4+ Star: Absolute Must Read

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The Anatomy of Peace is an excellent book written by the Arbinger Group, and is an absolute must read. The main topic of this book is how to treat people like people rather than objects. Reading this book opens your mind to others’ feelings, wants, and needs as well as understanding your own. This idea of treating others as people is illustrated through interesting stories, including a story about an Isreali and a Palestinian learning to become friends amongst so much hatred. This book will touch your heart and make you a better person as it teaches you to “have a heart at peace.” This book is a follow-up from Leadership and Self Deception, and it is even more entertaining and insightful than the first, thus I give the book my highest 4 plus star rating.

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Competing for the Future is an excellent book on business strategy, and I strongly urge all to read it, especially upper level executives of all companies. This book provides great insights into how to gain an edge on the competition in any industry. It also helps all business professionals to think outside-of-the-box. The book challenges the conventional wisdom on strategy and planning, and it encourages leaders to spend more energy and efforts on focusing on the future--for this is often where true success lies. It also provides insights into how to motivate a work force through strategic intent and how to maximize your ability to succeed in the competitive business world long-term using many real life business experiences and experiments. Though a few parts of the book are a little slow, and the book overall is not extremely entertaining per say, its wisdom, content, and guidance are outstanding and invaluable. I give this book my absolute must read 4 plus star rating.

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I recently reread
Leadership and Self-Deception by The Arbinger Institute and have consequently upgraded it from a 4 star to a 4 star plus. The reason is because of the profound impact the lessons from the book can have in each of our lives when applied. The central theme is we all deceive ourselves and rarely realize we have a problem. This self-deception leads to conflict and unnecessary people problems. In fact, this self-deception often causes us to provoke outcomes that are the exact opposite of what we truly want—simply to justify our own negative feelings. Leadership and Self-Deception is about recognizing we have a problem and then avoiding it by acting on the humanity we feel towards others. And its teaching can help us repair and restore any relationship in our lives. Though not extremely entertaining at times, the content of this book is both enlightening and priceless--thus I give it an absolute must read 4 star plus rating. (As a note, this book may require more than one reading to fully understand and appreciate its worth. It’s relatively short so it lends well to multiple readings.) This book is also followed by a more entertaining book called The Anatomy of Peace, that builds on the same concepts presented in this book.