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THE BOTTOM LINE by Michael Contento

THE BOTTOM LINE

What You Need for Success in Business, Leadership, and Life

by Michael Contento

Pub Date: Nov. 18th, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-228-84216-3
Publisher: Tellwell Talent

A wide-ranging guide focuses on the basics of business and life.

A great number of business-oriented self-help books, Contento notes at the beginning of his own work, tend to aim advice at the small percentage of managers who have already figured out the fundamentals of corporate culture and advancement. He intends his own manual to address the great majority of people who perhaps haven’t grasped quite so much. His guide, he contends, is not only for managers who have become indifferent or burned out, but also for the unemployed adolescent dreaming of success and the recent business graduate looking for a job. The precepts he lays out for such readers are the opposite of the multilayered complexity that’s common in other business motivation books—he believes that the key to success in business and life is to “deliver simplicity.” He proceeds to apply this basic idea to many different practical aspects of working life, always keeping things very direct and straightforward. “Success is positive; failure is negative. Simplicity is positive; complexity is negative,” he writes in one such passage. “Your job is to be positive and to deliver simplicity. By telling your boss you ‘can’t’ do something, you’re introducing complexity into her life.” He gives in-depth coverage to subjects that many of his readers may mistakenly consider obvious or self-evident, things like productivity, mentoring, networking, and punctuality. Contento is a very engaging writer, and he rounds off each of his fast-paced chapters with convenient summaries. His decision to stir in ample stories from his own experiences adds a palpable sense of unguarded authenticity to what are, after all, reductively simple observations about personal responsibility. Readers need not be planning careers as entrepreneurs to find a great many worthwhile reminders in these pages.

A likable and engagingly presented program for simplifying approaches to life.