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The Conference Board Review® Article
Worth Noting
By Matthew Budman
Nice Guys Can Get the Corner Office
Eight Strategies for Winning in Business Without Being a Jerk
By Russ Edelman, Tim Hiltabiddle, and Charles C. Manz
Portfolio, $21.95
Are you a nice guy? I thought as much. No problem. The difficulty comes when guys are overly nice: They're hard-working organizational assets, sure, but their "niceness gets in the way of their success in business and in life." To help these poor saps — surprisingly common, apparently — the authors lay out a Nice Guy Syndrome Bill of Rights and offer case studies and advice: "Overly nice guys must learn to take off the blinders and look at life with clarity and honesty." The authors, partners in a consultancy called Nice Guy Strategies, provide some counsel for corporate leaders ("Let your overly nice guys know that when people compete in a healthy capacity, better ideas are forged"), but most of the book explains how to, for instance, say no and protect oneself from others' demands. A lot of it sounds like good old-fashioned assertiveness training, but the book never pushes the reader too far toward the jerky end of the spectrum: "The key to long-term success lies in finding a balance between the extremes of being an SOB and being overly nice."
You Want Fries With That?
A White-Collar Burnout Experiences Life at Minimum Wage
By Prioleau Alexander
Arcade, $24.95
At 41, Alexander quit his ad-industry job ("a unique business in a suck-the-life-out-of-you sort of way") and set out to experience several "bottom-rung" jobs, just for the hell of it. He chronicles life as an ice-cream scooper, a pizza-delivery guy, an ER tech, and a few other thankfully temporary professions. The author's descriptions of his "minimum-wage adventures" are somewhat educational and frequently entertaining, with no hint of the desperation and sadness that characterize all too many low-wage jobs. (Indeed, few of Alexander's fellow employees seem to be working for any reason other than boredom.) This book isn't so much an on-the-lighter-side counterpart to Nickel and Dimed as it is an amiable introduction to the people who hand you your Whopper and greet you at Wal-Mart. Fortunately, Alexander is an engaging companion, and the reader is happy to follow him for at least a little while.
Dear American Airlines: A Novel
By Jonathan Miles
Houghton Mifflin, $22.00
Short and fierce, Miles' novel relates the furiously scribbled letter of a would-be passenger stuck at O'Hare after his westward American flight is canceled — for no visible reason, naturally. Bennie Ford, 53, finds himself impotently watching the hours tick away, foiling a planned reunion with his long-estranged daughter at her wedding. He begins a savage complaint letter but, with time to kill, veers away to detail the story behind his trip and his largely wasted life as poet, drunk, and absent father. And he pauses regularly to demand that whichever entry-level "corporate citizen" at AA HQ eventually opens the envelope containing his rant not only grant his $392.68 refund but read the whole damn thing.
The book careens between humor and pathos, with perhaps a few too many excerpted passages from the Polish WWII novel that Bennie, a translator by trade, has been assigned to shape into English prose. The narrator may be a disappointment to himself and his Left Coast family, but he's pleasant enough to spend time with — particularly if you read Dear American Airlines, as I did thanks to Amtrak, during a long transportation delay.
— Matthew Budman
Pages: [1]
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Return to the July/August 2008 The Conference Board Review® issue.
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