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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chock Full of Easy to Implement Gems, January 14, 2006
Steve Chandler and Scott Richardson are no strangers to helping people become better leaders - these tips are the result of many seminars and books they have done in the past. The book is able to give many real life examples from those seminars of situations in which these suggestions really made a difference.
While other management books drone on and on for long chapters, often losing sight of the aim, this book is very straightforward. 100 separate tips. Each tip is short, concise, but immediately useful. Try reading just one tip each day. Put a post-it on your monitor, reminding you to think about it. Find ways to apply it. Like anything else in life, you'll find some tips that don't really apply to you - but others that are amazingly helpful. As you collect those helpful tips, you can really find your work environment becoming more and more smooth.
Many things in here are things you know - but you never practice because you're just too busy or frustrated. For example, the book says to focus on one thing at a time. We know that when you focus on something, you tend to do well. But in modern offices, you have your email beeping, your phone ringing, people stopping by, and more. You try to multitask. Usually this somehow gives you the sense that you're achieving more - but in reality nothing is done as well, and people that you interact with feel short changed. A key message here is to slow down, focus, organize your priority list and really take care of issues. You feel much more relaxed at the end of the day, the people you work with feel like you really paid attention to their issues, and often you get far more done.
One issue I had with the book is they gloss over some issues. In a few tips on time management, for example, they talk about how everybody in the world only has 24 hours in a day and it's silly to complain you don't have enough time for your workload. I'm not sure what THEIR workload is like, but at my job, there honestly is NOT enough time in a given day to do all the tasks I need to do. In essence I need to find more people to help me, and to take on some of those tasks so I actually have a good match between what needs to be done and how many hours I can stay awake. It would have been nice if they'd talked about that, vs making it seem like this couldn't be a problem.
That being said, the book really does have quite a number of gems in it, and is well worth reading multiple times.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chock full of useful ideas, May 23, 2005
This review is from: 100 Ways to Motivate Others CD : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy (Audio CD)
While not a ferocious reader of business/self-help books, I do read those that come especially highly recommended. Dale Dauten, one of the finest business writers around, thought this the best audiobook of the year. Good enough for me.
While I cannot compare it to as many as he can, it is indeed one of the most useful books I've listened to. Broken into 100 short snippets, each idea opens with a good quote, explores and examines, and then tidies up nicely. I am not a salesperson, not a manager, and not a person readily identified as a member of the target audience. But this book had plenty of good things in it.
I'll start with just one. "Manage agreements, not people" is an early, and recurring, tip. How simple. Teachers tried this years ago when the "grade contract" idea was rampant. But moving one step beyond a simple contractual basis of a relationship, it provides a clear and vivid way of looking at all interactions, with spouse, children, co-workers. I cannot manage anyone but myself; well, I've known that for years, but how to function well with others if that is true has been a problem. This book offers specific suggestions.
Steve is no misty-eyed rah-rah guy, but a dogged thinker with clear ideas and some potent myth-busting analysis. Slow down. Do one thing at a time. and really pay attention to whatever it is you're doing now. Think long term. You'll do much better. In the words of Jane Austen "Take my word for it, if you are in too great a hurry, you will certainly live to repent it."
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good to Great to GREATEST!, March 4, 2005
This powerhouse of a book is the best book on business success since Good to Great, and what makes it BETTER than great is that unlike Good to Great, it gives you dynamite specific actions, real true inspired bursts of innovative ideas! Steve Chandler was brilliant in his 17 Lies, but this goes further.....I read it straight through, then I began reading and applying one each day to my team at work,and I'm getting insane results without driving them crazy. There are no real books on how to increase the numbers of your team out there...are there? I've never seen any until this one. Quick hits of clever writing, real case histories and great stories, wonderful lessons from everyone from Patton and Eisenhower to Drucker and Bennis. If you wanted ONE Bible our field manual on leadership THIS would be IT!!!
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