The Hindu Business Line : Snapshots of success and fleeting insights from interviews

What does ‘I’ stand for? Does the manifestation of fun change from culture to culture? What are the biggest challenges that companies will face in the next decade? Is the Internet a blessing or a curse?

What are the common traits of performance-oriented companies? Why is public speaking, even if it’s a presentation among colleagues in a conference room at work, a horrible prospect for most people?

What are some of the reasons that athletes mismanage wealth? Are there any triggers or warning signs about gender bias? These and more questions find answers in The Success Effect by John Eckberg ( www.landmarkonthenet.com).

The book of ‘uncommon conversations with America’s business trailblazers’ is organised in 47 chapters that are generically titled (as for example, desire and discovery, debate and delight, audacity and adversity).

“My style as a business reporter is to ask people questions about issues that appeal to me, and hope that the answers will resonate with readers,” writes Eckberg in the intro.

The people who answer his questions are those ‘who envisioned a future, a career, or a product, and watched it happen or made it happen through personal effort and force of will”. These interviews, beginning with golf coach David Pelz and ending with Deepak Chopra, are slices of time, and snapshots of success, explains Eckberg. “Insights from the interviews are sometimes too fleeting, the provocative thinking is sometimes brief.”

For instance, when answering the question, ‘Do people need to get a taste of losing to know they don’t like it?’

Marvin Lewis, the Head Coach of Cincinnati Bengals, says that you do learn some lessons in losing, as well as in winning. And, as a leader, what Lewis finds the most annoying thing to deal with day in and day out is jealousy.

A lot of people get hung up on what someone is going to say or think about them, and so they spend all their time worried about that, instead of focusing their energy on just doing, he reasons. “They stall themselves from being very good at something because they’re worried about the perception.”

A different view about people comes from Karen Stephenson, a CIA Analyst, with a PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University.

People in head-hunting societies didn’t have much violence at all, even though they were head-hunters, she tells Eckberg. A ritualistic finish, just the way the tribes did!

As a reprieve from that eerie thought, let me take you back to the intro, where the author avers that it is an immense, daily privilege to work on a newspaper. It’s a job, of course, but it’s more like being paid to be a lifelong, curious five-year-old, Eckberg cheerfully describes.

Unputdownable read.

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