final books of 2006
Jan. 2nd, 2007 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snugglekittyI wrapped up 2006 with A Brother's Price by Wen Spencer and Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (and it's all small stuff) by Richard Carlson. I also finished leafing through First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Best Managers Do Differently by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman.
A Brother's Price is an intriguing fantasy by the author of Tinker and the Ukiah Oregon series (the latter is next on my list). The premise is this - society is based on large families with many more girls than boys - twenty girls and one boy is a lucky outcome. For this reason, boys are prized. They are sold or traded to be communal husbands (one man per group of sisters) or kept in carefully guarded, very expensive "cribs" for those who can't afford a husband. The sibling bond is the primary bond, keeping family groups together for their whole lives, as they grow (hopefully) from sisters to mothers to grandmothers. The main character, Jerin, is a farm boy who rescues a princess and falls in love with her. The book is suspenseful, engrossing, and actually kind of sexy. Spencer thought through a lot of the details, too - like, where do women who can't afford husbands get sex? How does the reproductive labor get accomplished? Etc. Good book.
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff is a book I got at a book swap earlier this year. It is somewhat repetitive. It's basically focused on enjoying your life more by being a better person - more forgiving, more patient, more relaxed. If I had to sum up the central premise, I think I'd say that if you're good to other people, they'll be good to you. I need to spend some more time considering before I decide whether I agree that that is true, even in the case of strangers. I enjoyed it well enough, though in my opinion, Simplify Your Life by Elaine St. James is much better.
First, Break All the Rules talks about how to find and retain talented employees. Gallup Research did an enormous worldwide study of managers and managing, and then spent some more time analyzing the data they got from it. The focus of this book is the corporate setting, which is not what interested me about it, but it still had some good ideas in it. The central premise is that there are some things you can do that talented people will care about, but others won't. In other words, the really brilliant folks care about having the best tools for the job, knowing exactly what's expected of them, having their strengths played to, and having someone at work who cares about their career development - those who are just punching a clock don't find that sort of thing important.
Something that I liked about this book was the idea that treating everyone equally is NOT the best way to manage. Rather, it's better to treat everyone the way they want and need to be treating. A presented example was a restaurant manager who explained that he treated workers who were supporting families on their own preferentially, giving them extra shifts, where for student workers, he would allow them to take unexpected days off instead, because he knew that would be more important to them. Basically, treating your employees as people rather than drones.
I didn't read the whole book, because I didn't like the writing style, and it wasn't really focused on what I was most interested in. But, if you manage people, you could probably get something out of it - I did.
Look for another post on the books of 2006.
A Brother's Price is an intriguing fantasy by the author of Tinker and the Ukiah Oregon series (the latter is next on my list). The premise is this - society is based on large families with many more girls than boys - twenty girls and one boy is a lucky outcome. For this reason, boys are prized. They are sold or traded to be communal husbands (one man per group of sisters) or kept in carefully guarded, very expensive "cribs" for those who can't afford a husband. The sibling bond is the primary bond, keeping family groups together for their whole lives, as they grow (hopefully) from sisters to mothers to grandmothers. The main character, Jerin, is a farm boy who rescues a princess and falls in love with her. The book is suspenseful, engrossing, and actually kind of sexy. Spencer thought through a lot of the details, too - like, where do women who can't afford husbands get sex? How does the reproductive labor get accomplished? Etc. Good book.
Don't Sweat the Small Stuff is a book I got at a book swap earlier this year. It is somewhat repetitive. It's basically focused on enjoying your life more by being a better person - more forgiving, more patient, more relaxed. If I had to sum up the central premise, I think I'd say that if you're good to other people, they'll be good to you. I need to spend some more time considering before I decide whether I agree that that is true, even in the case of strangers. I enjoyed it well enough, though in my opinion, Simplify Your Life by Elaine St. James is much better.
First, Break All the Rules talks about how to find and retain talented employees. Gallup Research did an enormous worldwide study of managers and managing, and then spent some more time analyzing the data they got from it. The focus of this book is the corporate setting, which is not what interested me about it, but it still had some good ideas in it. The central premise is that there are some things you can do that talented people will care about, but others won't. In other words, the really brilliant folks care about having the best tools for the job, knowing exactly what's expected of them, having their strengths played to, and having someone at work who cares about their career development - those who are just punching a clock don't find that sort of thing important.
Something that I liked about this book was the idea that treating everyone equally is NOT the best way to manage. Rather, it's better to treat everyone the way they want and need to be treating. A presented example was a restaurant manager who explained that he treated workers who were supporting families on their own preferentially, giving them extra shifts, where for student workers, he would allow them to take unexpected days off instead, because he knew that would be more important to them. Basically, treating your employees as people rather than drones.
I didn't read the whole book, because I didn't like the writing style, and it wasn't really focused on what I was most interested in. But, if you manage people, you could probably get something out of it - I did.
Look for another post on the books of 2006.
