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Book Review – “8 Steps to High Performance: Focus On What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)” by Marc Effron

As any business book worm could notice, there is no shortage of career advice books being published. According to our own doitinvest.com rough estimations, at least 200 titles are heavily pushed towards the English speaking exec-suite “wanna be’s”. Naturally, with so much noise, one normal reader does not stand a chance to read even 10% of these.
Therefore the questions is – what makes “8 Steps to High Performance – Focus on What You Can Change” a book worth reading?

If you ask me, first is the author – Marc Effron. He is not only a relatively well known talent consultant, but also a refreshingly direct person. Marc Effron does not pretend he is reinventing the career management- instead, he states he relies on the old-fashioned approach of synthesizing significantly tested HR theories into easy to follow steps to improving one’s career.

Secondly, “8 Steps to High Performance – Focus on What You Can Change” comes fully grounded on the business realities of today. I would be hard pressed to quote anything odd or impossible to apply from the book – which makes it more of a high school career handbook than anything else.Read More »Book Review – “8 Steps to High Performance: Focus On What You Can Change (Ignore the Rest)” by Marc Effron

“The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market” by Scott Anthony – a Book Review

A book about how to transform your innovation ideas into a working machine? Anytime! Especially when it comes from Harvard Business Review Press and it is packed with actionable advice and study cases.

“First Mile”s author (Scott Anthony) is not quite new to the innovation field. As a managing partner at Innosight (a small venture capital and consulting company from Singapore which generates 76,400 hits, quite  a lot for a discrete company), he has seen hundreds of such small companies starting and failing – or succeeding. And objective books by venture capitalists, written out of passion, are quite rare. So I braced myself for a potentially good read.

“The First Mile” is an entrepreneurship book mostly about creating, testing and starting the implementation of your business plan. It is a book oriented towards the first-time or maybe serial antrepreneurs, who want to do other mistakes than their predecessors. As a Harvard Business Review Press book, it has two main advantages:Read More »“The First Mile: A Launch Manual for Getting Great Ideas into the Market” by Scott Anthony – a Book Review

“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review

Strategy books are so many this year, that you could literally by a dozen by the 10 dollar bill from Amazon. I would go so far as even to say that there are too many. So many strategy tomes are written, that the authors are no longer named “authors”, but “thinkers”, as a new job description… And classified accordingly. (top 50 thinkers, year by year).
“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” (to give the book’s complete name) is actually a very different book in this respect. First of all, “Playing to Win” is written from a practitioner’s perspective. Both authors (A.G. Lafley – by the way, you should buy the book at least for the nice haircut of this gentleman  – and Roger Martin) have created this strategic decision making system during their working life. Actually the system described here was literally applied and developed within Procter & gamble, a fairly successful company overall and a very successful one if e take out the tech sector in the last decade :).

Secondly, the book is written as a Harvard Business Review mega study case. Read More »“Playing to Win – How Strategy Really Works” by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin – a Book Review