Visit the NEW Book Club each month for best-selling business books of special interest to executive women. You’ll get great insights and great savings—and a portion of each sale will support NEW’s education and networking programs.

Main Selection

The Bear Necessities of Business

Building a Company with Heart

by Maxine Clark with Amy Joyner

John Wiley & Sons, 326 pp, 2006, hardcover, $15.72

Maxine Clark started Build-A-Bear Workshop with just one location less than ten years ago. Today, the company is one of the most successful concepts in retailing with more than two hundred stores around the world -- and Clark is acknowledged as one of the industry's most creative entrepreneurs.

The Bear Necessities of Business is the story of her company and her 30-year career in business. Clark reveals how you can achieve stunning business success in seven steps, which are easy-to-understand if not always easy to achieve. The seven chapters of the book focus on Getting Started, Becoming A Great Boss, Connecting with Customers, Adding Value to the Experience, Effective Marketing, Planning for Growth and Giving Back.

Clark's book is full of warm and practical advice on how to create a company that connects with customers and values its stakeholders. Her executive offices, for example, are covered with photographs of the store's guests so decision-makers never lose sight of who they're working for. Another Clark maxim: Reward mistakes. That's right, reward them. Because employees who make mistakes are learning, and that's the most valuable thing they can do.

The Bear Necessities of Business is full of such refreshing insights. It is a plainly written guide to making you and your organization more effective, creative, and consumer-connected.

Alternate Selections

Smart Women, Smart Moves

by Vanessa Weaver and Jan Hill

Amacom, 167 pp, 1994, paper, $15.95*

Vanessa Weaver and Jan Hill -- two presenters at the upcoming September 2006 NEW Leadership Summit -- discuss what to do when the brass ring loses its shine. In Smart Women, Smart Moves the two former corporate executives examine why women become disenchanted at work and what they can do about it. The book helps you understand your expectations, explore your values, assess your real position at your company, and make an informed decision to stay put or move on. The authors use personal relationships -- Just Dating, Girlfriend, Mistress, Fiancé and Spouse -- as metaphors for understanding work relationships. These relationship stages are explored through self-assessments, case histories, and relationship- and confidence-building exercises that will help career women make smart moves in their careers.

The Francis Effect

The Real Reason You Hate Public Speaking and How to Get Over It

by M. F. Fensholt

Oakmont Press, 376 pp, 2006, trade paper, $12.96*

Author M. F. Fensholt doesn't have a magic wand that will make your fear of speaking go away. But she does offer insight into the cause of this common anxiety and practical techniques for managing it.

Her book is divided into three parts: The first explains "The Francis Effect" and how to reduce anxiety and build confidence by "truly understanding the body's natural response to public speaking." The second part helps you plan and prepare your presentation, further reducing performance anxiety. Part three "will prepare you to deliver your presentation with confidence." Communication apprehension can ruin a presentation -- or even a career. This practical, well-written volume is recommended reading for everyone who wants to raise their profile and expand their horizons.

Career Bliss

Secrets from 100 Women Who Love Their Work

by Joann Gordon

Ballantine Books, 334 pp, 2005, trade paper, $15.63*

“There are no happy jobs,” business reporter Joann Gordon writes in the introduction to Career Bliss. “There are only happy workers.” In this volume of one hundred personal stories, Gordon examines the common threads that have enabled women from scores of diverse occupations to achieve job satisfaction. She not only interviews executives, but also a massage therapist, a flight attendant, a judge, and a greeting card designer.

What all these women have in common is taking “great pleasure in the day-to-day activities her job requires, whether that means selling, managing, writing, designing, driving a truck, building a team, analyzing data or running a company.” They saw opportunities where others found none, networked and saved or returned to school, and turned dead-ends into choices. They are not a perky bunch “hardwired for happiness,” just hard-working women who “took chances though they were scared to death.”

Suggest a selection for the NEW Book Club. Email NetworkNews at editor@newnewsletter.org

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