The Seven-Day Book Cover Challenge, Day Six: The Organization Guerilla: Playing the Game to Win

This one is going to have a few of you scratching your heads. It's a book I picked up off the 99-cent table at a bookstore, at the beginning of my career. It's easily worth 20 or 30 times what I paid for it.

This is a very cynical book, with practical advice that will save (and maybe even advance) your career, whether you work in a small business or a giant corporation. You may disagree with some of its principles, and you may go "well, duh" at some others, but after reading the book, you will see its truisms everywhere.

Here are three examples:

1. In business, as in politics, nobody ever gives you the real reason for their decisions/actions.

2. If you want to know who has the real power in an organization, watch where the money comes from, and where it goes -- in short, Power Follows Money.

3. I can't put this into a pithy sentence, but there's an entire chapter in the book about the politics behind distribution lists: who do you put in the From, To, Cc and Bcc fields of a memo or, in today's world, an email? There's a whole science behind it. Make sure you get it right.

Book Review: Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds

Bryan Merritt is a turnaround artist, a hired gun who travels around the world, helping companies who have lost their mojo to become vibrant and profitable again. If his clients are willing to take his blunt, straightforward advice, and make the changes he says they need to make, then they win, and he is successful. He loves this kind of work and it gives him great satisfaction.

Much of his approach to business was learned in the arena – the rodeo arena, to be specific. Ever since he got on the back of his first bull at 16, he was hooked. He loved bullriding, and it also gave him great satisfaction.

                                 

You don’t get a lot of time to think when you’re on the back of the bull. If you’re good, you get 8 seconds, and then the buzzer sounds, you win, and you look for a graceful way to dismount. But bulls don’t like to be ridden, so you’d better know what you’re doing if you intend to win. In his bullriding career, Merritt identified five key lessons to help him stay on the bull – the same five key lessons that he uses as a corporate fix-it man to save floundering companies.

You don’t have to hire his company, Matrix Management Systems, LLC, to benefit from his wisdom. Merritt also does webinars and workshops. Now he offers those five lessons to you in his new book, Boardroom Bullrider: 5 Lessons Learned about Business in 8 Seconds. Skillfully mixing rodeo stories with stories about the business world, Merritt presents his five lessons and, in his straightforward manner, at the end of each lesson he pushes you to “get on the bull,” to do something that will make you make the lesson part of you.

I won’t tell you what his five lessons are. That’s what the book is for. Read it yourself. I measured it against some of the classics in business literature, and Boardroom Bullrider holds its own. 

The one thing the classics have over Bullrider is page count. Merritt manages to make his points in 158 pages, not counting an absorbing introduction. Merritt is a great storyteller, but he doesn’t waste words. That’s his style. It’s part of the 80/20 principle that he focuses on so passionately. Still, you will find yourself wishing that he had spent more time on certain points, turning one sentence into a paragraph or one paragraph into several.

His advice is not just for moneymaking companies. It’s also for nonprofit organizations, government agencies – and you as an individual. Bryan’s advice can help you succeed in life.

Boardroom Bullrider is available from many booksellers, including Amazon.com, or directly from Bullrider Press.