The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Book Reviews

My book reviews. Fiction, non-fiction and mainly business literature. These are all excellent books, ’cause I never review the books I don’t like.

  • Book review: Feel the fear and do it anyway

    This book is about the fears that we all have in our lives to some degree. Fear of failing. Fear of succeeding. Fear of decisions. Fear of aging, of loss or of helplessness.

    The books basic premise is, that your aim should not be to get rid of your fears. You should feel your fear, but not let it stop you from doing things you really want to do.

    The book describes three levels of fear. The first level is the actual event that you fear – say losing you job. The second level is the deeper fear, triggered by the first level – eg. rejection (if being fired would make you feel rejected). Beneath that on the third level there’s only one fear: The fear that you won’t be able to cope. If you knew in advance that you could take it, there would be nothing to be afraid of. So all fear reduces to fear of not being able to cope.
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  • Book review: Down and out in the magic kingdom

    Cory Doctorow has written his first novel. It’s a science fiction story, set in the Bitchun society about 100 years from now, where the world has turned disneyesque.

    I liked the story, and I loved the neat, far out or just plain weird ideas and concepts. What’s most remarkable about the book though, is that it’s available either in a dead tree version or for free on the net. Yep, you can download the whole book to your PC or palm or just read it in the browser as I did.

  • Book review: The customer comes second

    The title of this book is a deliberate provocation. After endless messages about putting the customer first, Hal Rosenbluth, CEO of Rosenbluth International, says you should “put your people first and watch’em kick butt”. (Rosenbluth International is a world leader in corporate travel management, with over 5.000 people in more than 50 countries).

    The same principle works so well for Southwest Airlines, as described in the book “Nuts!“. And indeed there seems to be many similarities between the approaches taken by Southwest and Rosenbluth, and the results they achieve.

    Both companies enjoy huge financial success. They both lead their markets in quality of service and customer satisfaction. They both have a motivated, caring work force, willing to go very far for their customers, each other and the community. They both care deeply about people, and strive to make work a place where people learn, have fun and grow. They both hire people who have the right personality, and then train them to have the right skill.

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  • Book review: Nuts!

    Nuts!, Southwest Airlines crazy recipe for business and personal success is the story of Southwest Airlines. Lars Pind told me about this book, and I have to agree: It’s a joy to read about a company that values freedom, creativity, people and, yes, love.

    If your driving principles are love and fun, can you still make a profit in todays harsh business world? Well, here’s a few stats on Southwest:

    • They’re the only airline in America who have had a profit every year since 1973
    • They’ve grown from 3 planes and 250 employees in 1973 to 200 planes and 25.000 employees in 2002
    • They service twice as many customers pr. employee as any other airline
    • They have never mass-fired employees
    • They have the highest customer ratings

    So there!
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  • Book review: Getting past no

    The next lot of books arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I speed-read the first one in a couple of hours.

    This book is the sequel to “getting to yes”. The first book outlines the classic techniques for skillful, issue-based negotiations. The sequel, subtitled “Negotiating with difficult people”, presents strategies you can use when the methods from the first book don’t work.

    The book’s only 140 pages long, but well presented, well structured and with lots of illustrative case stories from difficult negotiations. And hey, it’s 6$ at Amazon. Read the two books, if negotiation is a part of your life – and isn’t it always?

  • Book review: Getting to yes

    This is the classic book about negotiating, from way back in 1980. I like the book, because it stresses a positive mode of negotation. A mode that is based on honesty, integrity, fairness and mutual understanding.

    The basic view is, that in a negotiation, the two extreme positions are hard and soft. Hard negotiators are adversaries, soft negotiators want to be friends. And between these two poles stands the principled negotiator, who ses himself and the other side as problem solvers. A very constructive view.
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  • Book review: The fifth miracle

    The ultimate question to science must be “how did the universe come to be?”. After that, I think the central question is “How did we come to be?. How did life come to the earth, and how did life create us?”

    Science has been working on these questions for a relatively short time. Remember that untill the late 19th. century, most people believed that the universe was static and unchanging. That the way things looked now, was they way they always had looked and always would look. Some scientists clung to a steady-state universe up untill the 1960’s.

    The fifth miracle by Paul Davies examines the search for the origin and meaning of life. It is a thorough overview of the scientific theories that are currently being used to explain life on earth.
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  • Book review: The dance of change

    Whew!

    I’ve finally finished Peter Senge’s trilogy on learning organizations. After The fifth discipline and The fifth discipline fieldbook, comes The dance of change: The Challenges of Sustaining Momentum in a Learning Organisation.

    The first book lays the theoretical foundation, and introduces the five disciplines which Peter Senge believes are the key to creating learning organizations. They are personal mastery, systems thinking, shared vision, team learning and mental models. The second book contains practical tips on how to implement each of the five disciplines. By now we’re already past the 1000-page mark.

    The dance of change brings the tally up another 550 pages, and deals with the challenges that all change initiatives in organizations meet. The link between change and learning permeates the book. You can’t turn an organization into a learning organization without changing. Conversely, any strategic change in a company, that doesn’t contain learning in some form is probably doomed. So change is learning and learning is change.
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  • Book review: The living company

    I always thought that the really big companies were immortal. That once an organization attained a certain size, it would last forever, barring some catastrophic event or weird fluke. But it turns out, that the average life span of Fortune 500 companies is under 50 years!

    Arie de Geus pioneered a study at Shell that uncovered this fact, and looked at companies that have lasted a long time, and “The living company: Growth, Learning and Longevity in Business” summarizes the characteristics of these organizations. The most important fact that sets them apart: They are not in business only for the money!

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  • Book review: The cathedral within

    The cathedral within by Bill Shore is about charity. Bill Shore is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength, an organization that supports anti-hunger and anti-poverty efforts worldwide.

    This book strengthened my conviction, that giving is important. Giving something to your community or your world confirms your identity, it strengthens your spirit and creates meaning for both individuals and organizations.
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