Corridor Business Journal Article

gigi@corridorbiznews.com

It’s about respect.

To improve the performance of employees, managers and a business overall, an atmosphere of mutual respect needs to be present in the workplace. That’s what John Langhorne wants readers to take away from his recently published book, Beyond Luck: Practical Steps to Navigate the Path from Manager to Leader.

The book was first released at the Economic Forecast Luncheon Jan. 13, hosted by the Corridor Media Group, publisher of the Corridor Business Journal and Beyond Luck.

Mr. Langhorne, a CBJ columnist, has worked for more than 25 years as a business consultant through his company, Langhorne Associates, in Iowa City. Throughout his career, he has worked with more than 300 private, nonprofit and public-sector organizations, helping those companies improve their practices.

Now he is expanding his advice beyond his client pool. In 75 short chapters encompassing about 200 pages, Mr. Langhorne spells out what he’s been telling his clients for years: how to become better leaders and workers.

“This is the basic skill set managers need to have,” he said. “We can make ourselves better by how we deploy ourselves.”

Topics include effective management practices and principles, leadership and executive behavior, motivation and morale, jobs and job loss and personal development.

“Management is hard work. It requires a large repertoire of skills and it requires a lot of knowledge; leadership even more,” he said. “American organizations could improve their productivity enormously by treating their people better. The word respect is everywhere in this book. There are a lot of managers who don’t understand that you can make people work, but you can’t make them work smart. The only way you can make them work smart is to use respect.”

“Beyond Luck” addresses a variety of workplace situations, such as employee attitude change, communicating and providing feedback, running effective meetings, leadership and mentoring, job change and business success.

“It’s designed to be very accessible, to get you to what you need to know very rapidly,” Mr. Langhorne said.

The book is designed for managers and employees of small- and middle-sized companies.

“I’m a rather odd consultant. I prefer to work with small companies and with entrepreneurs,” he said. “It’s for people 40 (years old) and up who own businesses, who are entrepreneurs, who are managers, who are executives. There are a lot of people in that category and they’re all very busy and I would hope that they like this format and find the information useful.”

Throughout the book, Mr. Langhorne quotes Peter Drucker, a renowned business writer who penned 39 books about industry and who was a frequent columnist for the Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review.

“Some people say he created management; he wrote the first textbook on management,” he said. “And his material is full of common sense and wisdom. And it’s remarkable stuff and it’s timeless.”

Several Corridor business leaders encouraged Mr. Langhorne to incorporate his newspaper columns and essays he had written for clients into a book that could be accessible to a larger audience. He began doing so in January 2009 and the book was published about a year later. The real work for the book began in 1984, however, he said.

“I started my business in 1984 and I started writing articles for clients right away, 700 to 800 words, on practical kinds of things,” Mr. Langhorne said.
At the start of 2009, he foresaw a difficult year for businesses with the slow economy. That instinct drove his desire to write the book.

“I work with interesting people and we work on interesting problems and when it works, it usually depends on whether the person is a good leader and whether the chemistry is good between us. When it works, I feel so good about it, I want to get out and run alongside the car, that’s how satisfying the work is. And when it works, companies get along better and people’s work environments are better and people’s lives are better,” he said.

He spent about five months rewriting his columns to appeal to a wider audience. Next, the book was edited and then was printed.

“I rarely recommend books to people because business people rarely have time to read books. That’s why we call this the un-book,” Mr. Langhorne said. “I thought, 700 to 800 words, that takes three minutes. You get 50 percent retention if you read it once, you get 50 percent or more retention if you read it twice, you read it three or four times, you’ve got it cold.”

With four indices at the back of the book to quickly identify topics throughout, the book operates like a web site, he said.

“There’s a bunch of different ways you can go into it,” he said. “You can look at the title, you can look at the pull-out (quotes), you can look at the table of contents. And then there are the four indexes.”

For more information about the book, visit www.beyondluck.net. CBJ

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