The Gifted Boss : How to Find, Create and Keep Great Employees

Piles of books come out every year on how to be a better boss, but few go beyond platitudes to provide vivid, real-life pictures of excellent bosses in action. Not so with The Gifted Boss, in which business columnist Dale Dauten not only tells how extraordinary bosses differ from ordinary ones but actually shows what these bosses look like on the job. Through anecdotes and extended quotes from bosses at dozens of companies, both the well known (Porsche, LensCrafters, Wendy's, and IDG Books) and the obscure (small and midsize businesses in Arizona where Dauten lives), he humanizes the problem in an entertaining yet practical manner.

Gifted bosses distinguish themselves from the pack, according to Dauten, by not just hiring employees but by "courting" and ultimately "acquiring allies"; by making their organizations or even just their department as "the best place for the best people to work"; by emphasizing standards (and leaving one's employees free to figure out how to meet those standards themselves) over rules and procedures; and by trusting employees to find their own answers to problems rather than spend one's days putting out brushfires for everyone.

To wit, we hear stories of bosses like Dan Schweiker, CEO of China Mist Tea, who, when he first started the company, told experienced salespeople who defected to him, "I'm not going to try to tell you what to do. We're hiring you to learn from you." (He also replaced the conference room table with a pool table!) Or an army general who chucked the weighty military procedure book and told his troops to figure out how to prepare for battle one minute faster than the standardized process... and outline it on one page. (And they did just that.) Or IDG head John Kilcullen (the brains behind the Dummies series of books), who wooed someone to be his finance czar by playing golf with him... even though Kilcullen didn't play golf and showed up in jeans.

The Gifted Bossis told in a sort of novelistic form, in which the first-person narrator, a corporate middle-manager stuck in a "glass rut," is regaled with stories by an eccentric but nonetheless warm, wise, and funny old sage named Max Elmore. If that narrative device sounds a bit cloying, it is. (Max, according to the author's acknowledgements, is based on a true-life mentor, a retired professor.) Still, that's a small price to pay for a book with not only smart and bracing ideas on how to be a truly A-1 boss, but a genuine wealth of vivid, sometimes touching stories to show what those ideas look like in the real world. --Timothy Murphy