Business Book Summaries

Based on a highly acclaimed public television series, this book takes the reader on a heartwarming and profound journey to find lasting happiness. John Izzo interviewed over 200 people, ages 60-106, each of whom was identified by friends and acquaintances as “the one person they knew who had found happiness and meaning.” From town barbers to Holocaust survivors, from aboriginal chiefs to CEOs, these people had over 18,000 years of life experience between them. He asked them questions like, what brought you the greatest joy? What do you wish you had learned sooner? What ultimately mattered and what didn’t?

Here Izzo shares their stories – funny, moving, and thought-provoking – and the Five Secrets he learned from listening to them.

This simple book will make you laugh, bring you to tears, and inspire you to discover what matters long before you die.

Growth is an ongoing process that occurs in many facets of our lives. There are so many individual factors that go into creating, increasing, and sustaining business value it is virtually impossible to list them all. Determining how to prioritize your business efforts is an even greater challenge.

This book encourages you to take a top-down view in your strategic planning as you strive to gain maximum benefit from the internal factors. There are three primary, internal Value Pillars that affect business growth:

•Offering – what product or service does your organization provide?

•Competency – who are the people involved? What infrastructure and information systems are needed for management to make productive decisions?

•Financial – what is the revenue and profit potential? Can shareholder value goals be met?

This book is designed for the small to medium size business owner, to give an overview of many different strategies that one can commit action to and not just to be convinced that it can be implemented.

Forget about making that one big swing that will save the day. The numbers are more than a little against you, and your big swings will be a distraction. Instead, hunker down, preserve what you have, and go for the sure-fire, incremental system-improvement advances: the singles and doubles. Go slowly at first. Be patient. Pay attention to the small yet permanent improvements that will add up to something big down the line. It’s the little things that add up.

Always offer a positive regard for those around you and do what you say you will do. Demonstrate quality and do it consistently. Keep your goals in mind and relentlessly work toward them through thick and thin. Don’t try to fool yourself or others around you. Start and finish things on time. Don’t complain.

Remember, you are a system of systems and your body and mind are the most important primary systems of your life, fortunately the ones you can control best. Improve your personal systems at every opportunity; maintain them always.

In everything you do, perform the basics, focusing hard on the pragmatic details. Keep things simple but don’t take shortcuts.

With finesse, take life as it comes.

The largest problem with swinging for the home run is that all those hammer-swings will cause you to strike out too often. And those strike-outs, added together, will make life a struggle, or take you down altogether.

Instead, you’ve heard this before: Swing steady, one swing at a time. Relax, keep your eye on the ball and make contact. Funny thing, your steady and controlled swing, combined with the right pitch, will effortlessly send the ball over the fence when you least foresee it, and more often than you could predict.

See that each swing is a closed entity unto itself; each has the singular goal of making contact with the ball. When you miss the ball, and of course you sometimes will, calmly accept it as a natural outcome in the numbers game of life and then, undistracted, give 100 percent focus to the next swing.

One last time, all your actions stem from this new, on-the-ground vision: Your world is composed of systems that function flawlessly 99.9 percent of the time. All you need to do is climb on board!

Every day has its flavour, its tone. Learn to work with your individual days and to savor them as they slide by.

Understand that most people wake up in the morning with only a vague sense of their ultimate, primary goals. Events quickly peel back the layers of control and the day becomes a Whac-A-Mole” epic that dictates reaction to bad results while disallowing efforts at system improvement.

In contrast, you carve through the hours, directing sub-systems with confidence and precision, constructing the primary systems you desire. By filling your days with accomplishment, the negatives that previously dragged you down will no longer factor into who you are and what you do. They will just annoy you occasionally.

Will you become blind to the dysfunction around you? Not a chance. In fact, you’ll be in a position to do something about dysfunction as it comes within your ever-increasing circle of influence.

The Work the System mindset is focused, deliberate, and organized.

It’s about action, not reaction.

THERE’S NO FREE LUNCH ON WALL STREET (OH YEAH, WHO SAYS?) BUT THERE’S ALWAYS A BULL MARKET SOMEPLACE

When Tech goes up, what goes down? By diversifying among sectors that zig when others zag, some investors have historically been able to get both a higher return as well as lower risk. Why shouldn’t you?

If Sir Isaac Newton had a law of motion related to the stock market, it probably would have sounded like “for every level of return, there’s an equivalent level of risk,” meaning that the higher the returns you hope to achieve, the greater the amount of risk you should be willing to accept.

It’s just like what Mom always said: “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” And the same goes for sticks – generally. If you expect a high-price return, then you have to expect to experience an elevated level of risk, either in the form of price volatility or the potential loss of your original investment. And the logic for this is fairly straightforward. If you could get something for nothing, it wouldn’t take long before many others joined you in this investment.

And as more people would learn about it and buy into it, the potential to exploit any price inefficiency would evaporate. It’s the simple principal of arbitrage.

Sometimes, however, one can find an investment strategy that delivers a free lunch: an investment that offers an improved return with lower risk. Investing in sectors with low correlations to one another has actually provided investors with above-average returns – even when factoring in risk or volatility.

Sectors are said to have low correlation when the price of one zigs, while the other zags. Over the long term, sectors with low correlations have recorded advances and declines at a different rate of pace, as if they each marched to the beat of a different drummer. Highly correlated sectors, on the other hand, ascended the staircase of price changes as if marching to the same beat.

Not all investors are Fred Astaire on the dance floor. For some, it may be best to let the market take the lead. This rear-view mirror approach to investing has a time-tested track record for picking near-term winners. Ready to take a spin?

In its simplest form, the There’s Always a Bull Market Someplace portfolio for industries is merely a monthly update of the Let Your Winners Ride portfolio for industries. The intent is to maintain an ownership of all industries that have had the highest trailing 12-month price performance.

Your goal is to buy high but sell higher. In addition, the number of holdings never changes. This makes the management of the portfolio fairly straightforward. A drawback to this rule for industries is turnover. The portfolio requires monthly fine-tuning.

What this rule endorses is that instead of picking sectors, industries, or stocks by trying to forecast where we are in the economic cycle, projecting which company will win a government contract, or guessing which way the dollar will fluctuate, let the market tell you where to invest your money.

Methods and philosophies of discipline have been the subject of heated debate and disagreement throughout the past seventy years. Psychologists and pediatricians and university professors have all gotten into the act, telling parents how to raise their kids properly. Unfortunately, many of these “experts” have been in direct contradiction with one another, spreading more heat than light about a subject of great importance.

Perhaps that is why the pendulum has swung back and forth regularly between harsh, oppressive control and the unstructured permissiveness we saw in the mid-twentieth century. It is time we realized that both extremes leave the characteristic scars on the lives of young victims, and I would be hard pressed to say which is more damaging.

At the oppressive end of the continuum, a child suffers the humiliation of total domination. The atmosphere is icy and rigid, and he lives in constant fear. He is unable to make his own decisions, and his personality is squelched beneath the hobnailed boot of parental authority. Lasting characteristics of dependency; deep, abiding anger; an even psychosis can emerge from this persistent dominance.

Many of the writers offering their opinions on the subject of discipline in recent years have confused parents, stripping them of the ability to lead in their own homes. They have failed to acknowledge the desire of most youngsters to rule their own lives and prevail in the contest of wills that typically occurs between generations.

Much has been written about the dangers of harsh, oppressive, unloving discipline; these warnings are valid and should be heeded. Many well-meaning specialists have waved he banner of tolerance, but offered no solution for defiance. They have stressed the importance of parental understanding of the child. But we need to teach children that they have a few things to learn about their parents too!

The term “discipline” is not limited to the context of confrontation. Children also need to be taught self-discipline and responsible behavior. They need assistance in learning how to handle the challenges and obligations of living. They must learn the art of self-control. They should be equipped with the personal strength needed to meet the demands imposed on them by their school, peer group, and later adult responsibilities.

When properly applied, loving discipline works! It stimulates tender affection, made possible by mutual respect between a parent and a child. It bridges the gap which otherwise separates family members who should love and trust each other. It permits teachers to do the kind of job in classrooms for which they are commissioned. It encourages a child to respect other people and live as a responsible, constructive citizen.

As might be expected, there is a price tag on these benefits: they require courage, consistency, conviction, diligence, and enthusiastic effort. In short, one must dare to discipline in an environment of unmitigated love.

The most effective parents are those who have the skill to get behind the eyes of their child, seeing what he sees, thinking what he thinks, feeling what he feels. The art of good parenthood revolves around the interpretation of meaning behind behaviour. If parents intuitively know their child, they will be able to watch and discern what is going on in his little head. The child will tell them what he is thinking if they learn to listen carefully. Unless they can master this ability, however, they will continually fumble in the dark in search of a proper response.

The most vital objective of disciplining a child is to gain and maintain his respect. If the parents fail in this task, life becomes uncomfortable indeed.