Talkin' 'bout the man (or woman)
in the mirror

"Would You Work for You?"
By Sam Geist
Addington & Wentworth, 181 pages

By Porter Anderson
CNN Career

(CNN) -- "Oh, to see ourselves as others see us," as the saying goes.

Business consultant and author Sam Geist and his publisher -- Addington & Wentworth of Toronto -- have conspired to give you what used to be called a "visual aid" in the matter: The cover of Geist's new "Would You Work for You?" has a mirror on it.

Not a good mirror, of course. After all, this is a book cover. But it's one of those rare moments when a little gimmick works, at least to get the point of a title across.

Geist -- whose earlier book is the 1997 "Why Should Someone Do Business With You, Rather Than Someone Else?" -- makes a thing of turning this kind of question on his readers and audiences at various talks and seminars he runs.

And of course, this is obviously a sensible technique. Almost any endeavor is going to benefit, or so we assume, from a good hard look at who's making the effort.

Wisely, Geist gets right to this with a list of 10 steps for developing accurate self-perception -- all seemingly easy and actually fiendish to master, of course, or people would never wear the wrong swimsuits at the beach, would they? Geist's 10 steps are:

QUICKVOTE To borrow from Geist's book, if you were unemployed today, would the people who work for you now -- hire you? In a heartbeat. I'm very lucky. I hope so but I'm not entirely sure. Not a prayer. They'd let me starve. View Results

•   Know your strengths and weaknesses

•   Focus particularly on the business aspects you want to improve

•   Assess your behavior in important situations

•   Emulate a role model

•   Ask for feedback

•   Keep a journal

•   Practice. Practice. Practice. (This, of course, is also the way to get to Carnegie Hall, for anyone who knows that old joke.)

•   Ask the right questions

•   Work toward your goal

•   Take a flexible approach

Beyond the clear good sense of these bits of advice, Geist has a clever organizational scheme at play here. Most of his chapters start with the sort of qualified answer many of us might give to the book's title.

"Would you work for you?" when asked in Chapter 2, for example, is answered, "Yes, if only you know yourself." Chapter 4's answer is, "Yes, if only you know the skills to do the job." Chapter 5's answer is, "Yes, if only you know how to communicate effectively."

The book does keep falling into that workbookish mode we see in other such guides. At the end of a chapter, you suddenly find "Some Tough Questions" and lines underneath so you can write in your answers. That's a snore.

What's more, there are those "Idiot's Guide" boxed, bulleted fields of info that are so popular today, along with bits of wisdom scattered out in the pages' margins. At least the quotes are some pretty fine pearls from a gratifyingly eclectic crew.

•   Playwright Henrik Ibsen of "Hedda Gabler" fame: "A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.

•   Yogi Berra, thank God for him: "If you don't know where you're going, you will wind up somewhere else."

•   And, best of all, Pope John XXIII: "It often happens that I wake up at night and begin to think about a serious problem and decide I must tell the Pope about it. Then I wake up completely and remember that I am the Pope."

Here's a box titled "Seven Ways To Inspire." Here's one titled "Before Delegating Ask." These are nice -- companion boxes titled "Trust Makers" and "Trust Breakers." Here's another: "The Basic Requirements for a Successful Team."

All this, of course, is a product of how sadly short our attention spans presumably have become -- we want only news for neurasthenics and please don't make us read an entire page of a book without some sort of tricked-up info-elements to break up all those words.

Such rigging aside, Geist clearly knows his material and makes a forthright case for his book early on.

"This book," he writes, "is not intended as a theoretical treatise for the CEOs of massive organizations. Rather, it is meant to be a hands-on guide to assist managers of neighborhood supermarkets become more aware of the specific factors that impinge on their specific environment, and to help supervisors of local McDonalds' better understand their employees."

Geist drew his title from a friend's question of years ago. Keith Van Beek, the former president of Toys R Us Canada, asked rhetorically, "If you were unemployed and looking for a job today, would the people who work for you now -- hire you?"

It's the kind of question many employees today might wish their bosses would ask themselves. But, of course, as in so many cases of books like this, H. Gordon Selfridge's wisdom seems likelier to reach the staff than the administration. "The boss drives his men;" Geist quotes Selfridge, the English department-store tycoon as saying, "the leader coaches them. The boss depends on authority; the leader on goodwill. The boss inspires fear; the leader inspires enthusiasm."

Geist's course in building the self-awareness of a leader is never far from practical realities. He offers an interesting five-point list of top "time-robbers," for example:

Sam Geist

•   Interruptions

•   Procrastination

•   Perfectionism

•   Not utilizing available resources

•   Difficulty in saying "no"

And Geist argues more esoteric points just as adroitly, as in his discussion of controlled vs. uncontrolled conflict. He's a big fan of controlled conflict, he writes, because it "resolves disagreements quickly, thereby increasing productivity" and "strengthens relationships and supports teamwork."

And for all his straightforward, sometimes even a bit ham-handed instruction, Geist isn't unsympathetic to what would-be leaders are up against today.

"When Marshall McLuhan talked about a global village in the 1960s," he writes, "I don't think anyone ever imagined it would look like this. Today's global village demands of its leaders capabilities, intuition and mental agility not previously expected or required. Not only do leaders need to know, they need to know what to know ... They must surround themselves with exceptional groups of professionals -- experts in areas where they lack expertise -- so the combined strength of the team outperforms any one of the players."

And in a final, smart kicker, Geist gets back to that reflective book cover: "We must look at ourselves in the mirror every morning," he writes, "see in that reflection who we want to become and work all day toward that learning, growing and becoming."