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
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.
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
But for the most part, flexible work arrangements still seem to be the exception rather than the rule.
That’s why I was eager to read Mass Career Customization, a book written by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg, two Deloitte executives who created the program of the same name at the New York-based consulting firm. Benko is chief talent officer at Deloitte and Weisberg is senior advisor to Deloitte’s women’s initiative.
I first heard about Deloitte’s mass career customization program a few months ago at a luncheon in New York sponsored by the Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm that advises law firms on work/life balance issues. Benko and Weisberg made the presentation.
Benko immediately got my attention by saying that the problem with flexible work arrangements today is that they “look at the job instead of the career.” She explained that if we look at the entire course of an employee’s career, we will see ups and downs in areas like pace and workload. The trick, she says, is for companies to create a formalized process around these ebbs and flows.
Mass career customization attempts to do that. At Deloitte, which has been piloting the program for the past two years, employees are each given a profile demonstrating where they are in regard to four categories: pace, workload, location/schedule and role. “This profile gets embedded into the employee’s career development,” Benko says.
By establishing this profile, Deloitte employees can discuss the option of “dialing up,” as well as dialing down. That makes the conversation not just about reducing workload, but also about accepting more responsibility, she says. For employers, the program offers an opportunity to better manage their talent, because at any given time they will be able to access a snapshot of who is working full steam and ready to take on more responsibilities and who isn’t.
In their book detailing the program, Benko and Weissberg provide very clear examples of how mass career customization can be implemented, complete with visuals of how an employee’s profile may change throughout his or her career.
It is incredibly easy to understand, but also very metric-based, making this program not just another soft flex-work offering. It is new, however. Deloitte is just now rolling out the program to all 38,000 U.S. employees, so evidence of its ultimate success remains to be seen.
But so far the pilot offers some promising results. Of the 7,700 employees who participated in the pilot, 30 percent showed interest in dialing up or dialing down; 13 percent ended up applying to do so and 9 percent got approved.
The fact that not every employee is clamoring to dial down should serve as evidence that this is a program worth evaluating. And the book also provides lots of other reasons (talent shortage, different needs of changing workforce, etc.) why HR executives should embrace these programs.
But what I like the most about this program is that it isn’t designed just to make working moms’ lives easier. By giving employees the option to dial up or dial down, mass career customization makes the conversation much bigger—and that to me is what will determine its ultimate success. It also moves the idea of flexible work beyond the domain of working moms.
For companies that want to create a more engaged workforce, have the ability to easily identify and move talent around their organizations and maybe even get some buzz for doing something forward thinking, reading Mass Career Customization may be a good place to start.
There are certain things that employers can control during an economic downturn, and some things they cannot. In her book One Foot Out the Door, Judith Bardwick discusses them both.
On the one hand, I’m not sure that companies can really do a lot about reforming our country’s health care or Social Security systems, which Bardwick writes about in Chapter 12. While the chapter’s discussion about the need for a national safety net for workers is interesting on a philosophical level, it doesn’t give employers anything practical to work with.
But the main premise of the book deals with an issue that all employers, and particularly their HR executives, can and should address—and that is what she calls “the psychological recession” that is plaguing our country’s workforce.
Bardwick, a management consultant and a former clinical professor of psychiatry, defines a psychological recession as “an emotional state in which people feel extremely vulnerable and afraid for their futures.”
Americans today feel this way for a number of reasons, according to Bardwick. First of all, the media is constantly playing a gloom-and-doom scenario, which is hard to ignore. Also, after the last market dip in 2001, many very bright, educated and experienced workers found themselves out of work and unable to find a new job. This phenomenon is particularly significant because in the U.S. there is the widely held idea that education leads to job security.
“After the 1990s bust, many of our best educated and highly skilled people could not find jobs for as long as five years,” Bardwick notes.
As a result, today’s workers are not only burdened with concerns about job security, but they’re also not particularly motivated to work hard. They no longer believe that if they are good at what they do, they will be guaranteed job security. At the same time, corporate leaders are taking fewer risks because of the economic downturn. These two factors result in U.S. companies becoming less competitive than their counterparts around the globe, Bardwick says.
“Mostly I worry because psychological insecurity has replaced psychological security for too many people,” she writes. “The American Dream, that uniquely American source of optimism, is in jeopardy.”
To address this deteriorating condition of the country’s workforce, employers need to step up their efforts to engage employees. Rather than just offering cookie-cutter menus of benefits to employees, Bardwick suggests that companies really get to know the people who work for them and ask them what their priorities are.
Bardwick provides readers with a list of priorities that organizations can provide employees to choose from, such as assignments that develop interpersonal skills, advanced professional education and access to career counselors.
Similarly, she suggests that companies figure out what kinds of rewards and recognitions their employees appreciate and make sure they comply when appropriate.
One of the most crucial ways that companies can make sure their employees are engaged and committed, however, is by hiring the right people, Bardwick says.
And to do this, companies need to look beyond candidates’ skills and experience, she says. “Regardless of education nor experience, ultimately it’s personality, values and attitudes that will determine whether or not someone will succeed,” she writes.
By focusing more on who the candidate is and not on what a candidate can do, Bardwick believes companies can make better hires who ultimately will be more committed workers.
While I agree with Bardwick that today’s workers in general don’t have the same level of trust that employees may have had 50 years ago, I am not sure that they’re so demoralized that they are jeopardizing the performance of their companies. While I am all in favor of yet one more argument to create a workplace that engages employees, I’m just not sure the situation is as dire as Bardwick contends.
Still, Bardwick’s statistics and research do indicate that companies with more engaged workers perform better than others. The problem is that anyone picking up this book probably is already in favor of that notion. It’s those executives who have little interest in the psychological state of their employees who need to read One Foot Out the Door.
Edward Lawler starts out his new book, Talent, discussing how sick he is of hearing executives give lip service to their employees with nothing to show for it.
“Time after time I have heard senior managers say, ‘People are my organization’s most important asset’ or ‘Employees are number one in my organization.’ Sounds good, but in many organizations, there’s an enormous gap between the rhetoric and the reality,” Lawler writes.
There is a lot in Talent that you may have heard before: how to make sure you have the right HR people in place (business partners versus administrative staff); how to implement an effective performance management system (that evaluates and motivates); and how to develop your managers so that they are leaders and managers.
This is all important stuff. However, there was one chapter in Talent that I found to be really new and interesting. That was the chapter about corporate boards and talent management.
Often when we think about boards of directors we think about a room of former CEOs and finance guys who go over numbers and compliance issues. That’s pretty much what Lawler has found in his research as well.
But if a company wants to really use its people as its competitive advantage, then these boards of directors have to be informed on the talent management issues within the company. Not only that, but at least some of these board members should have some HR expertise—which, according to Lawler’s research, is a pretty rare occurrence.
Most of the time, former CEOs are the go-to person on the board about talent issues.
“There is no doubt that many CEOs have some understanding of the human capital issues that corporations face, but they rarely have the kind of in-depth expertise that a professional in HR could bring to a board,” Lawler writes.
If boards rely on finance experts for financial matters, why wouldn’t they have HR experts for human capital issues? he asks.
To address this issue, boards should not just seek out HR experts to join them as members, but they should also participate in training sessions on talent management issues, Lawler says.
While boards often undergo training on compliance and finance issues, they don’t do anything with regard to talent management. This is really a problem considering it’s the board’s job to make sure companies have proper succession planning processes intact. How can they oversee this if they don’t fully understand it?
Lawler suggests that boards assess their companies’ talent by acting as “mystery shoppers,” either by dropping by companies and chatting with employees or watching focus groups.
Lawler proposed that boards set up “human capital committees” to delve into these issues.
But probably the most controversial suggestion that Lawler makes when it comes to boards is to have board members go through performance reviews in the same formal way that executives should be evaluated.
He notes that more than 80 percent of board members say they do an effective job. But most of these individuals are evaluated informally.
Lawler described how he once asked a board chair about this, and the chair suggested it would be insulting to establish a formal evaluation for board members considering the amount of time they are giving to be on the boards. But, as Lawler points out, aren’t these individuals being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be on these boards?
I think Lawler is right in saying that a company that really focuses on talent management should have a board of directors that does the same.
I don’t think that his vision will become the norm anytime soon, however. Particularly in the wake of Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC rules on executive compensation, boards are busy enough with financial matters to take the time to focus on talent management.
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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 
As a working mom, I am heartened to see that more employers are embracing flexible work arrangements. Particularly now, with the price of gas hovering around $4 dollars a gallon, a number of companies are moving to four-day workweeks and allowing employees to telecommute.
There are certain things that employers can control during an economic downturn, and some things they cannot. In her book 
Edward Lawler starts out his new book, 
