Reading for Hard Times (NYT)

Reading for Hard Times

By PAUL B. BROWN

As the recession continues, small businesses and entrepreneurs can use all the ideas, suggestions and tips they can get.

The nation’s publishers are trying to oblige. Here are some nuggets worth considering, from a crop of books that have just gone on sale.

‘ILLUSION OF CONTROL’ Depending on your perspective, this will — or won’t — make you feel better, as you go about trying to put out 23 small fires during the day.

“We suffer from an ‘illusion of control,’ that fools us into thinking the future is more predictable and less uncertain than it really is,” write Spyros Makridakis, Robin M. Hogarth and Anil Gaba, the authors of “Dance With Chance” (Oneworld Publications).

In other words, the world is a lot more random than we would like to believe.

The main message from the authors — a retired professor of decision science, a cognitive psychologist and a statistician — is that you need to accept that there are many things beyond your control and work to recognize what can and cannot be predicted.

Only when you know what you have a true chance of influencing can you “realistically manage the uncertainty we confront in our daily lives and avoid falling victims to the vagaries of chance,” the authors say.

Or, to put it another way: Concentrate on the things you can control and let everything else happen as it may.

WHAT WORKS “We’re badly in needs of rules of thumb that work, that make sense, that can guide us through and past these turbulent times,” writes Alan M. Webber, co-founder of Fast Company.

He provides 52 of these rules, gleaned from observation and interviewing people for decades, in “Rules of Thumb” (HarperBusiness).

These are among our favorites:

¶“When the going gets tough, the tough relax. Any time you approach a task with fear, you are at least a double loser. First, you color the work with it and increase the chances of failure.”

¶“Change is a math formula. Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change.” Until the risk of not changing outweighs the danger of trying something new, the odds are everything is going to stay just as it is.

¶“The difference between a crisis and an opportunity is when you learn about it.” If you wait too long, a problem really does become a crisis. The idea is to spot the potential concern while there is still something positive that can be done about it.

BE NICE Most managers understand that the harder employees work, the better the company’s performance, Henry Paul and Ross Reck write in “Instant Turnaround!” (William Morrow) “What managers don’t get is that the better they treat their employees, the harder they’ll work.”

This business parable stresses such advice as “be real; be appreciative; be interested; be nice” when dealing with the people who work for you.

The payoff from all this, the authors contend, is that your behavior will get people excited about coming to work and giving it their best efforts. That, they contend, is “the best bargain on the planet” since it costs nothing and requires only a minimum of effort.

LAST CALL Implicit in these books is the assumption that you, and your employees, want to improve performance.

Why would anyone want to do that, ask the comedian Jeff Foxworthy, and Brian Hartt, a comedy writer, in “How to Really Stink at Work” (Villard).

If you are successful, there will be more work to be done, and the authors say they don’t see the point of that. “Shouldn’t you want to work less?” they ask. “Isn’t that what life is all about?”

To make sure you don’t succeed, they offer a number of tips. This one is representative: “Try putting up one of those motion-activated wall hangers — like that loud laughing skull they sell at Halloween that goes off when you walk past it. It will keep people from wanting to come and talk to you about anything.”