Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Book Review: The Millionaire Mind

Recently, I read the book, The Millionaire Mind, by Dr. Thomas Stanley, who also wrote the book, The Millionaire Next Door.



The book is the result of his studies of many people with millions in net worth. Their habits. How they got rich.  And for those who want to market to them, their buying patterns.


Sample Size:

Dr. Stanley makes a distinction between millionaires, and deca-millionaires. When the book was published in 2000, the average household net worth over all the respondents was 9.2 million. The average annual household income of the respondents was $749,000.

Top Success Factors For Millionaires:

What did millionaires attribute to their success? 

Ranked, according to the percentage responding Very Important. The percent are those reporting the quality as being either Important or Very Important. 

Saturday, March 3, 2012

Book Review - The Coming Jobs War

Recently I read the book, The Coming Jobs War. It is written by Jim Clifton, the Chairman of Gallup Corporation, the pioneering survey research company.



He makes many great points throughout the book. What impresses me, is that the conclusions were all developed based on research, and empirical evidence. It's not just another unsubstantiated opinion.

Clifton says that so many companies pay attention to the wrong things. A most critical factor is actually the employees. Looking at the employment issue from the Six Sigma perspective, miserable employees are a "key defect".

"An engaged employee is one who is fully involved in, and enthusiastic about their work, and thus will act in a way that furthers their organization's interests"

Clifton writes many pages on how engaged employees are in their jobs, and provides some very interesting statistics: 
28% of Employees are Engaged in their jobs
53% of Employees are Not Engaged
19% of Employees are Actively Disengaged

Even Clifton is surprised. Only one quarter to one third of employees are actively engaged in their jobs! How does this occur? How to determine how engaged an employee is? In their research, Gallup has come up with twelve questions that can accurately predict how engaged employees are: