New book on HOW

post # 397 — July 3, 2007 — a Managing post

One of the advantages (or is it disadvantages?) of being a blogger is that I’ve ended up as a target for the book publicists, who want to promote their authors’ books.

As someone who has tried to get my own business books noticed, I feel sympathetic. So, I’ll try to let my readers know what’s crossing my desk. I won’t always be timely: sometimes it takes a while for reading a book to rise to the top of my to-do pile.

One that I was recently sent is how: Why HOW we do anything means everything in business (and in Life) by Dov Seidman

It’s already doing well (Number 389 among all books on Amazon.)

It’s got some great stories, but like many modern readers, I want to get straight to the punch-line. Seidman helps with this by providing end-of-chapter tabular or graphical summaries, enabling you to skip through the book and get it’s main messages.

One table I liked was this:

The Problem With Rules (As opposed to Values or Principles)

1. Rules are External: made by others
2. We are Ambivalent About Rules (we like breaking them)
3. Rules are reactive to Past events
4. Rules are both over- and underinclusive (they are proxies, not precise)
5. Proliferation of rules is a tax on the system
6. Rules are typically prohibitions
7. Rules require enforcement
8. Rules speak to boundaries and floors, but create ceilings
9. The only way to honor rules is to obey them exactly
10. Too many rules breeds overreliance