WHAT GOT YOU HERE WON’T GET YOU THERE

The book is divided in four sections and gives excellent advices on how the managers or people who conduct a business, or let’s say simply deal with the people’s management, are successful by improving their behavioral skills.

The section “The twenty habits that hold you back from the top” is very useful not only for the CEO-s or managers but for everyone who does not necessarily holds a position like that. All advices are very useful and necessary to be applied even in family life and merely saying those are characteristics of a real leader.

The book is attractive while reading it but when you take the first glance it seems that you have read 100 books like that. This feeling gives the book an air of commercialism and as a matter of fact there are lots of books like that which give clear cut advices on the rules of behavior with the dependents or colleagues. I would like to mention here the books of Dale Carnegie or Harry Box which are famous about their advices in business or daily life.

Once again I would like to state that those advices must be taken seriously but in my opinion what influences more the success of your relation with your team of colleagues is to try to understand their inner world and define the model on how they want to see you behave with each one of them. What I don’t like about the book is the generalization of criteria in treating people. It all depends on the character and the temper of people you are working with.

If you are a CEO for example and you have 20 dependants, probably with 5 of them you may behave according to the advices of the book while with the rest, you may need to show a bit of authority, tough person, sometimes rude and get out of the frame of the advices given strictly by the books. At the end, if you study the life of successful world leaders you may find lots of moments when they have acted in disrespect of the advices taught by the nowadays books.