Issue No. 137 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features one of those pass-along books that you keep handy for friends and family who need just-in-time wisdom. Read my review. And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Just-in-Time Wisdom
Hype or help? Nancy Lopez, LPGA Hall of Fame golfer, unabashedly endorsed The Noticer with this cover line, “This is the best book I have ever read in my life.” Come on, the best book ever? So…I had to read it.
Well…it’s pretty good. It’s tough to describe, but I’ll try. Twenty-something beach bum lives under a pier. Old guy (wise sage-type) confronts beach bum’s negative thinking. Urges him to read three biographies on Winston Churchill, Will Rogers and George Washington Carver. Then another three: Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln and Viktor Frankl. (Good stuff, I thought. He’s into the Book Bucket.) Three more books, then another three, eventually 200. But that’s not the story line.
The old guy wanders in and out of the lives of people in crisis. Best-selling author Andy Andrews warns us that you’re either in a crisis, coming out of one, or heading into one. His life lesson observations (the old guy has the gift of “noticing”), served up short story-style, are sometimes lame, but many are throat-grabbers. Like this: “Forgiveness is about the past. Trust and respect are about the future. Forgiveness will be in the hands of others and can be given to you, but trust and respect are in your hands…and must be earned.”
Halfway through this 156-page story, I wasn’t convinced I would recommend it. Then the second half delivered. I’ll connect with people in the future, and so will you, who will find the just-in-time wisdom of this book to be the perfect antidote to ego enlargement, marriage bugaboos, failing finances, excessive whining, and a dozen other life derailing obstacles. It’s not the best book I’ve ever read—but I’ve picked up some memorable lines and perspectives for my grandpa toolkit, if nothing else. I recommend it.
To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective, by Andy Andrews.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) The book asks one of the most probing questions ever: “What is it about me that other people would change if they could?” Are you gutsy enough to ask others that question?
2) The author also asks this question: “Five seagulls are sitting on a dock. One of them decides to fly away. How many seagulls are left?”
Thomas Nelson’s Blogger Bandwagon - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Customer Bucket, Chapter 2, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to stop treating all customers alike—and to understand that you must move customers through six levels: 1) ignorance, 2) awareness, 3) interest, 4) trial or consideration, 5) preference, and 6) purchase.
So I was intrigued when Thomas Nelson, publisher of The Noticer, this week’s book, mounted an unprecedented full scale awareness campaign. They’ve systematically engaged the loyalty of bloggers this year with advance review copies of selected books. For The Noticer, they asked a special favor: write your blog on Monday, April 27—one day before the book is released. Brilliant. (I’m tracking the book’s sales figures on Amazon all week—to see if it works.)
What is your company or organization doing to solicit the loyalty and engagement of previously under-utilized communicators who could help you create awareness for your programs, products and services? (By the way, Thomas Nelson does not require, of course, that bloggers give all their books high five’s. That’s gutsy and honest—and it works.)
For more resources and book recommendations to help you move people from ignorance to purchase, visit the Customer Bucket page at my Management Buckets website and check out other resources and downloadable worksheets in each of the 20 buckets.
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