Worth Noting

Recent reads that caught our attention.

You Can't Order Change
Lessons From Jim McNerney’s Turnaround at Boeing
By Peter S. Cohan
Portfolio, $24.95

When Jim McNerney was passed up as one of three finalists to replace Jack Welch in 2001, he didn’t get mad — he took the lessons that made him a contender for GE’s top post and applied them to resurrect an ailing Boeing. McNerney’s mantra at Boeing, “You can’t order change. After all, there’s only one of me and 75,000 of them,” serves as the foundation of the eleven leadership challenges he overcame, which consultant Cohan chronicles in detail.

The author uses candid interviews with McNerney and key players at Boeing and GE, to illustrate the CEO’s unique leadership style, grounded in realistic goals, team building, leadership development, and high ethical standards. In a straightforward, businesslike narrative, Cohan clearly establishes why McNerney’s consensus-driven style sets him apart. As one former colleague observes, “McNerney is not a flamboyant, force-it-to-happen kind of guy. He’s the efficient, help-it-to-happen-in-the-right-way sort.” Ultimately, the evidence of his winning stewardship at Boeing leaves one wondering what would have happened at GE if Welch had chosen him over Jeff Immelt.
—Daniel K. Eisenbud

ELSEWHERE, U.S.A.
By Dalton Conley
Pantheon, $24.00

“Work is the central aspect of our lives,” pronounces sociologist Conley, who identifies a “new type of American professional” — people for whom work is stimulating and fulfilling but all-consuming. But Elsewhere, U.S.A. is far more than another lament for our lost vacation days and the 24/7 plugged-in work culture. The author gets inside the heads of professionals who can’t help feeling anxious about the missed economic opportunity that leisure time represents. The “need to work-work-work has seeped deep into our souls,” Conley writes, forcing the reader to examine his own life and patterns.

In a style that’s breezy and urgent without being self-consciously hip — with perhaps a few too many clever coinages (“convestment,” “intraviduals”) — the author explores the “new texture of everyday life,” one colored by pervasive technology, market-driven inequality, and radical shifts in how we relate to each other interpersonally. Conley stays grounded through personal anecdotes and observations, but he maintains enough distance that the book never feels like a cry for help or call to arms. He finds much to like in “the Elsewhere Society.”

And, refreshingly, Conley refuses to conclude by offering simplify-your-life advice; instead, he counsels: “Do not hold yourself to a mythologized standard of the past in which everyone’s attention was focused on only one task at a time.” —Matthew Budman

THINK AGAIN
Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep It From Happening to You
 By Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell
Harvard Business Press, $27.95

Think Again not only asks why good leaders make bad decisions — it answers the question of how to mitigate the dangers of bad decision-making. The authors, a trio of distinguished business academics, use the research of neuroscientists and decision scientists to deconstruct the flawed thinking patterns responsible for some of the largest corporate and political blunders in U.S. history. The book explores the ways the mind can be tricked into making poor judgments, the four triggers for flawed thinking, and the means to avoid these pitfalls.

Through careful analysis of cognitive processes, the book argues that each example of failure — including the Enron collapse and FEMA’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina — is based on factors that are far more complex than one person’s bad decisions. The authors conclude that bad decisions, and the resulting aftermath, are really a function of an individual or group’s inability to challenge the decision-making process as it unfolds, until it’s too late. While acknowledging that it’s impossible to avoid all mistakes, Think Again makes a compelling case that it is possible to significantly improve the odds of avoiding them, without the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. —D.K.E.

FROM THE BUREAU TO THE BOARDROOM
30 Management Lessons From the FBI
By Dan Carrison
Amacom, $24.95

For obvious reasons, the FBI has always operated in secrecy, so it comes as something of a surprise to learn anything at all about its management structure — much less that underneath its culture lays a model paradigm of corporate governance and efficiency. Carrison argues that, despite relatively low pay, extreme danger, and the constant risk of profound failure, the FBI has retained the ability to motivate its employees, foster change, and maintain high performance standards. Citing FBI officials’ experiences, From the Bureau to the Boardroom offers lessons aimed at improving management across a spectrum of business models.

Carrison emphasizes the impact of the 9/11 attacks, using them to illustrate how the FBI is able to radically transform itself under severe time pressure, without compromising its core values. While the author at times comes across as somewhat star-struck by the Bureau’s cloak-and-dagger culture, he takes pains to note its shortcomings — most notably, in human resources. With a mandatory retirement age of 57, the FBI loses some of its best performers before their peak — a policy that even an exceptional management structure can’t overcome. —D.K.E.

JUST GOOD BUSINESS
The Strategic Guide to Aligning Corporate Responsibility and Brand
By Kellie A. McElhaney
Berrett-Koehler, $29.95

McElhaney’s extraordinarily readable book is less a plea for companies to go green than a guided tour of ways to get your company’s CSR efforts “noticed by the public, including customers, sponsors, partners, suppliers, employees, and shareholders.” Just Good Business illustrates how most corporate programs are “a hodgepodge of unfocused, unconnected, and unrelated strategies in search of an overarching goal” and makes clear how to arrive at that overarching goal.

In showing ways to expand CSR’s branding beyond awkward sponsorships and advertising, McElhaney offers a wide range of corporate examples that have more impact for not being overly familiar. It helps that she’s willing to slam programs as obviously well intentioned as Ford’s support for breast-cancer research (not “tied to business objectives of the firm”) and as progressive as Unilever’s Dove Campaign for Real Beauty (since it clashes with Unilever brand Axe’s womenas- sex-objects marketing). And throughout, the author remains pragmatic and realistic, emphasizing results over purity: “I tend not to get caught up in why a company was originally motivated to engage in CSR.” In eschewing preachiness, McElhaney strengthens her case for integrating social responsibility into an organization’s core, benefitting recruitment and employee morale as well as sales and marketing. —M.B.

REAL LEADERS DON’T DO POWERPOINT
How to Sell Yourself and Your Ideas
By Christopher Witt with Dale Fetherling
Crown Business, $21.95

“Leaders aren’t like other people — at least not when it comes to giving speeches,” is the opening salvo in a book that claims that leaders should steer clear of Microsoft’s ubiquitous software program. PowerPoint, Witt claims, significantly limits a true leader’s ability to effectively convey important and engaging information to audiences without boring them. At the root of the book’s argument is the contention that a great speech must be delivered naturally — that is, without ceding center stage to a screen.

Real Leaders Don’t Do PowerPoint is divided into four sections, outlining the four elements of a great speech, as dictated by Demosthenes. To that end, readers learn that speakers reach true oratory greatness only when they “become the message” and masterfully deliver it as their “authentic selves.” While the results will likely vary, the book, which often reads like a helpful how-to guide (think: Public Speaking for Dummies), should help speakers of all stripes avoid the pitfalls of the “corporate karaoke” that is Power- Point. —D.K.E.

WHERE AM I WEARING?
A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People That Make Our Clothes
By Kelsey Timmerman
Wiley, $24.95

One day, while staring at a pile of his clothes on the floor, recent college graduate Timmerman asked himself: “What if I traveled to all the places where my clothes were made and met the people who made them?” With 97 percent of Americans’ clothing imported from far-off lands, it is understandable why he became curious. What sets Timmerman apart is that he followed through, spending eight months visiting factories in Honduras, Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China to gain a firsthand perspective of the often-overlooked human price behind globalization.

Written in a light, frequently humorous style, Where Am I Wearing? nonetheless explores the dark side of international sweatshops, and movingly humanizes the men, women, and especially children who work in inhumane conditions to produce popular clothing lines. In between vignettes about impoverished boys and girls forced to toil their days away in unsanitary, dangerous factories — and the parents who are forced to send them there, or work beside them — Timmerman succeeds in raising awareness about the grim reality behind “Made In” labels. Indeed, Where Am I Wearing? makes a strong case for thinking twice before buying foreign-made clothes at all. —D.K.E.