As a new parent, I found the book Under Pressure by Carl Honore to be a welcome slap in the face.  Luckily I haven’t had time to descend into the madness of hyper-parenting but I’ve already begun to hear the seductive siren song.  After all who doesn’t want their kids to be better, smarter, stronger, faster?  We all do, we all want the best for our children.   But we often lose sight of what our children actually want in favor of what we want for them.

Traveling around the world Honore shows time and again that kids don’t want hyper-parenting, and that despite our best efforts it does not help them succeed more or become better people.  It often backfires and has the opposite effect.  What kids want and need is: to feel safe and loved, they want our attention and time with no conditions attached, they need boundaries and limits, they need space to take risks and make mistakes, they need to spend time outdoors, they need to be ranked and measured less, they need healthy food, they need to aspire to something bigger than owning stuff and they need room to be themselves.

Honore argues for us to slow down, and adopt a saner view of childhood.   I could not agree more.  I highly, highly recommend this book for all parents.  We can do better by our children, but not through hyper-parenting.  I think the following quote from the last chapter of the book, sums things up nicely.

“Half a century ago, an influential English pediatrician called D.W. Winnicott argued that engineering the perfect childhood was impossible and that striving to do so was damaging both to the parent and to the child.  Instead, parents should aspire to meet their children’s needs most of the time and accept that they will mess up occasionally.  Do a ‘good enough’ job, said Winnicott, and most children will grow up fine.”

Do your children a favor, get this book, read this book.

What are your thoughts?  Share them with us in the comments section below.

Enter Business as Unusual by Anita Roddick, one of the founders of the Body Shop.

In this book she talks candidly about her experience from founding the Body Shop to making it a worldwide company.  How she never compromised her principles despite intense pressure within and without the company to stop “her silliness and get with the program”, that is, running a business with the bottom line as the only goal.  She talks about being a leader in cruelty-free cosmetics (no animal testing), recycling, encouraging others both within and outside the company to be politically active about causes they care about, and going straight to poor and underserved populations to improve their quality of life.

If you’ve resigned yourself to business as usual as exemplified by the Great Recession we’re going through, caused primarily by the myopic focus on the short-term bottom line and greed, this book is a refreshing breath of fresh air.  You can be successful, found and run a multi-million dollar international company with both principles and profits.  You do NOT have to compromise your principles in order to be successful.

If this topic is of interest to you, I highly recommend picking up Business as Unusual and giving it a read.

Have you read the book?  Have you struggled between principles and profits in your life?  Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

More and more people prompted by the bad economy and growing dissatisfaction with the way many companies are treating people are striking out on their own to work for themselves and bring their vision into reality.  If you’re contemplating working for yourself as part of your goals to lead a high-quality life, know that it’s incredibly rewarding and a LOT of work.  Success is far from  guaranteed and the best thing you can do is to educate yourself.

Let me help.  Of the 20 or so business books I’ve read,  here, are the ones I found most useful.

1. E-Myth Revisited (Richard Gerber) – a classic for small business owners.  If you haven’t read it, I would classify this as a must read.  The key idea of working ON your business instead of IN your business is gold.  Just because you are good at your skill set (for me, being a doctor) does not mean you are good at running a business, eye opening.
2. Principled Profits (Shel Horowitz) – as a doctor who got into the field to help people, the idea of charging money for my services often feels unpleasant.  This book went a long way to helping me reconcile the idea that charging money and providing quality, caring service do not have to be mutually exclusive.
3. Toilet Paper Entrepreneur (Mike Michalowicz) – a great no-theory, boiled down to basics primer on starting a business.  Filled with good tips and information.  Unfortunately, for marketing purposes, the author uses the theme of bowel movements and the book is littered with references to toilet paper and poop.  You can choose to ignore it in favor of the good information, find it funny (I think most of us find a good bathroom joke funny, but for me it got old halfway through the book), or be turned off which I think is a shame as the book really is worthwhile.
4. Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky, and Rich (Richard St. John) – Richard St. John is a modern day Dale Carnegie.  As a successful businessman he was asked one day by a young girl, how to be successful.  Admitting he didn’t know, he set out on a multi-year project to talk to as many successful people as he could and find out.  After hundreds of hours of interviews he has distilled success into 8 principles: passion, hard work, focus, pushing oneself, new ideas, constant improvement, service to others, and persistence.  While nothing in this book is new, and there are no secrets revealed, this book is inspirational and helped me feel as a small business owner that success is not something magical or pre-destined for some, but a result of definite principles that anyone can master.  I will be passing this one on to my children.
5. Let’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play (Mahan Khalsa) – Mahan Khalsa, the author of this book on sales sums up sales this way, “ [sales is] the second oldest profession, often confused for the first.”  Almost everyone hates sales because our common conception of sales is bullying or tricking someone into buying something that they really don’t want.  Khalsa reframes selling into the process of helping a person get exactly what they want.  In this light, sales becomes more about service to another.  Again, as a doctor, the thought of being a salesman had turned my stomach, “I don’t sell to people, I help people”, but this book helped me reframe the idea of selling, to helping people get what they want and need.  The process that he lays out in this book is complicated and most useful for large sales with large businesses, but the basic ideas are useful for any size business.  Highly recommended for those who think of selling as distasteful.

What are your thoughts?  Have you read any of these books?  Do you have any others you think should be on the list?  Post your comments below.