| THE
BOOK Leverage Your Best, Ditch the Rest -- The Coaching Secrets Top
Executives Depend On (William Morrow, 238 pp., $32.95)
THE AUTHORS Scott Blanchard and Madeleine Homan, of The Ken Blanchard
Companies, are professional executive coaches and co-founders of
Coaching.com.
THE QUICK BITE "Action provides us with important
feedback ... Action begets action; the biggest mistake many people
make is doing nothing. They are always "getting ready" to act differently,
to take new paths, to reach for something significant. But getting ready,
or merely devising a plan, doesn't count as much as setting that plan into action."
THE CALL This volume's premise might, at first, seem
absurd. Coaching, after all, conjures images of over-weight
men hurling invective at slimmer men playing with
a ball. But this is not so much about training for
executive success as teaching oneself how to order
the chaos that passes for many these days as life.
But it's neither a recitation of simplistic notions,
nor a presentation of self-improvement juvenilia. There
are exercises, to be sure, but they're intelligently
revealing. And they will do the trick, if you pay
the price (I don't mean, of course, the aforementioned
30-odd bucks). "You have everything to gain, and nothing
to lose," Mr. Blanchard
and Ms. Homan affirm, "by being brutally honest with yourself." To be
honest, I turned on myself some of the brutality I generally reserve
for others -- and it worked. I'm now a more organized, equable, effective
individual. All I've got to do is get on with my life. |
