Pushing the Envelope: All The Way To The Top

Inspirational business speaker, popular newspaper columnist, and bestselling author Harvey Mackay has been "moonlighting" for 40 years as president of Mackay Envelope Corporation, an $85 million company that produces more than 17 million envelopes a day. With the help of imagery derived from this industry, he's now dispensing a new batch of lessons on life and business in Pushing the Envelope: All the Way to the Top. Its five sections--cleverly titled "How to Be A #10," "Licking the Competition," "How I Pushed the Envelope," "The Flap on Management," and "Going First Class"--offer practical advice on such topics as hiring, motivating, training, producing, and negotiating. Each short and highly focused chapter deals with one specific idea and concludes with a pithy aphorism dubbed Mackay's Moral, such as "There's much more to winning than finishing first" and "In negotiations, as in poker, a superior hand can be beaten by superior knowledge of your opponents." Interweaving experiences from a diverse lot including Sylvester Stallone, Ulysses S. Grant, Will Rogers, and Star Wars' Yoda with anecdotes drawn from his own career, Mackay presents a litany of solid suggestions that will prove as useful as they are fun to read. --Howard Rothman