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

Without Excuses

Unleash the Power of Diversity to Build Your Business

by Joe Watson

St. Martin's Press, 256 pages, 2006, hardcover, $17.22*

Joe Watson describes the lack of minorities and women in high-powered positions as an immediate and urgent problem. People under 25 are the most powerful demographic in our country today and 40 percent of these young people are people of color. “As 77 million baby boomers begin to retire, our society faces a workforce crisis because the most powerful demographic is not being proactively recruited.”

Watson, a management consultant who specializes in advising major corporations on employee issues like workplace diversity writes that actively recruiting minorities has moved from a moral obligation to an absolute necessity for business survival.

His book dismisses alibis like “we don’t hire minorities because we can’t find any” and “anti-discrimination policies and diversity workshops are enough to solve the problem.” Watson offers a straightforward step-by-step plan on how to build diversity, starting with stripping away excuses, defining the business case, finding talent and measuring success.

From mom-and-pop shops to Fortune 500 companies, hiring minorities is critical in maintaining any business, Watson maintains. His book offers real-world solutions. “The ‘kumbaya’ approach helped open communication but ultimately was superficial,” he says. “Long gone are the days of walking on eggshells around the topic to be ‘politically correct.’ It’s time to bring the issues to the forefront. Do stereotypes exist? Yes, to a certain degree. The only way to solve the problem is to address it with honest, unabashed dialogue.”

Alternate Selections

Never Eat Alone

And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

by Keith Ferrazzi with Tahl Raz

Currency/Doubleday, 309 pages, 2005, hardcover, $16.47*

If your networking consists of scattering your business cards around like car wash coupons, former Deloitte partner Keith Ferrazzi and former Fortune Small Business Editor Tahl Raz have a better idea. Never Eat Alone attacks the very concept of “self-help.” Ferrazzi shares his own journey from a poor Pennsylvania steel town to Harvard Business School, from Deloitte to his own consulting firm. It’s a journey he could never have made without an extraordinary support network -- more than five thousand people on his PDA “who will answer the phone when I call.”

Thirty-one rapid-fire chapters demonstrate how to master the art of networking. Ferrazzi uses what he calls a "deep bump" when meeting new people at conferences. Never Eat Alone is full of useful advice, showing readers how to reach out and stay connected.

Avon

Building the World's Premier Company for Women

by Laura Klepacki with forward by Andrea Jung

John Wiley & Sons, 264 pp, 2006, trade paper, $11.53*

Andrea Jung's appointment as Avon CEO was a high point in the transformation of Avon into a diversely managed company with five million representatives in 143 countries. Her knowledge of what women want has helped Avon achieve $8 billion in sales and made it the world's No. 1 direct-marketing powerhouse. Avon: Building the World's Premier Company for Women, is a blueprint for how American companies can leverage diversity to compete in the global market. It is also an intimate look at a company that morphed from a 19th century bookselling operation to a 21st century cosmetics giant.

More than 70 percent of Avon’s sales are outside the United States. It has grown by responding to its customers, introducing new products and adopting new technologies. It is a company flexible enough to sell perfume to women in remote locations of the Amazon rainforest and weight-loss products on the Internet. Avon succeeds because it is its customers. From the $3 billion it pays to its worldwide sales network, to the millions it raises to fight breast cancer and domestic violence, it’s a model of what can be achieved when companies, their people and their customers work in harmony.

Mustang Sallies

Success Secrets of Women Who Refuse to Run with the Herd

by Fawn Germer

Perigree Books, 225 pp, 2004, trade paper, $10.17*

What do Sen. Hillary Clinton, activist Erin Brockovich, author Mary Higgins Clark, former EPA chief Christine Whitman and FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley have in common? They are all extraordinary women who refused to "go along to get along" -- and achieved extraordinary success in the process. Journalist, consultant and NEW Summit speaker Fawn Germer is a self-described "mustang sally" herself. In this remarkable volume she recounts the journeys of more than fifty iconoclastic women, from CEOs to athletes, generals to entertainers and describes how you can chart your own course through life and business.

"Mustang Sallies" includes a test to determine how you score on the Germer's iconoclast scale, then offers more lessons on how to "compromise without selling out." The lessons are interspersed with profiles of more than fifty iconoclastic women who have succeeded on their own terms. "Life is so sweet when you take your power and use it for yourself," Germer writes. "Don't listen to your tormentors and don't torment yourself." Let loose and run your own race!

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