Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/62201
Bookshelf All About the People Business school deans have an overwhelming assortment of daily tasks to perform, from setting budgets to acting as the public face of the busi- ness school. But many of them find that they spend more time than they expected on an activity that might not have been specified in the job description: helping faculty and staff with problems. In Managing People, editor Deryl R. Leaming has gathered ten authors—all chairs, deans, and vice presidents of universities—to dis- cuss how best to deal with the human side of management. Leaming takes the first essay, walking away with helpful advice about how to deal with difficult situ- ations. (Anker Publishing, $39.95) ten, how to run the most effective staff meeting, and how to combat boredom and dis- illusionment. Deans and depart- ment heads will find themselves nodding their heads at the famil- iarity of the descriptions—and aimed at helping deans and depart- ment heads understand themselves before they undertake the effort of understanding their staff. A "behav- ior audit" self-test gives readers a chance to assess their recent actions, their levels of honesty and fairness, and their interpersonal skills. "Let's assume you have a confrontation with a colleague. Afterwards, you should ask yourself how well you handled your differences. Were you honest? Did you become defensive? Did you keep your dispute on a pro- fessional level?" When the answers are "no," self-improvement becomes the obvious goal. Other authors contribute chapters such as "Winning Over Your Detractors," "Handling Conflict with Difficult Faculty," "Dealing with Troubled Faculty," and "Improving the Odds of Hiring the Right Person." The contributors all draw from their own experiences when discussing how to learn to lis- 56 BizEd MAY/JUNE 2003 The Entrepreneur's Tale So you want to be an entrepreneur. So did John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, two Wharton graduates who in 1999 decided to forgo the lucrative jobs their schoolmates were pur- suing in investment banking and consulting work in favor of setting up their own small business. Their goal was to manufacture and market a computer mouse shaped like a golf club. The MouseDriver Chronicles is their story. And what a story it is! Intimate, engaging, and fascinating, the book takes a look at the most minute details of their struggle to get their innovative product to market. It details how they work their Wharton connections, call on friends and family members for advice and fresh cash, max out their credit cards, deal with their overseas supplier, grow depressed with each unexpected setback, and feel elation with each small victory. They find themselves obsessed with details of marketing and packaging that it had never occurred to them to wonder about before. "Before we'd started, we'd directed most of our admira- tion toward entrepreneurs," they write. "Now we were catching our- selves marveling at the design of half the products we ran across, all the way down to the padding and wrapping materials from the boxes they came in." Their plan was to be millionaires within two years. It won't surprise any reader who gets through the chapter titled "Darkness, Darkness, Darkness, Darkness" that their plan fails. Yet by the time those two years have passed, they have developed a unique product that has started to pull in solid sales and pay them reasonable salaries—and they've learned everything about running a small manu facturing busi- ness. They've had "an experience that exposed our strengths and weaknesses faster than any traditional jobs we might have taken." In short, they've had an extraordinary education—and the reader has had a marvelous ride along with them. (Perseus Publishing, $15) Quick Looks Marketers spend a great deal of time and money running focus groups, conducting surveys, and trying to determine what makes customers buy a certain product. Much of the data they gather is wrong, because marketers don't ask the right ques-