A book recommendation from Dan Beaulieu
10/26/16
Hard-Won Wisdom: True Stories from the Management Trenches
By Jathan Janove
Copyright 2017
Price $17.95
Pages: 221 and Index
A Management Book from a completely different perspective
Author Jathan Janove is a work place litigation lawyer. He has spent the bulk of his career litigating work place relationships which gives his book a completely fresh and different perspective to workplace management techniques.
Drawing from his own experiences and cases he has worked on during his career Mr. Janove uses real-life cases to show the reader what to do, what not to do, what to avoid and what to do when things are unavoidable when it comes to work place litigation.
Besides being very informative this book is also interesting and readable as it is filled with real stories rather than hypotheticals.
From how to fire an employee to how to properly document poor performance to how to deal with work place sexual harassment, this book is filled with true cases of things that have happened and how they were successfully and sometimes not so successfully handled.
I especially appreciated it when Mr. Janove talked about how to best avoid litigation in the first place by using several tools he has developed over the years.
His MIDAS touch apology program is priceless and should be known and used by everyone in business today:
When apologizing to an employee or peer for a real or perceived infraction the apologizer should use the following MIDAS touch apology method:
“M” is for “Mistake”: Acknowledge you made a mistake.
“I” is for “Injury”: Admit that you caused the person pain.
“D” is for “Differently”: Tell the person what you will do differently going forward.
“A” is for “Amends”: Do something to make amends. Something that will mean something.
“S” is for “Stop”: After you finish the first four parts, stop talking. Don’t say another word.
There are numerous other great guidelines such as this that the reader will learn from this book.
If you are a management position, or headed to a management position I would urge you to buy and read this book. And by the way get one for your HR department as well.
