Business Gets Personal

Warren Buffett on Business: Principles From the Sage of Omaha

By Richard J. Connors
(Wiley, 259 pp., $24.95)

Reviewed by Paula Ketter

When people hear the name Warren Buffett, they think about a prolific investor who found success and prosperity in the business world. But this book isn’t about the ins and outs of investing; it’s about basic principles of management.

This one-of-a-kind book takes the sage advice he wrote to his shareholders and maps out 25 management strategies that will turn an average manager into a successful business person. There is a part of me that felt uncomfortable reading his personal letters, which share insights into how to communicate and treat employees and shareholders, how to behave ethically in the business world, how to thrive with patience and perseverance, and how to admit mistakes.

Carefully selecting Berkshire
Hathaway letters to shareholders that span three decades (from 1977 to 2008), Richard Connors presents Buffett’s beliefs on corporate culture, communication, risk management, executive compensation, capital allocation and management, and how to manage in a crisis.

You get a sense of how Buffett viewed his position at Berkshire and the role that stakeholders played in his success when you read the first paragraph of his letter in Chapter 1: “Although our form is corporate, our attitude is partnership. Charlie Munger and I think of our shareholders as owners-partners, and ourselves as managing partners…”

Buffett’s letters are absent of the ego that surrounds corporate America today. His letter about executive behavior, however, carried a strong message to the CEOs of the big corporations. “The job of the CEOs is now to regain America’s trust—and for the country’s sake it’s important that they do so. They will not succeed in this endeavor, however, by way of fatuous ads, meaningless policy statements, or structural changes of boards and committees. Instead, CEOs must embrace stewardship as a way of life and treat owners as partners, not patsies. It’s time for CEOs to walk the walk.”

This book puts Buffett’s business beliefs in perspective and gives invaluable strategies that will help anyone succeed in business.

I give it three grande lattes.

Paula Ketter is editor of T+D; pketter@astd.org.

Seating Matters:
State of the Art Seating Arrangements

By Paul O. Radde

(Thriving Publications, 175 pp., $35)

It’s a safe bet that this book presents pretty much everything you ever wanted to know about seating and audience placement. “Once you read this book,” the cover states, “you will never again look at or set a meeting room the way you do today.” Organizational consultant and psychologist Paul Radde takes readers through the psychosocial and historical underpinnings of meeting attendance and provides dozens of illustrations of everything from precise chair angles to meeting room diagrams. Although the book focuses on “meetings” throughout, trainers will find applicable nuggets on how seating can enhance engagement and build stronger, more effective connections with the audience.

The Courageous Follower:
Standing up to and for Our Leaders
Third Edition

By Ira Chaleff

(Berrett-Koehler, 264 pp., $22.95)

By now, followership is an oft-trodden path for leadership and organizational behavior professionals—Chaleff’s first foray into the subject more than 15 years ago welcomed a wave of further research and exploration. With this third edition, he explores followership in two additional contexts: first, “the emerging power of electronically connected networks” and second, a growing need to permeate and work with the kinds of organizational hierarchies so prevalent in companies today. While the former topic interweaves throughout numerous sections, the author devotes an entirely new chapter to the latter in the section called “The Courage to Speak to the Hierarchy.”

Leading the Virtual Workforce

By Karen Sobel Lojeski

(Wiley, 155 pp., $29.95)

The primary thrust of this book is that the nature of the workforce is changing and changing rapidly, and leadership models are not effectively keeping up with the pace of these shifting realities. The author looks at the attributes held by highly successful global leaders (at HP, IBM, and Crayola to name a few) and also explores some of the tools that leaders can use to engage, motivate, and build authentic communities with employees dispersed across the globe and linked by technologies unimaginable to early leadership experts. Leading the Virtual Workforce is part of the Microsoft Executive Leadership Series.