ExpertCEO

About to dig into Sydney Finkelstein's "Why Smart Executives Fail" bit.ly/c3p8j9 And wondering if anyone else here has some inspiring summertime beach reading. The big three issues are (apparently) hubris, ego and a lack of emotional intelligence. Ouch. Hope that's not me.

Enjoy the dog days coming up, and Ken -- maybe we can put together a book recommendation tab or section here on ExpertCEO.

Maybe something like "What I'm reading now" "What's on my e-reader" or "Best Reads" or "CEO night-table" or "What I'm reading on my next long flight." There are several virtual bookshelf apps that might be easy to integrate.

Cheers,

Matt

With respect to business-oriented books, I highly recommend David Kirkpatrick's "The Facebook Effect" (available in all formats on Amazon). It's an interesting read and really drills down into the personalities of the founder and his early associates. I noticed in the paper that facebook has just passed 500 million active users, and it was pointed out that that represents 1/17 of the world's population.

Two books I highly recommend for executives include:
Living Into Leadership by Bowen McCoy
Questions of Character by Joseph Badaracco, Jr.
They are deep and thought-provoking, yet easy to read.

Hello Mat,

I am going to abandon my usual "Au shucks!" and suggest you might like to read on the beach this summer, "Influencing with Integrity". In my humble opinion the reason most executives fail is that they 1. do not understand themselves 2. do not understand others 3. do not know how to align their own vision with the outcomes of their sub-ordinates.

My opinion is based on 3 day seminars I have conducted at IBM, Chase Bank, Dell Computer, Arthur Anderson, AT&T, HP, Intel, Wells Fargo Bank, Stanford University, RIT, Dow Jones, the UN, and 93 other institutions and corporations.

Many years ago, a partner at Arthur Anderson called me from his vacation to say he was reading my book on the beach and wanted to know if I conducted seminars. Within two weeks i had presented a proposal in person to his staff in Chicago, and scheduled the first seminar. Two trainers and I taught the seminar at their corporate campus. The receptrion of his staff was mixed. They seemed to find the skills we taught to be strange.

Some of them bought into the idea of 1. know your own outcome 2. elicit your client's outcome 3. use creative thinking skills to find a solution in which you both gain more than you thought possible. "Enlarge the pie" it's called in negotiating parlance. Two weeks passed without another seminar being scheduled. The partner then phoned me to say that he still thought the company personnel needed the skills we taught and he was using them every day, but he said, "I was trying to lead, looked behind, and no-one was following."

Arthur Anderson, as you no doubt know, is no longer in business, and you can understand that I have often wondered if anyone had followed this partner's lead, would they still be auditing? Conducting business with integrity is a clear path to staying in business.

Negotiation with win-win in mind is what we train. These concepts and our seminars survived 18 years in IBM, 15 years in Chase Bank, 8 years in FPL, 5 years in Dell, etc.

I just noticed Thomas Loarie's book recommendations listed above. He attended one of our early seminars. I still remember that he said," The unethical ones always pay, sooner or later. That's my experience."

Amazon sells the book. Au Shucks