Book Reviews
The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval Broadway Business (2009) The great value of Thaler and Koval’s book is derived from their pragmatic approach to all manner of situations…
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The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton Harvard Business School Press (2000) How wide is yours? With few exceptions, the most valuable business books are those in which their authors share…
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Power: Why Some People Have It – and Others Don’t Jeffrey Pfeffer Harper Business (2010) Although Pfeffer does not invoke the core metaphor from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” in The Republic, I think it is especially relevant to the…
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Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results Morten T. Hansen Harvard Business School Press (2009) Hansen provides a brilliant explanation of how “disciplined collaboration” can help to enable leaders to avoid or free themselves from…
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PEAK: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow Chip Conley Jossey-Bass (2007) Note: Today is June 28, 2011. Chip has just announced the debut of www.peakorganizations.com, a site featuring new programs and resources based on his book PEAK: How Great Companies…
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Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons Jay Greene Portfolio/The Penguin Group (2010) How to create experiences that consumers crave According to Jay Greene, “effective design in the twenty-first century goes well beyond creating…
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What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management Jeffrey Pfeffer Harvard Business Press (2007) According to Jeffrey Pfeffer, there seem to be three themes that unify many of the ideas he shares in this volume: “(1) the importance of considering…
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Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton Harvard Business Press (2006) In this book, Pfeffer and Sutton examine what they call “the doing-knowing gap”: doing without knowing, or at least…
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The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance (Updated & Revised Edition) Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton Free Press (2009) Note: The review that follows is of the updated edition…
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The Orange Revolution: HowOne Great Team Can Transform an Entire Organization Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton Free Press/Simon & Schuster (2010) Those who have read any of Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton’s previous collaborations, notably Managing with Carrots: Using Recognition…
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