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Shift your thinking by asking yourself one powerful question each day, "Who are you serving?" In a new Cool Friend interview, James Strock and Erik Hansen discuss this and its impact on current events. James Strock is a leadership expert and author of Serve to Lead. Find out more about him at his site.

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Your White Room

dispatches from the new world of work

"Best Business Book 2008" (Hands Down)

Cellist of Sarajevo book cover If business's true bottom line is people & relationships (What else???), then I offer my, hands down, 2008 Biz Book of the Year:

The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway.

Fact is, it's the best book I've read in years. It is a short fictional account of the lives and personal and moral trials of a handful of people during the civil war in the Balkans.

I, like 99%+ of you, am/is a spoiled brat—I (you?) cannot imagine what it means to have life, every assumption associated therewith, turned upside down and inside out.

How would I react? No idea!

If you don't buy my "biz book" label, read it anyway.

(*Also on my list of fiction that applies to biz life is another recent read, The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin, 2005, an amazing tale of bureaucracy and moral trials. Together, this pair tops my reading list going back a long, long time.)

Tom Peters posted this on 05/19/08.

Comments

I was in high school 15-19 years old during the Balkan war. There were 46 airplane sirens in my town, ''only'' one bombing:-)). Profesors were hiding us in glas ceiling sport hall. We were joking that our professors worked for ''enemy''.Glas ceiling sport hall!!! What a perfect killing target!

Imagine that you do this in business...it's something like Bear Sterns through weekend:-()

Universe is just perfect. The Mind of a Child born in the Womb of Big Bang.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9TajOnjGTuE

Posted by Ina Matijevic at May 19, 2008 3:24 PM