Making Horses Drink: How to Lead & Succeed in Business [Hardcover]

Alex Hiam (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2002

Today, business success demands sustained peak performance- and that requires self-motivated, enthusiastic employees. How can you keep your team consistently at the top of their game? This powerful book begins with fresh insights from a fable about a horse and a boy who must manage it in order to save his family's farm. From the boy's story and the hundreds of real-world ideas that follow, you will discover how to harness your employees' talents to achieve breakaway success. You'll learn:

• Helpful tips and techniques to unleash your employees' innate drive to succeed- and harness their passion to achieve your organization's goals
• Strategies successful leaders use to replace old "command-and-control" management styles with more effective communication methods
• Common mistakes in dealing with employees that can lead to legal liability- and advice from Jackson Lewis, a leading employment law firm, on how to avoid these pitfalls
• Secrets to managing stress that will give you renewed energy and enthusiasm for your business
• Practical ways you can use encouragement, recognition and other powerful motivators to create a peak-performance workplace

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

As companies from GE to Southwest Airlines have proven for years, people really are an organization's most important asset. Yet many employees don't feel their company treats them that way. To get managers to change their approach, consultant Hiam (The Vest Pocket CEO: Decision-Making Tools for Executives) begins by presenting an allegory that brings to life the adage "you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." It turns out, Hiam contends, that while you can't make horses drink, you can let them, and it is providing that opportunity that makes it easier to get horses and employees to do what you want. Hiam proceeds to offer tips, inspirational sayings and homilies that urge managers to treat employees as if they have unlimited potential. He believes that if managers treat employees this way, employees will respond in kind. Thus, he coaches managers to "see that everyone is thanked," "have a leadership philosophy" and "take the lead by visiting employees to ask for their ideas." Hiam doesn't directly link this leadership method to greater sales or earnings, and the implicit assumption is that there are no bad employees, just bad managers. Still, his simple, specific advice will be useful to managers of all stripes.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

As companies from GE to Southwest Airlines have proven for years, people really are an organization’s most important asset. Yet -- Publishers Weekly review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press; 1 edition (June 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891984500
• ISBN-13: 978-1891984501
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #951,686 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Hiam has written extensively on business topics ranging from leadership and conflict management to marketing. He is an award-winning author of more than 20 books, including: Vest Pocket CEO, Adventure Careers, Marketing For Dummies, Closing the Quality Gap, and The Manager's Pocket Guide to Creativity.

His newest work, Business Innovation for Dummies (June 2010, Wiley), is a how-to guide that offers practical techniques for stimulating imagination and developing ideas into successful innovations.

When he's not writing, Hiam is a sought-after speaker on innovation, creativity and leadership. Thousands of managers - including Fortune 500 and government leaders - have attended his workshops and idea-generation retreats, and relied on his guides: Creativity By Design, Creative Roles Analysis, and The Entrepreneur's Complete Handbook.

Hiam holds a B.A. from Harvard College in anthropology and an MBA in marketing and strategic planning from the University of California, Berkeley. For more than 12 years, he has worked at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Isenberg School of Management, with additional teaching posts at American International College and Western New England Collage.

Today, Hiam is a consultant to a diverse set of clientele. At the U.S. Coast Guard's Leadership and Management School, he provides assistance with curriculum design for leadership development. His leadership novella, The Starfish Files, is required reading for U.S. Coast Guard leaders. Hiam also provides leadership training to nonprofit and government groups, extending his well-honed innovation principles beyond the private sector for clients ranging from the U.S. Army and U.S. Senate to the City of New York. In the business arena, Hiam's creativity exercises are used by top advertising agencies to help their staff be more open to fresh ideas.

His educational publishing company, Trainer's Spectrum (www.trainersspectrum.com), features assessments, workshops, books, and learning games for team building, leadership, conflict management and other employee development programs. He is also the developer of the Dealing With Conflict Instrument and the Strategic Leadership Type Indicator. His personal Web site is at www.alexhiam.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Creating Thirst, August 12, 2002

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Making Horses Drink: How to Lead & Succeed in Business (Hardcover)

By now I have become convinced that motivation is self-generated but it is possible to inspire others. That is, to help them to motivate themselves. That is precisely what the most effective military, political, and religious leaders have done throughout history. One of the keys is appealing to what is generally described as "enlightened self-interest." With all due respect to charismatic leaders, those who are inspired to follow generally do so for reasons of their own. Hiam seems to have this in mind as he explains "how to lead and succeed in business." Obviously, the core concept in this book is based on the aphorism that "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink." A corollary to that would be something to the effect that thirst -- rather than threat -- is essential to the consumption of whatever "water" may be offered. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I am convinced that those who are "hungriest" to achieve whatever the goal may be generally succeed.

In the Introduction, Hiam explains that a stable represents a lot of potential energy that isn't much use to anyone until its harnessed to some worthwhile goal and encouraged to work under good leadership." He goes on to suggest the same is true of organizations. They may have a great bunch of people on the payroll, a winning `stable' if you will. But without the right touch on the reins, the business produces little more than a stable full of horses. (In fact, like a stable, it actually consumes [italics] in its resting state. Anything it produces is waste product, to put it politely.)"

He then carefully organizes his excellent material within ten chapters which comprise two "Books. The first is "A Leadership Fable: The Horse Who Wouldn't Drink"; the second is "Horse Sense: Tips and Techniques for Managers." Each of the ten chapters corresponds to a core principle that Hiam believes all highly successful leaders apply. Moreover, each "is an important element of winning any horse race you wish your organization to enter. While they may seem like common sense, knowing when and how to apply each is a challenge."

It would be a disservice to Hiam as well as to those who read this review for me to list the ten. Each must be carefully considered in the context within which Hiam discusses it. He begins each chapter with a boxed observation. For example:

"Make sure the horse wants to win the race too." (Chapter 1)

"It is important to explore together. The best rides are often on unfamiliar trails." (Chapter 5)

"Encourage your horse to believe it is a winner. It won't run its hardest until it does." (Chapter 8)

I also appreciate the inclusion of a Checklist at the end of each chapter which highlights tips and techniques which will be most helpful during the process of applying the given principle. For those who are "thirsty" and "hungry" to become a more effective leader or to become a more productive member within their own "stable," Hiam's book is must reading.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Feeling thristy??, June 24, 2002

By 

Martin Schray (West Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Making Horses Drink: How to Lead & Succeed in Business (Hardcover)

Making Horses Drink starts with an interesting story of a boy and the family work horse. This horse is hard working, but he works in his own way, at his own pace, in this own time. Only when the boy learns to work in conjunction with the horses style do they reach their potential.

The story is a parable of managing knowledge workers. After you get past comparing knowledge workers to horses you will find Making Horses Drink intriguing. After the story Making Horses Drink explores 10 areas that influence a knowledge works work. Each topic gets a chapter and each chapter covers the main theme with an assortment of inspirational stories, intriguing practices, and thought provoking quotes.

The 10 areas covering knowledge worker effectiveness where crafted from surveys and are listed below:

Commitment
Communications
Leader's Personal Perspective
Supervision
Innovation
The workplace
Transitions
Encouragement
Decision Making
Development

Some of topics that I found the most interesting within Making Horses Drink were developing a credo, the profit/success rule, planning vs. action, free thinking and the use of crawford (routing) slip. These are topics that really stood out and had an immediate impact on my thinking. One are likely to have a different list, but this book is a quick read and bound to influence your thinking.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Making Horses Drink is Champagne for Thirsty Managers!, August 6, 2002

By 

A. L. Parkhurst, SPHR (Cedar Park, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making Horses Drink: How to Lead & Succeed in Business (Hardcover)

Alex has a tradition of turning issues that frustrate into workable solutions. In MAKING HORSES DRINK, Alex takes his readers through 239 pages of non-stop information and practical approaches to familiar issues manager's face. He refocuses the reader time and again to positive solutions and motivating ideas. If you pick up this book, you will not put it down! MAKING HORSES DRINK provides great insights and workable solutions for (among other things) inspiring employees, setting reachable standards, communicating vision, learning about leadership from employees, releasing stress to lead calmly and how to deliver praise and negative feedback. In the end, you will be a better manager with an even more positive approach and management style: a true Leader. If reading the book motivates you, pick up the telephone and call Alex! He is as approachable as the ideas presented in this and all his books.