Dr. Rebecca Jobe

Director, Office of Faculty Development

 

 

 

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don't

 

by Jim Collins (Collins, 2001)

 

This book cycles around the Walden community; a lot of my colleagues are reading it right now. The whole book is basically about what leads companies and organizations to greatness or what hinders them from reaching that level. The author actually empirically looked at a handful of U.S. companies and what characteristics turned them into these great organizations in terms of employee satisfaction, success, and profits.

 

In a nutshell, it turned out that leaders of great organizations tend to be very humble people—it was believed that they’d be very demanding with a top-down approach to management, but that wasn’t the case. The leaders of great organizations give credit where credit is due to their employees, but if employees aren’t a good fit, they are either redirected within the organization according to their skills, or terminated.

 

The book makes an allusion to seats on the bus—making sure that you’re not only hiring the best people but that you’re putting them in the right seat on the bus according to their skills and attributes. You may have really good people, but if they’re in the wrong places in the organization doing the wrong things, you’re not going to tap into those great skills they have.

 

There’s also an emphasis on shared vision. The CEOs of these companies were great leaders through creating a shared vision for the people who worked for them versus being more authoritarian in their style. It’s about bringing employees together to start discussing what their vision is, meeting in the middle, coming to a conclusion together as a team, and then working toward that goal—versus a leader coming in and saying, this is our goal, let’s start working toward it.

 

 

Driven From Within

by Michael Jordan (Atria, 2005)

 

This book might be my favorite. I’m a huge sports fan, and Michael Jordan might be my favorite athlete of all time. The theme of this book is perseverance, and it’s a good lesson not only in business, but in character.

 

In this book, Jordan goes back through his life when he was told he wasn’t good enough. But he kept working harder and harder, he stayed close to his values of hard work and diligence, and eventually he became the best basketball player of all time.

 

He talks about how he practiced longer and harder than everyone else, and how he didn’t believe in shortcuts. He alludes to building a foundation of fundamentals and how he would practice the little things every day, things he’d mastered long ago but still continued to practice even in the last years he was in the NBA. It’s much like the CEOs in Good to Great who talk about how you have to build a foundation of fundamentals and do the little things right to be good at the bigger things. Which actually ties into the last book I recommend …

 

 

Damned Lies and Statistics: Untangling Numbers from the Media, Politicians, and Activists

by Joel Best (University of California Press, 2001)

 

There’s one theme all the way through this book, and it’s the theme I think is my most important job as an educator—to teach critical thinking. It’s the most important concept that I teach, much more important than the actual content area or topics.

 

The book highlights a lot of statistics that are out there and even published in scientific journals, which we tend to trust because they’ve gone through a rigorous peer review or because we hear them in the media, but it highlights these statistics that, when you really dig deep, are clearly wrong or impossible. It shows how the media will report a statistic from a study and, perhaps unknowingly, twist it just a little and change the meaning. They may not do this intentionally, but still, the way they report it comes across much differently than what the findings of the study really tell us. Then it’s given to the public, and the public has this wrong idea about whatever concept they’re talking about. So the book examines how learning to read all information with a critical eye is vital to really understanding trends and what’s going on in our society.

 

 

 

NextDr. Bethe Hagens