Economics-and-finance

To depict the 12 hebavior patterns, the authors cleverly use different simple scenarios and business cases to address the orgins of the problem & pattern. They explain why the behavior patterns may limit your career advancement and how should break the behaviour patterns. I personally found that some patterns breaking approach could be helpful but some don't and lack of practical details. The authors seem to suggest most of the cases that the root of these behaviour patterns are arised out of childhood development. Well, I am not sure this is completely correct but you can certainly find more explanation in Part II of the book.

The 12 bad habits that hold good people back are listed below:

1. Never feeling good enough
2. Seeing the world in black & white
3. Doing too much, pushing too hard
4. Avoiding conflict at any cost
5. Running roughshod over the opposition
6. Rebel looking for a cause
7. Always swinging for the fence
8. When the fear is in the driver's seat
9. Emotionally tone-deaf
10. When no job is good enough
11. Lacking a sense of boundaries
12. Losing the path

To make readers easy to understand and remember these 12 behavior patterns, the authors also name these bad habits as the following easy terms:

1. Acrophobe
Feeling in their heart of hearts that they don't deserve to be where they have been placed.

2. Meritocrat
Seeing the world black & white, with answers that are right or wrong, all weighed on a perfectly fair scale and judged accordingly, on their merits alone.

3. Hero
Constantly trying to do too much and pushing too hard on both themselves and other people.

4. Peacekeeper
Going out of the way to avoid conflict, because of uncertainty about how it will end up.

5. Bulldozer
Talking and acting tough, bullying people, taking no prisoners, and leveling anyone and anything that gets in the way.

6. Rebel
To defy authority and everything associated with authority, including societal tradition, company custom, and good taste.

7. Home run hitter
Expecting & demanding extraordinary and immediate success.

8. Pessimist-Worrier
Seeing the negative and almost nothing but the negative; and worrying about it to excess.

9. Mr. Spocks
Having a hard time recognizing and understanding fear, love, anger, jealousy, greed, compassion, and other emotions in themselves or in others.

10. Coulda-been
These people have very little tolerance for hard work and little patience, not because they're lazy, but because doing the work to get to the top means that they're not already there. When they seem to be saying is "No job is good enough," but what they actually feel inside is "I'm not good enough for any job."

11. Loose Lips
The person who lacks an appropriate sense of boundaries doesn't understand that some subjects belong in the office and some belong only in certain corners of the office and definitely not outside.

12. Dig Deeper
Feeling they have lost their sense of direction, or a sense of enthusiasm that has dimished or disappeared for reasons that are not immediately clear.

If you want to know more details, you can find very rich information from Part II of the book. It includes not just a description of the core psychological issue for each behavior pattern, but tools you can use to access yourself in each area, and execrises that you can do to strengthen those weaker psychological "muscles."

Overall, this is a pretty interesting book you may want to put in your own collection.

Himanshu Pandit

I picked this up after searching online for a career transition book. The authors, two guys from Harvard, have written a really fantastic guide to managing your career. If you know anyone who has had negative performance review, has problems being a "team player" or if you are a manager that has an employee that everyone in the office perceives as "difficult", do yourself a favor and pick-up a copy of this book.

These guys have practical exercises and explanations for some of the bad behaviors we have at work---procrastinating, falling behind, constant feelings of stress or anxiety. Far from the "touchy feely" approach of many of the self-help schmaltz out there, these guys are from the business world and offer real steps and real solutions to modify the negative behaviors. (eg. you may be a natural worrier and never be worry-free, but you can cultivate new ways to process the worry so that it doesn't interfere with your "getting the job done.")

In my opinion, a must read!

Bob Scheinfeld answers those questions for you in the 11th Element. He has discovered the untold story and the true nature of what is usually referred to as luck, synchronicity, or being blessed. And more importantly, he has developed it into a system that anyone can follow.

Scheinfeld keenly laid out 7 steps for applying The 11th Element
Step 1: Expand and clarify your ideal outcome
Step 2: Craft a request for help to produce the optimal outcome
Step 3:Submit your request to your Inner CEO for approval
Step 4: Receive approval
Step 5: Tap into the invisible network for help.
Step 6: Perform due diligence and make decisions and plans
Step 7: Manifest the outcome

I find his review of the "10 Elements" that AREN'T good enough by themselves fascinating. The list might shock some people: Desire, Belief, The Law of Attraction, Goal Setting, Modeling, Create a Clear and Detailed Plan, Take Massive Action Now, Persistence, Visualization, and Affirmations.

I interviewed Bob Scheinfeld on "The Inside Success Show" and loved it. Impressive break-throughs don't come along that often, but this is one of them. Innovative is too mild - The 11th Element is extraordinarily different!

Here's some other things I learned from Bob:

** How Bob Scheinfeld lived under the thumb of "Murphy" for 7 years before finally discovering the 11th Element.
** What 4 things you can do bring 'luck' into your life
** Why you can make lots of money when its NOT your desire
** How to talk to your Inner CEO so he (or she) will listen
** What you can do right now to change the results of your life forever
** And much, much more ...

If you want to master the critical skills that make up The 11th Element (the true "X-Factor" to creating wealth, success, and happiness), then I recommend you read Bob Scheinfeld's book and follow his 7 Steps. I've begun using them and I already see a difference in my life.

Randy (Dr. Proactive) Gilbert, Host of The Inside Success Show (www.TheInsideSuccessShow.com) and best-selling author of "Success Bound"

I've going to give away one of the secrets of the book: the 11th element is a success strategy that almost no one talks about, yet it's easily the most reliable and important one for real world success. Unlike so many 'success' authors, Scheinfeld has made the principles in his book work, not by selling 'get rich quick' or 'believe and get rich' schemes, but in the real business world.

The other ten elements? They're the principles 'success gurus' spout that not only don't work, but can also lead you into a world of trouble.
Scheinfeld's advice on widely disseminated success principles
that DON'T work but many people believe is easily worth many times the cost of the book.

I appreciated his honesty, candor and his ability to break down a complex subject and put it into a system that anybody can follow.

Job well done - pick this one up and use it to change your life!

I'd be curious as to what the authors have to say about the trend towards bigger corporations, through mergers. According to the authors, these big corporation really shouldn't exist, because things diverge, and not converge.

They also make the pompous statement that the purchasers of business.com could have saved $7,499,979 if they had bought the authors' book. The fact that they could claim credit for saying that a brand name shouldn't be generic is preposterous. That is one of the most basic tenet of branding. Of course, the authors does not discuss sex.com, an equally generic name, which has made $40 million in the course of a few years.

The authors are obviously trying to cash in on their brand name "The ? Immutable Laws Of ...". When Al Ries and Jack Trout first wrote the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing", I thought that the book was very well written. I bought this book thinking that it would be the name. Alas, it is not to be so.

Still, the authors have explained the difference between a good Internet brand versus a bad one. The Internet is an Interactive Medium. As such, the marketer must realise the interactivity of the medium and how it affects branding. The lessons learnt have been quite interesting. However, I still felt cheated as I felt that I have paid for 11 laws but I have only learnt one.

Al and Laura Ries point out that companies seeking to do business on the Internet almost always get it wrong. And those errors begin with their choice of a brand name to use, the services they offer, the form those services take, and the technologies they plan to use. Basically, the authors make the now familiar argument (if you have read their earlier work) that there can only be one winning name in a category, that this name will be a proper noun or two rather than a common noun or two. The lousy examples they give of poorly selected brand names would be fairly humorous if it weren't for all of the money and lives being wasted in an obviously losing effort. One of the most persuasive arguments they make is that most categories will be dominated by one brand, and that brand will be the one with the best brand name (assuming some level of decent service), not necessarily the first entrant. Thus, Amazon.com is praised for having a good name while buy.com is hissed for a generic one. Yet everyone believes that being first on the Internet is the only issue for dominating a category. Wrong!

Since their earlier work called for 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, I was pleased to see that the Internet is less complicated to brand correctly than a typical new product. The main reason for this is that the seller is dealing directly with the buyer, rather than through an intermediary like a bricks and mortar retailer.

The most telling argument they make is that existing businesses have an important decision to make: To either turn the existing business into an Internet-based one (like Cisco, Dell, and Charles Schwab have done), or to create a new brand with an Internet business model to compete with the nonInternet business. Most businesses would benefit from carefully thinking through this point.

The authors also argue that making your Web site more interactively valuable is critical to your success. If you notice that most Web sites aren't, you will soon be convinced that this is advice more people need to read and understand.

This book points out the problem that many people are now operating Internet-based businesses who have little understanding of the fundamentals of how to succeed. This book will be a valuable contribution to the literature of how to solve that problem.

The book is also valuable for its ability to point out the sources of stalled thinking when it comes to the Internet. The issues are more similar to existing businesses than different, despite all of the hype in the e-press.