The One Thing You Need to Know or The Gridlock Economy

The One Thing You Need to Know: About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success

Author: Marcus Buckingham

Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success.

With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement -- a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity.

Great managing, leading, and career success -- Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this "one thing" and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham's great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO's to hotel maids and stockboys.

In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.

Library Journal

Following up on his first two best sellers (First, Break All the Rules; Now, Discover Your Strengths), Buckingham continues in the same vein, this time trying to quantify what makes a successful manager, leader, or even spouse. While occasionally referencing his earlier works, he concentrates on three key areas: management, leadership, and personal success. Much of the text boils down to essential truisms that are not very helpful in themselves, e.g., "discover your strengths and cultivate them." However, by using well-chosen case studies to illustrate his points and by writing in an enjoyable fashion, Buckingham succeeds in creating another book that will connect with readers and encourage them to succeed in leadership positions. Recommended for business collections in both academic and public libraries.-Susan Hurst, Miami Univ. Libs. of Ohio, Oxford Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

Contents

1: A Few Things You Should Know About the "One Thing"

"Get me to the core": "If you dig into a subject deeply enough, what do you find?"

A lifetime of "why"s: "What drove this book?"

The tests for the "one thing": "Why are some explanations more powerful than others?"

One controlling insight: "What is the One Thing you need to know about happy marriage?"

Part I

The One Thing You Need to Know

Sustained Organizational Success

2: Managing and Leading: What's the Difference?

A vital distinction: "Are they different? Are they both important? Can you do both?"

A view from the middle: "What do great managers actually do and what talents do you need to do it?"

A view from the top: "What do great leaders actually do and what talents do you need to do it?"

3: The One Thing You Need to Know: Great Managing

The basics of good managing: "What skills will prevent you from failing as a manager?"

Great managers play chess: "What is the One Thing you need to know about great managing?"

A walk through a walgreens: "How does one truly great manager do it?"

Great managers are romantics: "What are the benefits of individualization?"

The three levers: "What are the three things you need to know about a person in order to manage him or her effectively?"

The most useful questions: "How can you identify these levers?"

4: The One Thing You Need to Know: Great Leading

A leader wins our loyalty: "What did Giuliani say to calm ourfears?"

Five fears, five needs, one focus: "What are the universals of human nature?"

The points of clarity: "Where are your followers crying out for clarity?"

The disciplines of leadership: "How do the best leaders achieve this clarity?"

Part II: The One Thing You Need to KnowSustained Individual Success

5: The Twenty Percenters

Dave, Myrtle, and Tim: "What does sustained individual success look like?"

The early contenders: "What explanations seem like the One Thing, but aren't?"

What is sustained success?: "It's a broad term. How do we define it?"

6: The Three Main Contenders

Contender 1: "Find the right tactics and employ them."

Contender 2: "Find your flaws and fix them."

Contender 3: "Discover your strengths and cultivate them."

7: So, How Do You Sustain Success If...?

You're bored You're unfulfilled You're frustrated You're drained Conclusion: Intentional Imbalance Acknowledgments

Read also Strategic and Organizational Change or Passion for Fruit

The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives

Author: Michael Heller

25 new runways would eliminate most air travel delays in America. Why can’t we build them? 50 patent owners are blocking a major drug maker from creating a cancer cure. Why won’t they get out of the way? 90% of our broadcast spectrum sits idle while American cell phone service lags far behind Japan’s and Korea’s. Why are we wasting our airwaves? 98% of African American–owned farms have been sold off over the last century. Why can’t we stop the loss? All these problems are really the same problem—one whose solution would jump-start innovation, release trillions in productivity, and help revive our slumping economy.
Every so often an idea comes along that transforms our understanding of how the world works. Michael Heller has discovered a market dynamic that no one knew existed. Usually, private ownership creates wealth, but too much ownership has the opposite effect—it creates gridlock. When too many people own pieces of one thing, whether a physical or intellectual resource, cooperation breaks down, wealth disappears, and everybody loses. Heller’s paradox is at the center of The Gridlock Economy. Today’s leading edge of innovation—in high tech, biomedicine, music, film, real estate—requires the assembly of separately owned resources. But gridlock is blocking economic growth all along the wealth creation frontier.
A thousand scholars have applied and verified Heller’s paradox. Now he takes readers on a lively tour of gridlock battlegrounds. Heller zips from medieval robber barons to modern-day broadcast spectrum squatters; from Mississippi courts sellingAfrican-American family farms to troubling New York City land confiscations; and from Chesapeake Bay oyster pirates to today’s gene patent and music mash-up outlaws. Each tale offers insights into how to spot gridlock in operation and how we can overcome it.
The Gridlock Economy is a startling, accessible biography of an idea. Nothing is inevitable about gridlock. It results from choices we make about how to control the resources we value most. We can unlock the grid; this book shows us where to start.