You know the drill: Out of these four titles, we want to know which business book YOU want us to summarize in May. Voting concludes Friday, April 5th at 11.59pm EST.
<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/7007333/">What business book do you want us to summarize next?</a>
1. Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want by Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni
Study after study confirms that career development is the single most powerful tool managers have for driving retention, engagement, productivity, and results. Nevertheless, it’s frequently back-burnered. When asked why, managers say the number one reason is that they just don’t have time—for the meetings, the forms, the administrative hoops.
But there’s a better way. And it’s surprisingly simple: frequent short conversations with employees about their career goals and options integrated seamlessly into the normal course of business. Beverly Kaye, coauthor of the bestselling Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, and Julie Winkle Giulioni identify three broad types of conversations that will increase employees’ awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and interests; point out where their organization and their industry are headed; and help them pull all of that together to design their own up-to-the-minute, personalized career plans.
2. Organizational Culture Change: Unleashing your Organization’s Potential in Circles of 10 by Marcelle Bremer
Culture, leadership and the ability to change determine organizational performance… But 75% of organizational change programs fail – being too conceptual, organization-wide and command-and-control like. That’s why change consultant Marcella Bremer developed this pragmatic approach to organizational culture, change and leadership. The starting point is the validated Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument based on the Competing Values Framework by professors Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn. Next, Bremer shows how to engage people in OCAI-workshops or Change Circles. In peer groups of 10 coworkers they develop a change plan for their teams that is also personal and focused on specific behaviors. These Change Circles of 10 use the mechanism of “Copy, Coach and Correct” within groups to help organization members to implement the change and develop those behaviors that will make a difference. This book is a pragmatic user’s guide to organizational culture change. Learn the best practices from a change consultant and unleash your organization, too!
3. Saving the World at Work: What Companies and Individuals Can Do to Go Beyond Making a Profit to Making a Difference by Tim Sanders
How? Through simple acts of leadership and compassion. Open up this book and discover the true stories of people whose actions have caused a chain reaction at work and in their communities. Among them: A manager who gives an employee some supportive praise, and as a result literally saves his life (page 229). A sales manager who gets a copy of a groundbreaking book that leads to a transformation of the company’s operations. As a result, hundreds of millions of pounds of carpet waste avoid the landfill, and the company sparks a revolution in its industry (page 12).
4. You Are What You Choose: The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions by Scott De Marchi
Several recent books, from Blink to Freakonomics to Predictably Irrational, have examined how people make choices. But none explain why different people have such different styles of decision making-and why those styles seem consistent across many contexts. For instance, why is a gambler always a gambler, whether at work, on the highway, or in a voting booth?
Scott de Marchi and James T. Hamilton present a new theory about how we decide, based on an extensive survey of more than thirty thousand subjects. They show that each of us possesses six core traits that shape every decision, from what to have for lunch to where to invest. We go with “the usual” way of deciding whenever there’s a trade-off between current and future happiness, when facing the risk of a bad outcome, or when a choice might hurt other people. We’re also consistent about how much information we want and how much we care about the opinions of others.
Readers can determine their own decision-making profile with a test in the book. Once they understand the six core traits, they’ll have a big advantage in their marketing campaigns, management strategies, investments, and many other contexts.
