Time-poor managers don't read business books.
But stop learning and you fall behind.
Every modern business and organisations understands that gaining competitive edge means developing the qualitative edge of the top management team. Senior executives need to build their intellectual capital and expand their horizons.
An obvious way for managers to stimulate their minds is to read a good business book. The problem is that with over 3,000 business titles published every year in English alone (that's about 10 new books every working day), which books do you choose?
However, choice of book is the least of the problems facing today’s time-pressured managers. The real problem is that they’re not finding the time to read business books. And in a business environment where product, business and technology life cycles are getting shorter and shorter, a company’s failure to inject fresh thinking can have severe consequences.
To quote the Soundview Executive Book Summaries website: "Business executives recognize that to succeed, they must keep abreast of current business trends and ideas. They also know that, in the business world, education must be an ongoing process. To stop learning is to fall behind.”
Soundview’s solution to this problem is to publish 5,000-word eight-page summaries that cover the main points and highlights of each business book, providing a working knowledge of the book's contents.
Another solution emerged when Albert Wenger read a New York Times serialisation of classic works. He was able to read books by making this part of his daily routine of reading the newspaper. Realising that he read emails even more consistently than he read the paper, Wenger came up with his DailyLit website that sends books in instalments via e-mail.
Phil Dourado believes that business people should be more exposed to the business ideas in business books. But he also believes that there are just too many books out there on leadership. He decided that senior managers don't have time to wade through all the leadership information. What they need is a high impact, time saving guide to the essentials. So he wrote: The 60 Second Leader: Everything You Need to Know About Leadership, in 60 Second Bites, which distils 30 essential elements of leadership into 60-second bites.
But what about time-poor business executives who do wish to plug the gap in their corporate learning, but who don’t like clinical summaries? Who don’t relish an avalanche of emails – with DailyLit, it takes 430 daily instalments to get through Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Who don’t want a book consisting just of sound-bites.
Introducing bookbuzz, an executive learning solution for companies dedicated to developing their high-potential human talent as a key to business performance and profit growth. Specially designed for time-poor managers who don't want to be absent from their desks for too long, bookbuzz is an innovative learning environment that requires a minimum time commitment.
With bookbuzz, a pre-selected team of senior executives is assigned a pre-selected list of books around a business theme of the client company’s choice: leadership, HR, communication skills, innovation, etc. Clients also choose programme length - anything from 4 to 12 sessions. Participants undertake to read the same couple of chapters of each book, as a prelude to attending short (usually 2 hours) on-site facilitated discussion sessions around the book and the author.
The real added value lies in the choice of books, the facilitator’s expertise and sensitivity in stimulating lively debate, and the degree to which participants bring their fresh thinking back to the workplace. And because this is a facilitated learning – and not a training - experience, the facilitator does not teach, train, or even defend the views of the author.
Companies that have run bookbuzz programmes for their senior executives are effusive in their praise of the value of this novel way of increasing the CPD quotient of their senior people. One CEO commented: "The programme is not only nurturing innovative thinking and best practice leadership skills in our management team, it is also enhancing the engagement of our workforce, and helping us to attract and retain great people."
To learn more about Bookbuzz contact Yanky Fachler at 086 8575162 or send him an email.
As well as being the co-founder of Bookbuzz, Yanky is a corporate trainer, motivational speaker and business author. His latest book is “Should I Shouldn't I (Start my own business) (The Excellence Forum)
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