An outstanding performance playbook.
A debut business book offers advice from business leaders and athletes on achieving peak performance.
There is an elegant simplicity to this work that belies its depth. Beneath the surface of what seems to be a straightforward guide relying on an acronym is rich content deserving of serious consideration. Gillette’s own intriguing experiences as an endurance athlete, coupled with words of wisdom from over 100 fascinating people, make for compelling reading. The author’s credentials as a past human resources professional and current performance coach add to the volume’s veracity. The book is divided into five “pillars,” four of which are represented by the acronym EPIC (“Envision, Plan, Iterate, Collaborate”); the fifth one is “Perform.” Each pillar is succinctly summarized at the beginning by Gillette, who also helpfully includes synonyms, such as Dream and Conceptualize for Envision. Each pillar comprises three chapters, or “behaviors.” This structure cleverly provides continuity across the pillars, and it enhances the readability by breaking the text into manageable bites. Chapters are equally consistent; each one starts with a relevant quotation and ends with “Questions To Ask Yourself” and “Exercises,” helping readers to engage with the material and maintain focus. The author often refers to his remarkable athletic challenges—such as running races that were hundreds of miles—using them metaphorically to relate to personal and business leadership. These anecdotes are integrated with descriptions of business leaders’ challenges as well as their observations, all nicely fitting into the appropriate pillar. The Iterate pillar is particularly absorbing because it focuses on “trying, failing, tweaking, and trying again until you get it more right and then moving on.” The counsel conveyed in this section is especially valuable, including “Practicing when it doesn’t matter pays dividends when it does matter”; “You get what you inspect, not what you expect”; and “Big problems are easy to see but hard to fix, while little problems are hard to see but easy to fix.” These are a few examples of the meaningful, memorable lines that frequently appear in the work and should resonate with any high achiever.
An outstanding performance playbook.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63755-217-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.
A program of cash-management techniques for aspiring entrepreneurs, aimed at a minority readership.
At the beginning of this business book, Mariga reflects on the birth of her daughter, Florence, and on the depressing prospect of returning to her corporate job and missing some of her baby’s early moments. She realized that she “wanted to show Florence…that I could, that she could, that anyone could be anything they wanted to be in this world.” To that end, she wanted to start her own business, and she “wanted to help entrepreneurs build successful businesses that provide opportunities for others.” In a sentiment reflected by others she’s interviewed, she says that she wanted to strengthen her family legacy, so she founded her own accounting firm. She paints a vivid picture of the hardscrabble early days of other minority business owners like herself, the child of an African American mother and a Chinese father who also had a family accounting business. She and others were “all hustling to acquire clients and build our businesses…and most of us had absolutely nothing to show for it.” She was inspired by Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First money management system, and the bulk of her book is devoted to an explanation of how to make this system work for minority business enterprises. (Michalowicz provides a foreword to the book.) One of the primary goals of Profit First is to build “a self-sustaining, debt-free company,” so a large part of Mariga’s work deals with the details of managing finances, building and abiding by budgets, and handling the swings of emotion that occur every step of the way. As sharply focused as these insights are, the author’s recollections of her own experiences are more rewarding, as when she tells readers of her brief time as a cut-rate accountant and learning that it was a mistake to try to compete on price. These stories, as well as financing specifics and clear encouragements (“Small changes and adjustments accumulate. Over time, they will lead you to your goal”), will make this book invaluable to entrepreneurs of all kinds.
A vigorous and highly readable plan for building the finances of a new business.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7357759-0-6
Page Count: 230
Publisher: The Avant-Garde Project, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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