es for job seekers and employers It’s that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.

We’ve all seen the TV commercial in which a prospective employee receives flowers and fruit baskets from CEOs trying to lure him to work for their companies. All he did was post his resume on the Internet. If he can do it, you think, so can I. A mountain of fruit baskets waits in your future! Who’s not thrilled about the prospect of your potential advancement? The human resources department at your present employer. As the clever commercial suggests, the HR game is getting tougher and tougher these days. It is not too strong a statement to say that successful hiring can directly affect a company’s bottom line.

In fact, Frederich W. Ball and Barbara B. Ball say the most critical battle waged in business today is the war for talent. They address this hot topic head-on in Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar. Today, these recruiting and interviewing experts say, job candidates aren’t interviewing to try to get a job; they interview to see if they even want a new job. Superstar candidates know that for every offer they receive, there are two or three more corporations queuing up to court them. This happened to a friend recently. Following an MBA program at a top school, he was offered seven jobs with different corporations; all considered him a superstar candidate. Each post offered significant pay and an array of wonderful benefits. All offered to help his spouse relocate, find childcare, even pay for closing costs on a new house. Ultimately his choice hinged on what the Balls call “knowing the candidate’s agenda.” The financial strength of the company, the entrŽe to an interesting and challenging position and the strength of the senior management team led him to choose a job with a company whose culture reflected his own beliefs and whose corporate vision was filled with future possibilities. CEOs and human resource directors, as well as upper level managers with hiring responsibility, should read this book. Ball and Ball offer insight into the secrets of tapping and, more importantly, attracting superstar candidates. With keen understanding and years of corporate experience to boot, they outline the crucial steps every recruiter (for businesses big or small) needs to succeed when bringing a superstar player on board. While Impact Hiring offers insight into how to attract the best new recruits, Winning the Talent Wars: How to manage and compete in the high-tech, high-speed, knowledge-based, superfluid economy by management expert Bruce Tulgan traces the reasons companies lose their best talent. Tulgan says company loyalty is a thing of the past. The corporate downsizing and restructuring of recent years sent a clear message to employees: individuals must take responsibility for their own careers. Free-agency is an existing mindset for employees, and it will drive a more efficient market-driven economy, Tulgan believes.

Winning the Talent Wars explores the macro-level employment forces at work in the economy and confronts employers with the reality that they need to reevaluate their compensation systems to best attract and retain talented employees. Tulgan says employers must embrace the new economy and come to understand its effect on current employment trends. He stresses pay-for-performance approaches and wants businesses to turn managers into coaches, leading the team to perform. He challenges corporate leaders to “create as many career paths as you have people” and restructure the traditional notion of climbing the corporate ladder. His is an exciting proposition, one that will appeal to many 25- to 40-year-olds seeking jobs.

Winning the Talent Wars tells the stories of corporate executives who have gone to battle for talent and are beginning to win the war. “More and more of your best people are leaving, or talking about it, or thinking about it,” Tulgan says. Learn strategy that allows retaining employees and hiring new ones to be a win-win situation.

In recent years, newspapers have seen a decline in classified advertising revenue as employers put more want-ads on the Internet. But not everyone, and certainly not every company, is taking advantage of the Internet revolution. Poor Richard’s Internet Recruiting: Easy, Low-Cost Ways to Find Great Employees Online by Barbara Ling is a great introduction to both looking for employees and looking for your own new job.

Why recruit on the Internet? For most businesses the advantages are easy to see. First, Ling says, it’s often free. And who doesn’t want to free up money for R&andD or salary incentives or customer research? Just look at the bottom line. The Web is quicker, can be read 24/7, is easy to use for both prospective employees and employers and is an easy form of corporate advertising.

Ling knows her subject area well. An online columnist for the Boston Herald, she has written on Internet recruiting and led seminars on the subject. After you’ve finished her comprehensive guide to web recruiting, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

Staying ahead of the competition is the idea behind Richard C. Whiteley’s Love the Work You’re With: A Practical Guide to Finding New Joy and Productivity in Your Job. What causes people to leave their jobs? Increasingly, personal satisfaction ranks high on the list of reasons. Employees, however, often find their new jobs also fail to offer an advanced level of personal enrichment. He likens this syndrome to a failed relationship. How many people walk away from one relationship only to make the same mistakes again in another? Whitely convincingly helps employees and their employers recognize unconscious patterns of attitude and behavior that mark unchallenging and passionless workplaces.

Sometimes, Whiteley says, employees live in fear that they will be downsized, discarded or laid off. They never develop their potential to enjoy their job because they go to work every day wondering, what next? Whitely encourages employees to see themselves as positive forces at work, responsible for their own level of job satisfaction.

Both employees and employers can benefit from Whiteley’s insights. In the competitive marketplace, he says, each employee, each CEO and each manager has to infuse the workplace with a spirit of energy. He offers a series of exercises and self-evaluations for employees. They should also be required reading for human resource professionals who watch long-time and long-sought employees walk out the door in search of the “perfect” opportunity.

Briefly noted Â¥ The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of design firm IDEO’s leaders, offers a rich and exciting ride through the mindset of a unique company. A leadership book with style, charisma and fun, this book also demonstrates how to capitalize on fresh ideas.

Â¥ Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan’s High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp by Rob Ryan. From Roaring Lion Ranch in Montana, the founder of Ascend Communications infuses this model of how to start a business with his unique humor, wit and practicality. Ryan shoots down entrepreneurial wannabes but goes on to tell them how to get up and continue the battle.

Â¥ The PR Crisis Bible: How to Take Charge of the Media When All Hell Breaks Loose by Robin Cohn is the definitive source for what to do when the worst case scenario unfolds at your company. How to handle public relations crisis, how to prepare for them and, most importantly, how to handle them honestly is the goal of this deft manual. Required reading for every CEO.

Sharon Secor, who helped jump-start two businesses, is a Nashville-based writer.

es for job seekers and employers It’s that time of year again. The days are short and dreary; your job seems tedious and boring. Staggering mountains of holiday bills convince you that career advancement should be a springtime priority.

We’ve all seen the TV commercial in which a prospective employee receives flowers and fruit baskets from CEOs trying to lure him to work for their companies. All he did was post his resume on the Internet. If he can do it, you think, so can I. A mountain of fruit baskets waits in your future! Who’s not thrilled about the prospect of your potential advancement? The human resources department at your present employer. As the clever commercial suggests, the HR game is getting tougher and tougher these days. It is not too strong a statement to say that successful hiring can directly affect a company’s bottom line.

In fact, Frederich W. Ball and Barbara B. Ball say the most critical battle waged in business today is the war for talent. They address this hot topic head-on in Impact Hiring: The Secrets of Hiring a Superstar. Today, these recruiting and interviewing experts say, job candidates aren’t interviewing to try to get a job; they interview to see if they even want a new job. Superstar candidates know that for every offer they receive, there are two or three more corporations queuing up to court them. This happened to a friend recently. Following an MBA program at a top school, he was offered seven jobs with different corporations; all considered him a superstar candidate. Each post offered significant pay and an array of wonderful benefits. All offered to help his spouse relocate, find childcare, even pay for closing costs on a new house. Ultimately his choice hinged on what the Balls call "knowing the candidate’s agenda." The financial strength of the company, the entrŽe to an interesting and challenging position and the strength of the senior management team led him to choose a job with a company whose culture reflected his own beliefs and whose corporate vision was filled with future possibilities. CEOs and human resource directors, as well as upper level managers with hiring responsibility, should read this book. Ball and Ball offer insight into the secrets of tapping and, more importantly, attracting superstar candidates. With keen understanding and years of corporate experience to boot, they outline the crucial steps every recruiter (for businesses big or small) needs to succeed when bringing a superstar player on board. While Impact Hiring offers insight into how to attract the best new recruits, Winning the Talent Wars: How to manage and compete in the high-tech, high-speed, knowledge-based, superfluid economy by management expert Bruce Tulgan traces the reasons companies lose their best talent. Tulgan says company loyalty is a thing of the past. The corporate downsizing and restructuring of recent years sent a clear message to employees: individuals must take responsibility for their own careers. Free-agency is an existing mindset for employees, and it will drive a more efficient market-driven economy, Tulgan believes.

Winning the Talent Wars explores the macro-level employment forces at work in the economy and confronts employers with the reality that they need to reevaluate their compensation systems to best attract and retain talented employees. Tulgan says employers must embrace the new economy and come to understand its effect on current employment trends. He stresses pay-for-performance approaches and wants businesses to turn managers into coaches, leading the team to perform. He challenges corporate leaders to "create as many career paths as you have people" and restructure the traditional notion of climbing the corporate ladder. His is an exciting proposition, one that will appeal to many 25- to 40-year-olds seeking jobs.

Winning the Talent Wars tells the stories of corporate executives who have gone to battle for talent and are beginning to win the war. "More and more of your best people are leaving, or talking about it, or thinking about it," Tulgan says. Learn strategy that allows retaining employees and hiring new ones to be a win-win situation.

In recent years, newspapers have seen a decline in classified advertising revenue as employers put more want-ads on the Internet. But not everyone, and certainly not every company, is taking advantage of the Internet revolution. Poor Richard’s Internet Recruiting: Easy, Low-Cost Ways to Find Great Employees Online by Barbara Ling is a great introduction to both looking for employees and looking for your own new job.

Why recruit on the Internet? For most businesses the advantages are easy to see. First, Ling says, it’s often free. And who doesn’t want to free up money for R&andD or salary incentives or customer research? Just look at the bottom line. The Web is quicker, can be read 24/7, is easy to use for both prospective employees and employers and is an easy form of corporate advertising.

Ling knows her subject area well. An online columnist for the Boston Herald, she has written on Internet recruiting and led seminars on the subject. After you’ve finished her comprehensive guide to web recruiting, you’ll be one step ahead of the competition.

Staying ahead of the competition is the idea behind Richard C. Whiteley’s Love the Work You’re With: A Practical Guide to Finding New Joy and Productivity in Your Job. What causes people to leave their jobs? Increasingly, personal satisfaction ranks high on the list of reasons. Employees, however, often find their new jobs also fail to offer an advanced level of personal enrichment. He likens this syndrome to a failed relationship. How many people walk away from one relationship only to make the same mistakes again in another? Whitely convincingly helps employees and their employers recognize unconscious patterns of attitude and behavior that mark unchallenging and passionless workplaces.

Sometimes, Whiteley says, employees live in fear that they will be downsized, discarded or laid off. They never develop their potential to enjoy their job because they go to work every day wondering, what next? Whitely encourages employees to see themselves as positive forces at work, responsible for their own level of job satisfaction.

Both employees and employers can benefit from Whiteley’s insights. In the competitive marketplace, he says, each employee, each CEO and each manager has to infuse the workplace with a spirit of energy. He offers a series of exercises and self-evaluations for employees. They should also be required reading for human resource professionals who watch long-time and long-sought employees walk out the door in search of the "perfect" opportunity.

Briefly noted The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley, one of design firm IDEO’s leaders, offers a rich and exciting ride through the mindset of a unique company. A leadership book with style, charisma and fun, this book also demonstrates how to capitalize on fresh ideas.

Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan’s High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp by Rob Ryan. From Roaring Lion Ranch in Montana, the founder of Ascend Communications infuses this model of how to start a business with his unique humor, wit and practicality. Ryan shoots down entrepreneurial wannabes but goes on to tell them how to get up and continue the battle.

The PR Crisis Bible: How to Take Charge of the Media When All Hell Breaks Loose by Robin Cohn is the definitive source for what to do when the worst case scenario unfolds at your company. How to handle public relations crisis, how to prepare for them and, most importantly, how to handle them honestly is the goal of this deft manual. Required reading for every CEO.

Sharon Secor, who helped jump-start two businesses, is a Nashville-based writer.

ons from the East Jim Rohwer, a senior contributing editor at Fortune and former executive editor of The Economist offers a scintillating and thought-provoking argument in Remade in America: How Asia Will Change Because America Boomed Anyone with a business or personal interest in the globalization of markets and the impact of Americanization in the world economy should pick up this 3well-argued book. Rohwer says that after the Asian crisis of the ’90s, the continent began a radical transformation. After learning the hard way that interdependence on the American economy is real and lasting, Asians are now “intent on learning how the common future of mankind now being born in America is going to work and how Asia can profit from it.” Rohwer argues that Asia possesses underlying advantages which will guide it to success, from hard-working people to strong families to young societies. He predicts the next generation will see fast economic growth, based in part on the Internet. How Asia will succeed and where its strengths lie are the important insights of Remade in America.

Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas can’t wait until after college. StreetWise: A Guide for Teen Investors says kids can invest the money they make. It teaches teens how to pick stocks, handle the ups and downs of the market, covers tax concerns, and even pitches Wall Street careers teenagers might want to tackle someday. For parents who worry these books will turn their kids into money-hungry land sharks, don’t sweat. While both books offer sound small business and investing advice, the real power of these books is to build money-making and spending confidence for teens who may feel they have no monetary power. Teenage Millionaire says babysitting is a surprisingly effective way to earn income and build a business. StreetWise makes age-old investing advice on compound interest sound appealing. Far from luring your teenager with the promise of glittering riches, these books teach teens to earn and save their money. After reading them, teens might be willing to share their newfound financial wisdom with the rest of the family even their parents.

Just your type: behavior on the job We’re each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the “nature” part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the “nurture” side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Given the outpouring of ink in recent years on the varieties of human intelligence (such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed), it’s no surprise that business authors would seek to apply this evolving science to the workplace. This month, we look at four recently released books that delve into the connections between personality type and business performance.

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Davies-Black, $18.95, ISBN 0891061495), by William Bridges, is an updated edition of a title that gained critical acclaim upon its initial appearance a decade ago. Bridges looks at businesses as organisms, with their own personal histories and inherited characteristics. He argues convincingly that a company’s character is much more than the sum of its employees’ personalities, and he offers guidance in understanding how different types of organizations think, feel, perceive, and behave. Applied properly, his analysis may be able to steer a firm away from patterns of action that are self-defeating and toward actions that better suit its strengths.

As I read through Bridges’s 16 types of organizational personalities (modeled on the individual personality types of the widely used Myers-Briggs personality assessments), a Rorschach effect sets in. I see one of my former employers in the profile of an ENFJ corporation (a type in which extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors predominate), and then I see it again in the quite different profile of an ISTJ company (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging). I find another ex-employer in four different personality-type ink blots. Accurately defining one’s true type is hard in Bridges’ system (as it is in the Myers-Briggs system), but the very act of trying to figure out which profile fits best can improve self-knowledge.

Bridges includes in his book an “Organizational Character Index” that business teams can use to evaluate the character of their companies and, by implication, determine what kinds of people will fit best within a given corporate culture. The author is at pains to stress that his index should not be used as a screening tool by employers, stressing that there are no “good” or “bad” personality types just different types that are more well-suited, or less well-suited, to be part of a certain type of team. Just as a career counselor can help an individual focus on jobs he or she is good at, The Character of Organizations can help a company hone strategies that make the most of its strengths.

Conversely, another new book tries to help workers avoid being harmed by their own personality defects and, one must admit, we’ve each got a few of those. Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns that Keep You from Getting Ahead (Doubleday, $24.95, ISBN 0385498497), by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, is a thoughtful and useful compendium of things not to do and ways not to be, while you’re on the job.

Maximum Success is the consummate self-help guide for talented people who keep running into the same problems over and over, in different jobs. There are employees who never feel quite good enough to deserve the jobs they have. There are workers for whom no job is ever good enough. There are those who try to do too much at once, those who avoid conflict at any cost, those who can’t get along with the boss, and those who feel they have lost track of their career paths. The authors, who head up the Harvard Business School’s MBA career development office, have seen it all.

The downside of perusing a book like this is that it often brings on moments of rueful recognition. Playing the “peacemaker” or the “bulldozer,” exhibiting a “reactive stance toward authority” or “emotional tone-deafness” these are workplace behaviors that emerge out of a person’s deepest psychological being. Confronting them means confronting a piece of yourself. Like Bridges, Waldroop and Butler go out of their way not to be judgmental about such habits. But, again like Bridges, they draw on a body of psychological literature stretching back to Karl Jung as they offer constructive suggestions for recognizing these tendencies and avoiding the career ruin they can cause.

The human resource manager’s role as group psychologist is the subject of Making Change Happen One Person at a Time: Assessing Change Capacity Within Your Organization, by Charles H. Bishop, Jr. (AMACOM, $27.95, ISBN 0814405282). Bishop lays out the characteristics of four different personality types, classified by how they react to change. Making Change Happen is a precise, step-by-step guide to determining who within a company will be most likely to succeed during and after the implementation of a change initiative.

Here, too, part of the lesson is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all personality template that produces ideal employees. A company with too many of Bishop’s “A-players” or “active responders” the Alpha Males of the corporate world who embrace change, pinpoint opportunities and learn from mistakes will face leadership and succession problems because there’s not room enough at the top for everyone. On the other hand, Bishop is tellingly sparse with suggested roles for “D-players” who resist change: From the HR man’s perspective, the main point is to make sure these misfits don’t get in the way. And now for something completely different but once again related to psychological typecasting. Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, by Gretchen Craft Rubin (Pocket, $25.95, ISBN 0671041282), is an archly written guide to making a complete creep of oneself. Take Rubin’s advice to heart, and you can become any organization’s worst nightmare: a talented tyrant, a “user.” Like the other featured authors, Rubin is scrupulously non-judgmental. And her work is not exactly satire. It’s something that bites deeper an exposŽ of a certain type of person that lives among us.

Naturally, it begins with a personality assessment quiz. Presuming you are a “striver” and do crave power, the quiz is intended to determine whether you seek direct or indirect power. Power, Rubin notes trenchantly, will get you a lot further in life than merit. She then spells out how to use people to get power, money, fame, and sex, and then how to use power, money, fame, and sex to get more power, money, fame, and sex.

Advice like “Never let your effort show” and “Traffic only in the right products, places and pastimes” could have come straight out of J.P. Donleavy’s sadly out-of-print gonzo manners manual, The Unexpurgated Code. A discussion of “useful defects and harmful virtues” turns everything your scoutmaster tried to teach you on its head. Here as elsewhere, Rubin raises questions that cut through the book’s veil of irony for instance: “Did Richard Nixon become president despite his insecurity and mistrust, or at least partly because of those traits?” If it all sounds unsavory, and these postmodern perversions of the idea of manners strike you as something not quite cricket, then you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how others are trying to manipulate you. Rubin is not an advocate for this sort of behavior, after all. She’s just pointing out how it works. And I know a few people who would study a book like this carefully, doing their best to follow it to the letter.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

In The Great American Tax Dodge (Little, Brown, $22.95, ISBN 0316811351), Time Inc. senior writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele take on the inequities and iniquities of the American tax system. In the tradition of firebrand financial populism exemplified by William Greider’s Who Will Tell the People?, they expose the loopholes that allow thousands of people with six-figure incomes to pay no income tax at all, as well as the fact that millions don’t even file returns.

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management (Random House, $26.95, ISBN 037550317X), by Roger Lowenstein, narrates the inside-the-boardroom drama of the 1998 collapse of a hedge fund whose failure threatened to plunge the world’s financial system into chaos. Lowenstein not only explains the excruciatingly complex dealings of the fund in clear layman’s prose, he also spins a gripping and minutely detailed tale of the torturous negotiations among Wall Street titans and the Federal Reserve that led to a bailout involving $3.6 billion in private funding.

Howard Kurtz, dean of U.S. press critics, unmasks Wall Street’s hype machine in The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Fame of Money, Media, and Manipulation (Free Press, $26, ISBN 0684868792). The role of financial media outlets like CNBC in whipping up the stock-trading frenzies of recent years was ripe for scrutiny, and Kurtz lays bare the log-rolling dynamics of a new media industry that needs overblown stock stories as badly as stock promoters do.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.

Individual investors face a whole new set of challenges in today’s markets. An understanding of p/e ratios and balance sheets is no longer sufficient in the dot.com world, where stock prices sometimes bear little relationship to old-fashioned concepts like sales and profits. Whether you’re a neophyte in the financial world or a more accomplished investor, several new books offer help on negotiating this new territory. Here are four of the best: Investing 101 (Bloomberg, $14.95, ISBN 1576600440) by Kathy Kristof is a reader friendly introduction to the basics of investing and personal finance. Kristof leads investors through assessing a starting point, determining their adversity to risk, building an emergency fund, and determining how to save for such big ticket items as a car or a house and for such long term goals as retirement or a child’s college education. Kristof educates the reader on fundamentals like diversification and assessment of how different investments fit into their goals. One of the best features of the book is a chapter on picking individual stocks. Kristof teaches the reader how to read a financial statement and make some basic calculations to determine whether or not to buy or sell a stock. If I had to suggest a book on investing and personal finance to an absolute beginner, it would be Investing 101.

Victoria Collins combines a doctorate in psychology with years of experience as a financial planner to examine the impact of the Internet on investing and financial markets in Invest Beyond.com: A New Look at Investing in Today’s Changing Markets (Dearborn, $18.95, ISBN 0793138175). Collins explains many basic issues ranging from what the Dow Jones Industrial average is and how it is compiled to what a p/e ratio is and how it is useful to an investor. Collins also tells the reader where to get information and how to establish a relationship with a financial advisor. She examines how markets have changed and why the investment philosophies of such Wall Street gurus as Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch, and George Soros may or may not be applicable in the new Internet-influenced market. Invest Beyond.com is not only a very helpful tool for those interested in making sense of investing since the advent of the Internet, it can serve as an extremely valuable reference for the beginning investor as well.

Former Motley Fool columnist Robert Sheard defines financial independence not as the date when one retires, but the point at which a person has the ability to live indefinitely on the growth of an investment portfolio. In Money For Life: The 20 Factor Plan for Accumulating Wealth While You’re Young (Harper- Business, $25, ISBN 0066620430), Sheard directs the reader to determine how big a portfolio must be for an investor to live on its growth. He then shows what steps to take to reach that financial goal. Sheard’s final step is to teach the reader how to manage a portfolio once the financial goal is reached. Sheard advocates what he calls a "charitable foundation" approach to personal investing. Money for Life is written in a straightforward manner well suited for readers who are beginning to take hold of their financial life, as well as the more experienced person who wants to learn how to maintain his or her finances.

The days when a woman could rely on the man in her life to manage financial decisions are long past. To guide women on how to take hold of their financial futures, personal finance expert Marsha Bertran has written A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing: Everything You Need to Know to Protect Your Future (AMACOM, $16.95, ISBN 0814470998). Newly released in paperback this month, this book is an excellent guide for women who want to learn about investing. In this age, investing to most people means mainly stocks and bonds, but Bertrand examines various investment approaches, including buying stocks with puts, calls, shorts, and margins, real estate investment trusts, unit investment trusts, and initial public offerings. One of the best features of the book is that Bertrand holds the reader’s hand as she explains and then demonstrates how to run the numbers on an investment to calculate ratios, gains and losses, investment returns, and income tax ramifications. She also explains where to find public investor information, how to read annual reports, select a broker, and start an investment club. A Woman’s Guide to Savvy Investing is an excellent resource for any man or woman interested in improving their investing skills.

Jeff Morris is CPA in Nashville and has worked with investments and personal finance since 1992.

Cents-able advice for teenagers Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re too young to make money, say two new books for budding teenage millionaires. How to be a Teenage Millionaire offers the young entrepreneur advice on business ideas, start-up funding, even advertising strategies for kids whose marketable ideas can’t wait until after college. StreetWise: A Guide for Teen Investors says kids can invest the money they make. It teaches teens how to pick stocks, handle the ups and downs of the market, covers tax concerns, and even pitches Wall Street careers teenagers might want to tackle someday. For parents who worry these books will turn their kids into money-hungry land sharks, don’t sweat. While both books offer sound small business and investing advice, the real power of these books is to build money-making and spending confidence for teens who may feel they have no monetary power. Teenage Millionaire says babysitting is a surprisingly effective way to earn income and build a business. StreetWise makes age-old investing advice on compound interest sound appealing. Far from luring your teenager with the promise of glittering riches, these books teach teens to earn and save their money. After reading them, teens might be willing to share their newfound financial wisdom with the rest of the family even their parents.

Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn’t. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom from one age to the next without overt preaching.

Stories give us possibilities. In them we travel down the same path traveled by the person telling the story. We see what he saw and heard and felt. We don’t need scientific explanations of the event or statistics to tell us what happened. A story is short-hand to an experience. It is also a lesson.

Three recent business books rely on the short-hand of parables to help business executives consider approaches to leadership challenges. Some things can’t be communicated with statistics; their nature is most clearly revealed with stories. Leadership is one of those illusory qualities.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is an energetic new book that beautifully illustrates this idea. Written by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander and his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, a family therapist, The Art of Possibility whisks together a collection of stories, psychology, and references to classical music for an unusual illustration of the Zanders’ unique personal approach to developing leadership potential. One of the unusual steps they recommend is "Giving an A" individually telling every employee he or she is the most important member of a firm to promote risk-taking and allow team-building. Rule Number 6 don’t take yourself too seriously encourages team members to have fun with work and erase calculating personal competitiveness that destroys goal reaching. As anyone who has been on a team (or even a PTA committee) knows, almost everyone who attends a meeting brings along personal issues. Good leaders, say the Zanders, help people find the possibilities to be the best at whatever they do.

The Zanders’ steps to leadership possibility rely on common sense. We all know the things they say are true, but it’s the stories that best illustrate how to implement positive leadership changes in our own workplace. Like any good parable, it’s that little kernel of the unsaid in Zanders’ stories that allows this book to impart real wisdom. The Zanders tell this story: when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked to name his proudest accomplishment. He replied, "That I did the best I could with what I had." Zander says Marshall gave himself an A. He gave himself infinite possibilities for success. Through this story the Zanders convey the short-hand message that everyone has the possibility of success.

Learning Journeys: Top Management Experts Share Hard-Earned Lessons on Becoming Great Mentors and Leaders, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly L. Kaye, and Ken Shelton, shares the Zanders’ enthusiasm for story-telling. More than 35 American business executives relate the hard knocks, mistakes, and plain old-fashioned good luck that made them successful executives.

Written in narrative style, Learning Journeys accomplishes in 37 short chapters what a whole volume of MBA texts cannot tell you: leadership is a life-long process. In Learning Journeys, recognizable names in leadership literature share intimate tales of growth and learning. These journeys may be short stories but all share lessons of found personal truths. Executive trainers recognize stories are the foundation for creating an "aha!" moment for employees.

Collective voices, the authors say, will allow almost everyone to find a resonant personal voice.

Elizabeth Pinchot, author and executive coach, says sometimes it takes an elbow in the ribs to make leadership potential appear. Attending a conference, she relates, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead entered the conference hall, sat down in the chair next to her, and fell asleep. Pinchot says the conference turned toward debunking the ecological agricultural issues Pinchot had studied, but Pinchot was too nervous to raise her voice above the crowd. She started to talk to herself in hushed tones, arguing her point. From Mead’s chair a quick elbow was dispatched to Pinchot’s ribs. "Stand up and make yourself heard," Mead hissed. Yes, it’s true; sometimes we all need a mental elbow in the ribs.

The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development, by Robert M. Fuller and Marshall Goldsmith, follows a more traditional business case-study model. The theme of this new book is that companies which develop outstanding leadership within their ranks can weather any business storm. Companies as different and diverse as computer-maker Hewlett-Packard or the World Bank identify key leadership problems and solve those problems to ensure long-term success. The Leadership Investment puts the parables of possibility to the test.

One of six organizations profiled, the World Bank recently restructured its leadership training program to include a Grass Roots Immersion Program. GRIP requires bank employees to live for a week in a poor area potentially served by World Bank programs. Hewlett-Packard developed ethnic and gender diversity programs to attract and retain the best and brightest people to run the company’s many units. Both companies play out the parables of possibility on the real-life playing field.

The Leadership Investment identifies leadership potential at a company-wide level, and the stories of change are macro-level parables. What can happen to an organization when fresh bold thinking emerges? The Leadership Investment tells you. Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn’t. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom from one age to the next without overt preaching.

Stories give us possibilities. In them we travel down the same path traveled by the person telling the story. We see what he saw and heard and felt. We don’t need scientific explanations of the event or statistics to tell us what happened. A story is short-hand to an experience. It is also a lesson.

Three recent business books rely on the short-hand of parables to help business executives consider approaches to leadership challenges. Some things can’t be communicated with statistics; their nature is most clearly revealed with stories. Leadership is one of those illusory qualities.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is an energetic new book that beautifully illustrates this idea. Written by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander and his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, a family therapist, The Art of Possibility whisks together a collection of stories, psychology, and references to classical music for an unusual illustration of the Zanders’ unique personal approach to developing leadership potential. One of the unusual steps they recommend is "Giving an A" individually telling every employee he or she is the most important member of a firm to promote risk-taking and allow team-building. Rule Number 6 don’t take yourself too seriously encourages team members to have fun with work and erase calculating personal competitiveness that destroys goal reaching. As anyone who has been on a team (or even a PTA committee) knows, almost everyone who attends a meeting brings along personal issues. Good leaders, say the Zanders, help people find the possibilities to be the best at whatever they do.

The Zanders’ steps to leadership possibility rely on common sense. We all know the things they say are true, but it’s the stories that best illustrate how to implement positive leadership changes in our own workplace. Like any good parable, it’s that little kernel of the unsaid in Zanders’ stories that allows this book to impart real wisdom. The Zanders tell this story: when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked to name his proudest accomplishment. He replied, "That I did the best I could with what I had." Zander says Marshall gave himself an A. He gave himself infinite possibilities for success. Through this story the Zanders convey the short-hand message that everyone has the possibility of success.

Learning Journeys: Top Management Experts Share Hard-Earned Lessons on Becoming Great Mentors and Leaders, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly L. Kaye, and Ken Shelton, shares the Zanders’ enthusiasm for story-telling. More than 35 American business executives relate the hard knocks, mistakes, and plain old-fashioned good luck that made them successful executives.

Written in narrative style, Learning Journeys accomplishes in 37 short chapters what a whole volume of MBA texts cannot tell you: leadership is a life-long process. In Learning Journeys, recognizable names in leadership literature share intimate tales of growth and learning. These journeys may be short stories but all share lessons of found personal truths. Executive trainers recognize stories are the foundation for creating an "aha!" moment for employees.

Collective voices, the authors say, will allow almost everyone to find a resonant personal voice.

Elizabeth Pinchot, author and executive coach, says sometimes it takes an elbow in the ribs to make leadership potential appear. Attending a conference, she relates, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead entered the conference hall, sat down in the chair next to her, and fell asleep. Pinchot says the conference turned toward debunking the ecological agricultural issues Pinchot had studied, but Pinchot was too nervous to raise her voice above the crowd. She started to talk to herself in hushed tones, arguing her point. From Mead’s chair a quick elbow was dispatched to Pinchot’s ribs. "Stand up and make yourself heard," Mead hissed. Yes, it’s true; sometimes we all need a mental elbow in the ribs.

The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development, by Robert M. Fuller and Marshall Goldsmith, follows a more traditional business case-study model. The theme of this new book is that companies which develop outstanding leadership within their ranks can weather any business storm. Companies as different and diverse as computer-maker Hewlett-Packard or the World Bank identify key leadership problems and solve those problems to ensure long-term success. The Leadership Investment puts the parables of possibility to the test.

One of six organizations profiled, the World Bank recently restructured its leadership training program to include a Grass Roots Immersion Program. GRIP requires bank employees to live for a week in a poor area potentially served by World Bank programs. Hewlett-Packard developed ethnic and gender diversity programs to attract and retain the best and brightest people to run the company’s many units. Both companies play out the parables of possibility on the real-life playing field.

The Leadership Investment identifies leadership potential at a company-wide level, and the stories of change are macro-level parables. What can happen to an organization when fresh bold thinking emerges? The Leadership Investment tells you. Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

arables reveal possibilities Everyone knows the fable of the slow but steady tortoise and the excitable, ambitious hare. One animal won the famous race, and the other didn’t. Implicitly we know why. Once upon a time lessons were conveyed through stories, passing collected common wisdom from one age to the next without overt preaching.

Stories give us possibilities. In them we travel down the same path traveled by the person telling the story. We see what he saw and heard and felt. We don’t need scientific explanations of the event or statistics to tell us what happened. A story is short-hand to an experience. It is also a lesson.

Three recent business books rely on the short-hand of parables to help business executives consider approaches to leadership challenges. Some things can’t be communicated with statistics; their nature is most clearly revealed with stories. Leadership is one of those illusory qualities.

The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life is an energetic new book that beautifully illustrates this idea. Written by Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Benjamin Zander and his wife, Rosamund Stone Zander, a family therapist, The Art of Possibility whisks together a collection of stories, psychology, and references to classical music for an unusual illustration of the Zanders’ unique personal approach to developing leadership potential. One of the unusual steps they recommend is “Giving an A” individually telling every employee he or she is the most important member of a firm to promote risk-taking and allow team-building. Rule Number 6 don’t take yourself too seriously encourages team members to have fun with work and erase calculating personal competitiveness that destroys goal reaching. As anyone who has been on a team (or even a PTA committee) knows, almost everyone who attends a meeting brings along personal issues. Good leaders, say the Zanders, help people find the possibilities to be the best at whatever they do.

The Zanders’ steps to leadership possibility rely on common sense. We all know the things they say are true, but it’s the stories that best illustrate how to implement positive leadership changes in our own workplace. Like any good parable, it’s that little kernel of the unsaid in Zanders’ stories that allows this book to impart real wisdom. The Zanders tell this story: when he retired from the Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall was asked to name his proudest accomplishment. He replied, “That I did the best I could with what I had.” Zander says Marshall gave himself an A. He gave himself infinite possibilities for success. Through this story the Zanders convey the short-hand message that everyone has the possibility of success.

Learning Journeys: Top Management Experts Share Hard-Earned Lessons on Becoming Great Mentors and Leaders, edited by Marshall Goldsmith, Beverly L. Kaye, and Ken Shelton, shares the Zanders’ enthusiasm for story-telling. More than 35 American business executives relate the hard knocks, mistakes, and plain old-fashioned good luck that made them successful executives.

Written in narrative style, Learning Journeys accomplishes in 37 short chapters what a whole volume of MBA texts cannot tell you: leadership is a life-long process. In Learning Journeys, recognizable names in leadership literature share intimate tales of growth and learning. These journeys may be short stories but all share lessons of found personal truths. Executive trainers recognize stories are the foundation for creating an “aha!” moment for employees.

Collective voices, the authors say, will allow almost everyone to find a resonant personal voice.

Elizabeth Pinchot, author and executive coach, says sometimes it takes an elbow in the ribs to make leadership potential appear. Attending a conference, she relates, noted anthropologist Margaret Mead entered the conference hall, sat down in the chair next to her, and fell asleep. Pinchot says the conference turned toward debunking the ecological agricultural issues Pinchot had studied, but Pinchot was too nervous to raise her voice above the crowd. She started to talk to herself in hushed tones, arguing her point. From Mead’s chair a quick elbow was dispatched to Pinchot’s ribs. “Stand up and make yourself heard,” Mead hissed. Yes, it’s true; sometimes we all need a mental elbow in the ribs.

The Leadership Investment: How the World’s Best Organizations Gain Strategic Advantage Through Leadership Development, by Robert M. Fuller and Marshall Goldsmith, follows a more traditional business case-study model. The theme of this new book is that companies which develop outstanding leadership within their ranks can weather any business storm. Companies as different and diverse as computer-maker Hewlett-Packard or the World Bank identify key leadership problems and solve those problems to ensure long-term success. The Leadership Investment puts the parables of possibility to the test.

One of six organizations profiled, the World Bank recently restructured its leadership training program to include a Grass Roots Immersion Program. GRIP requires bank employees to live for a week in a poor area potentially served by World Bank programs. Hewlett-Packard developed ethnic and gender diversity programs to attract and retain the best and brightest people to run the company’s many units. Both companies play out the parables of possibility on the real-life playing field.

The Leadership Investmentidentifies leadership potential at a company-wide level, and the stories of change are macro-level parables. What can happen to an organization when fresh bold thinking emerges? The Leadership Investment tells you. Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

Author Deborah J. Swiss spent a year conducting interviews with 52 successful men to determine how they think and act in the workplace. The results are revealed in The Male Mind At Work: A Woman’s Guide to Working With Men, a provocative guide for women to the way male co-workers approach the workplace and what they think about their female counterparts. For any woman who thought swinging a golf club might help her chances to succeed in the marketplace, Swiss offers a different remedy: learn to promote women’s unique strengths. Far from male-bashing, Swiss offers inside information for women serious about their careers and gives tools to bridge the gender gap at work.

Sharon Secor is a business writer based in Nashville.

We’re each wired differently that much is for sure. Scientific knowledge about the "nature" part of our personalities is continually improving, while psychological inquiries into the "nurture" side are ever deepening. Nobody has mapped the human soul, as has happened with the human genome, but it’s not for lack of trying.

Given the outpouring of ink in recent years on the varieties of human intelligence (such as Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence and Howard Gardner’s Intelligence Reframed), it’s no surprise that business authors would seek to apply this evolving science to the workplace. This month, we look at four recently released books that delve into the connections between personality type and business performance.

The Character of Organizations: Using Personality Type in Organization Development (Davies-Black, $18.95, ISBN 0891061495), by William Bridges, is an updated edition of a title that gained critical acclaim upon its initial appearance a decade ago. Bridges looks at businesses as organisms, with their own personal histories and inherited characteristics. He argues convincingly that a company’s character is much more than the sum of its employees’ personalities, and he offers guidance in understanding how different types of organizations think, feel, perceive, and behave. Applied properly, his analysis may be able to steer a firm away from patterns of action that are self-defeating and toward actions that better suit its strengths.

As I read through Bridges’s 16 types of organizational personalities (modeled on the individual personality types of the widely used Myers-Briggs personality assessments), a Rorschach effect sets in. I see one of my former employers in the profile of an ENFJ corporation (a type in which extroverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging behaviors predominate), and then I see it again in the quite different profile of an ISTJ company (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging). I find another ex-employer in four different personality-type ink blots. Accurately defining one’s true type is hard in Bridges’ system (as it is in the Myers-Briggs system), but the very act of trying to figure out which profile fits best can improve self-knowledge.

Bridges includes in his book an "Organizational Character Index" that business teams can use to evaluate the character of their companies and, by implication, determine what kinds of people will fit best within a given corporate culture. The author is at pains to stress that his index should not be used as a screening tool by employers, stressing that there are no "good" or "bad" personality types just different types that are more well-suited, or less well-suited, to be part of a certain type of team. Just as a career counselor can help an individual focus on jobs he or she is good at, The Character of Organizations can help a company hone strategies that make the most of its strengths.

Conversely, another new book tries to help workers avoid being harmed by their own personality defects and, one must admit, we’ve each got a few of those. Maximum Success: Changing the 12 Behavior Patterns that Keep You from Getting Ahead (Doubleday, $24.95, ISBN 0385498497), by James Waldroop and Timothy Butler, is a thoughtful and useful compendium of things not to do and ways not to be, while you’re on the job.

Maximum Success is the consummate self-help guide for talented people who keep running into the same problems over and over, in different jobs. There are employees who never feel quite good enough to deserve the jobs they have. There are workers for whom no job is ever good enough. There are those who try to do too much at once, those who avoid conflict at any cost, those who can’t get along with the boss, and those who feel they have lost track of their career paths. The authors, who head up the Harvard Business School’s MBA career development office, have seen it all.

The downside of perusing a book like this is that it often brings on moments of rueful recognition. Playing the "peacemaker" or the "bulldozer," exhibiting a "reactive stance toward authority" or "emotional tone-deafness" these are workplace behaviors that emerge out of a person’s deepest psychological being. Confronting them means confronting a piece of yourself. Like Bridges, Waldroop and Butler go out of their way not to be judgmental about such habits. But, again like Bridges, they draw on a body of psychological literature stretching back to Karl Jung as they offer constructive suggestions for recognizing these tendencies and avoiding the career ruin they can cause.

The human resource manager’s role as group psychologist is the subject of Making Change Happen One Person at a Time: Assessing Change Capacity Within Your Organization, by Charles H. Bishop, Jr. (AMACOM, $27.95, ISBN 0814405282). Bishop lays out the characteristics of four different personality types, classified by how they react to change. Making Change Happen is a precise, step-by-step guide to determining who within a company will be most likely to succeed during and after the implementation of a change initiative.

Here, too, part of the lesson is that there’s not a one-size-fits-all personality template that produces ideal employees. A company with too many of Bishop’s "A-players" or "active responders" the Alpha Males of the corporate world who embrace change, pinpoint opportunities and learn from mistakes will face leadership and succession problems because there’s not room enough at the top for everyone. On the other hand, Bishop is tellingly sparse with suggested roles for "D-players" who resist change: From the HR man’s perspective, the main point is to make sure these misfits don’t get in the way. And now for something completely different but once again related to psychological typecasting. Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, by Gretchen Craft Rubin (Pocket, $25.95, ISBN 0671041282), is an archly written guide to making a complete creep of oneself. Take Rubin’s advice to heart, and you can become any organization’s worst nightmare: a talented tyrant, a "user." Like the other featured authors, Rubin is scrupulously non-judgmental. And her work is not exactly satire. It’s something that bites deeper an exposŽ of a certain type of person that lives among us.

Naturally, it begins with a personality assessment quiz. Presuming you are a "striver" and do crave power, the quiz is intended to determine whether you seek direct or indirect power. Power, Rubin notes trenchantly, will get you a lot further in life than merit. She then spells out how to use people to get power, money, fame, and sex, and then how to use power, money, fame, and sex to get more power, money, fame, and sex.

Advice like "Never let your effort show" and "Traffic only in the right products, places and pastimes" could have come straight out of J.P. Donleavy’s sadly out-of-print gonzo manners manual, The Unexpurgated Code. A discussion of "useful defects and harmful virtues" turns everything your scoutmaster tried to teach you on its head. Here as elsewhere, Rubin raises questions that cut through the book’s veil of irony for instance: "Did Richard Nixon become president despite his insecurity and mistrust, or at least partly because of those traits?" If it all sounds unsavory, and these postmodern perversions of the idea of manners strike you as something not quite cricket, then you can at least have the satisfaction of knowing how others are trying to manipulate you. Rubin is not an advocate for this sort of behavior, after all. She’s just pointing out how it works. And I know a few people who would study a book like this carefully, doing their best to follow it to the letter.

Journalist and entrepreneur E. Thomas Wood is working with author John Egerton on a book about Nashville.