How To Make A Right Turn On A Train

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: The Prodigal Executive

Competency: coaching

Who benefits: executive coaches, senior managers and executives

Consultant Usage: executive coaching

What’s it about? Let me begin with a disclaimer.  The author, Bruce Heller, is a good friend.  Bruce is an executive coach.  Been one for 15 years.  I have to share an image with you.  He is a big guy.  I mean big.  I can’t help visualizing Bruce walking into an executive’s office and saying “Hi, I‘m your executive coach.”  I know I would look up and say “Sure man, anything you say.”

But Bruce is a gentle fellow trapped in football player’s body.  He is also a smart and practical guy and it shows in the book he has just written on executive derailment. 

The book is aimed at those who are in their early stages of an executive coaching career or those who are thinking about entering the field (primarily as an external, but some chapters are directed towards internal coaches and coaching).  And if this is you, I would recommend that as you read this book you keep a laptop or pen and paper handy and copy some of his pithy lines for reuse when you meet some of the tough people you are liable to coach in your emerging career. 

This book is also for senior managers and executives who are thinking about hiring an executive coach for one of their wayward employees.  It is a quick guide to what executive coaches can and cannot do and a good primer when interviewing executive coaches.

The subtitle of the book gives you a good idea of what you will find in the book: “How To Coach Executives Too Painful To Keep, Too Valuable To Fire”.

What you will find inside and what I like best about the book are The Stories.  Bruce is a story teller.  These are stories of value.  They have learning points attached to them. 

There are chapters like “When to Hold’em and When to Fold’em”; myths like “You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks”; people stories like “Vladimir the Improver”.  And in the middle of the book there is a chapter every HR practitioner of any ilk should read: “Prescription Before Diagnosis is Malpractice”. 

Overall it is a short book, reads fast and gets to the point. 

At the end you will discover what Bruce means in his opening sentence.  And as opening sentences in books go, this is one of the best I have ever read: “My job is to defuse atomic bombs in the workplace.”  Yikes!

Catch you later.

[tags]derailment, derailed, coaching, executive coaching, executive coaches, heller, bruce heller,  bill bradley, william bradley, bradley[/tags]

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.