30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
One good idea amidst several bad ones, June 8, 2009
This review is from: Thank God It's Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love (Hardcover)
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This book shares the same theme as
Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard by Harry Paul and Ross Reck (to get the most out of employees, treat them with respect, and motivate them with trust instead of fear). Unfortunately, it shares the weakness, namely oversimplifying the real world, ignoring all other tasks of management other than cheerleading. Beyond that, it attempts to add poor philosophy, making statements such as "gut feelings are never wrong" and that to get enthusiasm, all one needs to do is "just decide to come alive". Further, she states that "there are two kinds of people in life and in business-givers and takers." This is categorically false in a (even somewhat) capitalistic society- there people are traders who trade value for value.
The book also focuses more on addressing symptoms than finding and solving root causes. For example, the book talks about the need to eliminate gossip (without giving detail how to do it other than not to tolerate it), but fails to mention the fact the root of most gossip is an office with inadequate communications.
If you are looking for a book to improve the culture, and hence the output, of a business, I highly recommend
Open-Book Management: Coming Business Revolution, The by John Case.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
100 words crammed into 200 pages, July 15, 2009
This review is from: Thank God It's Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love (Hardcover)
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I was looking forward to reading this book: the idea of creating a pleasant and productive work environment is certainly something that the majority of workers could benefit from. Unfortunately, this book adds little to the debate other than insisting chapter after chapter that treating co-workers and customers with dignity, respect and friendliness makes for a better business. This core idea, repeated endlessly through motivational-poster style one-liners told in the style of fictional third-person prose, is great but the book never delves into the practicalities of making this work in a real business environment.
The fictional prose element is really irritating. It makes it hard to find the concrete points that anchor the author's philosophy, and it's simply irrelevant to know that Sophie from Austin - whose father isn't paying child support and hasn't for years - enjoyed the airport because a band was playing and the TSA inspectors were in a good mood, while the wafting smell of authentic Texas barbecue put her in a near-Catatonic state. First, I lived in Texas, and I can tell you that Austin airport is the last place I'd go for anything authentic. But more importantly, this two-dimensional fiction overlaying a business book is completely unhelpful.
The other weakness is that in simplifying the problems of running a business to lack of cheer leading results in conclusions that are just plain wrong or redundant. "Gut feelings are never wrong" according to this author (just look at my gut feeling that this book would be good), and gossiping in offices is unproductive (which is true, but the more important question is how to eliminate it). The series of tall tales 'prove' these points but provide no instructional information on how to migrate your organization towards what she is advocating.
Basically, although I'm sure the author speaks at many of the Fortune 500 companies, the reader is left with no clear steps to become one of the "many businesses [that] double profits and size within three years". My cynical side suspects that this book is a teaser to drive her consulting business, and it's yet another publication from Financial Times Press that is remarkably thin on actionable content.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Management Lite., June 29, 2009
This review is from: Thank God It's Monday!: How to Create a Workplace You and Your Customers Love (Hardcover)
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THANK GOD IT'S MONDAY by Roxanne Emmerich is a small, 176 page book. There are no diagrams or graphs. The book could be subtitled, MANAGEMENT LITE, because of the fact that the writing dwells on easy-to-read descriptions of workplace environments, but provides solutions that are glib and of little substance.
The book is a bit too self-promotional. For example, the author states that she has created "profound change for hundreds of companies . . . many businesses double profits and size within three years." (page 1). Fortunately, the writing after this very early point in the book improves somewhat (but still suffers from severe disorganization problems).
The author is careful to set the context, in describing certain work environments, where the goal is that the reader will more easily understand the recommended solutions. We learn about an automobile repair shop on the rough side of town. However, we also learn that the employees are cheerful, customer-oriented, and technically savvy. The author provides a clearcut takeaway lesson, "Sara's mind begins to embrace the idea that if a place on the tougher side of the highway that fixes broken car windows can be a great place to be, then maybe working where she works can be fun." (page 11).
We learn about management attitudes that lead to good management versus bad management. A poor manager describes his vacation trip to Mexico as a "vacation to get away from his employees." (page 19). The book does refer to poor management techniques, "being controlling, heavy handed, or neurotic" (page 27), but unfortunately fails to provides a concrete example at this point. Later on, we find a description of poor management, "a management style that emulated Simon Legree . . ." (page 75). But this "description" is too nebulous to be informative or to be of any value to the reader. Another, somewhat more successful, description of poor management occurs on the next page ("employees crammed into tiny cubicles where you could hear the next employee sucking his teeth"). And we read about owners roaming from desk to desk at night checking for stolen pencils, or for failure to close window blinds, where the employee was punished by having her phone put in the wastebasket (page 77). It is true that these are all unhappy things. But the author fails to go a step further by providing a solution to these problems. Actually, the author does provide a solution, namely, killing the supervisors ("put the owners' heads on spikes").
Because of the use of glib, chatty narratives, and the failure to provide any concrete solutions, this book could be subtitled, "MANAGEMENT LITE."
For those interested in more concrete examples of bad management, I recommend CRYSTAL FIRE by Riordan and Hoddeson, which details the abusive management techniques of William Shockley (Nobel Prize winner and co-inventor of the transistor). I also recommend THE TRUTH ABOUT MIDDLE MANAGEERS by Osterman, which describes various types of abusive management techniques, for example, requiring employees to fill out forms at the end of the week, detailing how all their tasks were fulfilled (page 87 of Osterman).
Eventually, the author provides the reader with more concrete management techniques where the goal is to improve business, "how your phones are answered, how you greet visitors, the speed with which things are done, the accuracy of transactions . . ." (page 23), eliminating redundancies (page 26), followup plans for new customers (page 26).
Unfortunately, we are not provided with any concrete examples of these management techniques. The book could be subtitled, "MANAGEMENT LITE."
Roxanne Emmerich's book is sometimes too glib, that is, stating that certain problems, which in real-life are often impossible to overcome, can be easily overcome or solved. For example, we read that "you can be as miserable or as joyful as you choose." (page 37). The reviewer can name a couple of employers where assault and battery was used as a management technique. I do not find that this is a situation where anybody can be as "joyful as you choose."
To give another example of glib advice, the author recommends that we should all not shoot down ideas unless we propose ideas for further progress. (page 38). I agree with this suggestion 100%. However, what the author fails to understand is that many supervisors have no interest in listening to ideas. In part, the reason is that many "supervisors" are not technically savvy enough to understand the technology that they are supposed to be supervising.
Here is yet another example of glib advise -- easy to say but impossible to implement in many workplaces. This is the recommendation for "open communication . . . it's about being more open, honest, and direct." (page 42). The author fails to understand that many employers prefer to supervise on the basis of preconceptions and false "information."
And yet more glib advice is found on page 66, "Conflict should be worked through daily and directly . . . ask better questions and listen better . . . state all things in the positive." Once again, this is easy to say but often not possible to implement. The book CRYSTAL FIRE, cited above, provides one well-known example of a dictatorial supervisor where the resulting misery cannot likely be overcome by any advice found in THANK GOD IT'S MONDAY.
The author repeatedly recommends that managers provide "lavish praise at least five times a day" (page 67) "trusting others more," and "uplifting feedback." (page 72). However, the author fails to take into account of the fact that many managers are incapable of understanding the technical details of their supervisees, and are therefore incapable of providing "uplifting feedback."
Actually, I did find exactly one piece of insightful advice, namely that where a supervisor chooses to praise an employee, "there was a fine line between being patronizing and [meaningful praise]." (page 78).
To conclude, we find lots of advice, but some of the advice is just too obvious to be considered advice, e.g., be cheerful, while the rest of the advice is too glib to be workable in any real-life situation. Overall, this "book" might reasonably be characterized as being mediocre.
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