businessThink Book Nuggets

I see a shortage of execution, more than I see a shortage of good ideas. What’s the next best thing you can work on and how do you’ll get your ROI? Once I started asking this question, I found the book, businessThink: Rules for Getting It Right--Now, and No Matter What, by Dave Marcum, Steve Smith, and Mahan Khalsa. What a gem! It’s a framework for disciplined thinking that balances hard-core business thinking with high intuition and emotional intelligence.

Features of the Book
The book promises solutions for the following:

• Make winning strategic business decisions
• Have colleagues trust your judgement and leadership
• Leverage and utilize your talents
• Become highly influential and relevant
• Create business value

My Review
The framework is effectively a set of eight rules that help you make better business decisions about what to work on. The beauty here is that the framework tackles both figuring out which solutions will really work and what the impact will really be. Their assessment of impact not only includes the hard and soft evidence, but also the potential ripple effect in your ecosystem. From experience, I can safely tell you that I see a lot of ideas get implemented in the workplace without a good handle on the full impact in the big picture.

I see the book as a thinking framework for asking better questions. By asking better questions, you get better results. I like the authors’ fast paced writing style and the way they chunk up the information. I also like how the entire book elaborates on their eight rules. This makes the book easy to follow and turn into action.

My Nuggets
Here’s my nuggets from the book so far:

• Calculating Impact
• Eight Rules of businessThink
• Skills for the Road Ahead