The Exuberant Accountant - Scott Heintzelman

I have been called the Energizer Bunny on Steroids and people often ask me, “How do you have so much energy?”  I never really thought much about it until I read The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz.  The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. This is something we can control with our decisions and actions.

We live in the digital age and our pace is fast and relentless.  We face heavy workloads, many family responsibilities and we try to cram as much as possible into every day.  We may be wired up, but we are melting down.  Time management is no longer a solution; instead, we need to learn how to manage our energy.  As energy is the key to high performance as well as health, happiness and life balance.

The book outlines four key principles to increase our energy level:

In my continuing series of book reviews, I want to profile The Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann.  This book is a must read for any business person, but especially a young up and comer.

The book is a story about Joe who is an ambitious, young “Go-Getter” who is working to get to the top.   Joe is struggling to fulfill his quota for the quarter and is feeling a lot of pressure since he missed his quota for the past two.  He lands a meeting with a man known as the “chairman” in a desperate attempt to solicit clout and leverage to seal the deal with the big account.

In my continuing series of book reviews, I profile a great book by John H. Fleming, Ph.D. and Jim Asplund called Human Sigma.  This book describes an innovative management approach that improves the financial performance of sales and service companies by managing employees and their interaction with customers.

The Human Sigma approach is based on the following five rules:

I love to read books as I believe each one has something that can make me a better person, father, husband, leader…   One such book is called "Suzanne's Diary to Nicholas" by James Patterson.  The book has a great word picture about life. 

You are to imagine life as a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. You name them; Work, Family, Health, Friends, and Spirit.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls - family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered.

Thirty years ago, if you had to choose between being born a genius in Mumbai or Shanghai and an average person in Poughkeepsie, you would have chosen Poughkeepsie because your chances of living a prosperous and fulfilled life were much greater in the United States.  ''Now,'' Bill Gates says, ''I would rather be a genius born in China than an average guy born in Poughkeepsie.''  This is an excellent illustration that author Thomas L. Friedman uses in his book, “The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century.''  This is another great book in my continuing series of book reviews.

The world we live in is completely different from what it was 20 years ago and changes are now taking place at a faster rate than ever before. Distances have shrunk, accessibility has increased, new territories have been discovered and jobs have been broken down into processes that are digitally transferred and worked on by the person who is the most efficient, fastest and cheapest.

 In my continuing series of book reviews, I would like to profile Leadership and Self-Deception – Getting Out of the Box.  An infant is learning to crawl.  She begins by pushing herself backward around the house.  Backing herself around, she gets lodged beneath the couch.  There she thrashes about – crying and banging her little head against the sides and undersides of the couch.  She is stuck and hates it.  So she does the only thing she can think of to get herself out – she pushes even harder, which only makes her problem worse.  If this infant could talk, she would blame the couch for her troubles.  She, after all, is doing everything she can think of.  The problem could not be hers.  But of course, the problem is hers, even though she cannot see it.  The author of this amazing book tells us this lack of seeing the problem is the self-deception that is so central to leadership.

The Arbinger Institute wrote this book in order to help people realize that most personal and organizational problems are the result of self-deception.  We deceive ourselves into thinking we're doing the right thing for the right reason, but people won't follow a leader whose motives are selfish. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. Through an entertaining and highly instructive story, this book shows what self-deception is, how people get trapped in it, how it undermines relationships and organizational achievement, and, most importantly, the surprising way to solve it.

So, up until recently according to author Daniel Pink, we have been living in the Information Age. To succeed we needed linear, logical, and analytical skills – we needed to use the left side of our brain. In his book A Whole New Mind, Pink tells us we are now moving toward, or are already participating in the Conceptual Age. As he describes it, this is a new global economy that uses skills lodged in the long overlooked right side of our brain. These skills include: creativity, empathy, intuition, and the ability to link seemingly unrelated objects and events into something new and different.

Pink states that in the United States the Agricultural Age (farmers) gave way to the Industrial Age (factory workers), which was then overtaken by the Information Age (knowledge workers). He contends that each of these shifts was caused by the same three factors: (1) affluence, (2) technology, and (3) globalization. And, he states that we are now passing into the Conceptual Age (creators and emphathizers) and again these same three factors (otherwise known as abundance, automation, and Asia are in play.

 In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina lays out what he considers to be 12 "rules" or "principles" of the brain gleaned from the work of molecular or evolutionary biologists, those who study brain tissues, experimental psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists.  The beauty of the book is that for the first time ever I have had a glimpse into the inner workings of my own mind and gained a new level of understanding for much of what is happening inside my thick skull.  Even for those of us that don’t have a science background this work is written in lay terms.

The Eighth Habit is a sequel to The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.  The Seven Habits introduced the concepts used to become effective whereas The Eighth Habit continues the move from effectiveness to greatness, or to create personal significance and greatness.

The Eighth Habit is considered a new paradigm and Dr. Stephen Covey uses many examples and metaphors in explaining the concepts of The Eighth Habit.  The theme of The Eighth Habit is to “find your voice, and inspire others to find theirs”.  Covey begins the book with a look at the current work environment, indicating that many people are not happy with their jobs and are not satisfied with their contribution to their organizations.  He indicates that this is the typical voice of the workforce.  There is more pressure to do more with less, which has created the environment of doing things that are urgent, rather than important.  He concludes that if everyone is not on the same page than everything becomes urgent and it takes up a significant amount of your energy to address urgent issues, while leaving the important issues unattended. 

Never Eat Alone is a welcome addition to the networking books available since it presents concrete advice on the building of mutually beneficial relationships to assist you in all aspects of your life. In Never Eat Alone, marketing and sales consultant Keith Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps, and inner mind-set, that he uses to connect with thousands of colleagues, friends and associates.

The secret to accomplishing personal career objectives, Ferrazzi tells us, can be found in reaching out to other people. What distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships so that everyone wins.