Customer Reviews

Smart Moves For People In Charge: 130 Checklists To Help You Be A Better Leader

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Everyone can benefit from improved leadership skills, but it's sometimes difficult to take criticism constructively. This book provides managers with a lot of food for thought, broken down into managable lists. If your managers need a little help improving their leadership skills, buy them a copy of this book. I keep a copy of the book on my desk and re-read one list each day. When conducting Leadership Seminars, I have used some of the lists to initiate group discussions.

As a middle manager in big conglomerates for a decade (that means I failed to climb to the top), I strongly recommend you to buy the book and put it inside your drawer and not on your table if you want to have some competitive advantages after all. Without exaggeration, the book contains short but highly useful tips or checklists for over 95% of business engagements/tasks I can think of. Some reviewers criticized that the content is mostly common sense stuff. In my experience, the devil is in the details. It's efficient and "safe" to get a quick review of the important points for, say, budget discussion with your boss, interviewing a redundant staff, writing a complaint against your vendor, apologising to an angry customer and so on.

In a word, a must buy, unless you are confident enough to think that you are always on your top shape with perfect bullets and armors, for all situations and every single minute in a business day.

The guy who recommended this book said he wished he'd had it 20 years earlier in his career. I think he was right. This book is loaded with lists and list of things that you should think about in some situation. Someone has taken the time to itemize the things you should consider in dozens of different situations. Want to improve you customer realations. Take at look at that list and you'll find a lot of things that really make sense. These lists save you the time of trying to figure out what are the attributes if a given situation that you should be looking at. Great book for anyone. You won't use it every day but when you need it, one application of the list can repay you the price of the book many times over.

This is my second book from Deep and Sussman. Alot like "Yes, you can!" "Smart Moves" help you but does not "treasure map" you with a specific path. The book will guide you at the beginning saying you have multiple ways to "use" the book. The best books in type of genre, are the ones that help you help yourself. Pardon the cliche, but Deep and Sussman have an appeal in their writing that's like a teacher. Like the best teacher you've ever had. One that instead of giving answers, asks you the questions that help you be more internally aware of what you're looking for. Recommended for anyone in business trying to inprove themselves operationally. A great read!

I really like the book. As an executive director in a small not for profit agency, I sometimes find it difficult to apply some suggestions and recommendations from books to what I do. However, the authors present very practical lists of action steps. I have referred to the book many times, and have identified numerous ideas to put to use.

Rats! I wish I had written this week's book! It's very, very good and will probably make my Top-10 list for 2011. It's got checklists and I'm big on checklists. (FYI: one of my Top-10 books from last year, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, was just ranked No. 7 on this month's New York Times' paperback business bestseller list.)

So when a colleague recommended "Smart Moves for People in Charge: 130 Checklists to Help You Be a Better Leader," I was immediately hooked--even before the book arrived. It exceeded my expectations by about 129!

The "checklists" run about three pages each, but each item on the checklist has been expertly honed down to just the big idea, with three to five lines of color commentary. That's it--the big idea, an insight--and you're in and out. Examples:

Checklist No. 48: Nine Guidelines to Make Praise Motivating
#1. Overcome your reasons for not praising enough (there are three).
#9. Initiate a team-of-the-month program. "Your company will be one of the very few that elevates work teams in this way."

Checklist No. 50: Seventeen Inexpensive Ways to Reward Employees
#12. Taking a member of the support staff on a sales call. "People in support roles may spend their entire careers without meeting those people who ultimately pay their salaries--customers. What this trip will cost is puny compared to the motivation it will purchase."

Checklist No. 56: Thirteen Tactics for Increasing Teamwork
#1. Create a teamwork culture. "Rename staff meetings `team meetings.'"

Checklist No. 61: Eighteen Tips for Conducting a Selection Interview
#7. Stay away from hypothetical questions. "Whenever you ask, `What would you do if...' you encourage the candidate to guess at what answer you're looking for rather than tell the truth. These are hypothetical questions calling for hypothetical responses. Since you're not hiring a hypothetical candidate, it's best to avoid them. Instead ask, `When was the last time you encountered...? How did you handle it?'"

Each of the 130 checklists has an average of 10 to 20 big ideas--with easily 1,200 ideas in this 296-page goldmine. The first of nine sections, for example, "Build Your Executive Power," has more than 150 ideas, plus the short color commentaries and some memorable call-outs. You're probably familiar with half of the ideas (but maybe not practicing all of them)--but likely 20 percent of the ideas are new gems for you, or certainly many of your team members, including those you're mentoring.

Each of the nine sections, like Spread the Word, Lead Your Team, Build Your Team, Stay Close to the Customer, and Find Your Balance, conclude with a dozen or more pithy quotations. Example: under "Twelve Quotes Worth Quoting About Teamwork," the authors include this from former Boston Celtics NBA Coach Red Auerbach, "They said you have to use your five best players, but I found you win with the five that fit together best."

The call-outs scream-out to be shared immediately! For example:

"A consultant advised one manager to initiate a gripe session with several dissatisfied employees. The manager responded, `Are you crazy? All they'll do is complain!' To which the consultant retorted, 'I hope so--that's just what a gripe session is for.'"

Speaking of consultants, there's a checklist titled, "Ten Tips for Hiring a Consultant." The call-out is brilliant! "If you can't fully identify the problem in advance, consider using one consultant to identify the problem and another to help you solve it. Here's one reason why. Let's say you know you've got serious morale problems but haven't figured out why. If you hire a human relations consultant both to pinpoint the cause and to recommend solutions, you're tempting that consultant to find the problems he knows how to solve."

Or, as Abraham Maslow said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything like a nail."

How can you not buy this book when the checklists are so tempting?
--13 Ways to Get Employees to Keep You Informed
--6 Red Flags of Burnout
--13 Steps to Delegate Effectively
--17 Ways to See Your Business Through Your Customers' Eyes
--10 Steps to Resolve Customer Complaints
--9 Tips for Creating a Succession Plan
--8 Ways to Get Great Value From Mentoring
--9 Methods to Handle an Insubordinate Manager
--13 Ways to Make Sure Your Incentives "Incent"
--18 Management Classics You Should Read
--15 People to Listen To
--64 Business Terms to Have on the Tip of Your Tongue
--7 Tips for Giving Off-the-Cuff Speeches

Here's a gutsy idea from page 80:

"From this book's table of contents, select the 25 leadership behaviors you believe are most essential to your success (e.g. `Managing your time effectively'). Give the list to your employees and ask that they identify the three behaviors that you display most consistently and the three you display least consistently. Tabulate the results. Ask humbly for explanations and perhaps examples of feedback you don't understand. (For even greater impact, ask employees to choose the 25 leadership behaviors they'll evaluate in you.)"

At your next staff meeting (I mean TEAM meeting), make this announcement: "OK...who wants to borrow this book for a week? Your assignment: report back at our next team meeting on just one checklist--and what you learned."

Then inspire another member to do the same for next week. (Note: with 130 checklists, you can keep your team meetings energized for over two years with just one book!)

Like I said...this is a goldmine! Check!

As other reviewers have said, this book contains a lot of common sense. Unfortunately, most people in charge don't seem to put much of this common sense into practice.

This book is not difficult to read, it really is a collection of individual paragraphs written covering a main heading. Topics range from strategic planning to spontaneous speeches to team buidling and so on. The authors do a decent job of explaining the best way to handle each situation and give practical advice. Again, if only managers would listen and put some into practice.

This is one of those book corporations often give to managers which in turn then tend to gather dust on a bookshelf. But if this book is on your bookshelf, take a moment to look at it, it just might give you some good ideas.

Couldn't make it through the book. Mostly common sense. I just needed it for a class. Better books exist on the same subject. Get those instead of this marketing tool.