“Your personal reputation and the success of your organization depend on your ability to make and fulfill promises.”
If you are a business owner, a manager in an organization or an employee, if you read just one book this year make it this one.
If you are feeling stuck in your life and are looking for some good ways of getting un-stuck, this book might just be the one to read.
If your team’s performance is below par in spite of the individual skills and talents available to it, this book could turn the team’s performance around.
If you are doing well but feel you could do better, please read this book.
From the above rave you will no doubt guess that this book has excited me very much indeed. Normally I am not a fan of novelized non-fiction as I usually get the feeling that the author or authors are trying to get something over me, trying to sell me something while they distract me by telling me a story so I will be less critical than I usually am.
But in this case authors Tom and Birgit Hanson have done a wonderful job of getting serious ideas across in an honest and direct way by using a story. And the serious ideas are very serious – as serious as your life, to lift a title of one of Val Wilmer’s wonderful books.
I have not raved about a book like this for a very long time and its because the book has a serious intent and delivers it well without preaching or talking down to the reader.
The basic premise of the book is summarized in the quotation above. The book is all about integrity and trust and why they are so important in all parts of a person’s life. And the book is not just a lot of theory, nor is it a book of “shoulds” and “oughts”.
In the context of a fairly engaging and realistic story the authors present a number of tools and processes in which to use the tools. These tools are what they call the “Integrity Tools” and are challenging without being daunting. Indeed once one has grasped the general idea, the tools are almost self-evident and can be used relatively easily, although they also demand a dose of courage to make them work.
Along the way the Hansons deliver some very memorable and useful slogans a la Ken Blanchard and the One Minute Manager series, like: “The most important variable in determining the performance and retention of top employees is their relationship with their primary supervisor.”
Another super feature of the book is the acknowledgements the authors make to the many people who helped them with both the creation and the content of the book. So many authors, particularly in the management field, like to pass their work off as their own original stuff when in fact none of us can, in truth, claim that. Every idea, every thought we have has some spark of origin, some impetus that set our minds off in a particular direction. So its refreshing to come across authors who explicitly acknowledge the contributions of other people.
Please, if you want some upliftment in your personal or professional life take a look at this book – it has challenged me as I’ve not been challenged by a book in a long, long while. And as a result I am definitely changing some things in my life.
Who Will do What by When: How to improve performance, accountability and trust with integrity, by Tom Hanson and Bigit Zacher Hanson, Power Publicaitons Inc., 2007.
Another book on performance, this time sports performance, is Heads-Up Baseball : Playing the Game One Pitch at a Time.
The website of the Hansons is http://www.headsupperformance.com/