Business Book Summaries

Miami, Florida, February 2, 2009—BusinessSummaries.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites for business book summaries, announces that Gal Borenstein, acclaimed author of the book What Really Counts for CEOs (published by Borenstein Executive University Press in 2009), is the Author of the Month for February 2009.

At the end of the day, every CEO has to be able to find out which marketing strategies and tactics are working for in his or her company. Yet, trapped by old-school marketing practices that don’t fit and perpetuate finger-pointing between sales and marketing departments, it can be hard to find out for sure which marketing practices are really effective. That’s unless a CEO is able to quickly discern What Really Counts.

It’s a brave new world for CEOs. The move from old-school print advertising to Web 2.0 social networks and the emergence of digital strategies has left many CEOs in the lurch. Far too often, many of them have no idea which part of their marketing works and which part doesn’t. And neither do many of them know what they should invest in to enhance their company’s long-term success. This confusion leads to quite a few CEOs spending more marketing budget dollars than necessary – and by doing so, squandering profit margins and resources that could be used elsewhere.

If the CEO does not understand which parts of the marketing effort are producing the best ROI, there is a strong likelihood that in seeking to increase efficiency, he or she will cut the very infrastructure required to maintain or restore the company’s vitality.

In What Really Counts for CEOs, Gal Borenstein, founder and CEO of the Washington, D.C. integrated marketing communications firm The Borenstein Group, seeks to teach CEOs to ask their marketing, sales and communication teams the right questions that will produce better answers, those which lead to meaningful metrics resulting in marketing outcomes that can be repeated and adjusted accordingly. In short, they will find out What Really Counts and make it work hard for their money.

This book will help CEOs uncover the key challenges they must face, and will give them the tools needed to treat marketing as a science.

The BusinessSummaries.com editorial staff interviewed Gal about his book and the story behind it. Key excerpts from the interview are posted on the BusinessSummaries website. The summary of What Really Counts for CEOs was released to BusinessSummaries.com’s subscribers on January 5, 2009.

Every week, subscribers enjoy business book summaries of today’s business bestsellers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and mindmap formats. The latest versions of the book summaries are all available online upon subscription to BusinessSummaries.com.

It has got to stop. The average business presentation made in the English-speaking world today is woeful and we just cannot go on this way. It is little wonder then that when graduates find themselves in business, they struggle to make themselves understood.

The trouble is, many people delude themselves about their real abilities. The trouble with business is that everyone knows how to drink, therefore everyone thinks they know how to run a pub. It is the same with speaking. The ability to open one’s mouth and talk does not automatically mean that one is a brilliant speaker.

Sadly, the evidence of this lack of ability is there to be seen. And it often manifests itself in disaster. Oh, how one’s heart sinks when a clearly ill-prepared presenter arrives to speak with a huge pile of overheads! Often they compound the issue either by apologizing for not being the right person to make the presentation or by confessing that due to pressure of work, they have had “little time to prepare”.

This book takes the mystique out of presentation. It is designed for those who know they need to present more effectively. Whether you make presentations every day or have never presented in your life but know the fateful day is coming, this book is for you. But what about your time? We all know that presentations are hugely time-consuming, even if you have some idea about what it is you want to say. This book will actually save you time. How long will it take to improve? With a little application, you can use the information to good effect and become a stunning speaker in just six weeks!

You are about to break the final frontier in business – that of effective spoken communication.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service.  Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States.  For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

Lessons for Creating a Vital and Energized Workplace from the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market

Lessons based on the book by John Yokoyama and Joseph Michelli, Ph.D.

The Big Idea
People come from far and wide to the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, not only to witness the hilarious spectacle of fishmongers throwing slippery salmon to one another, but also to share in the joyous atmosphere generated by the company’s uniquely vital culture.

Pike Place Fish was not always World Famous, however. In this remarkable business-advice book, owner John Yokoyama tells the story of how he transformed a small company on the verge of bankruptcy into an extraordinary model of success.

Why You Need This Book
This book offers stakeholders – owners, managers, and front-line workers alike – strategies for achieving world-famous results in any kind of business by developing a culture that leads to excellent customer service, legendary employee morale, and a fun and energized work environment.

After all, if Pike Place Fish can make a world famous difference from a small storefront, with zero advertising, in a smelly, physically challenging profession, then the same is possible for any company.

Creating a Vision of Power and Possibility
With the declaration of “World Famous Pike Place Fish”, the company evolved from one that existed totally to sell fish to one that was interested in extraordinary service to its customers and its world. Anyone can sell fish – few can make a world-famous difference while doing it.

A purposeful vision has power like nothing else – breakthroughs happen as a result. Looking past the everyday demands of the bottom line, every employee continually seeks to love the company’s vision, World Famous Pike Place Fish. If World Famous Pike Place Fish is present through them, all else falls into place.

It is very clear to John Yokoyama what World Famous Pike Place Fish means. Make a world famous difference in the lives of everyone who comes into his business;

Empower the creative people he works with so that they can make a world famous difference for each other, the customers, the community, and beyond; and

Demonstrate what is possible when one empowers one’s employees.

Achieving Individual Commitment and Team Alignment
At Pike Place Fish, people are viewed in a very different way. People are not objects to be motivated or persuaded into action. In a general sense, this is the new reality John offers at Pike Place Fish:

You can share a powerful vision with our team and create breakthrough success, and yes, you can do all that while throwing and selling fish.

Committing to working here means you are not just accepting a job. If you take a stand to be on this team, you are declaring that you will make a difference for every customer and have a positive, world famous impact on the world at large.

If you say “yes” to working here, you become an owner and creator of this vision. What that means personally for you is that you are World Famous Pike Place Fish.

Focusing on the Process for Achieving Success
Through management’s intention to use World Famous Pike Place Fish as a way to serve other people, and the subsequent process that that declaration called forth, the company’s crew has made a difference in people’s lives and in the success of the market. We create intentions and commit to them.

Choosing Powerful Conversations
What conversations are automatic for you? By stopping automatic, passive, and power-reducing conversations, dynamic and generative forces are unleashed, and these forces drive their success and fuel their ability to make a difference.

Creating deep and powerful conversations works at Pike Place Fish, and powerful conversations have positively transformed the lives of the employees’ families as well.

Making a Difference by Listening Intently
When staff members feel that their manager listens to them, they are more likely to listen to their co-workers as well. Listening gives people access to their creativity and assists them in relating to one another.

When you live your life with a genuine interest and concern for others, it’s clear to you when members of your team aren’t listening to make a difference. If you do listen for that reason, it is just a form of manipulation. Has someone has truly listened to you lately? Do you typically listen to make a difference, or do you usually listen to defend yourself?

Coaching for Greatness
Let’s look at some conversations that interfere with coaching:

“I don’t want to change. When it comes to coaching, Pike Place Fish is a strange place. Defensiveness and resistance to change have melted away, and people see coaching as an opportunity for growth.

The success of the company’s coaching starts with the staff’s intention to make a world-famous difference and their commitment to care enough to consistently share supportive, compassionate comments and ideas with one another.

It’s just a conversation away.

Final Thoughts
While it is difficult to separate out the key components behind any company’s success, the following elements are behind Pike Place Fish’s success:

Creating a vision of power and possibility as a team

Enrolling and formalizing individual commitment and team alignment to the vision

Helping team members distinguish between the state of being and the state of doing

Having the leadership redefine themselves as effective agents of change

Assisting team members in letting go of internal and external conversations that rob them of their personal power

Guiding team members to listen to make a difference instead of listening to defend or blame

Helping the crew live their commitment to one another through effective coaching

Assisting crew members as they turn snags into breakthroughs

If Pike Place Fish can make a world famous difference from a small storefront with zero advertising in a smelly, physically challenging profession, then what’s possible for you, your business, your family, and your community?

Do you want to read the full summary of “When Fish Fly”? Please visit http://www.bizsum.com

“5 Steps to Successful Business Leadership” is an important management guide which explores the principles and practice of leadership in business. It provides readers with five creative and groundbreaking tools which, if used properly, can help them to succeed at the task of managing a team.

How to motivate the management team
Establishing and achieving targets
Coaching skills
Monitoring performance
Creating the environment for success
Thinking outside the square

STEP 1: Gain agreement that people want to be successful in their jobs
A common issue is the line where management influences stop and personal influence starts. All individuals have the right to select the thoughts they hold in mind and the thoughts influencing action.

Attitude leads to Behavior that leads to Consequences.

Do not train to change attitude. Training is the act of improving the performance of the actions and tasks to achieve the goals. It can and must be a focused activity with clear payback, and if there is no clear payback, then the training expense must be questioned. Attitudes can and should arise in training, but only good attitudes can help the employee focus behavior and enhance his or her performance at work.

Business has no right counseling employees. A person’s head is his castle. People will have life difficulties, such as divorce. But the business has no place involving itself these situations. It can only offer the employee the chance to file a leave, or offer advice on whom to approach for counseling advice.

Surveying attitudes is a waste of time and money. First, any effective manager can walk into a work place and have a very good idea in a few minutes of the attitudes of the employees there. The best and most effective thing management can do to build the best possible attitudes within the business is to focus on management’s proper job – of course, “to manage” – to do it very, very well and then ask everyone to come along for the ride, grow with the challenge and enjoy the success.

STEP 2: Define success in terms of the numbers the team must achieve
For a management team accountable for profit and loss, coordination of effort is effectively achieved by the profit profile. Each team member is responsible for some number on the profile and for some project whereby that number will be improved this year and next year. This defines success for the team, and momentum and commitment to being successful in this team and this job. The result of these clear and focused efforts is to arrive at a strong ‘team spirit’.

SUMMARY OF TEAM WORK
Coordination. All team members are expected to cooperate in such a way that the total level of operating profit is always enhanced.

Ethics. This is the responsibility of all team members, but a crucial focus of the team leader. It is not necessary that the team members actually like one other, but everyone must afford his or her fellow team members professional respect, ensuring that no personal biases undermine any aspect of team performance.

Personal performance. Bounded by the preceding points, each team member is expected to be thoroughly focused on his or her own job to the extent that when they say ‘such and such will happen’, other team members are confident that it will.

STEP 3: Identify the actions that, if acted out, will facilitate a satisfactory result
What management must do is create the climate to motivate, and provide the understanding and coaching and training in the behaviors of success to build the skills.

STEP 4: Keep the team focused on their level of effectiveness at implementing behaviors of success
The principles of job descriptions as we know them seem sound. Yet, there is something missing – a tie-up between the job descriptions and the behaviors of success. The form is kept very simple, with teams and team leaders completing it themselves. This process seeks to encourage regular discussions on ‘how we do a particular thing’, a.k.a. behaviors of success.

It must be clearly derived from and related to the strategic business plan and team members can see immediately why they in fact exist as a team.

The thrust is team based, and this emphasis on team effort and teamwork, when backed by the simple ethics as outlined in an earlier section, leads to improved team cohesiveness.

The system immediately places current performance expectations against business benchmarks, and the business benchmarks are always higher. The system focuses on the key behaviors of success with a strong positive effect on the person concerned. He or she is constantly reminded of the actions needed to attain success.

The system has proven very successful and has become a tool used by many managers to enhance the performance of their teams.

STEP 5: Celebrate large and small successes
A relationship can be established between the satisfaction and emotional state of a person’s life and the time he spends working. Daily emotional state is graphed as an irregular line, which indicates fluctuations in the level of satisfaction on a daily basis.

The progressive build-up of life satisfaction is something that should occur despite this daily flux, and ideally should increase over time. It can seen as being related significantly to a person’s goals.

Note that work is only one component of a person’s life and, for some people, not even a major component at that. Celebrating both small and large successes is a sure-fire way to get staff to realize their significance in the eyes of management and the team itself, itself a stepping-stone towards a realization of the importance of work in their lives.

FINAL NOTES
A leader has the ultimate responsibility for the productivity of his team, and some people will actively or passively resist the challenge to improve themselves and will show no energy or interest in doing so. These obstacles must be overcome by the leader if he or she is to bring the team to realize the power and potential of each person in that team.

As already stated, personal growth and an increase in satisfaction through success is only comfortable in retrospect.

BusinessSummaries.com is a business book summaries service. Every week, it sends out to subscribers a 9- to 12-page summary of a best-selling business book chosen from among the hundreds of books printed out in the United States. For more information, please go to http://www.bizsum.com

The Big Idea

“Warriors on the High Wire” demonstrates exactly why nothing is as important as managing the brand if a company is to prosper. The brand must be at the heart of an organization if it is to succeed, but very often companies fail to understand this maxim.

Based on interviews with CEOs and key decision-makers, author Fiona Gilmore distils the essence of many top brands. Top CEOs such as Michael Eisner of Disney and Sir Christopher Gent of Vodafone discuss the issues that are crucial to their success. They reveal:

How companies can create brand architecture to maximize competitive advantage
Why the role of the brand is of fundamental importance in the age of e-commerce
Why service brands are critical for much of twenty-first century business
How companies should deal with acquisitions

Why You Need This Book

Some of the greatest companies the business world has seen credit exemplary branding for their success. Conversely, some of those companies can sometimes lose their way and neglect to manage their brands. Fiona Gilmore shows how and why this happens through gathering inputs from top management of some of the most familiar and successful brands in history and highlighting lessons we can learn from their experiences.

Warriors on the High Wire

Brand warfare gives the same switch-back ride – alternating between exhilaration and disappointment – that has been the characteristic of physical warfare through the ages.

Brand warriors live on the high wire as they seek to grow, explore new markets, develop new techniques, and create a few useful ideas. Brand warriors, like chess grand masters, never stop learning, and the problems they face become more complex and difficult as the world around them changes.

Regardless of your company size or your discipline, you can stand to learn a lot more regarding effective brand warfare in the twenty-first century. And there’s no better way to do so than to read about some of the most successful brand warriors in the history of management.

Armani : The Cult of the Fashion Brand: Defining Style across Six Continents

The story of the Armani brand is one of a svengali-like series of transformations, keeping one step ahead of an easily fatigued consumer and at the same time presenting a public face of apparent seamless continuity.

Disney : Managing a Magical Brand

We’ve always known that the Disney brand generates a level of loyalty and affection unlike any other brand. This deeply held affinity is obviously of great benefit to the company, but where does it come from? Why does it exist?

Reuters : Transforming the Brand for the Information Age

After 150 years of existence, Reuters is on the threshold of the most exciting period of its colourful history. The Internet and new wireless technologies are opening the way for the company to broaden its markets.

Samsung : Another Rising Asian Tiger

Samsung demonstrates how important it is to deal with organizational issues in managing a global brand, particularly when past history has given autonomy to local managers.

Sony : Re-Inventing Itself to Keep Ahead in the Networked World

Sony revolutionized the home electronics markets around the world with products such as the first truly pocket-sized transistor radio, the Walkman personal stereo and the Trinitron color television. But it hasn’t rested on its laurels; Sony has expanded its operations to encompass businesses in the areas of films and TV programme production and distribution, music and video games.

Want to read the rest of this summary? Visit http://www.bizsum.com.

The Big Idea

Brand-name products represent the largest single sector of the U.S. economy, yet there is no simple format in existence to educate people about the rules of trademarks. In fact, many lawyers cannot even distinguish between the familiar © and ® markings. Protecting the Brand sorts out trademark law in a simple and descriptive manner.

Aspirin, Cornflakes, Dry Ice, Brassiere, Zipper – these are just a few of the names once recognized as brands that have lost their exclusivity due to owner misuse and ignorance of trademark law protection. Protecting the Brand dissects such disasters and offers information on how these losses could have been prevented.

Written in an easy-to-comprehend manner, Protecting the Brand gets to the heart of the matter, explaining in practical terms the complex minefield that is trademark law.

Throughout the book important trademark rules are explained and each is illustrated with a brief case study of a court ruling demonstrating the consequences of misuse.

Why You Need This Book

This book is invaluable to anyone who wishes to understand the intangible asset known as the trademark. Readers with a vested interest in protecting their own company’s brand will find this book to be worth its weigh in gold, as it is the key to protecting any company’s most valuable asset.

Part I: The Principles of Brands

A brand is a symbol that answers the question “Where did this come from?”

A trademark is a word, name, symbol, phrase, logo, color, sound, smell, or other marking (or combination of any of these) that lets consumers know who provides a particular product. Just like a brand on a steer identifies the ranch to which the steer belongs, a product’s trademark (loosely called a brand) answers the question “Where did this come from?”

A brand is a shortcut

Trademarks serve as a shortcut: an easy way for consumers to associate a service or product with quality, value, prestige, and other attributes. For example, seeing the Golden Arches may bring to mind hamburgers (the product), NBA basketball (sponsorship), family fun (advertisement), Ronald McDonald house (charity), instant winners (promotion), and convenience (service).

In fact, the brand has a greater effect on a consumer than any detailed sign ever will, because the brand conveys the consumer’s personal experiences as well as the image the advertiser wants to sell.

Brands are worth their weight in gold

An exclusive trademark associated with consistently superior products will have incredible value. But how much value exactly? This will depend on a variety of factors, some of which are beyond the trademark holder’s control, such as the state of the economy. A well-protected trademark, however, can be a company’s most valuable asset.

Brand value stems more from earning power than prestige.

Want to read the rest of this summary? Please visit http://www.bizsum.com.

Sam Wyly: Entrepreneur to Billionaire

“My work is to create companies and build them,” writes Sam Wyly in this candid and engrossing account of the process, relationships, struggles, and strategies in technology, energy, retail, and investments over the last forty-five years that have made him one of the 1,000 wealthiest people in the world.

From the hardships his parents faced trying to hold on to the family cotton farm during the Depression to the coaching he received on the high school football field, this self-made billionaire describes how his early years in Louisiana prepared him for what lay ahead. His sales experience with IBM and Honeywell in Dallas in the early 1960s gave him the idea to start the first “computer utility.” Risking $1,000 of his savings, he founded University Computing in 1963 and took it public two years later, becoming a millionaire at the age of thirty.

Later business successes included taking on the mammoth AT&T monopoly, expanding the small chains of Michaels Stores and Bonanza Steakhouses to over a thousand locations nationwide, co-founding the Maverick Capital and Ranger Capital hedge funds, and founding Green Mountain Energy, the largest provider of cleaner energy in America today.

Why You Need This Book
Part autobiography and part inspirational business guide, “1,000 Dollars and an Idea” is full of refreshing insights and homespun life lessons about what it takes to create, grow, and build successful companies that can challenge the world’s best.

Beat Tallulah
Business is a lot like football.

And although football’s certainly no prerequisite for success such that every entrepreneur should have played football in high school or college or even just in some sandlot league, had Sam not played in high school, his outlook on entrepreneurship would be very different.

Football taught him about setting goals, coping with fear, using leverage, maximizing assets, and understanding weaknesses. It also taught him about losing – you can’t learn how to win.

Setting a goal and then going after it is difficult for some people. If you don’t know who you are, becoming an entrepreneur can be a very expensive (and humbling) way of finding out.

Next, a goal needs to be realistic. Many people yearn for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but have no idea how to find the rainbow in the first place. Over the years, Sam discovered that whatever someone’s ultimate goal might be, the easiest way to get there is to map out a course with smaller goals along the way. Little victories add up.

Great teams do not always win, but without a great team – without synergy and oneness – winning becomes that much tougher. Being a lone gunslinger in team sports or in business will only get you so far. In both fields of endeavor, you need a team playing together and, at the same time, a structure that allows for each player on that team to flourish in his own unique way. It’s that way in business. It’s that way in life.

Big Blue
In Sam’s mind, early on in his career, becoming an IBM sales rep someday was as close to achieving the American dream as anyone could get. IBM was the best of the best, and joining and becoming the best was a challenge that appealed to him immensely.

He sat down for an interview with two IBM branch managers and it went well enough that he received an offer to join the company upon graduation.

But a dilemma was posed to him when Lousiana Tech offered him a new scholarship for an MBA. He knew that getting a master’s meant not going to work for IBM.

Some people have always known what they wanted to be – like Sam’s mother becoming a dancer or his father becoming a journalist – but he was never that way.

Reach for a Star, Not a Handful of Mud
Fast forward to some years later. Before long, his five-man office in Dallas was outselling Honeywell’s bigger offices, where they had thirty people. And he was making $30,000, triple his IBM earnings. Honeywell was a thermostat company that had gotten into the computer business. In the computer market there was IBM and then there was everybody else. Fortune magazine described the market as IBM and the Seven Dwarfs. Honeywell was one of the dwarfs.

By 1962 Sam had a two-story house on a tree-lined street in a good school district and two cars. By allowing himself a few moments of quiet reflection in his busy work schedule, he gave himself the mental space to realize what was most important to him. Those formative years at IBM and Honeywell were extremely important for him and for the career he was about to start building as an entrepreneur, and of course he would always be grateful to IBM and to Honeywell for the experiences and the opportunities they gave him.

The Birth of a Company
Starting a business from scratch exemplifies the saying “real boats rock” – the entire procedure will most probably be a bumpy one. Sure, everyone feels discouraged when progress grinds to a halt, but you can’t let frustration take over and control you. Rational problem solving is essential to company building.

Building successful economic models may very well be hard, but that’s part and parcel of the game. More often than not, if it’s too easy, someone else has done it already and has already made his mark, leaving new entrants to play catch-up. If you let frustration take control, you’re going to give up early and your precious infant idea won’t mature. If you can’t be creative, disciplined, persistent, and rationally optimistic in the face of repeated failure, you need to consider a different line of work.

Everybody faces frustration, obstacles, and failure differently, so there is no single correct approach to deal with them. What works for Sam is to stop, step back, take a deep breath, and seek to get to the most spiritual perspective, in order to think about where you are and what you are trying to achieve and to try to see the problem from all sides.

It’s funny, but when you take the time to let the well fill up like that, you sometimes discover there’s a solution that’s actually better than your original idea.

Multinational Entrepreneur
Creating an environment to attract and hold able people was the easy part. The hard part was learning how to be a good manager.

Right after they started, when Sam was spending a lot of time setting up in Tulsa, he could not figure out why some employees were not doing what he wanted them to do.

To get the best out of people who have the front-line responsibility for making the business work day to day, you need to be confident in their abilities. Moreover, you need to show them that you are confident, knowing what’s going on but not meddling in their jobs or micro-managing them.

You hold managers responsible for results, as opposed to trying to control how they get those results, and then you reward them for their successes. You give them a chance to create wealth for themselves and for other investors while making the company a good place to work for everyone.

The best work comes from highly motivated, richly rewarded, happy-to-come-in-every-morning people.

Sterling Software
Sam was very straightforward about how he saw this company developing and how he wanted things to go. They were betting their venture money in order to get them to the point where they could raise capital in public or private markets and make this enterprise work mostly with other people’s money. They were not just looking for ways to passively invest but for ways to capitalize and grow the business so that Sam wouldn’t have to keep putting in new cash forever.

Some entrepreneurs are able to get by with only their own money; by doing so they get much richer than if they share the equity. But most entrepreneurs who use only their own money end up sitting around broke, reading books about other entrepreneurs who understand how to create companies at least partly with other people’s money.

When Sam and his people started out with University Computing, he knew that he had to sell something. Starting with Sterling Software was different. Sam and company had the idea and knew that the customers were out there, and they had enough capital to make it happen. To get it going he had the advantage of choosing people he already knew and had worked with before.

Surrounding yourself with people you already know and trust can give you a massive head start. They know how you work and you know how they work. In some cases you can even finish each other’s sentences. So you hit the ground running if you can work with people you’ve worked with previously.

Take note, however, that while it is important in any company that everyone expresses his or her own ideas, having a partner who constantly disagrees with you doesn’t necessarily create good checks and balances. Company people need to be comfortable with being honest, with telling you the truth as they see it. Even if you think they’re wrong, you need to know. You need to be a simple seeker of truth.

Enabling people to do good work and giving them the freedom to make their own decisions is the best way to run a company. Pick the right people, get in agreement on company goals, pay them well, give them a shot at doing very well, then get out of the way.

Everyone needs openness and information and verification in an enterprise, just as in a marriage. People at all levels need to know they’re dealing with integrity. Integrity is the single most important quality in a boss. If a boss is not honest, people know it very soon. President Franklin Roosevelt said, “The way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.”

You can’t have the attitude in acquisitions that you are the buyer and your job is to fire those people you just bought. In order to grow a business by acquisition, you need to do several things.

Second, you need to find a way to keep your new employees as passionate about their work as they were before you acquired their company.

Maverick Investor
Sam has gone through four phases in his investment life.

First, he was a Saturday-morning investor. Next, as he entrepreneured new businesses and diversified his portfolio, he became what he calls an active investor-owner in several companies, including Sterling, Bonanza, and Michaels.

Thirdly, there was a sort of mutual fund that Wall Street came up with called “closed-end investment funds,” which focused on a particular country’s stocks. Shares in these funds are bought and sold in public markets at whatever price a willing buyer would pay.

Last was “the work.” Sam got himself deeply involved with the actual action in an investor’s life and his motivation to always keep up with it was unceasing.

The Good Earth
We are killing the earth with friendly fire. It has only been a few generations since we humans moved beyond the basic struggle for survival, but the cost of winning that fight has been huge. We have used the earth’s coal and oil in such gargantuan quantities that the last three generations have now consumed more of those precious resources than all the generations that came before us.

The warning signs are clear. We face serious questions that need to be answered now, and Sam believes entrepreneurs are the right people to wrestle with one question in particular:

How do we go forward in a manner that not only creates value for ourselves and our stakeholders but is also mindful of the threat to the earth and its inhabitants?

That’s one of the reasons Sam created BeGreenNow.com.

Through this innovative Web site, anyone, anywhere in the world can become “carbon-neutral,” by buying renewable energy credits from them. BeGreenNow.com helps consumers anywhere – not just in deregulated electricity markets – to calculate their carbon footprint and buy carbon offsets so that any individual or any business can reduce their impact on global warming in a convenient, flexible, and innovative way. Those credits go to fund capital investment that clean up dirty coal plants and other sources of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

It’s clear that the Web can democratize us, educate us, and help bust up monopolies. Utility lobbyists and their bought-and-paid-for state senators prevented them from bringing Green Mountain and clean electricity to all fifty states. But with BeGreenNow.com Sam and company have found a way to marry Adam Smith to Rachel Carson, and bring the entire planet to clean energy.

So here’s Sam’s question to everyone running a business, aimed at entrepreneurs and budding entrepreneurs alike: What does it take to be a great company in this day and age?

BusinessSummaries.com releases its new business book summary ““1,000 Dollars and an Idea: Sam Wyly: Entrepreneur to Billionaire”, by Sam Wyly. Subscribers may now access PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, Audio, Video and Mindmap formats of “1,000 Dollars and an Idea”, and enjoy the book summary anytime, anywhere. Visit http://www.bizsum.com.

Miami, Florida, November 6, 2008—BusinessSummaries.com, one of the leading e-commerce sites for business book summaries, announces that Mark Jordan, acclaimed author of the book “Selling Your Business the Hard Easy Way”, is the Author of the Month for November 2008.

Selling a business can be a tough, dicey process in which there are many potential pitfalls, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In “Selling Your Business the Hard Easy Way”, Mark Jordan offers readers down-to-earth insight into the key aspects of what is potentially one of the most momentous decisions of any entrepreneur’s life – deciding to sell one’s business – and everything that follows, from determining if potential sellers are really ready to sell their businesses, to finalizing a deal with the right buyer.

The BusinessSummaries.com editorial staff interviewed Jordan about his book and the story behind it. Key excerpts from the interview are posted on the BusinessSummaries website. The summary of “Selling Your Business the Hard Easy Way” was released on October 20.

Every week, subscribers enjoy business book summaries of today’s business bestsellers in PDF, PDA, Powerpoint, audio, video and mindmap formats. The latest versions of the book summaries are all available online upon subscription to BusinessSummaries.com.

Workplace conflict need not be a problem. There are steps that can be taken by management to ensure that conflicts can be resolved as soon as possible and without harm. Moreover, if and when properly managed, conflicts have the potential to generate positive outcomes for all concerned.

If conflict is to be handled in a gainful manner, it is vitally important that individuals and organizations develop robust strategies for coping with conflict in the workplace. Not surprisingly, managers will often intuitively seek to resolve these disagreements by means that are primarily unilateral in nature.

Without a culprit, ideally one that can be proven to be at fault beyond reasonable doubt, the unilateral approach to conflict resolution simply does not work. In acknowledgment of these facts, when confronting conflicts within the workplace, alternative methods should always take precedence.

When taking a consultative approach to conflict resolution, disputants attempt to take responsibility for, and ownership of, their own disputes. Of course, unless a manager is actually one of the disputing parties, they will typically not be involved in the consultative resolution of conflict, nor perhaps even aware that there is a problem, or that an attempt at resolution is taking place at all. If one is to capitalize on the potential gains of consultative conflict resolution it is crucial that managers can take a step back and allow employees to attempt to work out their differences. It is an unfortunate reality of the workplace that some matters simply cannot be resolved by the parties involved, and that these conflicts, if left unresolved, can tend to fester.

Often known as the ‘softly-softly’ approach, facilitation is a relatively informal approach in which a third party, preferably one respected by and familiar with the disputing parties, brings the complainants together for discussions in the hope of establishing mutually satisfactory resolutions. Facilitation is a strategy for conflict resolution that is most potent in the early-stages of conflicts. Employed typically for fairly minor or mild conflicts, facilitation can be an extremely useful approach for a manager, whom sometimes might have to do as little as get the parties together and lend his/her presence to proceedings. Certainly, early informal interventions into conflicts, such as facilitation, should always be the first response to the identification of a potentially serious workplace conflict.

On the other hand, as with all approaches, there are issues revolving around facilitation that should concern a manager. Having established that third party conflict interventions are an unfortunate reality of the modern workplace, there are times when the subtlety of facilitation simply isn’t enough. Mediation is defined as a formal process of negotiation conducted in a controlled environment through which an impartial third party, ideally someone with no inherent decision-making power in regards to the matter, takes an active role in guiding disputing parties towards voluntarily settlement of a dispute. Needless to say, properly conducted mediation, executed from a position of neutrality by suitably skilled and experienced mediators, exists as a powerful tool for resolving conflict in the workplace.

Evidence suggests that, when mediation does work, it tends to produce enduring resolutions that involve minimal damage to the ego or interests of those involved and minimum potential for negative ‘spill-over’ in the workplace. Mediation is therefore widely regarded as an excellent means for resolving serious and pressing workplace conflicts. Arbitration is a formal process in which a third party, or occasionally parties, mutually agreed upon by the disputants or appointed by a suitable authority, renders a rational, legally-binding decision based upon the interpretation of the available evidence. While relatively few workplace conflicts find their way into a court, or board of arbitration, in the most serious of disputes, lawyers or similar agents of representation will often be solicited by the disputing parties.

In the final analysis, the implication for managers is that conflict is not necessarily counterproductive, but the inability to resolve conflict definitely is.

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Every client, every situation is, of course, different, but regardless of the details of the situation, if you aren’t getting the response you want, or expect, you need to look at your message and – just as important – at how you are expressing that message.

Often, with just a few adjustments, you can go from a near miss to a slam dunk, from a “that was nice” presentation to one that knocks their socks off, from a mediocre meeting to one that fires up each and every participant.

The thing is, when you want to make a good impression no detail is too small. No amount of advance preparation is too much. No word choice is unimportant.

The shirt you wear, the chair you sit in, the thank-you note you write afterward should all be carefully considered, and ultimately compound the impression of someone who’s calm, confident, and in-command.

 The strategies offered in How to WOW, Frances Cole Jones’s new book, come from a spectrum of modalities and, aside from the general principles; the information offered is yours to pick and choose from.

There are no “rules” because each comes to the table with a unique set of attributes and circumstances.

And more important, each is smart enough to know what will work for them and their circumstances: what will help give you the confidence to speak your mind in a meeting, motivate your team under deadline, or negotiate your business deal over pasta puttanesca.

Cut down on reading time and still stay on top of the latest business trends and ideas from the business gurus. Visit us at http://www.bizsum.com