Customer Reviews

100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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."

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!!!

This is one of the best amongst the tens of motivational/leadership book I read. Not all the 100 ways are profoundly helpful. However, it is by all means well written, insightful, practical and useful. Below please find some of my favorite ideas to support my very positive comment above. Hope you like them!

Managers cant really directly control their people. Motivation always come from within your employee, not from you....The key is to get people to motivate themselves. And you do that by managing agreements, not people. pg20
Discipline is remembering what you want. pg20
How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a dog? Four; calling a tail a leg doesnt make it a leg. - Abraham Lincoln pg42
There is no such thing as constructive criticism. - Dale Carnegie pg46
Leaders create; managers react. He issued a playing card to every employee with perfect attendance for the month. A card was drawn at random from a bucket of cards. The employee then hung the card up in his or her cubicle. At the end of six months, the person with the best poken hand won a major prize, the second...pg65
We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same. pg127
The sprinsters tense up their muscles and their times actually drop. Trying harder slows them down! The sprinters dont realize that they're at their peak state of relaxation during their fastest times. pg131
What a manager can do is ask gentle questions and let the poeple they lead think and speak and make their own fresh committments. That's how motivation happens. pg163
Deadline propels action. So when you want to get people into action, give them a deadline, or you dont have anything that you can hold the other person accountable for. pg166
Just start off showing them a little bit about the books, then you close. And if they say, "No, I'm not interested," you say, "I know just what you mean," and you show them a little bit more, and you close again."...and again...and again. pg 184

Whenever I see a book that uses a list format, I usually avoid it at all costs. While "10 Methods", "25 Steps", or in this case "100 Ways" are emotionally satisfying numbers and titles; the larger lists are often padded with variations on a central idea. Even worse is when you sense that some clear omissions have been made.

I really do enjoy the writing in this book, and that many of the ideas here are consistent to the values and ideas of Steve Chandler's earlier works. This book reads like an extended brainstorm session with simply worded maxims followed by a brief explanation and a real world example. Many of the concepts here aren't new to voracious self-help and leadership readers; but Chandler is successful in putting his own proprietary spin on familiar ideas. How and if these 100 ways relate to your working situation depends on your own ability to honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses; and to make peripheral connections between the words on the page and your own experiences. There's a good chance you are doing some of these steps without realizing it; and a good chance that a few of these will need some 'adjustment' before becoming a part of your leadership practices.

I have a few small quibbles with this book. The first thing is in the title. 100 WAYS is a little bit of an oversell. This is more like 100 IDEAS that can help you improve your leadership skills and overall results. My second quibble is that the book relies heavily on logical and emotional appeal without much statistical or factual evidence to support claims. Sometimes it seems like Chandler is trying so hard to inspire the reader that he goes for how things "ought to be" instead of cold, hard human nature. A third slight criticism is in the overall organization of ideas. It would be helpful if the book broke these tips into the categories of communication, modeling, and self-reflection areas at the minimum. This 'buffet-styled' book puts the BBQ sauce right next to the chocolate pudding which makes it challenging to integrate a lot of these ideas at once.

That said, this book is a quick and helpful read that should appeal to anyone who is in a position of leadership or aspires to get there someday. As a high school teacher, I can't get enough materials about motivation, and the results of implementing a few of these ideas into my teaching practice have been fairly positive. Time will tell if I can integrate more of these into my classroom, but with reflection and a little tinkering on my part... who knows?

This book is well written and provides great tips to assist a diverse set of people ways to motivate others. I love this book and am in the process of trying different ways to motive my team.

Great tips and ideas for motivating others, especially in the business world. Some of them include, "Know Where Motivation Comes From, Teach Self-Discipline, Stop Criticizing Upper Management, Keep Giving Feedback, Get Input from your People, Accelerate Change, Don't Confuse Stressing Out With Caring, Manage Your Own Superiors, and Manage Agreements, Not People." If you want to become a great leader, I highly recommend this book.

I own this in audio, and it is so fantastic that I need it in written form too. I like to highlight and make comments to pass on in my preaching, and as Kindle gives me that possibilty, I don't need to buy the paper version.

Steve Chandler's straight talking advice is as effective as a Chuck Norris kick directly to your temple - hard hitting. My review is based on the audio book content that runs about 3 hours.

I first heard a Steve Chandler's audio program about 7 years ago. I was surprised by his deep, candid voice. Immediately you'll notice that Chandler's voice doesn't sound like the other authors that you've heard. You might not even like it at first - but, it'll grow on you once you grasp the sincere brevity of his messages. Chandler also has a wickedly funny sense of humor and authenticity that rarely comes through on commercial audio books.

So, what about the content? It's good stuff. Chandler takes a variety of situations both common and complex and puts in plain English how to work with them. You are always accountable for your actions and there is nowhere to hide, no one to blame.

This (audio)book offers many insights and useful tools to understanding the people that work with you and how you can effectively help them to empower themselves. If you, your coworkers or employees can't be accountable than who can? Like most of his other work, there is a common message of 'the buck stops and starts with you'. If that appeals to your work ethic and motivational style, you will be able to get a lot out of this book.

If you are looking for a point and shoot, one size fits all answer you might not find it here - but you will still be able to take away and apply a lot of useful methods.

A good book full of a lot of little insights that keep you thinking on different ways that you can use to help motivate others.