pay your mother-in-law in cash for making Thanksgiving dinner. Making a nice dinner for the family is something people want to do within a social realm. To offer them money for it makes it like work and therefore a business transaction. He has some humorous dating examples. But generally, he found that people are more likely to work harder at smaller tasks when they think they are doing you a favor than if you pay them. Ask a friend to move a couch and he’ll be there. Offer to pay him to help you move your whole apartment, and he’ll probably claim to be doing laundry all day.

Other good sections include the discussion on procrastination and self-control. In the latter I found his anecdote about telling a credit card company how “self-control” credit cards (i.e., ones that have small caps on them to keep people from spending more than they have) would be a good investment. Even he laughs at himself, as only an optimistic academic wouldn’t realize that the whole goal of the credit card companies is to get us all to spend beyond our limits.

I thought his discussion on why we like to keep our options open reminiscent of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. When given too many choices, it promotes inaction or dissatisfaction with your choice. I hear this is getting to be a problem with Match.com. People have too many choices to ever be entirely happy with anyone they date. But it’s not just dating where too much choice can become problematic.

I experienced this recently when I was trying to purchase a membership online to our local arts center. It had so many options/price points for memberships that I couldn’t figure out what was the best for me and my family. So I did nothing. Then when a friend called me to be on the advisory board for the center, I apologized for not joining yet, but said I didn’t know which to choose. She told me the level that would get what I wanted (discounted art lessons for the kids), and I did it ASAP. My first task on that advisory board? Fix the pricing. Will refer to the tiered-plus-free approach above.

Entrepreneurial lesson: Keep purchasing choices simple and straightforward: fewer choices = more purchases.

Admittedly I got a bit tired of the stats/tests by the end, but there is a lot of great information worth going back and looking at. But I’ll end on this one anecdote.

One of Ariely’s experiments involved him serving beer in a local brewpub. Just by chance, one of the patrons was a former colleague of Ariely’s. The colleague thought that Ariely was waiting tables for a living. What I liked was that the colleague went out of his way to tell Ariely how much he liked his last paper, clearly in an effort to make him feel better. Now, that’s the type of predictably irrational behavior I like in humans–random acts of kindness.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: Predictably Irrational is this year’s trend book and good fodder for cocktail banter. Not to mention there are some fun tests to try on your friends. But the bits on how people make choices when it comes to purchasing are really helpful for entrepreneurs trying to get people to click on that “buy now” button.