Catching up on my reading this week while on vacation, and thought I’d share a few thoughts about the books I’ve been reading.  The first book I knocked out was an easy reading business fable that I found very well suited to the modern workplace.  It’s a book all about people and how management by the numbers just doesn’t cut it – and hasn’t cut it for well over 100 years. 

“Instant Turnaround!  Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard” by Harry Paul and Ross Beck

I’m always on the lookout for books that focus on people as part of the business process — after all, you can’t have any type of successful business if your people are the last thought on your mind. In "Instant Turnaround!" the author walks us through a very easy to read fable about how focusing on the people in your company can have dramatic effects on performance and the bottom line. Through a fictional setup he walks us through a company that goes from an atmosphere of pure dread to work at to one where the employees and the CEO actually know each others name — and productivity soars.

This is the type of book every manager, supervisor and CEO should have tucked away for an easy read on their next plane trip. It’s such basic principles — focus on your people, take an interest in their lives and their work, and don’t be afraid to admit you are wrong — that you probably have heard them a thousand times already. If so, then as the author points out, why haven’t you acted on them and started putting some of them into practice?

Books like this are written for executives who have had enough of the old way of doing things and want to bring about change. They want to run their company with all the excitement they had when they were 21 again instead of acting like an 79 year old dictator from some 3rd world country.

It’s such an easy read and is packed with so many ideas and notes that there is only one question left — what’s your excuse for not reading it?

Tags: book review, business, leadership, work