HELP THE HELPER

Business-advice book emphasizing the importance of selfless teamwork.

Indiana Pacers general manager Pritchard and leadership professor Eliot (Overachievement: The New Model for Exceptional Performance, 2004) approach their "help the helper" theme from a wide variety of angles, some of them barely distinguishable from the others. Though the near-repetition gives the book a tired feeling at points, the authors offer interesting, instructive anecdotes. Sports fans—especially basketball, baseball and football—will quite likely relate to the dozens of illustrative examples from the realm of athletics, especially when the authors recount their firsthand experiences. Readers unfamiliar with the players or coaches may become bored or confused or both. Those readers, however, should be able to relate to the examples drawn from various business sectors, such as restaurants. Pritchard and Eliot explain that a restaurant adopting the most effective teamwork approach would hire servers and managers who place customers above all else. If a customer sitting at a table in the sector of server A asks for a clean fork from server B, server B will bring the fork immediately—although server A might benefit from a slightly larger tip later in the evening. In addition to pithy lessons about leadership, the book is salted with brief quotations from significant leaders, including Gandhi: “Man becomes great exactly in the degree in which he works for the welfare of his fellow men."

A welcome relief from business books filled with dog-eat-dog advice.