Two New Business Books to Help You Excel at the Office

Middle age is typically the period of maximum earnings potential for most working individuals. Because of this, on the job performance is of particular importance, which makes the regular reading of business books a very good practice. With this in mind I picked up two recently released best selling business titles, "The New Gold Standard" by Joseph Michelli and "Outsmart!" by Jim Champy. They take very different approaches to improving job/company performance.

The subtitle of Michelli's "Gold Standard" is the "5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company." Michelli pulls back the curtain to show how the Ritz-Carlton maintains its reputation for superior guest service, which largely boils down to the incredible level of focus they put into the details of of the guest experience. In fact the level of energy they put into something as mundane as picking a new pen to put in guest rooms is stunning. The message becomes clear, everything that impacts the guest experience is worth the effort whether it is how a guest is greeted when they walk in the lobby or the quality of the desk pen in each room.

Many of the lessons are applicable to managers in essentially any business, such as maintaining an unrelenting commitment to quality, how to maintain a culture when your employees are spread out across the globe ("Ladies and Gentlemen serving Ladies and Gentlemen"), and empowering people with trust. However by using a single company in a highly-specialized industry means that the examples are about hotels and hoteliers. Readers who aren't hotel employees will have trouble applying some of the messages to their own work lives.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Champy's "Outsmart!". While missing the richness of storytelling that one can get by focusing on a single institution, Champy's use of multiple industries ensures that there are lessons for every reader. The subtitle of the book is "How to Do What Your Competitors Can't" and distilling down the 180 pages of the book it comes to finding and exploiting an unmet customer need. He gives examples how to do this and even ends every chapter with questions you can apply to your own company and market. But even with these, one can find themselves saying to themselves, "But how do I do that?" For example, at the end of the Chapter Three, one of the questions you are supposed to answer for yourself is "Can you change your business model in ways that will point the entire industry towards better performance?" Not only will this question be unanswerable by most readers, unless they are a very senior executive, changing the company's business model is likely outside their scope. (By the way, this isn't so much a criticism of Champy's book as it is an attribute of all business books. It's also why no one book will ever be the definitive business book. Instead of one title, the subject matter demands regular reading of business books by different authors coming at similar problems from different perspectives. Looking at it this way, as I do, has me highly recommend Champy's book as an excellent investigation of business strategy especially in areas of finding growth).

Champy's background positions him well to address his subject matter. He is the Chairman of Perot Systems' consulting practice, is the company's head of strategy, and previously wrote the business best selling book "Reengineering the Corporation" and its follow-ons.

Amazon links:

The New Gold Standard: 5 Leadership Principles for Creating a Legendary Customer Experience Courtesy of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company

Outsmart!: How to Do What Your Competitors Can't