Business Book Club
A Bias for Action
by Heike Bruch and Sumantra Ghoshal
Buy book: $18.87

"By its very nature, a manager’s job leaves little room for reflection," Bruch and Ghoshal contend, "and as a result managers tend to ignore or postpone dealing with the organization’s most crucial issues." How can managers overcome this problem and learn to take "purposeful action" rather than drowning in the day-to-day deluge of email, phone calls and meetings? That’s the question the authors answer in this practical and motivating, if somewhat academic, self-help business book.

I was okay with this book (well, except how they seemed to constantly denigate their example) until today, when they lauded a team who put in 100-hour weeks until they got a good product. There are only 168 hours in a week! Assuming they slept 8 hours a night, that left only SEVEN HOURS A WEEK for anything else! I'm sorry, that does not sound like a formula for business success; rather, that sounds like a high potential for burnout. Let's hope all of those engineers were single and had no families.

This book lost all credibility for me right there. Just stopped reading it.

BALANCE IS THE KEY TO SUCCESS!