Author: Keith E. Ayers

ISBN: 1599320118

Successful companies benefit not just from interested or engaged employees but from employees who are passionate about their work, who have had a ‘fire lit inside them’ and who will do anything to improve their performance and that of their employers.

This book, by a prominent Australian management consultant and drawing upon the material used in his business, aims to provide managers with the knowledge and techniques necessary to light that fire and get the workforce burning with desire. This has been a recurrent theme in management literature over the years: managers look at their employees and observe how so many of them expend their time and effort on hobbies and on personal interests – people will spend hours on these personal pursuits, large amounts of their income and great gouts of their energy. If only those people could be brought to behave the same way towards their work! Well, Ayers notes that even the most passionate of employees can retain that enthusiasm for the job for no more than six months before a more sustainable equilibrium reasserts itself. He advocates various methods for understanding how to overcome this situation, how to understand why people behave the way they do and how best to motivate and reward different people.

In true management literature style, the many schools of thought are employed insofar as they are useful and the usual caveats with which they are hedged about with are ignored – as long as it works, in pragmatic managerial style, then that will be fine. And some of these ideas will certainly work with some people for some of the time.

Yet even the best manager cannot maintain passion in employees forever. It simply seems to be impossible. Consider, for example,  managers of leading sports teams – even these highly paid and regarded athletes, given the chance to do the thing they love to a high level, generally will after a couple of years switch off and stop listening to the manager. They must be moved on or else the manager must. There are people who maintain their passion for their work for decades – but do those people find that other parts of their lives suffer as a result? As ever, the answer is – ‘more research is required.’

Business books such as this one are generally in the curate’s egg category – some good parts and some which rather stink the place out. This one has its good points and, after all, a great deal of effort has been expended on studying business and how to be good at it – or at least persuading other people it is possible to teach them how to be good at it.

However, I feel I really must point out the appearance of the excrescence ‘acheive’ both on the front cover and on the inside title page. This is really unacceptable and the books should have been recalled and corrected before being published. 

The above review was contributed by:  John Walsh PhD:  Professor at Shinawatra International University CLICK TO VIEW  John Walsh's Reviews