Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head -- and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings

By Peter Sheahan

(William Morrow, $25.95)

Peter Sheahan is only 28 years old, so he shouldn't really have enough knowledge to think it worth sharing with older business execs. But let's accept that sometimes, youth can allow a person to see the possible behind the merely pragmatic. And if this Australian workforce consultant has counted among his clients Coca-Cola, L'Oreal and Ernst & Young, he must be doing something right. Sheahan applies the familiar philosophy that "the only rule is that there are no rules" and applies it to modern business. "The complexity of the current business climate," Sheahan writes in Flip, "means there is no single right way forward. There are many ways, and the most successful companies and leaders will try them all at one time or another. They will keep flipping." He puts forth a pretty simple set of core tenets:

• Action Creates Clarity: To move forward you must act in spite of ambiguity. Your action will create the clarity you're looking for.
• To keep pace with rising expectations, you must recognize that Fast, Good, Cheap: Pick Three -- Then Add Something Extra has become the new standard in every industry.
• To develop competitive advantage, you must Absolutely, Positively Sweat the Small Stuff.
• To satisfy customers' needs for engagement and contact -- spiritual, emotional, physical -- remember that Business Is Personal.
• To win mass-market success, Find It on the Fringe. The way to separate yourself from the herd is to be courageous and create new markets.
• To Get Control, Give It Up. You must empower customers and employees to create, dream, and believe for you.

While there's a certain amount of cheerleading to Sheahan's book, it does suggest some small but important ways to find focus in experimentation, to recognize what doesn't need to change and to keep pushing yourself out on a limb.

Hug Your People: The Proven Way to Hire, Inspire and Recognize Your Employees and Achieve Remarkable Results

By Jack Mitchell

(Hyperion, $19.95)

The title makes this book sound naïve. Yet it's anything but. Mitchell, the CEO of a small chain of East Coast clothing stores, focuses here on trying to get the most out of employees by creating a "niceness culture" in the workplace. He emphasizes the value of hiring pleasant people in the first place, then committing to them right away for the long term (forget about employment "probation"), and building a sense of communal trust in the office. He also insists companies must be willing to go over the top to please customers, and have to recapture the sense of employees as family, not as replaceable units of commercial effort. He even advises allowing workers to bring their problems to the office and seek help from managers, in order to show that the company cares about their welfare. Hug Your People (the sequel to 2003's Hug Your Customers) provides exactly the opposite of a hands-off employment strategy. He not only wants hands on, but arms around. Can't you feel the love?

"Crowds don't create innovations, they validate them. In a global marketplace, the crowd will recognize and celebrate the best innovations. But those innovations don't come from the center of the crowd. They come from the fringe, from bold companies and individuals who are willing to risk doing something different ... from the minds of maverick companies and individuals who have the guts to gamble on attracting the crowds that will eventually validate them.