On Saturday afternoon, we ‘crashed’ in the holiday home of our friends Kees en Loes. There is an excellent internet connection here, so I had the opportunity to do some surfing. One of the sites I visited was the blog of Mark and Mira. On his blog, Mark mentions the books he is reading and I thought that that would be a good idea to do here too, since I read a few interesting books during the last months.

‘The five dysfunctions of a team‘ is an excellent little book about the importance of trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and attention to results for teams. It is written as a story about a new CEO working with the executive team of a company. A very entertaining and profound book on the topic.

‘Getting to Yes!‘ discusses the difference between principled and positional negotiation. It has helped me, not only in negotiation but in conflict situations as well. The basic idea is that we often negotiate about positions but that we should look at the interests behind our positions. A Dutch summary of this book can be found here. Another good book about negotiation is ‘Everyday negotiation‘. It stresses the importance of advocacy and connection in the ‘under water’ area of negotiations. It is much more thorough than ‘Getting to yes’.

Those of you that are dealing with change in life, can benefit from reading ‘Who moved my cheese?’ This book tells the story of four little mice who find out one day that they ran out of cheese, and respond to this fact in very different ways.

At a conference I was asked, together with a friend, to give a presentation about strategy. We used Henry Mintzberg’s article ‘5 Ps for strategy‘ as the basis of the presentation but talked only about Plan, Pattern, Position, and Perspective. It was very practical and basic, with lots of examples, but I hope that we succeeded in conveying the idea that strategy is more than a strategy document.

During the coming weeks I hope to have some more time for reading but tomorrow we will first have to go to the dentist.

Erik