Review: The Conference Board Review®
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Have you always meant to pick up one of those business parables — you know, the kind of story in which a stalled executive learns valuable lessons and breaks through to the next level — but couldn’t bring yourself to do it? Perhaps it’s just me — after all, The Go-Giver has turned out to be a big bestseller, one that even those embarrassed to be seen with a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? can carry around without shame. Not that anyone should need to carry The Go-Giver for long: At 133 brief pages, it shouldn’t take more than an hour to read, and not much longer to process. Burg and Mann tell the story of Joe, a frustrated young go-getter for whom key accounts and sales goals remain just out of reach. With a deadline looming, Joe seeks out a fabled consultant dubbed the Chairman, who magnanimously introduces his new charge to a series of successful people — all generous types who have focused their energies on helping others. The reader will hardly be startled when the Chairman’s “Five Laws of Stratospheric Success” bear fruit just in time to meet Joe’s deadline. The book is a brisk read, with competently written prose and dialogue, and unlike your typical mice-in-a-maze fable, it never makes the reader feel as though he’s picked up his first-grader’s favorite storybook by mistake. No reader could be so hardhearted as to gainsay the to-give-is-divine message, and in the long run that is surely a winning philosophy for the individual, the organization, and for society at large. But even the most credulous reader will have to suppress a snicker at how quickly the karmic wheel turns in Joe’s favor, with what seems like remarkably little effort. Can it really be that easy? Generosity is well and good, but how many successful real-life businesspeople truly share the attitude of the (extremely fictional) Chairman? Too bad that Burg and Mann didn’t include a dark flip-side narrative, in which one of Joe’s colleagues fails to heed the Five Laws, remains grasping and selfish, and discovers that karma can be a bitch. Maybe there’ll be a sequel. — The Conference Board Review® |