simplerich

Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Dirty Little Angels by Chris Tusa was a good read. I’m from the South, and worked in New Orleans for a short while before Katrina. The book excellently captures the feel and tone of the area. If you’ve been there, and I mean there as in not just in the Quarter you’ll know that might not be the best tone to capture. The poverty, crime, and feeling of helplessness and inability to escape from the dead-end that surrounds New Orleans is excellently captured. The characters lives and their emotions came across really well. Unfortunately I didn’t find their lives something I could identify with… thankfully, and the primary emotion was despair, bleak mind-numbing despair.

European movies have to me always felt like they were different from US movies in that they seemed to be snippets of life without huge climaxes and then a nice tidy resolution scene where all the ends are tied up like most American movies. Dirty Little Angels is the same way. The book is like turning on the TV and coming in part way through a movie about someone’s life and watching a few hours and then turning it off without knowing how the players got there or what happened later. There’s no neat little resolution here. Life isn’t neatly wound up with little bows either.

They say the sign of a good book is that when you’re done reading it you want to read more. I usually agree with that. Here I didn’t want to read more because I was sympathetic to the characters, but I wanted to read more because I wanted to know that things turned out OK for them in spite of all the other crap going on in their lives. I hope they’re OK. They were in the shadow of a city that swallows people alive when I found them, and they still were when I left them. I recommend the book if you enjoy Southern fiction or books with/about New Orleans.

I received a free copy of this book digitally in exchange for reviewing it. I got a review copy and I agreed to review it. I didn’t get paid and I didn’t rate it higher or lower because of being given a review copy. I thought it only fair that I mention that. And yes. I read it on my kindle and I still love my kindle. I’m off to read it again now!

I discovered Uncubicled by Josh McMains on Twitter while he was advertising it for 99c for the kindle edition. I didn’t have a Kindle yet, but I knew one was in my future so I got the book. Last night I finished reading it.

Would I recommend it? Not the paperback. It’s just too expensive. The 99c version of it on kindle was good. It was worth a buck. I’d pay anything up to five dollars for it as it’s a fun story that the cover does not sell at all. In fact, the more I read of the book the less I liked the cover. While you can’t tell a book by the cover I like to think you can tell what type of book it will be by the cover. Uncubicled was an action/adventure book with an office intrigue cover. If M. Night Shamalamadingdong were on crack and had a cattle prod massaging his spine THIS is the book he would write. OK. It’s not that full of twists… but there are a few more than it absolutely needed.

It’s a good first book. I really did enjoy it. I liked the characters, without giving anything away, in spite of the deus ex machina twist that got so predictable that I fully expected a can-opener to develop the trait that was over-used towards the end.

I read this book really wanting to love it. I’m a new author. I’m a fan of twitter, and was dying to “discover” a new author who was great and about to make it big in a huge way. This won’t be the book that does it as it stands now in my opinion. Will I read the next book he writes? Absolutely. I enjoyed it and I like supporting new authors. It’s a good novice effort. If I owned it in dead-tree version I’d loan it to friends if they promised to give it back. I own it digitally so I can’t loan it which is my biggest gripe with digital formatted books. They’re unloanable.  This is a problem for new authors because I can’t loan the book to a friend so they can discover him and buy his second book. They can’t enjoy the thrill of discovering a new author without paying $20 for it. That’s a lot to pay for this book. Too much. THIS is the downside of digital.

How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Conners and Tom Smith is my most recent non-kindle read book. I say that because this is a prime example of a book that’s better on paper than on a kindle because I was constantly going back to previous pages, underlining, circling, and generally marking up the book. While I’m sure I’ll get used to those things on a kindle, this book’s scars from my reading and writing in it are proof enough that print isn’t dead!

Full Disclosure: I didn’t pay for the copy I’m reviewing here. I was sent an advance copy to review. I don’t believe that impacted my review at all, but thought it would only be honest to mention it to those of you who read me. OK. Disclosure over, on with the review.

As I read the book I had a lot of time in MANY of the chapters when I was thinking to myself, “This is exactly what THAT boss of mine did wrong!” As the evidence started piling up I started worrying that if my employees were to read the book they’d say the exact same thing. I know I’ve found Dilbert comics on their peg-boards that I thought were funny… even after I realized they had to mean I was the pointy-haired boss. I will be getting a copy for managers of mine that I think would read it and take it to heart. I don’t think all of them would… they’re not all the avid reader that I am.

The start of How Did That Happen?, where it talks about the title is a real eye-opener and a game changer for the way people think. If I had to sum up the impact of the book in one line it would be way towards the front of the book where it suggests instead of looking at a problem or break-down of some sort and saying “How did that happen” we should ask “How did I let that happen?” Those two words are so powerful. It addresses where I so often see a breakdown in communication. That sort of personal accountability is, I believe, the hallmark of a good manager. If I find someone who does that automatically instead of blaming their employees, the weather, or the economy I’m thrilled and work hard to get out of their way and help them to be great.

One of the breakdowns that hit home the closest was when a manager will give vague expectations, unclear boundaries of responsibility and authority, and accountability and then be surprised later when expectations aren’t met. Vague goals of “Make more money.” Would certainly fall into that category. Sure… it’s an easy one. But should we make more money or make more profit? I can make more money by marking things down steeply, but that will decrease our profit. I can make more money in the short term by cutting back on merchandise in a store so I’m not spending any more. Without giving clear, concise, and measurable outlines of my expectations my employees will find it hard to not disappoint me. I will be setting them up to fail over and over again by my own carelessness.

I’m one who typically scoffs at acronyms, as annoying mnemonics along the lines of Every Good Boy Does Fine for the piano. But Framing an expectation using the acronym given in How Did That Happen looks about fool proof, even for ingenious fools.

Expectations should be Framable, Obtainable, Repeatable, and Measurable.

Framable as in the expectations fit within the framework, context, business environment and culture of the business.
Obtainable, this one’s obvious and one I’ve been good at following. I once told a new supervisor they should ask for things a little sooner, faster, better than the employees volunteered to do as he was the leader, and should pull them forward, not let them wander wherever they wanted at their own pace, but I cautioned against giving impossible goals that nobody could finish in that time as it set them up to fail. He wanted to help them to exceed their expectations, not to teach them to expect to fail.
Repeatable was the one I had the most trouble “getting” as I read the book. It finally clicked when I quit thinking as in “do it over again” and thought of it as “communicated over again to other people who are working on the project. If the goal or expectation is so numinous and vague that only someone with a degree in macro-economics can get what is being talked about it’s going to be hard to get everybody on board with working towards that goal. Making sure that the goal is something that can be conveyed to everybody involved easily, and in a way they understand is important. It will be hard for them to get invested in a goal they don’t “get.” “We need to increase mom and pop profit store to store year over year by 5 percent” is not meaningful to a lot of front-liners who haven’t a clue what that means but they KNOW that they don’t work for their parents.
Measurable was and is my favorite part as my biggest “Ah Ha!” moment for me. Having a measurable goal makes it so much easier to know where on the progress bar we are towards achieving the expectations. Having delegated parts of a job that is measurable into other measurable parts it makes it easier for me as a manager to find where my bottle neck is and address that with further training, or reassessment of  how even I was at delegating the jobs.

I hate to sound like this was a new concept to me, it wasn’t. But in this context it was put in a way that something inside clicked that I just liked. I’m not a complete convert to acronyms yet, but I don’t hate this one.

Overall, How Did That Happen? is about accountability, it’s right in the sub-title, and it talks about accountability in way that makes sense and is applicable with real world examples. This brings up one of my stylistic complaints about the book. At the outset of How Did That Happen? the authors point out that they’re going to change the names of people and businesses to protect their identities and they’re going to put their names in quotes whenever the name is changed. Here’s the thing… those quotes get really repetitious and distracting really fast. I get it. In examples about the real world people names and company names are changed. Honestly, you’d be crazy not to for liability reasons. I think most readers assume that’s going to happen. Attributions, quotes, advice and suggestions coming from someone, those are attributed to real people. We understand that. It’s the reason I use names like “Mongo” and “Roy” in my blog. I have no employees by either name. They’re safe names to use, as are “Mega-corp,” and referencing products as “widgets.” We don’t need to put quotes around everything that is changed. Seriously, I got it, and by the end of the book I was seeing sly wink and air-quotes every time I came across it. It really took me out of the book. This is totally a stylistic quibble. The content was really good. I just wish they’d dispensed with the quotes around altered names.

There’s a diagram three-quarters of the way through the book that talks about people who are above the line and below the line with personal accountability. The above the line employee will see a problem, own it, solve it, and do it. That’s obviously the desired approach. The below the line people are depicted with someone with a lot of other options going through their head as they encounter a problem, choices like: Wait and See, not my job, cover your butt, and finger pointing to name a few.

This huge difference in above and below the line employees was highlighted for me personally when I went to work one day recently and found a note in my fax machine from Mongo, a relatively new employee who used to work for a competitor with a very different culture: “Rich, A customer bought a widget and when he came back later he said the box had been empty. I tried to call Manager and Assistant Manager but neither of them answered their phones so I told him I couldn’t help him. He got hostile so I called the police and had him removed.”

I was floored. The police had been called to remove a customer who was upset because we’d done something wrong and Mongo really thought this was a good answer. The cost of the widget in question was around 8 dollars. Obviously there’s room for improvement in this one. I still don’t know what I’m going to do in this situation to fix it. I don’t know if it CAN be fixed. I haven’t got the customer’s name and don’t know how to reach them but I really really want to. There isn’t enough time today for me to apologize for what went wrong there if I can ever find that customer again. But as soon as I read the note in my fax machine the graphic for below the line accountability came to mind. (As an aside the manager was on vacation and the assistant manager called minutes later after leaving doctor’s office, but it was too late it’d already happened. It was the perfect storm of bad timing.)

The take-home from How Did That Happen? is that accountability isn’t a bad word. It’s not the stick part of carrot and stick. Accountability is akin to ownership. I won’t equate it with ownership, because it’s bigger than that. It’s an empowering tool as much as it is a tool that makes us responsible. Accountability as it came across in How Did That Happen? was the perfect marriage of responsibility, authority and drive. I know — that’s a three way marriage, but just go with it would you? Please?

Some management/business books are thin, have fun drawings in them, clever titles, and have the feeling of a fad diet to them. This book is not that kind of reading. It’s not diet, it’s a lifestyle change. I say that in a good way. Those purple cows out there moving fred’s cheese factor are all great books I’m sure, but they all left me feeling a little hollow. Something like Angel Food cake. Yeah, I know I ate something, but it’s later and I can’t remember what it was I ate and I’m hungry again. How Did That Happen? isn’t a beach book and it’s not a read in a day and walk away book.

There was a point in How Did That Happen? where they said feedback was a habit that people quickly fell out of or started with good intentions but didn’t keep up with and I smiled to myself and thought immediately of Rosa Say’s Daily Five. Anybody who is a practitioner of that will take to the feedback discussions in here like a duck to water and will also smile at the idea that they wouldn’t give feedback.

I was pleasantly surprised by How Did That Happen? by Roger Connors and Tom Smith. I’d never heard of them or their other books before now and I find I’m going to have to go back and read The Oz Principle and the only real decision there is whether I’ll read it in kindle or paper edition. If the marking I did in this one is any indication I should get the paper edition. It might be a good time to learn to mark-up a kindle edition of a book though. (I just checked and The Oz Principle is available on the kindle. I’m going to get it that way.)

I’m on vacation this week and drove The Kid* down to his Gramma’s house for the week. We live in Iowa, and she lives in Texas. It’s a long drive and we listened to Neil Gaimain’s The Graveyard Book. I was planning, as part of my vacation to go visit the town I thought of as my home town for a lot of years… many many many years. Part of me still feels like “I grew up there…” I got directions to it from google maps and everything.

On the drive, while listening to The Graveyard Book (I got it from audible. /hat-tip) a line reached through the speakers and grabbed me by the face and yelled at me.

When the protagonist asked a parental figure if he could return home again he answered his own question:

“If I come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.“

Well there’s my vacation plans balled up and tossed out the window. He’s exactly right. What I’d have gained by going back would have been some photographs and a feeling of “Wow… this is nothing like I remember it.” So. I’m not going. If I start living in my past now, trying to recapture the feelings I felt when I was younger… that’s a slippery slope to dottage and I’m not ready to head down that road yet. I’m not ready to start trying to recycle old into new or recapture it. There’s plenty of life left to be lived, and I think I’ll do that this vacation instead of trying to go back to what was.

Oh, and the book? There’s a reason it won a Newberry. The reason is it’s a really good book. I enjoyed it and I’m 40. The Kid just turned 18 and he enjoyed it. I imagine younger kids would like it as well. The premise is that a kid’s whole family was murdered and he escaped to a graveyard and was adopted and raised by ghosts. That’s the short version of the fly-leaf synopsis. Neil Gaiman takes that premise and tells a wonderfully imaginative story using that as the launching point. I’m trying for a spoiler free review so I’ll stop here. I recommend it highly to anybody from 8 to 80.

*I refer to The Kid that way to preserve his anonymity. No names and no pictures of him here… or anywhere without asking him first. He’s 18 now, and not a kid… just ask him lol. But will still get that pseudonym while I write about him. He knows it and goes along with it even though he’d have picked something a little more Goth. (I say emo just to irritate him.)

My favorite book of 2008 was Little Brother by Cory Doctorow.
It’s my favorite for a couple reasons; not the least of which is that while it can be had for free download on the internet, provided by the author, not theft, it is also for sale and is a HUGE sales success.

From the author’s site:

The US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover’s selling so well that my publisher’s delayed the paperback for a year!). The book’s made just about everyone’s best-of lists for 2008:

It’s a young adult novel that,  briefly, tells the story of a high-school kid, group of kids, who live in a surveillance intensive society. The government, city, state, federal, watch and track almost everything, and then a terrorist attack happens and the tracking gets worse. Freedoms are curtailed, and people are kidnapped by their own government to be investigated for behavior that doesn’t match societal norms as determined by the surveillance. It’s a fight back against Big Brother by kids, hence the name. That’s such a brief thumbnail description it doesn’t do it justice.

You don’t have to trust me on this one. You really can get it for free from the author’s site, and if you like it you can buy a dead-tree version if you like, or even an audiobook version. I got it for free, read it on my palm and liked it enough to buy the dead tree version and the audiobook version.

Little Brother a great book, and it changed the way I look at the world around me. No higher praise can be given a book.