Partnership

While reading the book, you feel like you are right with him. For example, he describes the story of his first day of work where he isn't trained and makes significant mistakes. He leaves the rollers in the truck, fails to sort the packages, and comes close to losing his job. He doesn't hesitate to tell the reader about weaknesses- giving you a sense he is a well-rounded real person willing to share of himself.

This book also avoids many of the cliches and unreality of the typical "rags to riches" autobiography. For example, he speaks of two times in his life where he basically gives up and becomes apathetic. At one point in high school, his counselor tells him that he is not smart enough to go to college. He internalizes that message and partially believes it. He flirts with gang activity and drug dealing. He also gets turned down for promotions at United Parcel Service and makes the decision that many people make in that circumstance- to do his job, but not try to do more.

In each of these cases, he gets his ambition back and his life on track. A friend of his tells him about the Basic Educational Opportunty Grant which he uses to get his tuition paid. And, he is promoted at UPS four years later to be a division manager at the Lawnsdale Hub.

We are spared the usual impression of a person who remains totally determined and courageous under all circumstances.

Yet, he also speaks with detail about motivating employees in a union shop where the work is monotonous and the lifting is heavy. He describes the internal politics where he persuades the managers to hire people on welfare.

There are many lessons here- and it's very entertaining. I read it three times.

One of Rodney Carroll's greatest aspects is his commitment to his very own thoughts and thus, speaking his mind. He doesn't necessarily say what America's majority want to hear. That is why he is so phenomenal, so involved. His urgency in helping America's welfare recipients create themselves a better future, oppressed people world-wide; and his logical prioritising of human rights before civil rights, are evidential of his deep complex understanding of human nature.

Rodney's searing story belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a black kid trying to survive in the ghetto's of America finest into the exemplary, courageous and articulate man he is today. His honest portrayal of his life is a morally uplifting story, but it is also a fun read. This book will make you think, laugh and cry. It is also one of the most entertaining stories I've ever read. I've read it twice and in a few years, another read will be time well spent. All will be enriched by this fascinating book. It's a MUST!!

Rodney you're the BEST. Keep up the good work.

The book talks about the destructive circle of relationships, when I find myself caught up in that, I take out this book. Each time its helped me come back to reality and a more peaceful frame of mind.

From Penny's first encounters with elves and devas (whom she sketches at the back of her book) to her discussions with vines, weeds, and various marauding animal nuisances -- the reader gains a sense of what it feels like to be in communication with the vast variety of intelligent life around us every day. Is it possible to communicate with the plants and animals around us? Absolutely. Is this communication a one-way street? Hopefully not! Kelly's tale inspired me to pay more attention to the way I interact with the intelligent life all around me -- being a bit more conscious to listen instead of just commanding orders of what I expect to occur.

I especially loved reading the comments and questions the elves posed for Penny -- including such deceptively simple queries such as, "How is it ye choose among the activities that come before ye?" The insights Penny gained as she found a way towards achieving balance in her life are valuable to us all, whether or not we are raising organic produce.

As the author goes into detail about the effects of fungicides, herbicides and fertilizer on the land and how it affects the balance in teh soil and the terrain around, one can finally say they've learned more than the catch phrase "pesticides are bad for the earth." In the final chapter she goes into the various maladies caused by the sudden lack of nutrients in our food courtesy of teh green revolution and technology's sudden knowledge on how to do things "better" than nature has. Did you know, for instance, that diabetes was unknown to ancient peoples? This, the author says (and has cited books in the bibliography where one may read for themselves) is due to the lack of nutrition in our "cardboard" fruits and vegetables we have today. After reading this book I swore to never use another fertilizer or pesticide on anything I grew in my yard again. It is almost scary to read about the extent to which our impoverished diet has affected us mentally, emotionally and physically over the past sixty or so years.

This was a most excellent book. I simply couldn't put it down, even at the expense of homework and housecleaning. For anyone who wishes to know more about the nature of balance, and how one would go about working with the subtle energies of the earth to help whatever they grow, I most definitely recommend this book. She also has directions in the back for contacting your own devas and elves, and list of places where you could find the information she herself did.

Is time spent strategically a bad thing? Is strategy dead? Was time spent on strategy wasted? Does strategic planning have no place in our time-crazed, execution-obsessed New Economy? In 1983, the uber-executive of our age- General Electric Chairman Jack Welch dismantled the company's once heralded planning department. We have empirical evidence that those spending the most on traditional forms of resource-centric 'strategy consulting' [the cerebrally challenged SWOT - Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats dance] performed the poorest in the market place. The biggest strategic planner of them all, the Soviet Union appears to have just about finished its pre-Millennial journey from totalitarianism to disintegration. Strategy is not dead, but it had certainly fallen out of favor. Few companies don't have strategic plans. Yet few devote the resources to them they used to. Most disturbing, is that efforts to fix the problem, often had the effect of making things worse - or at least making them bad in a different way. Crusades and reforms intended to reinvent, relaunch and reposition the practice strategy have failed.

Lewis Mumford divided history into epochs characterized by their power sources. Traditional strategy tended to emphasize a focused single line of attack, executed by a single economic enterprise- a clear statement of where, how, and when to compete. Noticeably lacking was the question of 'with whom?' The new power source in the New Economy is the ability to assemble the most resource-rich, market-savvy, technology-gifted, fleet-of-foot, known-and-trusted-by-the-consumer armada of partners. The way you do that is the subject of Digital Deals.

No book can promise infallibility. No book can guarantee that good decisions will be made. This book will help you spend the time you can allocate to strategic thinking more efficaciously. As such, this is not a coffee-table book. This is not a Great-Title-No-Content book. This is not a Good-article-unbelievable-they-stretched-it-into-a-book-book. This most definitely is not a I'll-buy-it-but-I-won't-read-it book. Digital Deals is the new, new thing in strategic thinking. Using the framework in Digital Deals to analyze the ur-protangonists of our evolving New Economy [Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, AOL, AT&T, Amazon] I experienced something akin to the joy that must have accompanied Galileo's use of the telescope to study the heavens or Robert Hooke's (1635-1703) use of the microscope to study bacteria. The tools contained in these pages will let you see new things. It will simplify what heretofore has been an incoherent jumble of pieces parts. This book has helped me understand the players, the deals and the deal rationales of the market I work in - digital security and privacy. As I read the book, I continued to ask myself whether the two Georges were adding words to the existing vocabulary of strategic planning or creating a new grammar into which the old words might be conjugated. There is no doubt that the process of market modeling described within these pages fundamentally changes the types of conversations we will be having as we try to plan our respective futures.

In this context, the authors, in Chapter 8, first put forward the following ten reasons why organizations might want to become more global: competitive survival, cost spreading, trailblazing, rule of three, domino effect, evolutionary forces, technological revolution, search for innovation, ripple effect, and benchmarking against other companies. Then, they discuss seven challenges companies face in making the global leap: (1)Establishing a workable global structure, (2)Hiring global supermanagers, (3)Managing people for a global environment, (4)Learning to love cultural differences, (5)Avoiding parochialism and arrogance, (6)Designing unifying mechanisms and a global mindset, (7)Overcoming complexity.

In Chapter 9, to overcome these challenges, they show action plans, and suggest ways of moving forward, from learner to launcher and from launcher to leader into the global arena as summarized as below:

I- From Global Learner to Global Launcher

1. Human Resources Practices

* Supply language/cultural sensitivity training.

* Standardize forms and procedures.

* Set up an overseas presence via joint venture, modest acquisition, or establishment of a headquarters.

* Engage in extensive cross-border relationship building.

2. Organizational Structures

* Arrange short-term visits and international assignments.

* Staff for more diversity in management and board of directors.

* Use e-mail and videoconferencing to maintain day-to-day contact.

3. Organizational Processes and Systems

* Establish worldwide shared values, language, and operating principles.

* Conduct fact-finding missions.

* Design ad hoc transnational teams.

* Hold global town meetings and best-practice exchanges of information.

II- From Global Launcher to Global Leader

1. Human Resources Practices

* Seek complete liquidity of human resources: recruit outside the domestic base; place foreign recruits within the domestic base; promote the best people to global assignments; rotate people internationally; use twinning.

* Aim for a global structure.

* Map global processes.

2. Organizational Structure

* Provide continuing global leadership trining and regular transnational training to reinforce the global mindset.

* Remove/minimize country managers and replace with global managers and focus on global customers.

* Routinize real-time global communications.

3. Organizational Processes and Systems

* Use global reward systems.

* Multiply ongoing transnational project teams.

* Work for global integration (for example, total global sourcing, global design, global engineering, and global purchasing).

Finally, they write that "Many tools are available to organizations, and we have described a good number of them here (as summarized above). But senior management must have the skill and foresight to use the right tools in the right way, at the right time, and in the right sequence...Each stage requires structures that enable the crossing of boundaries, systems and procedures that drive global behavior, and people who can learn to extend their thinking beyond their present outlook."

Highly recommended.

"In living organisms, membranes exist to give the organization shape and definition. They have sufficient structural strength to prevent the organism from dissolving into an amorphous mess....Like a living organism, the boundaryless organization also evolves and grows, and the placement of boundaries may shift....Because the boundaryless organization is a living continuum, not a fixed state, the ongoing management challenge is to find the right balance of boundaryless behavior, to determine how permeable to make boundaries, and where to place them."

This brief excerpt from the first chapter correctly suggests the purpose of this remarkable book: To explain HOW to meet that challenge.

The material is presented within four parts plus a conclusion. The first explains how to achieve "free movement up and down" by crossing vertical boundaries; the second explains how to achieve "free movement side to side" by crossing horizontal boundaries; the third explains how to achieve "free movement along the value chain" by crossing external boundaries; and in the fourth part, they explain how to achieve "free global movement" by crossing geographic boundaries." Then in the Conclusion, the authors discuss "Making It Happen: Leading Toward the Boundaryless Organization."

The authors also include a series of six questionnaires. By completing each in sequence, the reader is able to determine (a) where her or his organization is now located relative to "the boundaryless paradigm", and (b), what is needed to eliminate the "gap" between where it is now and where it should be. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read The Boundaryless Organization Field Guide. It contains a a hands-on set of diagnostic instruments as well as exercises and tools, and a disk with presentation slides in Powerpoint format.

I agree with the authors: The most restrictive organizational boundaries are in the minds of those within an organization. Organizational as well as personal wounds are usually self-inflicted.

Cudos to the author for putting forth a recipe for a more hopeful future for the world.