BizEd

May/June2008

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Bookshelf When the federal government grounded all planes on 9/11, many airline pas- sengers and staff were stranded far from home. One Southwest Airlines crew, which had landed at an airport where the company normally didn't fly, wanted to do something special for the customers marooned with them—so the flight crew took all the customers bowling. That's the kind of anecdote people have come to expect about Southwest, but it still holds a lot of power. It also illus- trates one of the basic tenets that has made the airline so successful: its commitment to its people. "The truth is that employ- ees who love their jobs will cause cus- tomers to love their company," says for- mer Southwest CEO James F. Parker in Do the Right Thing. "People who enjoy their work do a bet- ter job than people who don't." Parker quickly points out that he has not written a nuts-and-bolts case study of the airline. Instead, he's put together a warm, inspirational story about how Southwest was built on key interrelated principles: delivering excellent customer service, operating at high efficiency, and following the golden rule in dealing with custom- ers and employees. It's almost guar- anteed to make you wish that your company—or your business school— shared the same outlook. (Wharton School Publishing, $22.99) In 2006, women held just 15.6 percent of the corporate officer positions in Fortune 500 companies. Yet women still managed to have a significant impact on the economy because women-owned firms employed 12.8 66 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2008 million people and generated $1.9 billion in sales. So what does it take for a woman to succeed in business, and what kind of leadership style does she exhibit when she does? Those are the questions tackled in Women in Business, written by Patri- cia Werhane, Margaret Posig, Lisa Gundry, and Laurel Ofstein of De- Paul University and Elizabeth Pow- ell of the University of Virginia. The authors interview 22 women who own, run, or hold high positions in a wide range of companies and describe their distinctive and person- al journeys to the top. While every wavers from the notion that hard work and determination can pay off with great rewards. (Praeger Pub- lishers, $39.95) Whether you want to preserve the spot- ted owl or drill for oil in Alaska, you have to face the reality that environmental issues are poised to have a massive impact on business. "Don't think of climate change as an environmental issue; think of it as a market issue," urge Andrew J. Hoffman and John G. Woody in Climate Change: What's Your Busi- ness Strategy? The slim little book is part of a new Harvard Business School Press series called "Memo to the CEO," in which current business topics are briskly discussed in short, pointed, eas- ily digestible formats. Hoffman and Woody argue that, since woman's story is different, the authors find these women have cer- tain traits in common: a focus on collaborative and interactive leader- ship styles; an emphasis on commu- nication and inclusiveness; and a determination to make their work lives mirror the values they hold in their personal lives. The women profiled also mostly fall within the category the authors call "new age managers," who are committed to hard work and high ideals but are willing to move on to new careers when opportunities arise. "This breed of executive is well prepared for the 21st century, where job security and lifetime employment are no longer viable options, if they ever were," write the authors. That's a nice optimistic note on which to end a book that never international controls on greenhouse gas emissions are going to affect so many parts of the supply chain, cli- mate change is nothing less than a market transition and must be dealt with as such. To compete in the new reality, they say, CEOs must measure their companies' carbon footprints, take steps to reduce them, and determine how much they want to be involved in future policy deci- sions. Acting quickly might give them competitive advantage, the authors point out—while failing to act at all might destroy the business, not to mention the world. (Harvard Business School Press, $18) As Tolstoy might say, happy workers are all alike. Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher spell it out further in The Levity Effect: "If people are hav-

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