Take This Job and Love it

Reviews of eight business books, including three books from CEOs on the angst and joys of building a company, three books on open-book management, and two books that look beyond the millennium.

Tweet

Book Value

New books from CEOs on the angst and joys of building a company

• Motherswork by Rebecca Matthias (Doubleday/Currency, 1999)
• Managing Upside Down by Tom Chappell (William Morrow, 1999)
• The Superman Complex by Max Carey (Longstreet, 1999)

There's an interesting new trend in the ever-flowing stream of books written by CEOs. In the past every example of this minigenre followed the same formula: Here's how the CEO succeeded and how you can, too! But lately, we're seeing more revealing, heartfelt tales mixed with hands-on advice, confessional books that tell of--no, make that testify to --the very personal journey CEOs have undertaken.

The most compelling and best crafted of the lot is the only one that sticks to telling the story of the CEO's experience without delving deep into said CEO's psyche. It's also the only one written by a woman. MothersWork: How a Young Mother Started a Business on a Shoestring and Built It into a Multi-Million Dollar Company recounts how, in 1981, a 28-year-old pregnant woman started a business out of her home, selling business clothing for pregnant women. Today that business is a $300-million public company that is gobbling up the competition by acquisition.

Author Rebecca Matthias has packaged her book smartly. After describing a particular operation or strategy, she segues into a meat-and-potatoes treatment of the skills and knowledge she used to craft that approach. Valuable, practical stuff.

That's not to say that the two other CEOs don't have a lot to offer. Max Carey's The Superman Complex: Achieving the Balance That Leads to True Success builds on an article he wrote for Inc. in 1988. Carey went from Columbia football star to fighter pilot in Vietnam, then became an Inc. 500 CEO--only to double over in anxiety one day. Totally driven, he suffered from what he'd later identify as the Superman complex. His book tells the story of his trip to the brink and back, then offers basic diagnostic tools to assess whether you or others who have notions of leaping tall buildings in a single bound are suffering from the same complex.

Tom Chappell, the living personification of Tom's of Maine, has written a book called Managing Upside Down: The Seven Intentions of Values-Centered Leadership, which is even more personal than Carey's. Anytime you talk about managing your company based on your own values, it gets personal, and that's the heart of this book: "letting your deepest beliefs and values drive your business."

The book's built around Chappell's "seven intentions," which, he says, should be followed by anyone who wants to run a business based on personal values. But he frequently concludes that various business problems arose because the rest of the organization was not as focused on values as its owners were. That seems not to jibe with his stated principle that "different gifts and perspectives" build strong teams. And that's the trouble with defining a business using a CEO's values: values aren't universal.

Now, to be fair, Chappell does include some solid ideas in his seven intentions, such as the need for vision and for relying on expert advisers. But then there's the one that says you should explore who you are and the meaning of your work. That's where you might run into trouble if, God forbid, your meaning just doesn't measure up.

The need to know

• Human Capital by Thomas O. Davenport (Jossey-Bass, 1999)
• Business Ethics by Norman E. Bowie (Blackwell, 1999)
• Open-Book Management by John Case (HarperBusiness, 1996)

Last year a study by the national Center for Employee Ownership showed that after companies began to practice open-book management, their revenues grew 1.66% faster than those of their non-open-book competitors.

It's no wonder, then, that the phenomenon of open-book management continues to blossom. The premise of Thomas Davenport's new book, Human Capital: What It Is and Why People Invest It, is that "people are not costs, factors of production, or assets. They are investors in a business, paying in human capital and expecting a return on their investment." To make human capital work effectively, Davenport believes, management must make sure that people understand how the organization becomes successful.

Jump across into the academic world of business ethics to Norman Bowie's Business Ethics: A Kantian Perspective, and you will find that he too recognizes the importance of open-book management: "The underlying philosophy of open book management is that persons should be treated as responsible autonomous beings....With complete information and the proper incentive, employees behave responsibly without the necessity of layers of supervision."

 1 | 2  NEXT 

Read more:

Sign-up for our Finance Newsletter

Email Address: