Top Shelf Reading Picks:

The wonderful thing about tiggers
Is tiggers are wonderful things!
Their tops are made out of rubber
Their bottoms are made out of springs!
They’re bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy
Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!

I think we all need a little more bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy fun these days, and here are a couple of books that might help.

First, my fellow Entrepreneur blogging pal, Lena West, sent me a book she highly recommended from Barry J. Moltz, appropriately called, Bounce!: Failure, Resiliency, and Confidence to Achieve Your Next Great Success. I have to confess, one thing that kept going through my mind while reading the book is that the author is a slightly handsomer version of Henry Winkler. Now I mention this because it was a good thing, as reading the book I was hearing Winkler’s distinctive voice in my head, and there’s just something nice about listening to the Fonz give you advice. So what sort of advice did we get here? No, it’s wasn’t to date the Polaskey twins, but looking at business failures in a whole new way.

Here are some excerpts that stood out:
1. Don’t hide mistakes. When pilots make mistakes, the FAA encourages them to report it. This is a much better business model than what happens in the real world, where people feel they need to hide and cover up mistakes.

2. Humility vs. ego. “Why do we repeat some mistakes over and over, while others we figure out the first time? Humility allows us to see our mistakes, learn from them and not repeat them. Ego, by contrast, hides mistakes and, in a way, dooms us to repeat them until we screw up so badly our mistakes can’t be hidden anymore.”

3. Humility balances ego. “Humility leads to a balanced ego and an acceptance that many business results are beyond our control. Humility is not the absence of pride, but freedom from the burden of personal arrogance that tells us that we can and will, individually, determine our own futures.”

Now that last one is ringing true these days for many of us–our best client goes bankrupt, our supplier raises prices or, in my own case with DowntownWomensClub.com, a HUGE source of site traffic for us made some improvements to itsr own site, which resulted in our link being buried with the rest of the pack. We’ve been scrambling to recover the lost site traffic. But maybe it was reading these books or just a maturity that comes with living through a few down business cycles; I chalked it up as a setback, not a failure, even though it may prove to be too difficult a setback to overcome.

Here are a few other ways to think about failure:

1. Change the vocabulary. Use a more neutral word. You notice I used “setback” above. Other suggestions: “decision point,” “outcome” or “result.” Even “disappointment” sounds better than failure. Moltz includes a quote from Anna Belyaev, CEO of TypeA, a training agency, who takes a long-term view. “I try to stick to the very objective definition of failure. At the end of the day what I usually say is, you don’t know whether you fail until you’re dead.”

2. Fear of failure can motivate. Moltz says, “Many times in business, the only thing that made me move was the greater fear that staying exactly where I was would never lead to success or, worse, would hasten my failure.” Definitely shades of Seth Godin’s The Dip.

The next book in this group is The First 30 Days: Your Guide to Any Change (and Loving Your Life More) by Ariane de Bonvoison. The first 30 days is not focused on business like Bounce!, so I found it to be a bit more in the “self-help” category, but it has a different bent in that it looks more at “change” than at failure. Personally, I’m someone who loves change. In fact, I thrive on it, but only when it’s good change or change that I initiate. It’s the other changes, those beyond our control, that aren’t so easy for any of us to deal with appropriately. Here are some of the good points about change that I picked up:

· Make the change your own. “During change I’ve found that a lot of people have a tendency to hold on to other people’s patter. People need to look at themselves and ask, ‘who am I as an individual?’ not ‘who am I as the daughter of my mother of rather, the wife of my husband or the mother to my kids?’ ”

· It’s our desire for total certainty that causes us to feel paralyzed when faced with change. Loved the quote she included here from Gloria Steinem: “The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” Hmmm. Maybe that explains a lot about people’s fears in this election . . .

· When she asked people what is the best change you’ve ever made or had to face, they tended to answer with the most difficult or hardest changes, such as divorce, receiving a cancer diagnosis, going bankrupt. It seems that the toughest changes reap the most rewards.

· The six primary emotions or change demons: fear, doubt, impatience, blame, guilt and shame. [Note that Moltz also had an interesting section on shame, too.] But these demons aren’t all bad. They exist to help you recognize how you don’t want to feel and get you back into alignment with the calmer, wiser version of yourself.

· She includes a great quote about the change demon, guilt, from Peter McWilliams “Guilt is anger directed at ourselves.” This introduced the section about how to conquer guilt.

Finally, the last book in this category is The Bounce Back Book: How to Thrive in the Face of Adversity, Setbacks, and Losses by Karen Salmansohn. This one is also not about bouncing back specifically from business, but it’s great advice delivered in Salmansohn’s usual fun, quirky style. Her book includes a lot of happiness research and theory, which is another way to look at bouncing back–making yourself happy. If you like your self-help in bullet points, this book contains 75 tips to help you bounce back in style. Like the other authors, Salmansohn is living proof that someone can overcome adversity. To hear more from Salmansohn, you can tune into my blogtalkradio show, Smash the Ladder with Anita & Diane, where she was my guest.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: If you’re feeling like you’re in the bottom of a down cycle, it would be well worth it to pick up one of these books. Moltz’s is more business-oriented, de Bonvoisin’s focuses on change, and Salmansohn looks more at how to be happy. So grab one if you need some help getting in touch with your own inner Tigger, because . . .

The wonderful thing about tiggers
Is tiggers are marvelous claps!
They’re loaded with vim and vigor
They love to leap in your laps!
They’re jumpy, bumpy, clumpy, thumpy
Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!
But the most wonderful thing about tiggers is
I’m the only one

Setting partisan politics aside, one has to acknowledge that Colin Powell made a profound and memorable statement Sunday. What struck me as I listened to it was that he followed the SUCCES(s) principles set forth by authors Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (one of my all-time favorite business books). I review a ton of business books, and sometimes it’s hard to see their relevance. That’s why I decided to revisit the book and demonstrate how it applied in Powell’s talk.

Powell’s statement last week was political and had nothing to do with business. I highlight it, however, because if I were going to give a speech that was intended to sway people who were undecided or even adamantly against a proposition I was making, I would model it after Powell’s statement.

The Made to Stick authors focus on six key principles that make an idea “sticky”:

• Simple: Make your message basic and profound.
• Unexpected: Capture your audience’s attention by doing something unexpected.
• Concrete: Avoid abstract ideas.
• Credible: Make sure you have support and data so that people will trust your authority.
• Emotional: Get your audience to care.
• Stories: Tell the right stories so that your ideas sink in.

Powell nailed them all–and gets a 10.0 for sticking the landing.  To view his speech, you can click here.

• Simple: “I’m supporting Sen. Obama.”
• Unexpected: He stepped across party lines to do so.
• Concrete: He stated several clear, easy-to-grasp reasons for making his statement. Some were extremely simple and completely unexpected, like the following. “Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?”  Well, now that you put it that way . . . of course not.
• Credible: He’s Colin Powell. Whether you disagreed with his support of the war or other positions in the past, or you now disagree with his endorsement of Obama, we can all agree that he earned our respect long before he went on camera Sunday.  Had he been a Hollywood actor or a local politician, that same statement would not have held as much weight.
• Emotional: I shed a tear when he spoke about Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan’s mother grieving at his grave.  He struck my mom chord and got my full attention.
• Stories: He explained his change of heart by not only telling Khan’s mother’s story.  He also gave us a visual reference by describing the photograph that moved him to support Obama.

It’s not likely we will ever be giving our own statements of national importance, but these are all factors we can try to emulate in our everyday attempts to get our ideas to “stick.”

Top Shelf Bottom Line:  If you haven’t read Made to Stick, I highly recommend it, as being an entrepreneur means you are in the business of peddling ideas.  This means we have to sell them. And it’s easier to do that when we can make them stick.

This week I perused an advanced copy of Closing the Engagement Gap: How Great Companies Unlock Employee Potential for Superior Results by Julie Gebauer and Don Lowman with Joanne Gordon. I’m sure in these crazy times, the last thing management at any size company is doing is focusing on employee engagement, but that could be a huge mistake. The companies that are going to make it through this crisis (or should I make that crises?) are going to need engaged employees.

First off, I’ll be honest–I was expecting a bit of a dry textbook. But since my pal Joanne Gordon (Roadtrip Nation, Be Happy at Work) was involved, my gut said it would be worth the read. True to form, it was a bit lighter than expected and included lots of lists (excellent to use as HR checklists), as well as colorful anecdotes.

The book starts off with an interesting global work force study by Towers Perrin (Gebauer and Lowman are from Towers Perrin), which examined and categorized the top 10 items that drive employees and even broke those items up by different countries. The rest of the book is written in five sections that encapsulate how to engage employees.

1. Know them
2. Grow them
3. Inspire them
4. Involve them
5. Reward them

Throughout the book, the authors incorporate the stories and experiences of eight companies that they call “the Engaging Eight.” These are: Campbell Soup Co. (hey, this week’s big stock market winner, so it must be doing something right), EMC corp., Honeywell, McKesson, MGM Grand Hotel and Casino, North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, Novartis AG and REI. Despite huge variations between the companies, there were clear similarities when it came to employee engagement.

Know Them–highlights:

• A checklist of “Ten things every organization’s senior leaders should know about the work force.”
• Interesting anecdotes from EMC about how it attracts self-starters, which instills some peer pressure to excel.
• The Campbell Soup stories were nice, about a divorced dad wanting a flex schedule to be with his kids, and another about a gentlemen who wanted to take a month off to sail with his father. Of course, right after I did the “awwwww” thing, my radar went up as I wondered whether a woman needing to deal with a deported nanny or ill children would’ve received the same treatment. (I know, in theory, yes; but let’s be real, they’d likely be labeled “not dedicated to the company.”)
• I liked the part about measuring company practices in comparison with employee expectations.

Grow Them–highlights:

• “Most employers can’t guarantee job security, but they can deliver career security as a byproduct of a learning culture, and in turn produce more skilled and engaged employees.”
• Create a safe place to fail and learn. “Given that failure is inevitable in life, in school and in sports, should it be less tolerated in the workplace? To be sure, failure’s consequences can be far-reaching in business, but its learning potential must be leveraged.”
• “From an employee’s perspective, career growth is not always equivalent to moving ‘up’ the career ladder.” (Cool. I didn’t even pay them to plug the underlying theme behind my blogtalkradio show, Smash the Ladder)

Inspire Them–highlights:

• There were some good stories about the engaging eight companies, especially those that focused on supporting people from the top down.

Involve Them–highlights:

• “To ensure their genuine involvement, employees must be knowledgable participants, treated as valued contributors and have the freedome to act in ways that they believe will enhance the performance of colleagues and the organization.”
• Create a business-literate work force. Help all your employees understand how your business works. This will help them see how they all play a role in its success.
• Gather employeee input to leverage experience and foster creative problem-solving. I was pleased to see that EMC was featured in this section for its use of social media via an internal, online tool it calls EMC.ONE that lets employees at all levels of the organization, located anywhere in the world, share ideas.

Reward Them–highlights:

• The four items that make up a good Rewards program: pay, benefits, development and environment.
• They also put it as “ABC’s” of rewards–appreciation, benefits and compensation.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: If you’re looking to ensure that your employees stick with you through the bad times, then you should definitely take a peek at this book and see how your company measures up to the engaging eight. At the very least, the checklist at the end is a must-have for your HR department to ensure that you engage your employees and obtain the results everyone wants.

In this depressing week I couldn’t bring myself to write the reviews of some of the books I’ve got ready to go (let alone be upbeat and amusing). Instead, I dug through my old posts to find this one I wrote for www.womensDISH.com in March of 2007 comparing the factors leading up to the Great Depression to what was going on in our economy in the spring of 2007.

It is interesting to note that I wrote this before the runup on gas prices and before we had any idea of the impending financial crisis. It’s now a year and a half later. Back then the fear of the widening income gap reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

In Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel we saw a glimpse of pre-Depression society, where the rich were very, very rich and could afford to live by different rules. Tonight, I’ve still got Fitzgerald on my mind, but rather than revisit Jay Gatsby, I think I’ll turn in with a copy of Tender is the Night.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this below!

********

[Excerpted from earlier post dated March, 2007]

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F.Scott Fitzgerald.

I don’t know about you, but this New York Times article about the income gap widening kind of worried me:

Income inequality grew significantly in 2005, with the top 1 percent of Americans–those with incomes that year of more than $348,000–receiving their largest share of national income since 1928, analysis of newly released tax data shows.

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than $100,000, also reached a level of income share not seen since before the Depression.

Let me say that again–A level of income inequality not seen since 1928. Now, I’m woefully lacking in my knowledge of historical economics. But this stopped me cold and caused me to go read a bit about what was going on with the economy right before the Great Depression. According to the info on Paul Alexander Gusmorino III’s site (seems to be an authority on the Great Depression), the following was going on:

• There was a huge inequity of incomes.
• There was a large increase of output from workers, and wages were increased at only one-quarter the rate of production.
• Calvin Coolidge’s administration (and the conservative-controlled government) favored business and, as a result, the wealthy who invested in these businesses.
• Three-quarters of the U.S. population would spend essentially all of their yearly incomes to purchase consumer goods such as food, clothes, radios and cars.
• Through such a period of imbalance, the U.S. came to rely upon two things in order for the economy to remain on an even keel: credit sales, and luxury spending and investment from the rich.
• Between 1925 and 1929 the total amount of outstanding installment credit more than doubled, creating artificial demand for products that people could not ordinarily afford.
• Much of the wealth and economic dependence was in only two industries: automobiles and radio. This was a problem when the 75 percent of the population could no longer afford the gas for the automobiles and had to return the radios purchased on credit, which was now due.
• Add to that bad international debts, the stock market crash, and the run on the banks . . . well, we all know what happened next.

Flash forward to 2007:

• We have an inequity of incomes.
• Technology has brought us increased output for workers at a rate higher than increases in income.
• George Bush’s administration (and the formerly conservative-controlled government) favors business and, as a result, the wealthy who invested in these businesses.
• Three-quarters of the U.S. population spend essentially all of their yearly incomes on rent/mortgages and to purchase consumer goods such as food, clothes, computers, and cars.
• We are becoming dependent on credit sales, and luxury spending and investment from the rich.
• Credit card debt is expanding, creating artificial demand for products that people could not ordinarily afford.
• While we’re not dependent on just two industries, many of our largest businesses: oil, auto companies, finance, retail, technology may have a problem when 75 percent of the population can no longer afford the gas for the automobiles or games for their playstations.

This is why I started this post with a Fitzgerald quote: The more we change, the more things stay the same. But perhaps there is another Gatsby quote that may be applied to the situation:

“They were careless people, . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Top Shelf Bottom Line: No advice for entrepreneurs this week. Sorry. I’ll be back with a bunch of reviews starting next week. But I think we all need to step back and take a deep breath. Let’s all put the business books aside (how many of them actually deal with leading a business through what could be a second great depression, anyhow?). Instead, try reading a classic. There’s a reason we studied Fitzgerald in high school, even though clearly we couldn’t read it with the life’s experience we can now. I highly recommend giving Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Maugham a second look if it’s been a few decades since you last read a classic.