Tag: Bruce Rosenstein

2013 Holiday Book List

Friday, December 13th, 2013

I’ve read dozens of business books this year, and reviewed at least one each month for OPEN. If you’re looking for a thoughtful gift for the business book-lover in your life, you simply cannot go wrong with any of these 15 picks!

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink. Bestselling author Pink argues that selling has changed more in the past 10 years than it did over the previous hundred. “We’re all in sales now,” Pink says. “One in nine Americans—some 15 million people—make a living trying to get others to make a purchase. But the other eight in nine work in sales, too—we’re persuading and influencing others to give up resources in exchange for something we have.”

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin. Martin, one the world’s foremost authorities on strategy and former dean of the progressive Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, teams with one of the top CEOs of all time, Lafley, of Proctor & Gamble. Together they boil strategy down to two critical questions: Where to play? How to win?

Red Thread Thinking: Weaving Together Connections for Brilliant Ideas and Profitable Innovation, by Debra Kaye. Innovation demands looking at the world differently and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things. According to Kaye, the book’s theme is based on an Oriental legend, which she believes provides a powerful metaphor for the way in which the right connections can lead to brilliant insights and ultimately result in commercially viable innovations.

What’s the Future of Business? Changing the Way Businesses Create Experiences, by Brian Solis. Solis argues that now is the time every business must go beyond price, performance or value. “The future of business is about creating experiences,” Solis writes. “Products, programs and processes that evoke splendor and rekindle meaningful and sincere interaction and growth. At the center of this evolution—or (r)evolution—is the experience.”

The Fearless Front Line: The Key to Liberating Leaders to Improve and Grow Their Business, by Ray Attiyah. Attiyah argues that all too often, the front line activities of a business are so unpredictable, unreliable and complicated that business owners and leaders can’t seem to pull themselves away from them. But if you’re spending most of your time on the day-to-day operations of your business, you’ve left a critical gap.

Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers Into Fanatics, by Jackie Huba. The author argues that Lady Gaga hasn’t just created a brand but cultivated a fanatical group of consumers—”Little Monsters”—that will follow her for the next two decades of her career and beyond. Huba distills seven key strategies from the Gaga approach.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The bestselling Heath brothers expose what’s wrong with how decisions are made by our political and business leaders, and by us individually in our personal lives—from how much we save for retirement to choosing a job, spouse or college. By curating the latest psychological research, the authors first reveal why our brains are hardwired to make foolish decisions.

CTRL ALT Delete: Reboot Your Business. Reboot Your Life. Your Future Depends on It, by Mitch Joel. According to Joel, we are in business purgatory, but he believes there’s a way of navigating out of it: reboot. Hence the title, a retro reference to the original Windows keyboard combination you’d use when your computer was frozen. Rebooting never moved you forward, but it did allow you to regain stable footing and position you to move in whichever direction you wished.

Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic, by Bill Jensen. Using the real-life stories of not only well-known business figures and founders but also everyday innovators who’ve created everything from a Craigslist for people with disabilities to a Pakistani school for young boys who had been indoctrinated into the Taliban, Jensen’s interviews offer an inside look at the character of some of today’s greatest change makers.

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets, by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. The authors describe why our economy is primed for a new wave of entrepreneurship using new methods of disruptive innovation, then go on to provide real-world examples of how entrepreneurs are creating new markets and disrupting others. This books shows anyone interested in starting a new business or launching a new idea how to get started creating value.

Compelling People: The Hidden Qualities That Make Us Influential, by John Neffinger and Matthew Kohut. Everyone wants to know how to be more influential. But most of us don’t really think we can have the kind of magnetism or charisma that we associate with someone like Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey or Jon Stewart unless it comes naturally. According to the authors, however, it’s something we can learn, and they show us how in a book that’s already being taught at Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown.

Looptail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinventing Business, by Bruce Poon Tip. Looptail is Tip’s extraordinary first-person account of his entrepreneurial instincts to start and develop G Adventures, a highly successful international travel adventure company. Along the way, he reveals his unusual management secrets that not only keep his employees fully engaged but also keep his customers extremely happy.

The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, by David Burkus. Much has been written about creativity in business in an effort to understand just how great ideas are born, and much of it is just plain fiction, according to the author. Based on the latest research into how creative individuals and firms succeed, Burkus sets the record straight on 10 popular but mistaken beliefs.

Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Ph.D. An internationally recognized personality expert exposes the dark side of confidence and offers a strong case for the upside of negativity and pessimism. Chamorro-Premuzic shatters much of the conventional thinking about confidence with compelling scientific research. The bottom line: Confidence is overrated.

Create Your Future The Peter Drucker Way, by Bruce Rosenstein. Rosenstein knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” Drucker was always ahead of his time, but he wasn’t always easy to read, follow, or apply. That’s where this book come, because the author does just that.

NOTE: Republished in slightly different form from my OPEN column.

Bruce Rosenstein On Decoding Drucker & Creating Your Future

Wednesday, November 27th, 2013

My friend and colleague (and Laws of Subtraction contributor) Bruce Rosenstein is a prolific writer and editor. He’s Managing Editor of Leader to Leader, author of the wonderful Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker’s Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life and wrote for USA TODAY for over two decades, from 1987-2008.

Bruce knows more about the most acclaimed management thinker of all time: the late Peter Drucker. He spent many hours with the man, and is both a student and scholar of “the Drucker way.” I’ve read everything Drucker ever wrote, and if there’s one thing I took from his collected works, it’s that he was always ahead of his time. He was on Main Street long before the parade arrived. I would challenge anyone to point to a business or management idea that can’t be traced to Drucker within a few degrees of separation.

But Drucker wasn’t easy to read. And his thoughts weren’t always easy to apply. That’s where Bruce comes in, because he does just that in his new book just out by McGraw-Hill, entitled: Create Your Future the Peter Drucker Way.

I had a few questions for Bruce after I read the book on my recent trip to the Middle East and India…

How do you define a “future-focused mindset” beyond what the term obviously implies…thinking about the future?

Thinking about the future is one component, but not the only one. The idea is to keep the future in mind as you go about your life and work, and factor it into your decisions and choices. So it’s not necessarily thinking about specific things that may or may happen in the future. When your mindset is future-focused, you recognize the necessity of managing your present reality and working toward building a better tomorrow for you and others.

We are notoriously bad about predicting the future…even about how we will feel about a specific event in the future. Why bother with the guesswork?

I agree. We should not guess about the future, and predictions are often faulty. That is why, in the book, I don’t advocate either predicting the future, or guessing about it. But figuring out where the world is heading, based on new knowledge, trends and events that have already happened but where we have not yet seen the full effects, in areas of life and work that potentially have an impact on us, can be quite beneficial.

Can you explain what you mean by “becoming your own successor?” I get the concept of legacy by a portfolio of work, but I’m struggling with self-successorship.

This is an idea of mine that was inspired by Drucker, but it is not his concept. Because I believe that, in the years following his 2005 death at 95, there has been so much additional scholarship about Drucker’s work, in addition to posthumously published material by him, we understand his work in a different, improved and more nuanced way. That makes him, in my estimation, his own successor as the top management guru.

I decided to broaden the concept to have people think of themselves as their own successor. Obviously, this is somewhat metaphorical and it’s hard to read it literally. Here are some possible ways of considering it: athletes breaking their own records; getting a promotion within your own organization, requiring you to think of yourself and your abilities in new ways; staying in your current job but redefining/reinventing it; or leaving your job and taking on something new and challenging in a different realm, also requiring new ways of thinking and acting.

You mention the role of spirituality and religion in creating one’s future. What’s the Drucker perspective on those issues?

Drucker was not particularly overt in a public sense about his specific religious or spiritual beliefs and actions. All indications are that he was privately religious. And there is considerable religious imagery and many references to religion and the Bible in his writing. There have been several scholarly articles published after his death about Drucker and religion. A classic part of his writing about faith, and the need for believing in something beyond the tangible and beyond oneself, is in the essay “The Unfashionable Kierkegaard,” published in 1949 and anthologized in at least two books.

I’m not a theologian or an expert on religion and spirituality, but these subjects hold considerable interest for me, and their intersection with Drucker’s writing was something I felt was perfect to include in the final chapter of the book, “Build Your Future Beyond Your Current Workplace.”

You were fortunate to have spent time with Peter Drucker. In what if any ways did Drucker the man differ from Drucker the management thinker? What was the most personally impactful moment for you?

Drucker the person and Drucker the management thinker were intertwined in a holistic way. Being a management thinker (as well as a thinker about other disciplines), was an inseparable part of his overall being. However, if some readers feel that his writing can at times seem stern, in person I found him to be quite warm, generous, gracious and at times humorous. I was impressed that he answered his own phone, and made his own arrangements for my interviews with him. And as we set up right before the cameras started rolling for an interview on video in 2005, seven months to the day before he died, he put me at ease by saying that during the interview, we should just refer to each other as “Peter and Bruce.”

By most psychological accounts, the Western world is nearly all doers, not thinkers. Drucker was in that small percentage (by some estimates less than 3%) of thinkers. What then do you believe to be the most relevant components of his thinking for a doer world?

My sense of this is that there has to be a lot in common between thinking and doing, and that the former is a necessity for much of the latter, beyond the instinctive. This gets back to his idea of the knowledge worker, a term Drucker coined in the late 1950s. If we are indeed in a doer world, whatever people do should be adequately thought out. A considerable amount of knowledge work may be going on behind the scenes. And though Drucker was a model thinker, he also did and accomplished a lot: regularly writing books and articles, teaching at a school named after him, and consulting for companies, nonprofits, arts institutions and governments. And that was just for his work-related activities.

What has been the most impactful personal or professional practice you have developed or adopted based on a Drucker mindset?

It is tough to choose. But in this case I will cite his idea of ‘living in more than one world,’ a phrase he used in that 2005 interview with me referenced above, and which became the title of my first book. It’s the idea that you have a number of things going on in your life, personally and professionally, for many reasons: meeting and interacting with different people in your different worlds; seeing where these worlds intersect; providing a buffer against setbacks, particularly at work ; and giving you experience and growth opportunities in areas where they may be unavailable elsewhere in your life.

What’s the one thing you want people to take away from this book?

I’d like people  to consider that despite ambiguity, uncertainty and risk, they should still consider the future to be something they can create in the present moment, by their moment to moment, day to day actions, thoughts, commitments and decisions. That if you approach the future in a reasonably systematic, organized way, you can successfully become, as Drucker put it, “organized for change.”