This is the first baker’s dozen of my lending library list. I am a voracious reader who is making an enormous life switch from fiction to nonfiction which makes up this list. If you haven’t read any of these, check them out. They are great.

If you are a business coaching client or TAB member, these books are available directly from me for loan.   If you don’t want to wait, you can link directly to Amazon.  Bon Apetit.

A Stake in the Outcome: Building a Culture of Ownership for the Long-Term Success of Your Business – Jack Stack

The Great Game of Business – Jack Stack

The Open-book Experience: Lessons From Over 100 Companies Who Successfully Transformed Themselves – John Case

Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier – Gary Harpst

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful – Marshall Goldsmith

Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More – Chris Anderson

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life – John G Milller

The Contrarian Effect: Why It Pays (Big) to Take Typical Sales Advice and Do the Opposite – Micheal Port

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – Seth Godin

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die – Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Employing Generation Why – Eric Chester

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable – Patrick Lencioni

Taming Your Gremlin (Revised Edition): A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way – Rick Carson

Bill Vrettos is a facilitator with The Alternative Board in Colorado. He posted this fantastic document on the TAB facilitator hotline answering our swirling question for business owners and coaches:

What is your Best and Most Creative Alternatives to Layoffs.

Now is the time to do what we should always be doing and that is to use and develop our Human Resources to their fullest potential. Our employees are our most valuable resource and, therefore, we need to address this critical asset head-on.

-Do performance reviews diligently and more frequently.
-There is no better time to clarify expectations (and probably get a positive up-tick in performance) than now.
-Provide Leadership like never before.
-Your employees look to you for stability and guidance during difficult times.
-Give them articles or have short seminars about money management, positive news, and future challenges.
-Educate and communicate.
-Share positive news regularly.
-Consolidation of jobs is common place as volume decreases and activity reduces.
-Good job descriptions and knowledge of your workforce’s abilities and potential are critical to doing this analysis well.
-Rank your staff by their contribution to the bottom line and/or the ROI of their cost to the organization.
-Sales and production staff become disproportionately valuable in an economic downturn.

-Adjust wages, benefits, and perks to better align with shrinking revenues and margins.

-You are the steward of this economic ship and are responsible for its success and must make hard decisions.

Is there someone who is overpaid or underperforming?
In many cases, layoffs are necessary.
-Your best employees deserve consideration for their hard work and loyalty.

Many considerations need be thought through before taking actions: will several employees share in the layoffs and work alternating weeks to draw unemployment periodically; will you provide job attached status to key employees you want to return, will you offer a return to work bonus after the period of layoff ends, etc.

Possibly reducing hours is an alternative, either in select slow parts of the business or across the board.

The labor force market has turned around over the last six months and this might be a time to upgrade talent and experience.

DO NOT WAIT to take the necessary actions required to right your economic ship until you are overly vulnerable and might not survived. DO NOT GO into the recession with a negative business plan or hurting for cash.

Diane Dileo gave me a copy of Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us” to read. His thesis is that since we are not limited by geography anymore, being a leader is easier than ever as your tribe awaits you. His idea that we are all leaders and that leadership is a behavior that we develop is very motivationally delivered by Godin. Love it.

Here is a poem taken from the end of the book:

“Belief

People don’t believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.

What leaders do: they give people stories that they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change.”

Our debut attempts at podcasting are in the works, and will be published to the site soon. Please ceck back in a week or so!

Nov. 25, 2008

This month’s message is an excerpt fromGary Harpst’s book, “Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem That Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier

“One of the most persistent challenges we face as humans is to narrow the gap between knowing what needs to be done, and actually doing what needs to be done. In fact, as business leaders, we collectively know quite a bit about what needs to be done. We’ve read books, taken seminars, and listened to management gurus. We’ve even earned business degrees in understanding what needs to be done. Yet the challenge to somehow bridge this gap continues.

Any approach that stands a chance of taking organizations to the next level of business excellence – and helping them stay there – must address our human nature and help us overcome our frequent failure to do the things we know we should do.”

” Busness coaching has emerged as an industry that has proven its value. The model of bringing in outside expertise and accountability to organizations and individuals within organizations works. As such, it is one of the core tenents upon which the Execution Revolution will be built.”

Happy Thanksgiving

Yours truly,

Ruth

Does your organization have meeting-itis? Maybe you have long, endless, aimless rambling meetings? Or a Coffee-and-Gossip Hour disguised as a meeting? Do people bring embarrassing personal issues to meetings? Does your team come together and accomplish absolutely nothing? Do you do all the talking, accompanied only by a soundtrack of snoring and the tap-tap-tap of Palm Pilots?

Meetings are an opportunity, a gift of time together with a group of people to review, plan, discuss, understand and truly communicate with one each other. There is no other time as valuable or profitable as meeting time. Then why do business executives almost unanimously say that they either hate meetings or don’t have them at all?

Dale, civil engineer: “Meetings are a boring revision of current work flow and projects. A complete waste of time.”

Suzanne, linen service: “Meetings, no. I don’t know what to say!”

Donna, bookkeeping service: “We used to but we just got too busy.”

Mark, plumbing contractor: “We argue and we don’t really get anything accomplished.”

Steve, auto parts manufacturer: “People don’t want to come to meetings. They don’t think anything there concerns them.”

Jaime, HR professional: ”These managers are on so many committees that they have no more time for team meetings.”

Imagine a meeting that everyone looks forward to and participates in. If you could communicate with each other in a meaningful, informative, decisive manner, would you see the value of meetings?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to use these top secret rules to create successful meetings.

Secret Rule #1:

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