Here are some back issues of my monthly "Book Beat" column (featured in the Central Wisconsin SHRM newsletter.  These might just encourage you to go out and refurbish your business library.  Happy reading!

September 2001

Did you know that your organization, if average, is operating at about 20% of its human capacity?

That's the shocking premise of Now, Discover Your Strengths. Despite the annoying stridency of a title that begins with now (I prefer books whose titles start with eventually, but haven't gotten around to reading them yet), any volume that promises to quintuple your productivity just has to grab your attention.

Drawing on the recent positive psychology movement, the book makes assertions about innate talents that range from the obvious (it's better to play to your strong suits than to expend hopeless effort shoring up your weak ones) to the surprising (the way to get smarter is to shrink your brain). It offers the notion that there are 34 built-in talent patterns which, like keys on a piano keyboard, can be combined and recombined to produce the richness of human capacity. Names of these talents range from the familiar (empathy) to neologisms (intellectence) to terms that clearly require professional help to interpret correctly (woo).

The heart of the book isn't the book, but the related Web site (www.strengthfinder.com) that offers an 180-item timed inventory of your talents and a detailed report regarding your five top strengths. An ID number in the book overleaf activates the inventory, but since my copy of the book was a borrowed one, the ID didn't work. (No fools, the Marathon County Public Library folks.) At least, I got a literate, kindly, tricolor error message telling me to rush to amazon.com and buy my own copy.

Even without the Web inventory, the book offers four easy ways to target your own talents, a laundry list of what the 34 talents look like in practice and how to manage people who major in each, and a plan for turning your company into a "strengths-based organization". It also offers handy hints for distinguishing Charles Darwin from Mother Teresa, a neat trick since both of them are dead.

For statistical wannabees, there is a technical appendix in the back that treats you to larynx-choking terms like "ipsative" and "multicollinearity". Those without a graduate degree in the social sciences may want to wait for the movie version of the technical appendix. The rest of the book is readable and accessible, with lots of compelling anecdotes, like that of a man who cured himself of stuttering by discovering that he loved public speaking, or a discussion of why Warren Buffett refused to invest in Microsoft.

The book is great for anyone who fears ending his or her career as "a sundial in the shade" (read the book to learn what those are) or who wants to learn how to stop beating his or her head against a brick wall at work. The brick wall is not included with the book, at least not in the library lending copy I had.

Copyright (c) 2001

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

Business Development Group

All rights reserved

-------------

October 2001

If you've been undervaluing the contents of your skull, this month's book should cure you of that foolishness. It may even make you decide to dust off your brain and use it more frequently, or at least send it a thank-you note.

The book is Jimmy Breslin's I Want To Thank My Brain For Remembering Me. Breslin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, was diagnosed with an aneurysm and given the choice of (a) brain surgery, (b) death. On his way to choosing the former, he ended up writing a book summarizing what he learned about the brain, both his and other people's.

The book is by turns profound, nostalgic, and amusing. Profound sections explore the nature of consciousness and why scientists have absolutely no idea what it is. Nostalgic sections take readers like me, who are old enough to belong to a protected employment class and thus can remember the people and events about which he writes, through a tour of the past sixty years of American history, from Joseph McCarthy to Jack Ruby to Malcolm X to Jimmy Hoffa to Paul McCartney. Amusing sections explore the brave new world of medical euphemisms, reasons why elderly widowers usually marry women just barely old enough to make the transaction legal, and the absurdity of thinking that life can be planned and orderly.

The book has its faults, of course. It is rambling, like most of my book reviews. It has a distinctly urban flavor, which makes parts of the book inaccessible to readers from Halder. It presents some ideas with which I don't agree, but then, that would rule out most books, effectively ending this column entirely. However, it will make you think hard about the brevity of life and the average American's penchant to get caught up in the "tyranny of the urgent". It may even make you determine to distinguish, to plagiarize a line from a film you should remember if you are in my general age cohort, between what really matters and what only seems to matter.

Copyright (c) 2001

Marlowe C. Embree, Ph.D.

November 2001

Coming soon!  I've written it... but CWSHRM gets first crack at it... if you want to read it RIGHT NOW, join CWSHRM!