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Show BUSINESS INTERVIEW Weighty gifts for business readers STEPHANIE SWILLEY Weighing in at almost eight pounds, Business: The Ultimate Resource (Perseus, $59.95, 2,208 pages, ISBN 0738202428) is the champion business book of the season. Among its pages, youll find a dictionary, an almanac, profiles of business leaders, practical checklists and information resources on hundreds of subjects. Before you scoff at the idea of giving a hefty resource volume as a gift, consider this: Where else can you find one source for all the expertise and ideas that comprise business intelligence? You can buy an entire library or just one book. Sounds like a value even Scrooge would love. A collection of 150 original essays from todays innovation leaders capture the best practice ideas on everything from people and culture to renewal and growth. The entries are blissfully brief (two to three pages) and come complete with a Make It Happen action plan to help you implement the ideas. The Viewpoints from scholars and bestsellers such as Philip Kotler and Jim Collins present intriguing ideas on moving companies into the future of good business practices. Whether youre in human resources or Business has a management checklist or actionlist to guide you through nasty assignments like performing a SWOT analysis or creating a 360 degree feedback review. When you get the impossible task of implementing Kaizen or have to deal with a computer virus, the comprehensive but easy to use table of contents makes it simple to navigate to the right resource. Business book lovers will love the Management Library, a section that summarizes the 70 most influential business books of all time into one page. Learn The Art of War, understand Megatrends and get cynical with The Peter Principle. Then youll want to dive into the lively profiles of more than 100 business thinkers and management giants. Business covers everyone from Dale Carnegie to Oprah Winfrey and shares their backgrounds and key contributions. This resource is a must have for any business library. Managers, marketers, MBA students and everyone in between will drool over the giant books depth of knowledge on every conceivable topic. BY step-by-st- 60 seconds to riches of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, Authors Mark Victor Hansen, and Robert Allen, author of bestsellers such as Nothing Down, want to create a million millionaires. Every 60 seconds, someone becomes a millionaire, and their goal is to help people one minute at a time. Their first tool is The One Minute Millionaire: The Enlightened Way to Wealth (Harmony, $19.95, 416 pages, ISBN 0609609491), a unique book that uses both fiction and nonfiction to explain their d ideas. pages provide summaries of their nuts and bolts information in short lessons called Millionaire Minutes, which cover topics like leverage, real estate and marketing. Right-han- d pages tell the fictional story of Michelle, a waitress and mother of two who has just 100 days to come up with $1 million dollars to save her family. With ethics in business in seemingly short supply, Hansen and Allens goal of finding winwin solutions is refreshing. Their motto: Do no harm, do much good and operate out of stewardship. Both men contribute 10 percent of their earnings to their communities and want to inspire the same spirit in future millionaires. Enlightened millionaires not only build wealth but also make the world a better place. If you want specific, concrete steps to lead you to your first million, Hansen and Allens plan for earning fast cash might be disappointing. Their road to riches takes you up a millionaire mountain and into the stock market, real estate or the Internet. But their advice is often generalities like tap into your genius and you are your wealth that dont yield practical, money in your pocket results. More valuable are their insights into our own sabotaging behavior. They describe the voice in all of us that wreaks havoc by leaving landmines, setting ambushes, or) blowing up your own bridges and give advice on building congruence between your beliefs, your desires and your When those three elements are working toward the same goals, nothing can hold teams and netyou back, the authors say. Leverage relationships with mentors, works are also important because the person with the largest network of milRolodexes wins. They suggest you start building that network byjaking a lionaire to lunch each month and asking how they found success. Left-han- Entering the weasel zone STEPHANIE SWILLEY creator Scott Adams receives hundreds of every day from disgruntled workers share their office horror stories. These tales of corporate cluelessness are sprinkled throughout Adams hilarious new book, Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel, which exposes the selfish, greedy, weasel ways of office workers and managers in all their undisguised glory. But dont worry, Adams assured us in a recent interview, Everyone is a weasel except you and me. Whew. Adams had plenty of opportunities to observe weasel tendencies during his own stint in corporate America. After earning an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkley in 1986, he worked at a San Francisco bank and later in a number of jobs as a starting that defy description at Pacific Bell. Using his doodles of point, he launched the Dilbert comic strip in 1989 and finally quit his day job in 1995 e cartoonist. We asked Adams to tell BookPage readers about the ways to be a of the weasel and the special joys of the holidays in Dilberts world: BY Dilbert full-tim- Explain the Weasel Zone. Where did the idea come from? It was this growing realization that everybody in authority seemed to be a weasel. So everybody who had an opportunity to steal money was in fact stealing it or rigging something or cheating in some way. Every few years my personal respect for humanity goes to a new low, and I know its time to write another Dilbert book. Do you consider yourself to be a weasel? No one considers themselves to be a weasel. I dont think there would be as much weaselness if people n didnt think that they had some right to get a little extra. God-give- Does Dilbert decorate his cube for Christmas? Decorate might be overstating it. He might put on a holiday screen saver, but even that would be banned by the company, so it wouldnt last long. Whats the best thing to wear to the office Christmas party? I cant imagine Dilberts office having a Christmas Christmas a The of concept party. party is, first of all, you cant have any alcohol in the office. And second, youre forced to be with the people you would least like to be with, eating food that is not your first choice of food. I would think that the only way you could make that better would be wearing uncomfortable underwear. Just to bring up the average. Whats the ideal present for your boss? The ideal present for the boss would be something you pilfered from the office itself. Maybe matching salt and pepper shakers from the company cafeteria or a stapler from Wallys desk. That sort of thing. What should you tell your boss if he wants you to work late on Christmas Eve? Tell him that youll be at the office for many hours after DILDEnTtu mcfmvum he leaves, as far as he knows. Does Dilbert take time off during the holidays? Dilbert tries to. He lives in dread that the last five minutes of work before his vacation starts, his boss will come into his office with a new impossible assignment. He tries to take vacations, but hes a little like me in the sense that he goes to the Grand Canyon and he looks at it and says, Thats a big hole. That looks nice. Now what do we do? So hes not easily impressed. Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel In your days as a corporate drone, what kind of boss By Scott Adams were you? HarperBusineu I probably was a bad boss, even though I thought I was a $24 95, 352 poges ISBN 0060518057 good boss. My theory is that everyone thinks theyre a good boss, but most people arent, so there must be some sort of weird blindness built into the job that you think youre doing a better job than you are. My guess is that I was a bad boss. Why? am insufficiently evil. All leadership is a form of evil because the point of leading is to get people to do things they dont want to do. You want people to work a little extra for the same amount of pay, that sort of thing. I couldnt get past the fact that if I didnt understand why they would want to do it, I couldnt figure out how I could make them do it. I ended up being a fairly lenient boss just so they would like me at least I would get something out of the deal. i 1 DECEMBER 2002 BOOKPAGE 17 |