8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This Is What A Business Book Should Be, October 26, 2003
This review is from: The Accidental Leader: What to Do When You're Suddenly in Charge (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) (Paperback)
I received an advance copy of The Accidental Leader because I review business books for a big-city newspaper. I put it at the top of my pile because I have always liked what Finley and Robbins do. I now recommend it enthusiastically, not only for the suddenly-empowered people the title addresses, but for anyone with leadership responsibilities.
In my view, the business books that are truly useful for real-world managers have two qualities. First, they don't pretend that managerial life is anything less than unbelievably complex and unbearably demanding. Second, they provide straightforward, relatively simple tools, methods, and strategies for dealing with all that complexity and pressure. Tools that actually work.
The greatest business writers, geniuses like Jim Collins and Gary Hamel, can embrace huge amounts of complexity and then provide advice that's somehow whittled down into manageable prescriptions that still have world-changing impact.
This book isn't as great as those, because its topic is more limited, but it still has those great-book qualities. There's a whole lot of reality encompassed here - organizational realities, performance-related realities, and personal ones, too - yet the highly distilled, non-nonsense advice still imparts ways of wrestling with those realities and coming out on top.
There's also a lot to like about the way Finley and Robbins write. They're direct and pungent, funny and witty, and completely readable. They earned some deserved recognition a few years back when their book Why Teams Don't Work was named "Best Business Book in the Americas" by Financial Times and Booz Allen & Hamilton, but they still haven't gained the wide readership and top-of-the-charts sales they deserve. The next step for them is to sell a whole bunch of books. So, if you buy this book and like it, why not check out their other entries here at amazon.com -- it's all good, and good for you, too.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Insightful!, March 1, 2004
This review is from: The Accidental Leader: What to Do When You're Suddenly in Charge (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership) (Paperback)
Say the boss drops dead and suddenly you're the acting boss. Or the company reorganizes, everyone above you is fired and guess who's in charge. Imagine that your career suddenly becomes one of those movies where the plane starts to go down and some poor, benighted sap finds himself in the pilot's chair trying to land a 747 on a stormy night on what is either a landing strip or just a long, broad swath of plankton in the water. Can you land it? What do you do? You're responsible. Suddenly people look at you in a different way. Your friends no longer completely trust you, your enemies are working actively to undercut you and your ability to come to terms with accidental leadership will make or break your career. It is full of little motivational tips, kind words and straight talk covering everything from managing complex and difficult teams to firing people (tip: avoid Christmas Eve). The book is thin, a quick read and a good one.
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