It’s not because I love book lists or what they’re selling at the SHRM store. No, I love the annual SHRM store conference book list because it gives me an opportunity to see yet again how the people at SHRM who put out this list can continue to water down what was once a useful comparative tool and muck it up by not ranking the annual best-sellers and by also throwing in stuff like top-selling software and videos. (Videos? Did they miss the move to DVD?)
My guess is that they do it because they don’t like lists that allow readers to compare and contrast what people are reading from one year to the next, and perhaps make a few assumptions and draw some conclusions.
That’s probably why SHRM has watered down the summer list of best-sellers from the annual conference, although this year they’ve removed the caveat from last summer (these are “just some of the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories at this year’s Annual Conference”) and now simply say that they are listing “the top-selling books, software, videos and accessories from this year’s Annual Conference SHRMStore in New Orleans, LA.”
So, I present here again this year, without further comment, the best-sellers at the SHRM bookstore from the recent conference. And, as I always say, you can tell a lot by the books a person buys. If you agree, what does this list of the top-selling books purchased at last month’s SHRM New Orleans tell you about the HR profession during the summer of the Great Recession?
Who’s Got Your Back: The Breakthrough Program to Build Deep, Trusting Relationships That Create Success—and Won’t Let You Fail, by Keith Ferrazzi
101 Tough Conversations to Have With Employees: A Manager’s Guide to Addressing Performance, Conduct and Discipline Challenges, by Paul Falcone
Beyond Reason: Using Emotions as You Negotiate, by Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro
Employee Engagement: Tools for Analysis, Practice, and Competitive Advantage, by William H. Macey, Benjamin Schneider, Karen M. Barbera and Scott A. Young
Never Eat Alone, and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems, by Paul Falcone
Management Courage: Having the Heart of a Lion, by Margaret Morford
The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness, by Dave Ramsey
The Essential Guide to Workplace Investigations: How to Handle Employee Complaints & Problems, by Lisa Guerin
New Employee Orientation Training, by Karen Lawson
Booher’s Rules of Business Grammar: 101 Fast and Easy Ways to Correct the Most Common Errors, by Dianna Booher
How to Deal With Annoying People: What to Do When You Can’t Avoid Them, by Bob Phillips and Kimberly Alyn
Please Sue Me: The Guide to Safe Hiring and Firing Practices for the Frontline Manager With a Short Attention Span, by Hunter Lott
State-by-State Guide to Human Resources Law 2009, by John F. Buckley
Linkage Inc.’s Best Practices in Succession Planning, by Linkage Inc.
Auditing Your Human Resources Department, by John H. McConnell
Egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability), by David Marcum and Steven Smith
The HR Scorecard: Linking People, Strategy, and Performance, by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, and Dave Ulrich
Leave the Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro Shows You How to Do More in Less Time … and Feel Great About It, by Laura Stack
Loyalty Unplugged: How to Get, Keep & Grow All Four Generations, by Adwoa K. Buahene and Giselle Kovary
2600 Phrases for Effective Performance Reviews: Ready-to-Use Words and Phrases That Really Get Results, by Paul Falcone
The Personal Credibility Factor: How to Get It, Keep It, and Get It Back (If You’ve Lost It), by Sandy Allgeier
What If? Short Stories to Spark Diversity Dialogue, by Steve L. Robbins
With summer here, it’s time to get a fix on those books you really want to read this summer. As I said when I served up my first summer reading list back in 2007, if you want to multitask and combine your reading with an opportunity to glean some great management wisdom, here are five books on my summer reading list you might want to add to yours:
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain de Botton. You might not believe it based on this blog, but I have a soft spot in my heart for anything that is philosophical in nature. That’s why I’m intrigued by the premise of this new book by Alain De Bottom: that despite the fact that we spend most of our waking lives at work—in occupations that we often chose at a young age without a great deal of thought—we rarely spend much time asking what our occupations really mean to us. “With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom,“ says the description on Amazon.com, “Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art—in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.” Given our current economic condition, this is a great time to reflect on the nature of work and career, and this seems like a good book to help do that with.
Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell. I’ve heard Gladwell speak several times, and I really enjoyed his earlier books like The Tipping Point and Blink. That’s why I want to make some time to finally get to his latest book with a very strong workforce component to it: why do some people succeed, living remarkably productive and impactful lives, while so many more never reach their potential? That’s certainly a question I want to get the answer to, and Gladwell’s notion about the myth of the “self-made man” and his premise that superstars “are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot” is one that ANYONE who manages people should think about.
The Cost of Bad Behavior: How Incivility Is Damaging Your Business and What to Do About It, by Christine Pearson and Christine Porath. I must say, this looks like a worthy follow-up to Bob Sutton’s The No-Asshole Rule (another book you need to read if you haven’t already). The two Christines examine the toll that bad behavior can have on otherwise well-functioning companies, and they reveal strategies that successful organizations are using to stop incivility before it takes hold. I’m not sure if they have all the answers to this eternal problem, but I’m going to take a read and see what they say.
Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City, by Michael A. Lerner I’m fascinated by Prohibition, mainly because it is an object lesson in how an overzealous minority can push through a law that no one really wants and just about everyone tries to ignore. There are some good workplace issues that come out of that, and how New York coped with Prohibition has got to be fascinating. This is a book that’s been one my nightstand for a year. This summer, I vow to get to it.
The Last Editor, by Jim Bellows. It’s not often you get to read a book about or by someone you worked closely with, and that’s my connection to this autobiography by Jim Bellows. He hired me and was my first editor back at the late, great Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. I learned a lot about life and journalism from watching Jim, and I’m sorry I missed his funeral this spring when he passed away at age 86. A consummate street fighter who loved the challenge of being at the No. 2 operation in town, Bellows developed superstar journalists like Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin as well as generations of guys like me. Plus, Jim was a great editor and sharp businessman who knew how to battle a bigger and better-funded competitor to a standstill—lessons we could all use today.
Got a good workforce book worth reading this summer? Let me know what it is—I’ll list the best suggestions I receive here in a future blog post.
Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
Anyone hoping to read it to see how far HR has come will be disappointed. The times may be changing. HR is not.
The most-discussed issue in HR circles (aside from why everyone hates HR) is whether the human resources function has finally become a full partner in shaping an organization’s business strategy. Sadly, the 2007 survey found little or no change since 1995 in the extent to which HR reports being involved in business strategy, according to Lawler and his co-researcher, John W. Boudreau, both of whom are with the Center for Effective Organizations in the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.
Think of how the business world changed between 1995 and 2007: We had the rise and fall of Enron, and the exposure of compromised executive ethics. We had a dot-com crash and suffered a national security crisis triggered by terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, both of which racked workforces across America. Since 1995, we’ve seen the growth and dominance of the Internet in the workplace, with related technologies that promised to streamline HR record keeping, recruiting, performance management and benefits administration. But despite of all that, and despite all the books, conferences and articles that have told HR it can and should have a strategic focus, it apparently hasn’t happened.
Lawler and Boudreau note few changes in the importance of HR services and the characteristics of an effective HR function. They also find little change in efforts to rotate people into, within and out of HR. This kind of rotation is critical if HR practitioners are to have an understanding of how other parts of the business work, and, if they hope to be well-rounded enough to be considered business partners and possible candidates for a CEO spot someday. Virtually no HR professional has managed to achieve that at a Fortune 500 company. (Xerox’s retiring CEO, Anne Mulcahy, shouldn’t count; she was in HR, having done a three-year tour of duty there, but wasn’t from HR.)
Perhaps the most disappointing stagnation of all can be seen in the amount of time HR spends on rote activities. That hasn’t changed since 1995, when respondents said they spent 15.4 percent of their time maintaining employee records. (In the late 1980s, it was 22.9 percent.) In 2007, the time spent on this non-strategic activity increased to 15.8 percent. Lawler and Boudreau dryly note that respondents “may have perceived more change in their role than has actually taken place. In short, they may be guilty of wishful thinking and a selective memory.”
The same wishfulness can be seen in a question about strategy. Again, the needle barely moved. In 1995, respondents said they spent 21.9 percent of their time in activities associated with being a strategic business partner—being part of the management team, being involved in strategic HR planning and working on organizational design, for example. In 2007, they estimated it to be 25.6 percent of their time. In both instances, they estimated (incorrectly) that they were currently devoting substantially more time to strategy than they had in prior years.
Although the authors mostly maintain a dispassionate and scholarly tone in the book, frustration with the static state of the profession seeps through: “It is almost an understatement to say that the world of business has changed dramatically since 1995. Thus it is surprising, indeed shocking, that how HR spends its time has not. It is perhaps less surprising that HR continues to believe it has changed, even though it has not! But this may be a major problem if it leads to HR executives believing they have made progress toward an objective they feel is important when in fact they haven’t.”
This gets at the heart of HR’s aspirational problem: Its desire to be strategic may be unattainable in the vast majority of organizations. Most companies don’t understand or want strategic HR, the authors say.
“The existing role and activities of HR are well institutionalized in a kind of codependency relationship,” Lawler and Boudreau write. “The individuals in the HR function are comfortable in their current role … the recipients of these services are happy to have an administrative function that removes what they see as onerous HR responsibilities from them.”
Late in the book, Lawler and Boudreau quote a senior HR leader as saying that it is “easier to find an organization that understands and supports strategic HR than to try to change an organization that does not.” That might be the best career advancement strategy yet for serious HR game-changers.
When I was on my first whitewater rafting trip several years ago, one of the safety instructors told us: “Assist in your own rescue.” If you’re thrown out of the raft, in other words, don’t just flail around in a panic—help your team get you back onboard.
Last week, in a bicycle spinning class at my gym, the instructor said that if the exertion was too much or too little at any point, we could dial up or dial down the tension knob that controlled the wheel. “You control your own tension,” she said.
As it turns out, those are the points being made in Positivity by Barbara L. Fredrickson. A professor of psychology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a researcher in the science of positive psychology, Fredrickson says that we all have within us the ability to change our response to the world, to manage our moods and improve not only our relationships, lives and health, but also our workplaces. To some extent, we can even make them more successful, she says.
If you are rolling your eyes right now, I understand. At a time like this, in the face of what could very well be a global depression, it sounds crazy to talk about using meditation and positive thought to effect change. What we really need, you might say, is to get the economy to start thinking positive thoughts.
But I thought Fredrickson might be on to something, so I stuck with her book.
If you’re put off by puffy self-help books, as I am, you can be assured that this is not one of them. It is vehemently anti-smiley face and free of cute illustrations. There is no “Fake it till you make it” philosophy here.
In fact, Fredrickson writes, lab experiments show that people whose positivity was not “heartfelt” had levels of the stress hormone cortisol as high as people who admitted their anger or depression.And such fakery is dangerous. In one study, scientists found that “insincere positivity put [men in the test] in as much coronary danger as did anger. Mountains of research tell us that anger kills. This new discovery suggests that insincere positivity may kill too.”
(That same experiment, by the way, uncovered a “tell” for fake positivity, which you can look for in your next staff meeting, if you’re so inclined. It’s called the “non-enjoyment smile.” The non-enjoyment smile engages the muscles that raise the lips, but doesn’t activate the muscles that circle the eyes.)
Although Positivity is not a workplace book per se, it does have some business applications: Managers with greater positivity are more accurate and careful in making their decisions; they are more effective interpersonally, Fredrickson says, citing research in the field. They “infect their work groups with greater positivity as well, which in turn produces better coordination among team members and reduces the effort needed to get their work done,” she writes.
The book also offers a description of an ongoing experiment among business teams. The high-performing team in the experiment had unusually high positivity ratio—about 6:1 (That means that for every negative statement or interaction, they performed six positive ones). The low-performing team’s ratio was 1:1. The average team came in at 2:1.
Finally, Fredrickson’s book is a tool kit for how to develop your own positivity and get to a 3:1 ratio at which positivity begins to have significant impacts in a person’s life. The book includes both a positivity self-test on paper, and a link to an online version to track whether you’re raising your positivity level: www.PositivityRatio.com.
Fredrickson talks frankly about the limitations of positivity: It won’t keep bad things from happening, she writes, and she offers a pretty harrowing example from her own life. She also describes how she used her field—her own medicine—to cope with her husband’s serious illness.
“As I see it, there are two basic responses to hardship,” she writes. “Despair or hope.” We can either wallow in misery or be buoyed by resilience, a skill that Fredrickson argues can be learned. We can, she says, control our own tension. And assist in our own rescue.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like The 100 Best Business Books of All Time pretty much hits you over the head and says, “Read me!”
I have a surefire way to spot a book like that, and it’s simple: Look to see how the authors feel about Peter Drucker. If you have studied or understand business much at all, you certainly know that Drucker is considered to be the father of modern business management. Any book that purports to be a collection of the greatest business writing ever needs to have something by Drucker. If it doesn’t mention him at all, it’s a good indication that the authors/editors don’t have the foggiest notion of what constitutes great business thinking. You should close the book as quickly as possible.
That’s why I feel I can recommend, with a few reservations, The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Authors Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten’s list includes not one, but two Peter Drucker classics: The Effective Executive and The Essential Drucker (but, oddly enough, not his best and most groundbreaking book, The Practice of Management). Any business book compilation that lists two from Drucker has immediate credibility with me.
There are other pluses, and few minuses, that I found in The 100 Best Business Book of All Time. Some of them include:
Plus: Listing a Dr. Seuss book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, as one of top 100 business books. Some might quibble with this, but that just shows they haven’t actually read much by Dr. Seuss. He’s full of great observations and lessons about both business and life, but I actually think the better Dr. Seuss title in this regard is the underrated but insightful I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew.
Minus: Throwing in not one, but two Marcus Buckingham titles: First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths. Given that Buckingham essentially says the same thing Drucker did about playing to strengths and not weaknesses, why would you read Buckingham when you can get it from the master instead?
Plus: Including such modern titles as The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, Leading Change by John Kotter and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni along with all-time classics such as Dale Carenegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and Winston Churchill’s Never Give In!
Minuses: Missing some great books such as Robert Sutton’s The No Asshole Rule, DisneyWar by James B. Stewart or anything by Harvard professor Michael Porter, who wrote the Five Forces of Strategy and Competitive Advantage (although the authors mentioned some of Porter’s Harvard Business Review articles instead).
Overall, I’d give The 100 Best Business Book of All Time a B-plus. It’s a good book to help you get a sense of what great business thinking is, but it has some flaws. And maybe in the real world, that’s about as good is it gets.
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Every three years since 1995, HR researcher Edward E. Lawler III and his colleagues have conducted a survey to assess the human resources function, measuring how it is changing and determining how effective it is. It’s the only long-term analysis of its kind, and the 2007 survey results have just been released in Achieving Excellence in Human Resources Management: An Assessment of Human Resource Functions.
When I was on my first whitewater rafting trip several years ago, one of the safety instructors told us: “Assist in your own rescue.” If you’re thrown out of the raft, in other words, don’t just flail around in a panic—help your team get you back onboard.
If you appreciate really good business books—the ones that are truly insightful, inspirational and demand that you keep them close at hand—a title like 
