Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success
by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg

How’s this for performance? Southwest Airlines has turned a profit every year since 1973, yet it maintains the lowest fares in the industry. It has never laid off an employee, regularly ranks best in customer service, and has a consistently high safety record. It is continually rated as one of the ten best companies to work for in America and the CEO and employees have all been labeled as NUTS!

This book will explain how Southwest Airlines can be so NUTS and so successful at the same time. The authors describe the inner workings of one of America’s biggest success stories, complete with 60 color photos. The book is conveniently divided into several different parts that emphasize various perspectives. You’ll learn the history of how the culture was born, some key principles of the company’s vision and culture, and how the culture is maintained and encouraged. The final section takes a more leadership-oriented perspective.

You’ll discover how Southwest manages problems under tight constraints and intense competition. You’ll learn how they think and act “out of the box” to achieve faster results. You’ll discover how to re-define the rules and make the impossible happen. You’ll gain valuable insights into corporate recruiting and employee retention. You’ll learn to manage in difficult times, how to manage with limited resources, how to be optimistic and how to overcome heavy odds in your personal life to fulfill your dreams. You’ll also laugh to yourself from cover to cover!

(This book review was originally published in 2000 as one of the Top 10 Books – Edition 4.)

Great Leaders See the Future First: Taking Your Organization to the Top in Five Revolutionary Steps
by Carolyn Corbin

Carolyn Corbin is co-founder and president of the Center for the 21st Century, a think tank providing executive briefings, organizational training, consulting, and studies. She is also the author of the best-selling Strategies 2000 and Conquering Corporate Codependence. 

This renowned business strategist and futurist cites critical issues that impact all organizations. This thought-provoking book on leadership makes a nice connection to the need to lead differently in the face of powerful, irresistible forces that are becoming stronger. This book offers many diagnostics to give you a sense of where and how you might become more effective. 

The author heads a think-tank called the Center for the 21st Century, and she draws on a lot of forecasts to describe important issues for the new century in terms of trends. Basically, she is calling for a convergence of forces in a way that will make organizations uncomfortable places for many to work. She sees leadership as being the answer. “Leaders determine whether an organization succeeds or fails,” she says. This will require a new model of leader who is more of a strategist, innovator, seer, speeder-upper, and user of new technologies in a more free-form environment with mostly project workers involved.

(This book review was originally published in 2000 as one of the Top 10 Books – Edition 4.)

If You Want to Make God Really Laugh Show Him Your Business Plan: 101 Universal Laws of Business
by Barry J. Gibbons

The former CEO of Burger King blows the cover on corporate incompetence—and uncovers the secrets of good business—in his sharp-tongued, riotously funny book.

Why are so many businesses such depressing, poorly directed messes? Ask Barry Gibbons, enlightened capitalist, high-spirited wit, and the man who nearly single-handedly pulled Burger King out of a long, disparaging slump, rendering it robust and dynamic (without cutting heads).

In this rollicking, easy-to-read book, Gibbons blasts apart the thick wall of arrogance, hierarchy, regimentation, and exaggerated complexity so often contributed to the corporate world—and lays bare his 101 “Universal Laws of Business,” commonsense truths about how to run a business profitably and well. His sage witticisms and sensible opinions cover motivational theory, limited terms for business leaders, being big but acting small, hurdling marketplace barriers, unhealthy profit, new branding, innovation, information technology, and more.

And Gibbons deftly answers nagging questions, such as: why mediocre products litter a hyper-competitive marketplace that demands distinct ones, why the workforce is supremely alienated, exactly at a time when businesses need savvy, motivated employees and why the most meticulously crafted business plan contains the one and only scenario guaranteed not to happen.

These 101 business truths will grab readers by the gut and make them gasp in relief because they’re the things that most everyone (especially the folks laboring in the trenches) know to be true—and wonder why the top dogs don’t have a clue.

(This book review was originally published in 2000 as one of the Top 10 Books – Edition 3.)

Leadership A to Z: A Guide for the Appropriately Ambitious (Jossey Bass Business and Management Series)
by James O’Toole

Instead of focusing, as most leadership tomes do, on who leaders are, their character, style, charisma, and so on, this book looks closely at what great leaders actually do. As the title implies, Leadership A to Z is organized alphabetically by topic, from Apologia to Zenith, in bite-sized chunks of two to four pages that are meant to be pondered between meetings or while waiting for a plane. However, the author crams a lot of great information in here, drawing on examples from Gandhi to Abraham Lincoln to Roger Enrico of PepsiCO to pro basketball coach Pat Riley.

A leadership coach in a book, this essential reference guide features more than 90 lessons covering an alphabet of leadership topics. Author James O’Toole, a 30-year veteran of leadership coaching, gives specific how-to’s drawn from great leaders’ success stories and challenges. Leadership A to Z challenges readers to learn what leaders do on a case-by-case basis and to incorporate their styles into their own day-to-day leadership practices.

(This book review was originally published in 2000 as one of the Top 10 Books – Edition 3.)

The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton

The market for business knowledge is booming, as companies looking to improve their performance pour billions of dollars into training programs, consultants, and executive education searching for ways to improve. Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice? The authors wondered too, and so they embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge. The authors describe the most common obstacles to action—such as fear and inertia—and profile successful companies that overcome them.

The book, based on four years of research, is broken into chapters with titles such as “When Talk Substitutes for Action,” “When Fear Prevents Acting on Knowledge,” “When Internal Competition Turns Friends into Enemies,” and “Turning Knowledge into Action.” Each chapter contains tips on what to do and what to avoid, and provides examples of how a lethargic company culture can be transformed. The Knowing-Doing Gap is a useful how-to guide for managers looking to make changes. Yet, as the authors point out, it takes more than reading their book or discussing their recommendations. It takes action.

(This book review was originally published in 2000 as one of the Top 10 Books – Edition 3.)