Review
Want the recipe for building a winning team? Read this ----- By Rieva Lesonsky / Small Biz Daily ---- Are you having trouble getting the key players in your business to work together? Then you could benefit from reading Amilya Antonetti s new book The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams. The Recipe tells the story of Prosperous Bakery, founded by an elderly couple who leave the business to their grandsons after they die. The six Givvantake brothers are eager to make the business even better, but each brother has a different personality, different skills and different ideas on how to improve the bakery. Unless they learn to work together instead, the bakery is in trouble. A long-time employee helps the brothers out by giving each of them one day to run the bakery the way he wants to. As you might expect, each brother is convinced his way will work best and each is sadly disappointed. The brothers learn that only by combining all of their unique talents and skills can they create the perfect recipe. I have to admit, I m not normally a big fan of the business fable genre, but The Recipe won me over with its simple, but hard-hitting lessons. As you read, you ll undoubtedly cringe to recognize elements of yourself in the six squabbling brothers. But as the brothers learn, conflict while it can be painful is necessary to growth, and differences make for a stronger team. There s a difference, Antonetti notes, between a team of champions and a championship team. Your team needs innovators, motivators, communicators, researchers, planners and implementers, but only by creating the perfect blend of all these qualities will you have built a championship team where each player works in harmony with the others and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Antonetti earned her entrepreneurial stripes with Soapworks, a line of earth-friendly soaps, which she later sold to start AMA Enterprises and focus on speaking and motivation. Told in story format because Antonetti believes that s the best way to learn, the book includes Little Spoonfuls ideas, tools and exercises that you can use to take the next step. --Small Biz Daily --Small Biz Daily
The Recipe is a gem of a book. It offers important and easily actionable lessons on leadership and team-building for both your professional and personal life---and it does so in the most delightful, whimsical way. --- Monica Crowley, Panelist, The McLaughlin Group; News Analyst, Fox News Channel, and Nationally Syndicated Radio Host. --Amilya.com
Book Review: The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams by Amilya Antonetti -----Review by: Diane Danielson/ Entrepreneur - The Daily Dose ----- Headed to the beach? Here's one business book you can toss into your beach bag and enjoy reading by the ocean or the pool. It's a light one with a big message. Generally, I'm not into fables because they tend to be "one concept" books. However, The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams by Amilya Antonetti is not a one concept fable. It's much meatier than Who Moved My Cheese? and has a pretty good Tips and Exercises section at the end. I also found it to be useful for both individuals (which of these characters is me?) as well as for team leaders (which of these characters are my employees?). The story involves sons of the Givvantake family who inherit a bakery from their deceased parents. As it often happens in real life, each of the brothers brings their own special talents, bad habits, and familial history with them into this new task of running the bakery. While women may initially balk at the absence of a sister,... no worries, the level-headed female guide through the book more than makes up for all the testosterone. For managers, it would be interesting to see if not only you, but your team could recognize themselves in any of the characters. I personally saw bits of my own bad habits in a couple of the characters and there were some I definitely identified better with than others. What it boils down to is that there are potentially six types of team members:
Innovators
Motivators
Communicators
Researchers
Planners
Implementers
It's a leader's job to get these different personalities to work together as a team by providing them tools and directions. Antonetti's book provides guidance on this via the fable itself as well as in tips section at the end. Realistically, not many managers will be able to watch employees try and fail patiently as the female "guide" does during the fable. But chances are, by the time you pick up this book, you've already observed your team for a while. I actually think that if you are leading a team through difficult times, you should put both The Recipe and Chip and Dan Heath's Switch into your beach bag. Between the two of these books, you should be able to get your team moving in the right direction. One final thing I liked about The Recipe was that it acknowledges the fact that many of us bring our personal baggage with us into the office. In this case, birth order and interfamily issues helped create some of the problems for the brothers. It also shows the difficulty of working in a family business when the family can't separate your professional self from the self you were when you were five years old. One side note, I couldn't help but wonder what would have happen if Antonetti upped the drama by throwing in one more character - maybe a surprise half-sister named Ivana Takeandtake, and made her a narcissist, borderline or other high conflict personality? Now that would really stir this pot (or perhaps be too realistic to be a fable!). --Entrepreneur - The Daily Dose
A secret to your success is making the most of family, leadership and teamwork. The Recipe has the ingredients of all three. --- John Assaraf, New York Times Bestselling Author,
The Answer and
Having It All. --Amilya.com
About the Author
Amilya Antonetti spent the first years of her son's life in hospital emergency rooms. That battle to save her son s life led to not only a wondrous solution but also to the launch of Amilya's Soapworks. A decade later, not only had she moved her natural products into the major grocery chains across the USA and Canada, she helped to redefine the cleaning aisle and usher in the human and earth friendly movement which consumers are embracing in waves today. A popular personality on television and radio, Amilya has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as a regular guest on The BIG Idea with Donny Deutsch, FOX Strategy Room, CBS This Morning, Extra, and countless international radio and television shows. Her story of Amilya s Soapworks has appeared in books, newspapers, magazines such as Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneurial Soul, People, Working Mother, First for Woman, Smart Money, Inc., Time, and her Smart Choice Mom lifestyle and organization tips can be read in Parent and Child and Family Circle Magazines. Amilya has received numerous entrepreneurial awards and been lauded by her peers. Her first book, Why David Hated Tuesdays, has continued to make her a much sought after guest and public speaker. Amilya has addressed audiences alongside the greatest speakers of our generation, including Tony Robbins, Zig Zigler, Oliver North, Katie Couric and Hillary Clinton. With the sale of Soapworks, she has moved on to the helm of AMA Enterprises and, through Amilya.com, delivers real world information, products and services to help 21st century consumers make smarter, healthier lifestyle choices. Amilya is living her life doing what she loves: speaking, writing and illuminating the pathway for others. But as busy as she is, Amilya never forgets her most important job, which is to be a great mother to her son David and her young daughter. They remain, and will always be, her purpose in life as well as key passion.
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