SHAM - is it for real?

Read excerpts from a book called 'Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless' by Steve Salerno. Very disturbing insights into what is now an $8 bn a year industry. Who would have known. BTW .. SHAM apparently stands for the Self Help and Actualization Movement - quite helpful for an acronym - is this for real?

The author follows the money trail laid down by several of the popular evangelists of the self help commune and I think it is so because you typically see these blurbs written by other 'gurus' on a new book that it changed his/her life and will transform you into whatever you wish to be. But, on the whole the industry thrives on selling a rather simple home-spun truth wrapped in a couple of hundred pages of mumbo jumbo and workbooks and action plans.

The business apparently thrives on the books and the ancillaries - the workshops,  the seminars, the personal coaching, the productivity assets, mugs, t-shirts, fridge magnets..phew, the list goes on. Why then do we buy this stuff?

The industry taps into the confused nature that is prevalent today, no one wants to be branded as not with it, kind of like the metrosexual male thing doing the rounds these days. Someday when I have a bit of time I want to dig into the etymology of the word.

Coming back to the book, it read in portions like a rant but there is no disputing certain facts that there is no single book that claims to have it all, once your in your hooked on it. I recognize that I am one of these too, but I feel that if I get a single usable idea out of the book then its worth it. 

No ancillaries for me please, thanks!

When two minutes is too long!

Breezed through 'the one minute manager' by Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson. A very interesting book, written on the premise that the common management functions of goal setting, getting team buy in, monitoring and the reward/reprimand activities can be performed in a minute or less.

In our daily work lives we come across many situations where we dawdle so long that the point gets lost. We are often verbose and end up confusing all parties concerned. This book details how to get around this problem and maximise our productivity (the magic word!) and deliver that manna.. more time to spend on things that are really important in our lives like family and investing time on ourselves.

My beef with this is that the solutions offered are too simplistic, it does not take into account the dynamics of the communication between the manager and the report and also does not deal with personality types. Another gap is that it does not take into account the priority of the situation or the inevitable conflicts and their resolution.

My 2 paise - start off with this technique and play it by ear.

Argumentative .. me?

Started reading The Argumentative Indian by Amartya Sen, this calls for a rather different approach to reading. I find myself debating quite a few of the assumptions the author works from. I know he is supposed to be a Nobel Laureate and a Harvard professor etc, but something does not ring right with the logic propounded in the book.

Will post a more detailed critique once I am done.

Time to inject some GTD juice into my life

Trying to implement a GTD (David Allen's Getting Things Done) implementation in my life. I need to get more organized and as is said in the book, if I can leverage a couple of tricks from this book then it would help. Maintaining a complete GTD system seems time consuming, even though the author claims it will help with the chaos.

I intend to use Microsoft OneNote 2007 for my implementation and if it works will post some learnings.

Wish me luck!