Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy by David H Maister

Finally read David H. Maister's Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy.

Here's the table of contents:

Introduction I
Strategy 1
Strategy and the Fat Smoker 3
Strategy Means Saying "No" 19
It's Not How Good You Are; It's How Much You Want It 33
Are We In This Together? The Preconditions for Strategy 47
What's Our Deal? 59
Client Relationships 75
Do You Really Want Relationships? 77
The Friendship Strategy 93
Doing It for the Money 107
Management 119
Tyrants, Energizers, and Cynics 121
Why (Most) Training Is Useless 131
A Great Coach In Action 143
A Natural Manager 159
Accountability: Effective Managers Go First 171
Selecting a Leader: Do We Know What We Want? 187
Putting it Together 197
The One-Firm Firm Revisited 199
Managing the Multidimensional Organization 219
The Trouble With Lawyers 229
The Chief Executive's Speech 243
Passion, People, and Principles 251
Bibliography 257
Acknowledgements 259
About David Maister 261
Additional Material David Maister 263
Index 267

I wish I could highly recommend this book, as I do his other books (The Trusted Advisor and Managing The Professional Service Firm).

But I just wasn't impressed. Maybe it's because my expectations were so high; maybe it's because his other books were so superb.

In any case, this book is worth skimming through but I don't love it.

Books on Consulting

Any recommendations for books on consulting?

I'm considering entering into a consulting arrangement with a medium sized private company -- I've never formally worked as a consultant before -- and could use some advice!

I'm a big fan of David Maister (The Trusted Advisor, Managing The Professional Service Firm and Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy) and Charles Green (The Trusted Advisor and Trust-based Selling: Using Customer Focus and Collaboration to Build Long-Term Relationships) but I'm looking for more practical / how-to / nitty gritty books.

NYTimes.com Book Review - Kluge by Gary Marcus

Just read this week’s NYTimes.com Book Update and found one more book that I’d like to read:
Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus (NYTimes Book Review "Patch Job" by Annie Murphy Paul).

I'm admittedly interested in reading this book largely because Marcus is a fellow MIT alumnus. Marcus, professor of psychology at New York University and director of NYU's Infant Language Learning Center, borrows the engineer's term kluge, used to refer to a clumsily designed solution to a problem, to describe the human mind.

And the other interesting article from the April 25, 2008 NYTimes.com Book Update was an essay by Rachel Donadio titled "You’re an Author? Me Too!." This essay discusses how despite the "well established [fact] that Americans are reading fewer books than they used to" (check out the June 2004 article "Fewer Noses Stuck in Books In America, Survey Finds" by Bruce Weber), more and more people are becoming authors by writing blogs and self-publishing. I think I am unlikely to purchase a self-published book by an author whose books I haven't read.

I don't have aspirations to become a published author, though I am fascinated by this self-publishing phenomenon. I've only purchased one self-published books, and that is Strategy and the Fat Smoker: doing what’s obvious but not easy by David H Maister. And that was only because I had read two of his other books (The Trusted Advisor and Managing The Professional Service Firm) and found them both educational and straightforward.

Still, I am skeptical about the survey data that says that Americans don't read anymore (I tend to agree with this WSJ.com blog that questions the methods used in the famous 2004 National Endowment for the Arts survey). Statistics and studies can be manipulated so easily to confirm anticipated results.

I think the 2007 Associated Press-Ipsos poll that showed that only 25% of Americans had not read a book in the past year may be more accurate, though who knows?