Customer Reviews

Living Above the Store: Building a Business That Creates Value, Inspires Change, and Restores Land and Community--How One Family Business Transformed ... Using Sustainable Management Practices

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While Living Above the Store pertains most particularly to builders and real-estate development businesses, it contains valuable strategies and lessons for creating a values-oriented business. If you are interested in creating a "flater" management structure in which all of your employees define and implement a vision for your business, Melaver describes a variety of techniques for doing so. I found the discussion of the "5 Whys" particularly intriguing as a method of getting to the root cause of a problem that usually forces oneself to admit one's own initial mistake or careless error. This book offers an alternative to the usual "maximize shareholder value" goal of contemporary capitalism, suggesting that other values such as environmental quality and employee meaning and satisfaction can be added to create a better, more meaningful business that can not only remain profitable but grow in a more orderly, natural pace. It should be added to your shelf of classic revisionist business books along with Ray Anderson, Paul Hawken, and E.F. Schumacher.

Many writers have written about how businesses can do well by doing good. In this addition to the literature, Mr. Melaver gives us his own take on the connection between doing good and doing well.

Early in his tenure as the new CEO of a 70 year old family-owned business, Mr. Melaver was confronted with this question: Does it matter what our business does (especially if we're only doing what others in the industry are or have been doing), as long as we're giving back to the community? Mr. Melaver's answer to this question is yes, and he tells us the whys and hows in this book.

According to Mr. Melaver, doing good and doing well are inseparable concepts; a business that takes into heart the principles described in this book will do well without having to sacrifice its core values.

Mr. Melaver's world view is an integrative view: Every person is the sum of many diverse parts -- land (place a person lives in), community, etc. -- and each of those individual parts is recursively the sum of many other diverse interconnected parts; the challenge for each of us is to reflect on our values and how we want to conduct ourselves so that we can grow to our highest potential at a thoughtful pace, while simultaneously giving others the same opportunities to reach their own potentials without disturbing the natural order of the integrated whole. This challenge requires, among other things, a willingness to change the way we view ourselves, competitors, knowledge sharing, partnering, etc. and is a daunting one.

The principles described in this book are supposed to help us rise to this challenge; but principles, like good high-level plans, still require the translation of abstract, general matters to concrete, more specific actionable items, and this is where, I think, the book falls a little bit short. While writing beautifully and passionately, Mr. Melaver sometimes tends to keep the level of discourse abstract for far longer than necessary, offering drawn-out nuanced discussions of ideas and concepts from many different angles and perspectives that sometimes borders on belaboring a point. The few times that Mr. Melaver was able to work in real-life examples of the described principles in action (e.g., the risks his family took when they stood firm on their desegregation stance, the effort to understand a stressed out employee who left the company, the admission of error when someone failed to follow one or more of the principles advocated in this book and lessons learned, etc) were some of the best moments I've had with the book because they were moments of insights for me as well, and I wish Mr. Melaver had been able to work in a few more examples, because principles, like good plans, are only as good as how well they're executed.

In the 1960's, the book ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE was popular among those who leaned towards alternative ways of looking at the world. That book caused the reader to lose themselves in a complex, yet, simple task, of taking care of what one had.

In LIVING ABOVE THE STORE: BUILDING A BUSINESS... Martin Malevar has given us, those who long for a quality in ownership we seem to only remember in "Saturday Evening Post" ads, a true feeling that there is something more than greed and fear in American businesses. There can be life.

I was very fortunate to have been raised in small Central Western Alabama town of 3,000 after my father retired. In the early 1960's, the rampart culture of Big Business was just beginning to sweep from larger companies, via Madison Avenue, to medium size businesses in larger cities of the South. Our town only had the local businesses that depended on word-of-mouth advertising to exist upon and grow. The ethics and quality of the individuals who owned and ran those stores were a lot like those of the farmers who farmed outside our city limits. Those farmers managed their farms as if everything they did impacted on the future of their farm, because they knew it did.

Martin Malevar has provided us with the guidance on how one can, not only, restore this quality to the current business model, but must restore it if faith in our businesses is to be restored.

LIVING ABOVE THE STORE: BUILDING A BUSINESS THAT CREATES VALUE, INSPIRES CHANGE, AND RESTORES LAND AND COMMUNITY is a 'must' for any business library and many a general lending collection. It shows how to create a sustainable business, using a 70-year-old, third generation family business as its model for example. From incorporating ideals of contributing to the community in a business plan that works to handling workers differently for highest achievement and understanding limits to growth, LIVING ABOVE THE STORE is a top pick.

There are a million ways to go at running a business. Living Above the Store should give any business owner pause to thinking of how they run their own business. Businesses have but one real goal, and that is making money. Failure to make money will close the business. What is great about this book, is to show that you can make money AND do good for the land and community around you. This book is not really a light read if you aren't used to this style, but it can be read in search of pearls to apply to you own business.

I would find it unrealistic to expect that you would copy the business plan exactly, but there are lots of great ideas that can be harvested. If nothing else, reading this success story should show you there is always another way to doing business. I would call this the non-jerk method of business. You can be ruthless in your business or you can play nice and be in it for the long-term.

As I finished this book I have been thinking about it a lot and discussing it with friends and colleagues. Perhaps the best way to sum up my thoughts is that the book is much more encompassing than I had expected and really attempts to express a shift that is occurring (or hopefully occurring, or should be encouraged to occur more) in the world in general. After finishing the book I went back and re-read Ray Anderson's introduction. In his piece he mentions Dana Meadows' "Places to Intervene in a System, in Increasing Order of Effectiveness", where number 1 on the list "is to challenge the mind-set behind the system-...the mental model of how things are that underlies the system in the first place." This is what this book does, and I was taken off guard by its subtle calm writing style and modesty that is essentially entreating you to re-think everything that you do in context with everything else around you. Ray also writes "Dana said that this is the most effective place to intervene, but she also acknowledged that it is the hardest", and this is also true of the book- which Martin Melaver acknowledges in his own way. The complexity of the ideas expressed need a multi-dimensional space (hence the 3d diagrams, grids, and multi-level matrices) and it's inherently limited by any form of media/communication that is not the thing itself (ie Melaver Inc, the meeting, the Story itself).

There is something about this book that is much broader and applicable beyond what most people consider traditional business. I will continue share this book with others as a way of engaging an ever expanding audience in this evolving experiment for a more thoughtful and holistic future.

This is one of those books that everyone in business or in their life time at some time or another need to read and who concepts need to be pondered. While the concepts and business strategies aren't necessary all that new or revolutionary, Living Above the Store, addresses in today's GREEN movement those ideals and values. It reestablishing how we take care of mother earth on a local basis using common sense practices. I suggest reading it and passing it on to a friend. Good Book and Recommended.

There is no need to go into content because the description, editorials and the other previous reviews cover it extensively. What we have here is an amazing wealth of information hiding behind some less than readable text. Normally I would have given 3 stars, but in this case the value of the content far outweighs the writing itself. If you've made it to this page, read all the editorial comments and are now looking at customer reviews, buy the book.

I love the books that Chelsea Green publishes, and the ideals they stand for. Not only does Chelsea and its authors help people envision a cleaner, greener, more sustainable, more community-oriented future, but they usually give practical advice on how to implement the ideas. And, based on a few of the authors I know personally, these folks put their money where their mouths are: they live what they preach. That's refreshing.

So it would also seem is true for the Melaver family. Yet another great example of the Chelsea style, the

This book includes one incredible story after another Those interested in business will enjoy the authors values and great stories that follow