The Balanced Business
Building Organizational Trust and Accountability through Smooth Workflows
- 2023 INDIES Winner
- Honorable Mention, Business & Economics (Adult Nonfiction)
The detailed business guide The Balanced Business introduces an efficient management operating system with convincing illustrations.
Andrew Temte’s shrewd management book The Balanced Business covers how to strengthen organizations by streamlining workflows and creating a robust workplace culture.
Addressed to leaders hoping to foster organizational health, achieve continuous improvement, and balance trust and accountability, this book outlines ways for businesses to attain strong cultures built on clear visions, goal-setting, and a sense of shared purpose. Its topical chapters tackle subjects like indispensability, setting annual goals, and customers in a logical order. They also draw on Temte’s experiences as an executive at Kaplan alongside examples from major companies including Salesforce, Allstate, and Ford, making use of illustrative anecdotes to explain their abstract ideas. Some of the stories are too worn, though, as with the example of Blockbuster passing up on a deal to acquire Netflix.
Still, the book’s step-by-step explanations of its concepts are punctilious and convincing. It advances detailed systems and processes in a way that will be encouraging to managers hoping to achieve consistency without being rigid: its frameworks are designed to be customized in a way that serves an individual organization’s particular needs. And the book reasons through its secondary topics well, too, as when it discusses why performance reviews tend to be ineffective (and suggests an alternative method). Compelling cases are made for managerial techniques like repeating ideas with consistent fervor: “one of the unpleasant truths of leadership is that the people who populate your organization at all levels are constantly trying to divine your position on myriad topics.” Sophisticated, savvy C-suite language complements such presentations, as do effective metaphors and similes (businesses are compared to various streams merging to form a powerful river, for example).
The book also makes frequent use of clear graphics and charts, making it easy to visualize complicated ideas, as with calculating net promoter scores. Some of its sketches are whimsical, injecting appealing notes of levity as well. And all of this work builds toward the book’s most reference-ready chapter, “Putting It All Together,” which synthesizes the book’s ideas well and sets audiences up for their implementation. Indeed, it explains how to put a new management operating system into place with clarity, outlining all the actionable steps needed to do so.
The detailed business guide The Balanced Business introduces an efficient management operating system that allows everyone in an organization to contribute to its goals.
Reviewed by
Joseph S. Pete
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
