D’Arcy’s Book Club – Assholes Finish First

Assholes Finish First Tucker Max Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters/Indigo

I’ve take a bit of a break from business and life-empowerment type books for my next two reviews, both of which are somewhat autobiographical.

The first is Assholes Finish First, the follow up to Tucker Max’s first hit I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Since that book came out, Tucker has done a few things: produced a movie based on one of his stories, become somewhat of a celebrity, and moved into his 30’s. All of this has an impact on AFF’s tone. IHTSBIH was an autobiography of a frat boy while still a frat boy. AFF still has stories of debauchery, sex, drinking, partying, and encounters with the law, but its tamed with a sober and mature tone (yes, I used sober and mature to describe Tucker Max’s tone).

Take for example a cornerstone story of the book that takes up a good chunk, which involves taking a rented RV with a group of Tucker fans on a drunken voyage through the Bronx. Typical Tucker fare…except this time we’re met with a disclaimer by Tucker warning against the evils of drunk driving.

Wait, what?

Also, the stories here seem to be tamer fare from the previous book. Early on we read about how he accosted a tent city of Duke students waiting to get tickets to a sporting event using a megaphone. After verbally assaulting them through the night, security comes and gives Tucker a stiff warning which results in…well, in him not bothering the tent city students with the megaphone anymore.

There’s also a different tone in how he talks about the women he beds. In IHTSBIH, there was an obvious “I don’t give a f*ck” attitude towards the women, but in AFF women are placed on an even field. He talks about his “f*ck buddies”, suggesting that he has more than just one night stands and some level of a relationship. He even devotes pages to the writings of women who have slept with him to give their take on the experience.

Of course, this is still Tucker we’re talking about, so we hear about how he beds an unattractive woman just to strike off “sex with a spy” off his list, or his threesome with two female little people (and he answers whether you can spin them around…yeah, its what you think). And the clown party, ooohhh the clown party…

Tucker is at his best when delivering the short stories, or the quick one-liner escapades. The RV story, while entertaining, was looong , and some like the megaphone story didn’t seem to have the expected payoff.

Still, for those of us in our 30’s wanting to go along and revisit our 20’s (or live vicariously through another’s experiences), AFF offers us the opportunity from someone who seems to be realizing the absurdity of his life events.

3.5/5

Book Review – Tribes by Seth Godin

The world is a vampire, sent to drain
Secret destroyers, hold you up to the flame
And what do I get, for my pain?
Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game

Even though I know – I suppose I’ll show
All my cool and cold – like old job

Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage…

Smashing Pumpkins, Bullet with Butterfly Wings

A few years ago I was given these words of wisdom by my then boss:

Leaders lead.

At the time, the weight of wisdom in that statement was lost on me. In Tribes, Seth Godin instigates a big-bang and expands those two words into a book that challenges our thoughts on organization, work, management, religion, and purpose.

We learn about who leaders are: heretics struggling against the status quo that decades of factory-based work models and similar schooling structures have imbedded in our society.

We learn about what it means to “lead”: that leaders don’t require authority or permission, but a passion for change and the initiative to bring people together and rally around that change.

We learn about what drives leaders to lead: Passion, tenacity, commitment, compassion, and selflessness to see effective change.

Interesting that Godin titled the book “Tribes”, because this is really a book about leadership. It’s also not a book that tells you step by step how to build a tribe, how to recruit, how to market effectively. Part of the reason is that there is no right answer, because as the book mentions:

Leaders have nothing in common except the decision to lead.

And the tribes they lead are equally as different, with their own nuances, communication mediums, and customs.

The underlying point of Tribes is that the world, industries, education, government – all of these and more need leaders now more than ever. The problem is that societies vision of a “leader” is skewed, and we need to plant the seed on what leadership really means and realize the potential change we could see if more leaders emerge…if more people band together as a tribe under one common goal. Tribes make change, leaders organize and orchestrate the tribe.

I started this post with a lyrical quote from a Smashing Pumpkins song. That song is the anthem for people all over the world: feeling caged in the environment they’re surrounded in, feeling that they have no choice but to continue going through life under the rules set upon them. Tribes is an answer to those people. Tribes is a way out, a chance to unlock the cage and escape. From the book:

The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there. People will follow.

Once you choose to lead you’ll be under huge pressure to reconsider, to compromise, to dumb it down, or to give up. Of course you will. That’s the world’s job: to get you to be quiet and follow. The status quo is the status quo for a reason. But once you choose to lead, you’ll also discover that it’s not so difficult. That the options available to you seem really clear, and that yes, in fact, you can get from here to there. Go.

Imagine what our world would look like with leaders forming tribes and pushing for real, meaningful change.

Rating: 5/5

Purchase from:
Amazon.com
Amazon.ca
Chapters.ca

The Dip by Seth Godin

The Dip Seth Godin Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters/Indigo

I’ve seen Seth Godin give Ted talks, and I’ve heard people go on and on about “purple cows”, but I never was intrigued enough to actually read him. After a friend went on and on about his latest book, Lynchpin (which I’m currently reading), I decided to take the plunge into the Godin tomes. And I’m kicking myself that I didn’t do it earlier!

“The Dip” refers to the time between starting something and mastering it. It’s the difficult period after the honeymoon phase where the rubber hits the road and our noses are put to the grindstone. Look at the book cover image above. That gentle rolling hill behind the stick man, that’s the starting/honeymoon stage. At the top of the hill in front of him, that’s mastery. Notice the sharp climb awaiting our stickman.

In that space between is the dip, a place where we must evaluate the journey at hand and ask the question: is it really worth it?

The main idea of the book can be summarized by a passage from it:

Please understand this: if you cannot get through the Dip in an exceptional way, you must quit. And quit right now.

In our western culture and society, quitting is seen in a negative light. “Winners never quit” is something we’ve heard over and over again. If we quit something, it somehow shows a weakness in us…an inability, a failing. When we’re faced with a daunting assignment, engagement, opportunity, project, etc. we can either call uncle or we can buck up, put our heads down, and charge right into the fray!

But that’s stupid.

It’s stupid because its not about being macho, or showing that you can take the most pain, or that you can tolerate even the worst of environments. It’s stupid for a simpler reason: quitting pales in comparison to being average.

What Godin calls us to ask a simple question:

The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

Quitting is not an admission of failure or inability, its a quality control tactic to ensure you’re only associated with exceptional results.

This book is about encouraging the reader to never settle for being less than exceptional. The biggest crisis-of-faith moment happens in the dip, when you face the mountain. Can you climb it and still be exceptional? Do you have the passion, the drive, and the commitment? Or, is this not your mountain to climb? Will you just be seen as another average climber, an also-ran, just another name for who climbed to the top?

Godin’s books, I’ve found, are somewhat scattered. You get one to two pages of a thought, then it switches to another thought, then another. But put them all together, and you have a book filled with wisdom and insight.

As its a short book, this is also a great introduction to Seth Godin and his writing style and content. I highly recommend this book to everyone, no matter what industry or position you hold.

Rating: 5/5

D’Arcy’s Book Club - The New Strategic Selling

 

The New Strategic Selling Miller and Heiman Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters

Everybody is a salesmen. Every day, without knowing it, we sell something to someone. Now, the typical vision people think of when they hear the word “sales” is the sleazy used car salesperson who does whatever they can to get you to buy the clunker on their lot.

But selling is not an action tied to money and products. Selling is about convincing people to see your point of view and act on it. If you want your company to cover a trip to a conference, you may have to sell the idea to your boss. If you want to buy that new big screen TV, you have to sell the idea to your significant other. If you want to go on a weekend fishing trip with the boys you might be called in to help sell the idea to your buddies wife.

We all sell, but we don’t all sell very well.

So enter The New Strategic Selling, a book based on the sales course put on by the Miller-Heiman group. In fact, this isn’t really a “New” strategy to selling as its been around for a number of years. But the concepts they present, the ideas about selling, these are still very radical based on what most of us have experienced.

Gone are the high pressure, win at all cost, GlenGarry-GlenRoss style of sales…instead the book presents a framework to switch to need-based selling. It’s the idea that instead of going in raving about a product or service, you build a relationship where the buyer expresses what their needs are and your response is to present a solution that best fits that need. Instead of focussing on the amount of money you can squeeze out of a client, you focus on whether everyone wins, that they receive win-results from the engagement, that repeat business is developed over time delivering value over and over again.

The great thing about the book is that what it teaches…things like how to identify different buying influencers, how to prepare for meetings, techniques to solicit information about what the buyer is really thinking/feeling…these things are entirely applicable in *any* situation that you need to sell to someone…and remember: selling is convincing people to see your point of view and act on it.

So that new big screen TV you want to buy but need to convince your wife on? This book can help you. That training opportunity you want your company to send you on? This book can help you. The upgrade to your community park that you want to lobby the local civic authorities for? This book can help you.

The book is a bit wordy. I found that the length could have been reduced and the points still have gotten across. That’s really the only knock that I have though; the insight that it provides is so worthwhile that having to chew through extra words is well worth it.

You definitely don’t have to be a professional salesperson to benefit from this book.

Rating: 4/5

D’Arcy’s Book Club – The Dream

The Dream Gurbaksh “G” Chahal Amazon.ca Amazon.com Chapters was “down for maintenance”, so no link for them!

If Gurbaksh (his friends call him “G”, and since he’d *obviously* want to be my friend after meeting me, I’ll refer to him that way from here on) seems familiar to you, it may be due to his recent stint on FOX’s Secret Millionaire show. I bring this up for one very important reason: DON’T BASE YOUR VIEW OF THE BOOK ON THAT SHOW!

I re-watched the episode on YouTube tonight and to be honest he comes off like a douche at first, with his letter G on everything and his overuse of “bam”. Keep in mind that its a FOX show, and while mind-numbingly entertaining, their style of production is always on the extreme dramatic-effect side of the spectrum.

But reading his book is nothing like what you see on the show. Here we have a story of hope, desire, drive, and determination. This book chronicles his life from his parents coming to America from India through his adolescence and into his professional career…which, btw, started at 16, and the guy is only turning 28 this year.

During the height of the dot-com craze, G began a web advertising company in his bedroom…at 16. He grew the company and eventually it got bought, he made $40 million (on paper) on the deal. That eventually led him to start Blue Lithium, another web ad company, which he sold to Yahoo! for $300 million dollars.

The book is his story, but not just recounting the happenings. G talks about the lessons he learned in just over a decade of entrepreneurship. It’s also an interesting look at the unique struggles minorities must face in the business world and a warning of the realities of doing business.

Dealing with family issues and concerns, being hounded by a former employer who launched lawsuits against him, having to overcome other’s concerns about his age, and just the work involved in starting and selling two successful companies make this book an interesting and worthwhile read for anyone who is thinking about getting into business, currently in a business venture, or who is feeling stuck in their current job. G’s story is one of empowerment and freedom: empowerment by having an amazing attitude and freedom that comes from hard work and taking ownership of your own life.

I’m giving this book a 4.5 out of 5 for a rating because of its conversational narrative and the amount of valuable business wisdom it contains. Why not 5/5? Well…ok, there is *one* part of the book that you’ll roll your eyes at and think “this guy is kind of a douche”. It’s when he’s talking about, after he left the company that bought his first company, how he bought one car after the other: a Lamborghini, then a Ferrari, then something else, eventually settling on a Bentley…we get it G: you’ve owned a lot of cars. ;)

Rating: 4.5/5

D’Arcy’s Book Club – When All You Have Is Hope

 

Welcome to another instalment of my book review blog posts! It’s only the middle of January and I’ve already blazed through the second book of 2010! Before we get to the review, I wanted to mention that if anyone has recommendations for books I should flip through, please send them my way! Alright, on to the meat of this post…

 

When All You Have is Hope Frank O’Dea (For more information about Frank, check out this ‘About’ page on his website which includes a great interview on CBC’s The Hour) Links To Purchase At: Amazon.ca Chapters.ca Amazon.com

The caption on the cover of the book reads:

That was me, the guy begging money for a bottle of wine and a fifty-cent bed in a flophouse. I was thirty years away from being named an Officer of the Order of Canada, twenty years away from marriage and fatherhood, ten years away from earning my first million dollars, and a week away from deciding that I must change or die.

In italicized print under the title and author’s name is:

Co-founder of Second Cup

Unfortunately, as much as the author (Frank O’Dea) and publisher tried to make clear what this book was about, I’m sure many readers (including myself) focussed on that small bit of text at the bottom. In a world where corporate-world authors like Trump focus on their businesses successes, maybe it wasn’t such a stretch to assume this book would be the same: Frank picked himself up, co-founded a successful coffee chain, and the book would be almost entirely based on his experiences in setting up and running Second Cup.

Well let me state emphatically dear reader that this is *not* what this book is about. In fact his time with Second Cup takes only 32 pages of the 222 page book. I’ll admit that, having bought this book in the business section, I was a little bewildered at the course the narrative took. In fact after finishing it and digesting what I had read, I felt it was a disservice to Frank to have his Second Cup involvement feature so prominently on the cover, and why this was even in the business section to begin with.

This book is not the story of a businessman, it’s the story of a man who ran businesses among other aspects of his life. Those looking for insight into how to run a successful business from the ground up would do better to look elsewhere, that’s not what’s trying to be communicated.

The book spans three distinct time periods in Frank’s life. Pages 1 – 74 detail his childhood, his adolescence and entering adulthood. He walks us through life changing events involving his family, sexual abuse, and alcoholism that eventually brought him to live on the streets.

Pages 75 – 168 cover the business years, and not just at Second Cup. Frank was involved with many different businesses and political endeavours while dealing with leaving the company he co-founded, having his parents pass away, finding and holding on to love, and dealing with feelings and issues anchored in his past but revived in new experiences.

Pages 169 – 222 move into a new phase of Frank’s life: charity work, global causes, realizing the importance of being involved and giving back. In a speech he gave to the graduating class of Royal Roads University, he said “It’s not the money you make that matters most. It’s the difference you make.”; a fitting quote that speaks to the entirety of the book.

There were times reading the book that I was frustrated. During the course of his life Frank was sexually abused four times, yet I seemed to have more of an emotional response reading about them then was communicated through the book. Perhaps that’s due to what Frank was feeling as he lived through an alcohol-induced fog for so much of his life though, numbed to the severity of what was happening to him. It’s interesting to note that the more emotionally charged areas of the book seem to come after he became sober and dealing with his business partners and family.

Not all books we read to gather experience need to be topical, focussed on experiences in business or finance, telling stories from the boardroom and the sales floor. Business is a means for us to live, its a facet of our lives but it should never become our lives. Business is a means to an end, a payoff whether it be monetary or whether that business is in charity work for the betterment of street kids. Frank O’Dea’s story speaks to that, but it also speaks to something else. He entitled the book “When all you have is hope”, but I think a more apt title is “When you realize you have power.” Frank turned his life around on his own. He even admits that the moment he realized that he had to get off the street it wasn’t any big, emotional, spiritual experience. It was matter of fact. It was practical. And then, he acted on that.

That’s what I loved about this book. It’s not a rags to riches story. It’s a rags to riches to realization to giving back & finding happiness story. And really, its one that any of us could claim as our own if we wanted to.

As a Biography: 4/5

As a Business Book: 1.5/5

D’Arcy’s Book Club and 1st 2010 Review: The No Asshole Rule

That’s right, Oprah isn’t the only hottie to have their own book club! One thing that I didn’t get a chance to do as much of last year was read. I have a pile of books sitting on my night table, but with our daughter being born in July I haven’t had a chance to plow through them. Now that life has settled into a schedule, I want to get back into these tomes of business and technology wisdom. What better way to help ensure I do that then by creating a semi-fictitious book club! I say semi-fictitious because, while you probably won’t see my book club logo on any book jackets at your local store, I am hoping that people will comment and share their thoughts on the books I post about. I’m aiming for at least 2 books a month (which is actually pretty aggressive). Let me know if there’s any books you recommend as well. Ok, so on to our first review:

The No Asshole Rule Robert I. Sutton PHD Links To Purchase At: Amazon.ca Chapters.ca Amazon.com

We all can look back on our careers and point to at least one person (and probably more) that we would label an asshole. If the language is a little too blue for you, feel free to substitute jerk. Dr. Sutton, in The No Asshole Rule (TNAR), explains what a workplace asshole is and what they do, describes the damage (both interpersonally but also financially and reputation wise for an organization), strategies to implement your own NAR, helps the reader realize if they in fact are an asshole, and tips for those having to survive working with assholes.

The book itself is an easy read; it clocks in at under 200 pages. For myself I found it more of a review. Maybe that’s telling that I’ve worked with assholes in the past or that I have built up my own defence system against asshole behaviour. Still, Sutton presents a great amount of knowledge and insight gleamed from years as a professor and pulling in commentary and statistics from business people and researchers.

Assholes exist, and they suck the life out of people wherever they go. They’re energy vampires, preying on those they see as vulnerable and beneath them. The book encourages readers to try and implement a No Asshole Rule in their organizations. The rationale is that if you get rid of the negative drains on your employee’s energy and remove aspects of fear and negativity in the workplace, productivity and overall health of the organization will increase.

This sounds like a no-brainer, common sense type of thing. The problem is that, while many of us may recognize assholeic behaviour, we rarely act to squash the behaviour or we work in an atmosphere that encourages it. For those that are experiencing this for the first time, or are trying to cope in an environment plagued with assholes, this book offers some great insight and guidance. For managers and leaders, its an important read that challenges us to evaluate what we really value: money and production or treating people with dignity and respect.

But there were parts of the book that I found really frustrating. Chapter 5 is called “Tips for Surviving Nasty People and Workplaces”. This chapter is basically telling people who are stuck working in toxic situations how to weather the storms and come out with some semblance of mental health and emotional stability. I was uneasy reading this as it’s somewhat akin to telling a drug addict: Look, heroin is really bad for you…but if you’re going to shoot up, here’s some clean needles. Ideally everybody should have enough self respect to not put up with asshole behaviour. Of course, ideally we wouldn’t have assholes to begin with. I guess I have my own standards of who I will/won’t work for and the environments that I require to maintain employment.

The hardcover of the book is available now, and it appears that a paperback is going to be available in March or May of this year. If you’ve read the book please leave a comment and tell us what your take of it is.

D’Arcy’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5