Customer Reviews

Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business Without Losing Your Self

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Most self-help books (amazon.com currently lists 24,855 of them) are generous with words and thin on genuine ideas. Alan Webber either wanted to be done with the book business in one go or he has an endless supply of ideas. "'52 Rules of Thumb"' contains material for 52 average self-help books; each single rule could have been rolled out to 200-plus pages easily. Thank you Mr Webber for resisting that temptation. For anybody in the communication business (PR, priesthood, politics, parenting) this book is a treasure trove. The idea looter''s wet dream. Whenever preparing a sermon or a sales pitch or a motivational speech just pick one of Mr. Webber''s rules of thumb and you have an easy start. This book deserves five stars. You don''t agree? Well, my favorite rule in the book is '"Learn to take 'No' as a question"'.

Alan Webber has a track record unlike almost anyone else in the history of business. His passion and insight at Fast Company magazine revolutionized our world in the best possible way.

This book is like a blog, but better, because you can highlight it, postit it and bring it on an airplane. If you find yourself enjoying books where you can mull over a nugget or two and suddenly find them changing your strategy, this is a great book for you.

I just read this book during a cross-country plane flight on Monday and I must admit that I will not be requiring any Botox injections, for my forehead wrinkles, for some weeks. As I read through the various "truths for winning at business", fellow passengers would observe me slapping my forehead and uttering either, "Yes, of course" or "Why didn't I think of that."

With just the kind of chapter titles you would expect coming from one of the guys who invented Fast Company (the insanely great business mag that has never recovered the founders' absence), my favorites among Webber's various rules include: Change is a math formula; A good question beats a good answer; Learn to take no as a question; Facts are facts but stories are how we learn; If you want to change the game change the economics of how the game is played; Everything communicates; and Content isn't king, context is king.

You will find that each of these 52 entries includes a short story followed by a 'So What?' explanation of how this rule has practical application for the reader. Alan, thanks for a great, thought provoking read . . . and a flat forehead.

I've used a combination of 3 X 5 cards and a digital recorder as an "idea catcher" for years. It's a great technique. Alan Webber carries those cards, too, and he makes notes on them. He's turned 52 of them into a book called Rules of Thumb.

That's forty years worth of cards, including the ones he wrote up after interviewing people like Bill Bradley and Jim Collins and Helmut Schmidt. They're interesting and Webber is a great writer so this book is worth reading as long as you know what to expect.

But what we've got here aren't rules. They're more like lessons or observations.

That's an important distinction. You'll love this book if you dip into it from time to time and read a bit. You'll love it if you read a lesson a week and try to apply it.

But if you're looking for a real book, one that not only shares stories and insights, but connects the dots, Rules of Thumb will probably disappoint you. It's a collection of lovely tiles, but not a whole mosaic.

The subtitle also overstates things a bit. I'm not all sure what "winning at business without losing yourself" means, even after reading the book through. If I was a risk of losing myself before I read the book, it's still true afterward.

My bottom line: Rules of Thumb is a fine collection of little pieces. They're entertaining and some are thought-provoking. Most of them are business-related. If that's what you're looking for, you'll like the book.

Not many people have been observer and participant in waves of business change as has Alan Webber. He has something to say about these key intersections: public/private, academic/industry, media/Internet, entrepreneur/manager, and social/profit enterprise. This course of learning introduces us to key people, experiences and insight without claims for eternal truths. Webber is too respectful of his readers for that. In a time of great change and need for business innovation, Webber reads the signals, charts the currents, and shares his impressive influences. You can trust this book to deliver provocative, brief but grounded rules that the author does not dumb down. As his own experiences teach, Webber encourages us to be architects for change, not its victims.

A friend of mine recently recommended Rules of Thumb, here is my take, and my rules.

I like that he approached the key topics of management through these rules. I know in Management by Design: Applying Design Principles to the Work Experience, you can read for a while to see what I'm getting at. This isn't an issue for Alan. Once you get past the occasionally too pithy rules, the narrative is straight forward and consumable. In the era of the Twitter and Facebook, you need to grab people quickly or they move on. Alan does a good job of grabbing the reader. I think this format is also good in that it lets the reader's curiosity decide where they want to wander, and what they should be grabbed by. I don't need to read the entire book to get value (which is the approach we discussed for the new book I pitched called Uncertainty).

So here are the areas that I really resonated with, perhaps it is because versions of them exist in my own talks, but we can't have too many people on the side of change is good, embrace it, deal with it and lets go co-create the future...

* New Realities Demand New Categories
* A good question beats a good answer
* We've move from an either/or Past to a Both/and Future
* Speed=strategy
* Learn to See the World Through the Eyes of Your Customer (would probably still be at Microsoft and be a VP if they got this one)
* If You Want to Change the Game, Change the Economics of how the Game is Played (thus my harping on the US getting over itself and trying to reinvent the economy rather than playing all the old games: Strategic Measures-Toward New Measures for a Sustainable, Knowledge Economy
[...]* The soft stuff is hard (thus my leaning that the future of IT will end up seeing automation cost reductions offset by investments for people to use collaboration technology in an effective way)
* Good Design is Table Stakes. Great Design Wins. (I would also add that it matters what you design, thus the emphasis on Management by Design around designing workplace experiences)
* Words matter (and putting names on things matters too. If you can't refer to it, you can watch it or change it)
* Content isn't king. Context is King. (Amen)
* Everything is performance (I like that everything isn't productivity, and that performance has more than one meaning, for all of us players)
* Simplicity is the new currency (entire chapter on simplicity in Management by Design - most managers create complexity in the name of oversight and compliance, just to discover, when it is too late, that they made their own job harder)
* Technology is about changing how we work (and how we live)
* Don't confuse credential with talent (thus my push in my education work to de-emphasize traditional degrees in favor of recognizing life-long learning and experience, in an official way -- thus reinventing one of the primary functions of colleges. They may evolve so they aren't about teaching, but about recognizing learning)
* On the way up, pay attention to your strengths; they'll be your weaknesses on the way down (I would offer a caveat, that this is true only if you climb down the same mountain. If you shift mountains, the rules change)
* Take your work seriously. Yourself, not so much (should be on the boardroom bathroom wall in all Fortune 1000 companies, well, all companies, because if you need it by the time you make it to the Fortune 1000 it is probably too late)
* Stay Alert! There are teachers everywhere (which watching the labor discussions at a local college, really bothers teachers. This has always been my mantra and if I didn't believe it, I would be where I am today. Just-in-time-Learning, however, doesn't fit with the American education system, and learners who decide who they trust, where and when, is very disruptive to traditional education).

To me, this book should be in the hands of all those people pushed into a leadership role (at any level in an organization) without a formal education, and/or maybe into the hands of those whose formal management degrees are a bit dated. Webber has crafted 52 really well-considered pieces of advice that can be read to prompt some useful "food for thought" moments.

It's a great blend of stories with actions, so that we can appreciate the "in context" view and then move forward with the lesson provided.

I tore my own copy apart. I wrote in the margins. I tore out pages. I kept them in my pants pocket, shifting them from pants to pants until they became frayed and I decided to type them into a notepad file.

What will you do with yours?

I've taken this book in one-chapter-per-week chunks by reading each short chapter as the first thing each workday morning. The repeat readings during the week brought new insights. Each rule is so right-on, and I found myself saying that if I remembered solely the rule I was reading it would have been worthwhile. The nice thing is that by re-reading it as I go along I end up with all of it. Each rule is soundly based in acknowledging the three-dimentional reality of situations - the me, the you, and the resources... rather than being pie-in-the-sky thinking. I highly recommend this book.

Don't confuse the pleasure of reading Rules of Thumb for its seriousness of purpose -- or its intelligence and wisdom. Alan Webber's new book is an important and valuable work of "edu-tainment." (See Rule 33.) I write this as the owner and operator of a small business who has benefitted immeasurably from the author's rare intelligence.

Today we are flooded with information and starved for wisdom. Alan provides the antidote. Few people have his breadth of experience to draw on, or just as important, the ability to communicate it with stunning, simple brilliance.
Whether you are at the beginning of your life/work journey or a seasoned executive, I believe you will find this book is like having a Wise Elder guiding you along the way.
I found Rules of Thumb to be superb at capturing critical life lessons in bite-sized chunks that went beyond what he had learned to provide practical guidance about taking action that would make a real difference. Kudos!