Finance

I really enjoyed the book. It is a a no-nonsense, common sense approach to leadership, time management, communication skills, strategic planning, etc. When I was studying for my 6th year in Administration and Supervision (a required education degree for CT administrators), many of these topics were discussed.

This book applies to ALL who desire refining their leadership, business, and professional skills. The market expands well beyond the medical profession. Perhaps The 12-Minute MBA for Doctors should have been called The 12-Minute MBA for Professionals. Actually, when Charles Johnson and Andy Thibault write the sequels, they can be entitled The 12-Minute MBA for ________. Educators, Engineers, Attorneys, etc. There is a market for those books. I am sending this review and my personal recommendation to all members of the CT Council of Language Teachers for their dissemination to World Language teachers in CT. I look forward to reading the sequels myself!

Carol A. Kearns
Vice-President / President-Elect CT Council of Language Teachers
National Vice-President La Sociedad Honoraria Hispánica

Self-help manuals rarely impact professions other than their targeted audiences. "The 12-Minute MBA for Doctors," however, shatters that myth by providing practical skills for any novice trying to survive in today's chaotic business world.

You don't have to be a medical professional to benefit from this fluent and provocative book. Anyone who doesn't know how to negotiate a lease, hire staff or deal with an insurance company will learn how to build a successful business.

Written by two Litchfield, Connecticut friends and neighbors, "The 12-Minute MBA for Doctors" is a lively collaboration between Charles Johnson and Andy Thibault. Johnson's firm, Medical Education Training Associates of Woodbury, Connecticut, helps doctors, bankers and other professionals run their businesses.

A couple of years ago, Johnson delivered a 12-minute talk before the Society for University Surgeons in New Orleans. After several colleagues asked for help running their businesses, one of them suggested Johnson call his program "The 12-Minute MBA for Doctors." A book was born.

Thibault, a columnist for The Connecticut Law Tribune, is an award-winning feature writer and nationally known investigative reporter.

Together, Johnson and Thibault provide punchy insights in eight chapters on such practical business skills as persuasive communication, team building and conflict resolution. One section in the chapter on communication is applicable to the home front as well as the business world.

Johnson asks: "What are the first three answers you hear from your significant other when you get home. For most people, it's three words - fine, fine, chicken. Why is that? Simple. The questions you asked were probably: How was your day? How are the kids? What's for dinner?" Not exactly great conversation starters.

"After I spent a day with one of my sales managers," Johnson continues, "I was invited to his house for dinner. We talked about a strategy before we went home. We walked in the door and he says hello to his wife. He says, 'Tell me about your day.' She started to say, "Fine," but then she heard his question.'Well, the kids and I went shopping and we went to the park and we played on the swing, and.' He could actually hear information she was imparting and was able to give her positive feedback."

This is just one communication example of trying to persuade people with your people power instead of your position power. Communication, the book notes, is one of the five components of a successful team, along with leadership, defined roles, clear objectives and trust. Specific chapters deal with negotiating skills, interviewing and hiring skills, understanding financial issues, strategic and tactical planning, teamwork and leadership.

As Johnson and Thibault detail, surgeons are still trained like blacksmiths. Although they are at the pinnacle of their profession, they tend to know little about business - after four years of college, four years of medical school and then five more years of residency and fellowship education. They are turned loose in their early to mid-30s and expected to run a business that is not run by their peers.

Today, health care is run more and more by business people - not doctors. Hospital administrators tend to be business people. Insurance companies have everything to do with the running of health care today. Yet the highly skilled physician, untrained in management and economic matters, has to deal on an everyday basis with people who run business. How does he get his business started and survive?

The answers are in this book. But readers from many other disciplines will benefit significantly from any 12-minute helping of this management primer.

(Richard McGowan, former White House correspondent for the New York Daily News, retired from government service after
serving as spokesman for the federal Office of Personnel Management. He resides in Wicomico, Va. and lectures on the
modern presidency at universities.)

Generally informative, although I was hoping to learn more about why the executives (who unleash the dysfunctional managers and supervisors on the rest of us) think and act the way they do.

The advice in this book is strong enough for a man, but made for a woman.

Karen Randall is very either/or about the office culture. Some offices are great and then there are the crazy ones. This is a survival guide for the office that is not nice, polite, fair, or even fun. Helps you to survive and succeed.

Without actually realizing it, I have, for the last few years, followed many of the rules of this book, and with great success. I can trace many of my failures and problems with work to *not* following these rules which I know to be true. Some of the primary ones: Do *not* get emotionally involved with your job. Do *not* get too involved with your co-workers, because when you start to like them too much, you will start to get involved with *their* work problems which will do nothing but cause you trouble. The only person who really has to like you is your boss, or the person who actually makes all the real decisions. Always act like a "team player" (it is totally true, from what I have observed, that all owners/managers like to live in some hallucination that their employes are one happy team going for the same goal) while actually watching out for yourself and keeping emotionally detached. These are not necessarily palatable realities to most people but they *are* realities. If you have ever had the experience of working hard and really trying in a job and it has not gotten you anywhere, or you have even gotten fired, this book could be an invaluable asset in turning your working life around.

This author is one of those get-rich quick schemers who is using the profits from this load of hogwash to finance his soon-to-be-released informercial making the same bogus claims. Everyone knows there is money to be made on the Net; what we don't know (and subsequently desire to know) is HOW. This book offers a bunch of lame ideas that any dim-witted fool could come up with while reading through the classified section of an income opportunity type magazine. Get real. There appears to be absolutely no original thought work put into this book. Do yourself a favor...if you really want to MAKE money...don't throw it away on this fodder for birdcage bottoms.

This is the first book about online entrepreneurship I've read that doesn't pile it up and doesn't overhype the online market. It's very honest about what you can and can't get out of the Internet in terms of business, and dispels many misconceptions about the market. Not every one of the 121 business ideas mentioned there is right for anyone, but for the most part it really inspired me to find my own niche (pet related products).

After reading several "pro-active" books on online business, it is refreshing to finally find a book that doesn't paint a too rosy a picture of the future of online commerce. The message of this book is: you can make an income from the Internet - supplemental income, at least - but will probably not become a millionaire. The Internet is not here to drive existing businesses out of business, and hence can't claim to take their share of the market and give it to Internet entrepreneurs. It is a very informative book that, as other readers have mentioned, gets your creative juices flowing. The graphic layout of the book leaves something to be desired, however, and some of the URLs are outdated.