What’s New ...

January, 2010

As seen in Publishers Weekly:

How to Be a Fierce Competitor: What Winning Companies and Great Managers Do in Tough Times

Jeffrey J. Fox. Jossey-Bass, $19.95 (256p) ISBN 978-0-470-40854-4
Fox (How to Become a Rainmaker) explores the best practices of fierce competitors and how they gain market share, seize opportunity, and win when the stakes are the highest. With multiple bulleted lists of key action items, he swiftly covers a wide array of timely topics, including why bad times are actually good times, the benefits of piling up cash in tough times, and being cautious while showing fearlessness. He also encourages executives to play relevant “what if” games, always have a plan, stay off magazine covers, and be obsessive about execution. Of particular value are the sections on employee relations, which offer counterintuitive actions that reap big rewards on reserved executive parking spots, unionization, nurturing those hired and acquired, pruning dead wood, and cutting out all bureaucracy. This concise book will give motivated managers and executives the guidance they need to successfully bring their organizations to the next level. (Mar.)

As seen in Publishers Marketplace:

NON-FICTION: BUSINESS/INVESTING/FINANCE
Professor of management and strategy at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and the former chairman and CEO of Baxter International Harry Jansen Kraemer Jr's untitled book on Values-Based Leadership, illustrating how self-reflection allows the development of a values-based leadership, how that leadership sets the standard for business, and how that business can influence the world at large, to Genoveva Llosa at Jossey-Bass, by Doris Michaels at DSM Agency (World English).

As seen at the Coalition for Space Exploration:

Book Review -How NASA Builds Teams: Mission Critical Soft Skills for Scientists, Engineers, and Project Teams

by Charles J. Pellerin

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey; (hard cover) $39.95; 2009.

NASA over the decades has been revered as a technological Tour de Force of an agency - witness the Apollo Moon landing program, the now outgoing space shuttle project, as well as the International Space Station venture. These are all examples of engineering at its challenging best.

But in reaching for such competence, every successful organization needs high-performance teams to compete and succeed. Yet, as the author of this inside look at the softer side of NASA explains, technical people are often resistant to traditional "touchy-feely" teambuilding.

What the reader finds throughout this well-written, easy to grasp book, is the ongoing need for a workplace like NASA to always strive to improve communication, performance, and morale among technical teams. Doing so doesn't come easy.

Pellerin is no outsider to NASA. He's a former director of NASA's astrophysics division. He was on the receiving end of lessons learned in dealing with the aftermath of NASA's out of focus fiasco - the flawed mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope.

The book's opening chapter dives into that foul up - one that Pellerin flags as "Conscious Expectation of the Unexpected" - an early Hubble motto. And from that experience, the author explores the dominant driver of team performance - the context.

Pellerin has pioneered a process he tags the 4-D System approach, how to manage the drivers of social contexts to enhance success. You need not be a space program manager to reap the benefits from this book. The processes spotlighted by the author in this very readable volume can be transported to almost any enterprise.

By Leonard David

http://www.spacecoalition.com/