Find a Way
The path to putting your people on track
The first management books from the Gallup Organization--First,
Break All the Rules (1999) and Now Discover Your
Strengths (2002)--became bestsellers with more than a million
copies in print. Now Follow This Path by Curt Coffman and
Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina, offers the same combination of deep
research, contrarian findings and lucid presentation. Among its
conclusions: Talented people in the right role produce several
times as much as poorly slotted people, and unleashing human
potential yields 20 to 2,000 percent return on investment within 18
months.
The Gallup Path is a 10-step process for achieving these
results. It opens with the recommendation-unusual for a data-driven
management manual-to acknowledge emotions' role in business
outcomes. By emotionally engaging both employees and customers, the
authors contend, you can supercharge productivity, loyalty and
profitability in ways unimaginable to number-crunchers. Convincing,
practical and clear, this book promises to be at least as useful
and popular as the first two in the series.
Primal Instincts
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Physical human needs, such as sex, are surrendering
primacy to ethereal concerns like spiritual bliss. Consumers, no
longer driven by material wants, are replacing doctors with
marketers as healers. Brand glut will resolve itself to a single
"choose this lifestyle" choice. If anyone but Melinda
Davis made such predictions, she'd be laughed out of the future
as well as the present. But the CEO of New York City trend-tracking
company The Next Group has shown uncanny ability to tap our
national subconscious. In The New Culture of Desire she unveils
findings of the "Human Desire Project," a research study
underway since 1996. Forecasts are interwoven with practical tools
like a "self-administered metaphysical" to see how
engaged you are in "imaginational life." She concludes
with five principles for adapting to the new environment, the first
of which is to "Recognize your primal desire." Grrr.
Austin, Texas, writer Mark Henricks has covered business and
technology for leading publications since 1981.