Limitless

No Limits: Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity – John C. Maxwell (Center Street)

Think about it; there seems to be no limits to what bestselling author, speaker and coach can bring his ability and focused training skills to. Clearly he delivers the goods on leadership, but he has also trained countless folks on positive thinking, communication, influence, success, team work, growth and relationships.

With his latest book, No Limits: Blow the CAP Off Your Capacity, Maxwell shifts his focus to examine how folks can expand their capacity and drive themselves to even greater success. When you ponder the word capacity it is easy to view it as a measure of our limitations, but Maxwell posits that any limits on your capacity is based on something that we consciously set for ourselves. He makes the persuasive case that by re-working your thinking you can actually grow your capacity in a wide array of areas.

Maxwell has identified seventeen areas for capacity growth ranging from; leadership to attitude and production to partnership. One area that I found particularly useful was the chapter on creative capacity; while my day job is in a creative role, I find that more and more my work with community organizations, leadership coaching and my writing side hustle has taxed my creative energy. Maxwell gave me actionable steps I can put into play to leverage untapped resources in the creative realm.

That was one of the great things about No Limits; while it hangs together well, you can really pick and choose to tap into the very specific nature of areas that you may feel the need to grow your abilities in. As a bonus it’s all delivered in the clear, concise style that has made John Maxwell a go to resource for so many folks.

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.”   

The Conundrum of Innovation

The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game – Andrew Grant and Gaia Grant (Wiley)

Full confession: Since it arrived on my doorstep, I have picked this book up, struggled through some of the concepts it present and put it down. Later I would return, pick it up and put it down. It reached the point where it became a challenge for me to work my way through the book and develop a meaningful review.

As I worked my way through the ups and downs, I finally reached the conclusion that the problem I have, is understanding exactly what innovation really is. Innovation is a word/concept that gets tossed around by all sorts of business folks, but what does it really mean?! Naturally I went where I always go; the dictionary.

Innovation – The action or process of innovating. Really!? Alright, how about this one- change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, breakthrough, modernization. Well that certainly didn’t solve the problem I faced.

So I shifted the focus to what is truly at the root of innovation? Think about the concept of innovation; in the process of “innovating” you are often simultaneously causing obsolescence? Now ask what role does disruption play in the process? How do we find that magical delta between innovation and obsolescence? Are you getting the drift here? The Grants concept of the pace of innovation and the so-called purpose driven route to innovation certainly is a challenging one. Are we innovating just for the sake of innovating and is that really serving the needs or fixing the problems that lead to the desire to innovate.

Not sue I have come up with a helpful review here, other than to say that this book is certainly challenging and thought provoking.

Not So Disruptive

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions and Created Plenty of Controversy – Leigh Gallagher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

There is something just this side of ironic about a business book written about a company that is touted for disruptive to and entire industry. Fortune editor and the books author, Leigh Gallagher gives a nod to that irony in the introduction to the book when she acknowledges that Airbnb founder Brian Chesky intimated at the time she pitched him the idea for the book, that by the time it would go to press, it would be outdated.

So is the nature of the guys and the business profiled in Gallagher’s new book, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions and Created Plenty of Controversy. While the idea is far from groundbreaking, it is the way that the idea was accelerated and the nature of the platform that they built to speed the process that is at the heart of this story.

The disruption really comes down to the selling of two ideas; one that you have space, a spare room, and extra home, or maybe something more unique, so why not monetize that space? And second, wouldn’t you rather have a unique experience or save money the next time you travel. It is certainly not a proposition for everyone, but it is one that seems to have caught fire in some circles.

Gallagher spells out that Chesky and company certainly seem to have a clear vision of the future of their company; expand into areas of the entire travel experience. While that makes sense because the shine may wear off on the initial disruption and results could dwindle; it’s hardly disruptive to offer discounted flights and rental cars. The focus will have to evolve into selling experiences, which may be a tougher market to hack.

Gallagher does a nice job of detailing the companies first decade and spelling out the challenges ahead as it moves into it’s second.   

A Nice Addition to the Go To Library

If Not You, Who? –Cracking the Code of Employee Disengagement – Jill Christensen (Knightsbridge Press)

I have taken on the habit of keeping a strip of Post-It flags while I am reading new business books. Maybe it’s a case of OCD, but I have never really felt that highlighting was a very useful why of truly marking things that I wanted to remember and use in my business. These handy little flags are easy to place the exact line on a specific page that I want to circle back to.

As I review books, I can get a pretty good sense of how good a book is based on the number of flags that dot the outside edge of the book. While I have utilized many of the tactics that Jill Christensen, an employee engagement expert outlines in her new book, If Not You, Who, this concise collection is a great reminder and a useful tool to have within reach on the go to books shelf. One look at the pile of red flags will easily illustrate why what this book teaches, makes so much sense.

If you are struggling with keeping your staff engaged, recruitment and retention of good employees and rewarding and recognizing those folks who make your shop hum, then this book demands your attention. Christensen lays out the statistics, but the fact of the matter is it, is common sense that an engaged workforce can make a huge difference to your bottom line.

Like I said, I have used a lot of this stuff before; while it’s not necessarily groundbreaking, what Christensen succeeds at doing is synthesizing the engagement process under the cover of one easy to read, easy to implement cover. She even spells out action steps at the end of each chapter that boils this stuff down to an easy 1, 2, 3. I found myself implementing the stuff I could do myself right away and then put the team stuff on the agenda to roll out to the larger group.

While Christensen will tell you how to take this on in bit size chunks, she also explain that there is some heavy lifting involved and while the process works, it does take some time. What better reason to get started today do you need?

Revelation: Men and Women Are Different!

Own It: The Power of Women at Work – Sallie Krawcheck (Crown Business)

Sallie Krawcheck, the current co-founder and CEO of Ellevest, a self-described “innovative digital investment platform” to help women reach their financial goals, draws on her years of Wall Street experience in high level, high profile positions with the likes of Smith Barney, Merill Lynch Wealth Management and Citigroup to detail a career playbook that helps women to shift the paradigm and changes the rules for workplace success.

In, Own It: The Power of Women at Work, Krawcheck posits the stunning revelation…wait for it…wait for it…that men and women are different! Shocking right? Krawcheck delves a little deeper into this thought process when she gives women permission to be different. Now that may seem a bit silly, but think about it; more often than not for women to advance and move forward in the corporate world they get sold on the idea that in order to succeed women basically have to become men!

Krawcheck makes her case be clearly defining exactly how men and women are different and why that is definitely not a bad thing! She outlines the strengths that women bring to the workplace and how by playing on those strengths and not co-opting themselves, both women and the companies they work for will benefit and grow in the long run.

This might be viewed by some as radically different thinking, but it actually makes perfect sense. Have you ever been in a work environment where cookie cutter thinking is the order of the day? A place where they seem to punch folks out of the same mold, with the same skillsets and the same thinking process? Not much in the way of creativity and innovative thinking going on there.

While Own It is supposed to be directed at women, there are probably more than a handful of men who would benefit from this mold breaking thought process.