HR practitioner Cheryl Stone reviews Harry Paul and Ross Reck’s book Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard.

Looking for a way to turn around employees overnight that is easy to implement, costs nothing, and where everybody wins?  Check out Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard by Harry Paul (Ken Blanchard Companies & coauthor of Fish! Tales: Real-Life Stories to Help You Transform Your Workplace and Your Life) and Ross Reck, Ph.D. (management consultant & coauthor with Paul of Revved!: An Incredible Way to Rev Up Your Workplace and Achieve Amazing Results)

In an easy-to-read format, the authors take you through the experiences of a fictitious company that embraces a program called “Destination: Work.”  With conversational dialogue, they tell a story and challenge us to make work a place that employees want to come to on Monday morning, replacing TGIF with TGIM — “thank goodness it’s Monday” and I get to go to work!  While they acknowledge the importance of the immediate supervisor and employee relationship, by the end of the book, they place the responsibility for this program squarely on the shoulders of senior management.

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Resources for Humans editor Celeste Blackburn reviews Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business from Tolstoy to Now, edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge. While those looking for straightforward business insights will be disappointed, literature lovers should appreciate the business lessons that can be learned from great literature.

Whether you are a member of the business community that enjoys literature or a bibliophile looking for some business insight, Minding the Store: Great Writing about Business, from Tolstoy to Now [MINDING THE STORE] edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge, is for you. A refreshing break from the standard, dry how-to-succeed in business model, this collection of stories and excerpts from longer works looks at the business world from a literary perspective.

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HR manager Paul Knoch reviews the book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. The review counts this business fiction as a quick, informative read that would be of use to almost any HR practitioner who must work with a team of employees.

Have you ever wondered why your team of smart, competent, generally pleasant people can’t seem to come together as a cohesive, effective team? Building a strong team requires much more than simply having good people on board. Our natural tendencies often lean more towards dysfunction than cooperation. Turf wars, tension, and cynicism can erode a team’s ability to cooperate. Over time, this lack of cooperation will eventually lead to devastating results.

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Resources for Humans managing editor Celeste Blackburn reviews the book Recognizing Richard Rabbit: A Fable about Being True to Yourself by Peter Weddle. Review finds that while book may be useful in therapy setting, it doesn’t offer much for the HR professional.

In Recognizing Richard Rabbit: A Fable About Being True to Yourself, Peter Weddle separates each page turn: on the right side is the fable of Richard Rabbit and on the left is what he calls “a corresponding interview with yourself.” The fable follows Willie Wabbit’s transformation into his “true self” Richard Rabbit. Along the way, his friends offer support and try to help him find a good luck charm that will help him change his life. In the end, he realizes that he is his own good luck charm (he does, after all, come with an attached rabbit’s foot). This fairly clever fable does a good job of illustrating that we make our own luck and that we can’t just wish for things and hope that they will happen.

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HR writer Sarah McAdams reviews the book Straight Man by Ricard Russo. Review highlights real-life business lessons that can be learned from the fictional book.

Straight Man: A Novel isn’t your standard business book—hell, it isn’t any kind of business book.

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