Type Talk at Work or Quiet Leadership

Type Talk at Work: How the 16 Personality Types Determine Your Success on the Job

Author: Otto Kroeger

Determine your personality using a scientifically validated method based on the work of C.G. Jung and gain insight into why others behave the way they do, and why you are the person you are.

Library Journal

Written by noted consultant Kroeger and his colleagues, this entertaining and informative volume is aimed at anyone trying to navigate the challenging social setting of the workplace. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) on which it is based was originally developed by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers Briggs, who drew on the work of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. This method has been widely used as a tool in both education and business. Originally published in 1988 and now fully revised and updated, the book is designed to help readers identify their own type and gain insight into the learning and operating styles of their colleagues. Its three sections are an introduction to typewatching (determining types), putting typewatching to work (leadership, team building, and conflict resolution), and understanding the 16 type profiles. A self-help book sure to be popular with readers, it will appeal to those who want to go a step beyond horoscopes to succeed in their careers. Recommended for self-help and popular business collections in public libraries and for academic libraries that collect in management consulting. Rona Ostrow, Lehman Coll. Lib., CUNY, Bronx Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The authors have followed up their Type Talk (Delacorte, 1988), an introduction to the study of personality types, with this handy explanation of how we can better understand personalities in the workplace. Based on C.G. Jung's classic 1923 Psychological Types and the famous Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), this useful work makes common sense out of a complex idea, and the pragmatic workplace meaning of ``typewatching'' should strongly appeal to managers and human resource professionals. The 16 types are explained and are then related to real workplace issues such as problem solving, managing time, setting goals, managing stress, and other understandable applications in business. Millions of people have completed Myers-Briggs, and now we have a very accessible application in business of this fascinating field of study. Recommended for all libraries. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/91.-- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.

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Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work

Author: David Rock

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?" Supported by the latest groundbreaking research, Quiet Leadership provides a brain-based approach that will help busy leaders, executives, and managers improve their own and their colleagues' performance. Rock offers a practical, six-step guide to making permanent workplace performance change by unleashing higher productivity, new levels of morale, and greater job satisfaction.

Publishers Weekly

A leader's job "should be to help people make their own connections," Rock asserts-a commonsense message he overcomplicates in this guide for executives and managers who want to improve employee performance. Rock, CEO of Results Coaching System, strives to legitimize his methodology with neuroscience, acronyms and catchphrases and gratuitous, Powerpointesque illustrations. But his writing style conflicts with his advice-keep it succinct and focused. Promising that his approach "saves time and creates energy," he details his six steps: "Think About Thinking" (let people think things through without telling them what to do, while remaining "solutions-focused"); "Listen for Potential" (be a sounding board for employees); "Speak with Intent" (clarify and streamline conversation); "Dance Toward Insight" (communicate in ways that promote other people's insights); "CREATE New Thinking" (which stands for Current Reality, Explore Alternatives and Tap Their Energy, an acronym about "helping people turn their insights into habits"); and, finally, "Follow Up" to ensure ongoing improved performance. Rock also explains how to apply the steps to problem solving, decision making and giving feedback. Perhaps Rock conveys his strategies more effectively in a seminar setting, but for busy executives, this guide (after Personal Best) is more likely to generate frustration than an " `aha' moment." (Apr.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

From the title, this work sounds subdued. But Rock (CEO, Results Coaching Systems; Personal Best) actually grounds his ideas in dynamic discoveries about how the human brain works. Typical management approaches to changing behavior fail to account for the surprising differences in how each person processes information and solves problems. Rock suggests that it's far more effective to build new neural pathways to learn new habits than to deconstruct old ones. Transforming performance involves listening and communicating in more positive and effective ways. The ultimate goal of quiet leadership is to empower employees to think and solve problems for themselves. This highly practical guide includes exercises for each major concept introduced, giving readers a chance to practice what they've learned. A brief bibliography highlights research for further reading. Recommended for public library business collections. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Advanced Guide to Real Estate Investing or Tippecanoe and Tyler Too

Advanced Guide to Real Estate Investing: How to Identify the Hottest Markets and Secure the Best Deals

Author: Ken McElroy

If you're interested in real estate investing, you may have noticed notice the lack of coverage it gets in mainstream financial media, while stocks, bonds, and mutual funds are consistently touted as the safest and most profitable ways to invest. According to real estate guru Ken McElroy, that's because financial publications, tv and radio programs make the bulk of their money from advertising paid for by the very companies who provide such mainstream financial services. On the other hand, real estate investment is something you can do on your own--without a large amount of money up front! Picking up where left off in the bestselling The ABC's of Real Estate Investing, McElroy reveals the next essential lessons and information that no serious investor can afford to miss. Building on the foundation of real estate investment 101, McElroy tells readers:

• How to think--and operate--like a real estate mogul
  
• "The Top Ten Real Estate Markets to Watch"
  
• How to identify and close expert deals
  
• Why multifamily housing is the best real estate investment out there
  
• How to surround yourself with a team that will help maximize your money
  
• How to avoid paying thousands in taxes by structuring property sales wisely
  
• Important projections about the future of real estate investment


• And more.

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Tippecanoe and Tyler Too: Famous Slogans and Catchphrases in American History

Author: Jan R Van Meter

“By necessity, by proclivity, by delight,” Ralph Waldo Emerson said in 1876, “we all quote.” But often the phrases that fall most readily from our collective lips—like “fire when ready,”  “speak softly and carry a big stick,” or “nice guys finish last”—are those whose origins and true meanings we have ceased to consider. Restoring three-dimensionality to more than fifty of these American sayings, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too turns clichés back into history by telling the life stories of the words that have served as our most powerful battle cries, rallying points, laments, and inspirations.
In individual entries on slogans and catchphrases from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth century, Jan Van Meter reveals that each one is a living, malleable entity that has profoundly shaped and continues to influence our public culture. From John Winthrop’s “We shall be as a city upon a hill” and the 1840 Log Cabin Campaign’s “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” and Ronald Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” each of Van Meter’s selections emerges as a memory device for a larger political or cultural story.  So the next time we hear or see one of these verbal symbols used to sell a product, illustrate a point, make a joke, reshape a current cause, or resuscitate a forgotten ideal, we will finally be equipped to understand its broader role as a key source of the values we continue to share and fight about. Taken together in Van Meter’s able hands, these famous slogansand catchphrases give voice to our common history even as we argue about where it should lead us.

Michael O. Eshleman - Library Journal

That the LC subject headings use miscellanea six times in this book's CIP data shows its neither-fish-nor-fowl nature. Van Meter, a retired public relations executive, examines five dozen phrases, most historical ("fifty-four forty or fight!") but some from sports and pop culture ("say it ain't so, Joe!"). Yet the book isn't about the slogans themselves, their origins or their legacy; they are an excuse to walk through American history. "The buck stops here" provides the life of Harry Truman, and "old soldiers never die" gives the story of the Korean War. It is as if Van Meter is writing for an audience completely ignorant of history. He also ignores how some phrases, such as "Give me liberty or give me death," first appeared decades after they were supposed to have been uttered, akin to Parson Weems's story about Washington and the cherry tree. Librarians should instead be sure to have Ralph Keye's scholarly and broader The Quote Verifier, which is focused on the words and their origins.

Agile Project Management with Scrum or Investment Biker

Agile Project Management with Scrum

Author: Ken Schwaber

Apply the principles of Scrum, one of the most popular agile programming methods, to software project management-and focus your team on delivering real business value. Author Ken Schwaber, a leader in the agile process movement and a co-creator of Scrum, brings his vast expertise to helping you guide the product and software development process more effectively and efficiently. Help eliminate the ambiguity into which so many software projects are borne, where vision and planning documents are essentially thrown over the wall to developers. This high-level reference describes how to use Scrum to manage complex technology projects in detail, combining expert insights with examples and case studies based on Scrum. Emphasizing practice over theory, this book explores every aspect of using Scrum, focusing on driving projects for maximum return on investment.

Table of Contents:

	Foreword
	Foreword
	Acknowledgments
	Introduction
1	Backdrop: The Science of Scrum	1
2	New Management Responsibilities	15
3	The ScrumMaster	25
4	Bringing Order from Chaos	37
5	The Product Owner	53
6	Planning a Scrum Project	67
7	Project Reporting - Keeping Everything Visible	83
8	The Team	101
9	Scaling Projects Using Scrum	119
	A: Rules	133
	B: Definitions	141
	C: Resources	145
	D: Fixed-Price, Fixed-Date Contracts	147
	E: Capability Maturity Model (CMM)	151
	Index	155

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Investment Biker: Around the World with Jim Rogers

Author: Jim Rogers

Legendary investor Jim Rogers gives us his view of the world on a twenty-two-month, fifty-two-country motorcycle odyssey in his bestselling business/adventure book, Investment Biker, which has already sold more than 200,000 copies.
Before you invest another dollar anywhere in the world (including the United States), read this book by the man Time magazine calls “the Indiana Jones of finance.”
Jim Rogers became a Wall Street legend when he co-founded the Quantum Fund. Investment Biker is the fascinating story of Rogers’s global motorcycle journey/investing trip, with hardheaded advice on the current state and future direction of international economies that will guide and inspire investors interested in foreign markets.

Author Biography:

The E Myth Revisited or The Little Book That Builds Wealth

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do about It

Author: Michael E Gerber

In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business -- from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed -- and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

Library Journal

Indicating that 40 percent of small businesses fail within their first year, Gerber, a small business expert, talks about how to be successful. In this revision of his 1986 book, he describes the "E-Myth," which basically states that a person with technical but few management skills can do well in business. Gerber describes developing a precise business system that produces consistent results because it has been tested and refined. He says that businesses thrive because of innovation, quantification, and orchestration. Visualize what is true success to you as a person, Gerber advises, and work from the ideal to the specific. While the author is a consumate salesman who reads his material in soothing tones, he offers too many abstract ideas and too few concrete plans. There is little useful content here.
-- Mark Guyer, Stark City District Library, Canton, Ohio

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Foreword
	Introduction	1
Pt. I	The E-Myth and American Small Business	7
Ch. 1	The Entrepreneurial Myth	9
Ch. 2	The Entrepreneur, the Manager, and the Technician	19
Ch. 3	Infancy: The Technician's Phase	34
Ch. 4	Adolescence: Getting Some Help	43
Ch. 5	Beyond the Comfort Zone	51
Ch. 6	Maturity and the Entrepreneurial Perspective	68
Pt. II	The Turn-Key Revolution: A New View of Business	77
Ch. 7	The Turn-Key Revolution	79
Ch. 8	The Franchise Prototype	91
Ch. 9	Working On Your Business, Not In It	97
Pt. III	Building a Small Business That Works!	115
Ch. 10	The Business Development Process	117
Ch. 11	Your Business Development Program	134
Ch. 12	Your Primary Aim	136
Ch. 13	Your Strategic Objective	149
Ch. 14	Your Organizational Strategy	166
Ch. 15	Your Management Strategy	187
Ch. 16	Your People Strategy	197
Ch. 17	Your Marketing Strategy	218
Ch. 18	Your Systems Strategy	234
Ch. 19	A Letter to Sarah	253
	Epilogue: Bringing the Dream Back to American Small Business	259
	Afterword: Taking the First Step	267

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The Little Book That Builds Wealth: The Knockout Formula for Finding Great Investments

Author: Pat Dorsey

To make money in today's dynamic market environment, you need to invest in companies that will perform in the face of sustained competitive pressure. But how can you accurately identify companies that are great today and likely to remain great for many years to come?

The answer to this question lies in competitive advantages, or economic moats. Just as moats were dug around medieval castles to keep the opposition at bay, economic moats protect the high returns on capital enjoyed by the world’s best companies. If you can identify companies that have moats, and you can purchase their shares at reasonable prices, you’ll begin to build a portfolio of solid businesses that will improve your odds of doing well in the stock market.

In The Little Book That Builds Wealth, author Pat Dorsey—the Director of Equity Research for leading independent investment research provider Morningstar, Inc.—outlines this proven approach and reveals how you can effectively apply it to your own investments. Step by step, Dorsey discusses why economic moats are such strong indicators of great long-term investments and examines four of their most common sources: intangible assets, cost advantages, customer-switching costs, and network economics. After establishing a firm understanding of moats, Dorsey shows you how to recognize moats that are eroding, the key role that industry structure plays in creating competitive advantage, and how management can create (as well as destroy) moats.

Along the way, Dorsey provides an informative overview of valuation—because even a wide-moat company will be a poor investment if you pay too much forits shares—and illustrates the issues addressed through case studies that apply competitive analysis to some well-known companies.

Although the moat concept is not a new one—it was made famous by Warren Buffett—the modern-day investor can benefit from what it has to offer. With The Little Book That Builds Wealth as your guide, you’ll quickly discover why moats should be an integral part of your analytical investment toolkit and learn how to leverage this approach to build a portfolio of high-performance stocks.

Pat Dorsey, CFA (Chicago, IL) is Director of Equity Research at Morningstar, Inc. He played an integral part in the development of the Morningstar Rating™ for stocks, as well as Morningstar’s economic moat ratings. Dorsey is also the author of The Five Rules for Successful Stock Investing: Morningstar's Guide to Building Wealth and Winning in the Market (Wiley). He holds a master’s degree in political science from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in government from Wesleyan University. Please visit findingmoats.com.

Six Disciplines Execution Revolution or Legend of Colton H Bryant

Six Disciplines Execution Revolution: Solving the One Business Problem that Makes Solving All Other Problems Easier

Author: Gary Harpst

With all of the pressures successful business leaders have today, none is more urgent or challenging than learning to execute strategy.

While larger businesses have always had the luxury of budgets and resources to meet this challenge, small and midsized businesses now have a tremendous opportunity to level the playing field and leapfrog past the expensive, outdated approaches of the past. Today, they can attack the challenge of execution in a revolutionary way.

Based on breakthrough research, field testing, and proven best-practices, the vision described by Gary Harpst in Six Disciplines Execution Revolution sets a new course for how small and midsized businesses can finally confront the never-ending challenge of planning and executing strategy.

About the Author:
Gary Harpst, a highly successful entrepreneur and CEO, spent twenty years as the leader of Solomon Software, which implemented more than 60,000 business management systems in small and midsized businesses, across almost every industry imaginable, before it was sold to Great Plains and eventually Microsoft

Table of Contents:

Introduction     1
Business Excellence     5
The Biggest Problem in Business     23
Why Is It So Difficult?     33
The Leapfrog Opportunity     43
Requirements for a Next-Generation Program     63
The First Complete Strategy Execution Program     77
A Repeatable Methodology     91
Accountability Coaching     103
An Execution System     121
Community Learning     141
Make Solving All Other Problems Easier     157
An Enduring Pursuit     165
Final Thoughts     179
Notes     181
Resources     185
Index     189
Acknowledgements     192
About the Author     193
Ready to Join The Revolution?     196

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Legend of Colton H. Bryant

Author: Alexandra Fuller

From the bestselling author of Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, the unforgettable true story of a boy who comes of age in the oil-fields and open plains of Wyoming; a heartrending story of the human spirit that lays bare where it is that wisdom truly resides

Colton H. Bryant was one of Wyoming's native sons and grown by that high, dry place, he never once wanted to leave it. "Wyoming loves me," he said, and it was true. Wyoming—roughneck, wild, open, and searingly beautiful— loved him, and Colton loved it back. As a child in school, Colton never could force himself to focus on his lessons. Instead, he'd plan where he'd go fishing later, or he'd wonder how many jackrabbits he might find on his favorite hunting patch, or he'd dream about the rides he would take on the wild mare he was breaking. "At my funeral, you'll all feel sorry for making me waste so much time in school," he said to his best friend Jake—and it was true.

Two things got Colton through the boredom of school and the neighborhood "K-mart cowboys" who bullied him: His best friend Jake and his favorite mantra, a snatch of a saying he heard on TV: Mind over matter—which meant to him: If you don't mind, it don't matter. Colton and Jake grew up wanting nothing more than the freedom to sleep out under the great Wyoming night sky, to hunt and fish and chase the horizon and to be just like Colton's dad, a strong and gentle man of few words. When it was time for Colton to marry and make money on his own, he took up as a hand on an oil rig. It was dangerous work, but Colton was the third generation in his family to work on the oil patch and heclaimed it was in his blood. And anyway, he joked, he always knew he'd die young.

Colton did die young, and he died on the rig—falling to his death because the drilling company had neglected to spend two thousand dollars on the mandated safety rails that would have saved his life. His family received no compensation. But they didn't expect to—they knew the company's ways, and after all as Colton would have said: Mind over matter.

In Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller brought us the examined life of a Rhodesian soldier; now—in her inimitable poetic voice and with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue— she brings before us the life of someone much closer to home, as unexpected as he is iconic. The moving, tough, and in many ways quintessentially American story of Colton H. Bryant's life could not be told without also telling the story of the land that grew him—the beautiful and somehow tragic Wyoming; the land where there are still such things as cowboys roaming the plains, where it's relationships that get you through, and where a just, soulful, passionate man named Colton H. Bryant lived and died.

The Washington Post - Carolyn See

At first it would seem that The Legend of Colton H. Bryant marks an extraordinary change of pace for accomplished writer Alexandra Fuller, whose earlier books, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Scribbling the Cat, are detailed, realistic narratives, both set in Africa, in some of its most inhospitable climes and dire circumstances. The Legend of Colton H. Bryant is set in Wyoming (where Fuller now resides with her husband and children). It is short, incantatory and, although true, cast as a fable, a story of why-things-are-the-way-they-are, a little like Rudyard Kipling's "How the Leopard Got His Spots." But this short "legend" has a great deal in common with the African books. They all concern men who fall helplessly in love with impossible landscapes and hopeless situations. Something within them connects to the hard times outside them, and that connection increases in strength until it snaps.

Publishers Weekly

Fuller, author of the bestselling Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, narrates the tragically short life of Colton H. Bryant, a Wyoming roughneck in his mid-20s who in 2006 fell to his death on an oil rig owned by Patterson-UTI Energy. A Wyoming resident herself since 1994, Fuller is expert in evoking the stark landscape and recreating the speech and mentality of her adopted state's native sons. Along the way, she sheds light on the tough, unpredictable lives of Wyoming's oilmen and the toll exacted on their families. Though the book is wonderfully poignant and poetic and reads more like a novel than biography, Fuller acknowledges that she has taken narrative liberties, composed dialogue, disregarded certain aspects of Colton's life and occasionally juggled chronology "to create a smoother story line," leading readers to wonder what is true and what invented for dramatic purposes. As such, it is difficult to assess Fuller's simplistic conclusion that the company's drive to cut costs killed the young man, though she is right to highlight the strikingly high number of fatalities in the industry. As a touching portrait of a life cut short and a perceptive immersion in the environment that nurtures such men, Fuller's volume excels, but in terms of absolute veracity it should be read with caution. (May 6)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

A lyrical paean to an unsung . . . well, not exactly hero, but one of life's unsung people. If this book were a country song, it would be by Merle Haggard. Whether British-born Fuller (Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier, 2004, etc.) knows from Haggard is a matter of speculation, but what is clear is that she has an unfailing eye for common people caught up in uncommon events. This story of a young Wyomingite named Colton H. Bryant is also that of the oil and gas boom wrought by deregulation in these rapacious years of Bush, "a tragedy before it even starts because there was never a way for anyone to win against all the odds out here." Alternately bullied and ignored-"Retard" is a slur-cum-nickname that figures often in these pages-Colton did most of the things a young man in the heavily Mormon southwestern corner of the state is supposed to do: ride and rope, fish and hunt, cruise around in pickup trucks. Moreover, like young men in Evanston, Colton "was born with horses and oil in his blood like his father before him and his grandfather before that and maybe his grandfather's father before that." Having endured adolescence thanks to a good friend named Jake and a slightly misquoted creed borrowed from television ("Mind over matter"), Colton followed the second birthright to the oil patch, where he quickly found work as a roughneck, an unforgiving job. "They have to keep drilling hour after hour--storm, heat, sleet, ice, sun--no matter what," writes Fuller. "They'll slap another beating heart on the rig to take your place if you're so much as five minutes late." Diligent and aware of the dangers, but needing to support a wife and baby, he fell into the well, as so manyothers have, just one of 35 Wyomingites to die on the rigs between 2000 and 2006. The petroleum company, in the meanwhile, boasted record profits-while Colton's family "received no compensation for his loss."A latter-day Silkwood, quiet and understated, beautifully written, speaking volumes about the priorities of the age.