Confidence : How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End

Rating:
Summary: practical no-nonsence advice
Review: A well written book that explores sports organizations and businesses during their losing seasons and either how they bounced back or how they stayed beaten.

Rating:
Summary: CONFIDENCE
Review: An outstanding read and actionable guide on the use of CONFIDENCE by leaders in Sports and business to develop high performing teams. I used this book as the basis of a National Sales Meeting for a consumer packaged goods company. Ms Kanter uses her Fortune 500 contacts to provide insights into winning teams and organizations. She then ably draws similiarities to help any junior or senior executive become a better leader.
A must for any business library

Rating:
Summary: Good Writing Style, Relates to MyIssues.
Review: Confidence is certainly an important part of almost anything, not the least of which are sports, business, politics and war. It's clearly not the only part -- while I suspect that both of the two running for President are confident that they are the best possible choice, one of the two isn't going to win unless it's a very unusual election.

The counter to this is that if you know you aren't going to win (or succeed or whatever) you're right. The situations where essentially organizations, armies, or teams have competed and one has consistently won are too high to ignore. The German army in both World War II out performed the allied armies by at least one and a half to one even when faced with superior equipment. They knew they were better and they were. Of course, when you have 5,000 Panther tanks up against 53,000 Sherman tanks....

This is an excellent book. It's writing style is almost as easy to read as a novel. The incidents it relates are very applicable to the story. While they probably don't relate to your business, industry or team, you'll find enough that are close enough to clearly cover the cost of the book.

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Summary: Practical material for individuals and organizations...
Review: Have you ever wondered how come winning teams/organizations keep on winning and losing groups struggle to break the cycle? Confidence by Rosabeth Moss Kanter does a pretty good job examining this issue...

Chapter list:
Part 1 - Winners and Losers: How Confidence Grows Or Erodes - The Locker Room and the Playing Field: Booms, Busts, Streaks, and Cycles; Winning Streaks: The Cycle of Success; Why Winning Streaks End; Losing Streaks: "Powerlessness Corrupts" and Other Dynamics of Decline; Why Losing Streaks Persist
Part 2 - Turnarounds: The Art Of Building Confidence - The Turnaround Challenge; The First Stone: Facing Facts and Reinforcing Responsibility; The Second Stone: Cultivating Collaboration; The Third Stone: Initiative and Innovation; A Culture of Confidence: Leading a Nation form Despair to Hope
Part 3 - Implications And Life Lessons - Delivering Confidence: The Work Of Leaders; Winning Streaks, Losing Streaks, and the Game of Life; Notes; Acknowledgments; Index

This isn't one of those "get fixed quick" books that are so common these days. Kanter examines the culture of winning and losing by using sports teams and a number of organization and government leaders. By telling their stories and examining their histories, it becomes clear how winning begets winning and losing begets losing, and it's a formidable task to break the cycle. I think one of the most inspirational and moving stories is when she writes about Nelson Mandela's rise from a prison cell to leader of South Africa, and the steps he took to promote and drive racial and cultural unity when it would have been much easier to just take the route of revenge. Although the examples are large, it's not devoid of personal application. Each chapter distills down the lessons into actions that you can take as an individual to build your own confidence and lead others in the same path.

Good material, and well worth reading...

Rating:
Summary: It's Confidence! Everyone
Review: Kanter has it right -- we have to be confident in ourselves as we make our way through challenges. Here's what's great about this book -- Kanter uses real examples with tough problems -- an airline, a community health center. Kanter does not dispense easy answers. She does not think there are Pollyanna-simple answers. This book has a scholarly foundation -- but not academic writing style -- of thousands of interviews and years of research.

We start to solve tough issues by having confidence and this book helps us keep that confidence through thick and thin. As for her sports examples, I agree. What's behind the Red Sox win but confidence by us all -- eighty-four years of confidence. Who said it's easy. But it's worth it.

Rating:
Summary: Endless Repetition
Review: Long-winded, short on ideas. The thesis of this book can be summed up in one short sentence: Success makes further success easier while failure begets failure. Why this takes 400 pages to say is beyond my understanding. The remaining space is devoted primarily to simplified anecdotes further illustrating this simple point. My Recommendation: Skim the argument over the first 5 pages in a book store. While saving yourself both time and money you will come away with a perfect understanding of everything this book has to say.

Rating:
Summary: Take a pass...Nothing new here.
Review: Repetitious. Long-winded. Over-hyped. Over-rated. Disappointing. Read the first 5 pages in book store and redeploy your capital elsewhere.

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Summary: Thorough Look at Leadership Basics to Build Confidence
Review: There are many leadership books about what the job of leaders is, and there are some excellent books about how optimistic people accomplish more. Confidence is the first book that I have seen that combines both perspectives in to a description of leadership basics to use confidence to accomplish more. The most valuable part of the book is in how to build confidence in a turnaround situation, another subject about which many good books have been written.

The book's main strength is found in its many compelling stories of how sports, business, non-profit and government organizations have gotten caught up in vicious cycles of losing confidence, broken those cycles and build virtuous cycles of building confidence and effectiveness. These stories are not only interesting; they are balanced for gender and race as well. You come away with a sense that the book's principles are more than adequately established across a broad range of experiences and backgrounds.

I especially enjoyed the rich details behind the headlines of many of these famous stories. In each case, I gained from adding details that I didn't know before even though I was aware of most of the organizational stores involved (I even know some of the people).

Those who get lost in the details will be pleased to discover that Professor Kanter summarizes her findings, with references back to the most telling examples in the brief Part III.

Leaders help create confidence by setting high standards, being a role model for those standards, and establishing processes to get the job done. The cornerstones of confidence that leaders should use include individual and system accountability, mutual respect, communication, collaboration, initiative, imagination and innovation. In doing these tasks, leaders need to address building confidence among those outside of the organization as well as those inside it. Whenever you find yourself losing your way, stop thinking about what's going wrong and focus on what you must do to ensure that things will go right in the future.

This book will be most welcome to those whose organizations are mired down into stalled behavior of attitudes and bad habits that delay progress. With Confidence, they can see what they need to do next to move forward at the right pace and in the right way.

Get going! What are you waiting for?


Rating:
Summary: Too Verbose, Repetitive, Does not respect reader's time
Review: This book is overly hyped. It seemed to start well but about half way through I found it hard to continue. The book goes on and on saying the same thing - none of which is very insightful - over and over again and again . The author has picked up three themes for confidence - accountabiliity, collaboration and initiative and twists every example to suit this theme. In most examples these are just one piece of the puzzle and in no way the complete solution by themself. The book could have been a third of its size and could have probably doen a better job at getting the point across.

in short - your time is better spend on other things. The only cofidence you need is to say No to this book and know that you will not be any worse off.

Rating:
Summary: Consider Your Expectations
Review: This book is well written and very interesting just from the point of view of understanding the history of what has taken place within a variety of organizations. I suppose a reader's opinion has a lot to do with the expectations they had when they opened the book. I picked up this book because of a very brief reference to it in a magazine I was reading in a hair salon recently. I thought it was curious to see a book like that recommended by a magazine devoted to style and fashion. Naturally it piqued my curiosity.

Perhaps that's why I think this book is one of the best I've read in the last year - I'm a naturally curious person who finds helpful, valuable, inspiring information everywhere! I thought it was a real page turner. I got up early every morning to read a little more of it before I went to work every day. I'm the director of a start-up program in a 36 year old company that's a leader in a very mature industry. I loved this book and would highly recommend it.