The Bitch is Back

Boss Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Take Charge of Your Career – Nicole Lapin (Crown Business)

With her first book, Rich Bitch bestselling author, television host and finance guru Nicole Lapin helped you get your financial house in order. Now she is back with a new book to help you get your career on the right track and help you make some informed choices when it comes to what direction you choose to take when it comes to life and work.

In Boss Bitch: A Simple 12-Step Plan to Take Charge of Your Career, Lapin avoids the tried and true resume building and doles out advice in three categories:

• ·       Section one – figuring out the career path you want to take; this one is short (20 pages) and to the point and helps build the foundation you will work from.
• ·       Section two – boils down to how to “act” like the boss in your chosen field…even if you don’t have the title. No this isn’t about being bossy, it’s about developing a take charge attitude; branding and pitching yourself, interview skills, goal development that keeps you on track and how to look the part. These are a solid mix of hard and soft skills that aren’t often taught.
• ·       Section three – how to be the boss of your own business if you choose that path. Lapin offers the right insights into how to identify the business that’s right for you and even how to get the ball rolling even when you’re not necessarily ready to make the full-time leap. She hits a home run with her advice about what it takes to truly make your side hustle work and the commitment you need to be successful.

While Lapin’s often gruff and gritty style; hard to believe some of the stuff that comes out of this nice young lady’s mouth, may put some people off, but, I think she brings a no nonsense approach that delivers a reality based punch to the advice she doles out.

The bottom line is you won’t need an MBA to understand the knowledge Lapin imparts; it’s practical and actionable. If you’re pondering a side hustle or started one that it stalled out, then I suggest that you focus on section three of Bitch Boss and get your shit on track.

Agile Business: Nothing Finishes, Where it Starts

Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously – Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden – (Harvard Business Review)

I have become fond of saying “nothing finishes where it starts.” While that may seems a bit self-evident, think about it; how often have you seen business or leaders set out on a path to developing something and then the unexpected or unanticipated comes along. How often have you seen examples of a “leader” not well equipped to handle or lead change gets rooted to the original idea, either doesn’t or refuses to adapt based on the challenge and dooms a business or idea to failure?

It happens far too often that these leaders fall in love with an idea and can’t take the steps necessary to see it evolve. “Nothing finishes where it starts” change is inevitable and often necessary. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden have offered a great overview of how leaders can be well prepared to not only navigate changes, but expect it and react in their latest book, Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously.

Gothelf and Seiden illustrate how nimble businesses and leaders are like the Tom Brady of their team; rather than reading and reacting to the defensive scheme they see, they read and react to their customers. But rather than being reactionary, great leaders can anticipate what their customer’s needs might be and how they and their businesses can develop new products and services to meet those needs.

Gothelf and Seiden deliver real world examples of how businesses/leaders have set in place the tools and resources to become more intuitive to customer needs and respond quickly to deliver those new services and products and continually grow the business. Will businesses who set up this kind of model always hit home runs or to stick with the football analogy hit the long bomb? The answer is easy; “nothing finishes where it starts.”