Sandbox Wisdom

This is an easy book to read with fundamental statements on what is most important in being successful today in business and in your own career. Good reminders in a world where communication is quick and often without the human feeling of caring and understanding. In addition to being easy to read is is a great story!This book is a must for managers and supervisors working in a fast changing and highly competitive market. The book has good examples for leaders today in taking risk in listening, feeling, and caring. I introduced this book to my team in a call center of 500 employees in Phoenix Arizona with great results in terms of culture change. While some books talk up fun in the work place this book brings in the human side. It is about recognizing the needs and feelings of our employees and customer. This is a "MUST" book to read for anyone in business, leading others or involved in their own start-up business. It gives real useable ideas for branding your business and being competitive when all else in your market is even. You will learn how to attract customers and keep your customers coming back.

Most business fables attempt to teach one to three key lessons about how to be more effective. And the geniuses who do this successfully (like Dr. Ken Blanchard and Dr. Spencer Johnson) certainly have my admiration. Sandbox Wisdom is unique in my experience in its scope and effectiveness as a fable. It takes the bulk of the discipline known as Neuro-Linguistic Programming and teaches it in the context of a fable about a CEO learning from being with children and animals.The beauty of this approach is that you can learn the techniques in their most common and easiest-to-understand form. Practicing with children is also a great way to learn these methods.Some of the techniques outlined here include mirroring and matching, chunking ideas and concepts, stimulating positive emotions to encourage behavior, deciphering mental models, and managing your own mood with physiology changes. The only major areas that I noticed that were missing were eye movement analysis, and verbal content analysis, both of which are helpful as clues to mental models and sequences.A good companion book for this one is NLP Masterclass.If you like the idea of learning from working with children, Dr. Blanchard's new book High Five! uses the metaphor of being a children's coach to learn how to accomplish more in working with children.I often encourage people who want to become better in their business lives to take on coaching of children's sports teams. When pursued in the spirit of serving the children's objectives, this can be quite eye-opening. I think I learned more from being Coach Don than I did in all of my graduate school courses in management and seminars I have attended since then. Be sure you don't lose the knowledge that works well in the sandbox!

I purchased this book based on the recommendation of a friend, and after reading the MANY impressive editorial reviews on the site (have you read them?).I now understand why everyone is so HOT on Sandbox Wisdom! It's a touching story filled with insights on how to develop meaningful, lasting relationships with customers, employees, and associates. A must read!

I'd recommend this book even if I didn't know the author personally, and had the pleasure of speaking with him one-on-one and in his unforgettable, one-of-a-kind seminars. This is one of those breakthrough books like "Who Moved My Cheese", "One-Minute Manager" and "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" of which you'll buy a couple of dozen to pass along to your best friends and clients. You probably won't even wait until Christmas, but when it comes, you'll buy a couple dozen more for the new friends and contacts you've made - simply by applying the wisdom from the sandbox. And the lessons learned go way beyond re-energizing your business batteries, reaching as well into all of life's important relationships like love, parenting and enduring friendship. Way to go, Tom!

A client who heads trends research for a major company recently wrote a paper whose title included the phrase "Sea of Complexity." His thesis was his company should refine its marketplace image to present its products as a source of respite in the "sea of complexity" surrounding us that has been created by technological and other changes moveing over us too fast for easy adaptation. Sandbox wisdom reminds us of one strategy for coping with comlexity: stop every once in awhile and peer at the world through the eyes of a child. At a time when countless pundits and self-appointed gurus are overloading us with didactic pontifications on how to solve our problems, Tom Asacker brings fresh air into the room by using the most ancient method of conveying wisdom -- storytelling. In reading Sandbox Wisdom, I recalled something that Walt Disney decided when the first Disneyland was being designed. He insisted that doorways to buildings be reduced to 4/5 of normal height to reinforce the idea that Disneyland was for the child mind in both children and adults. I thought about that story when realizing that the most enjoyable and productive way to read Sandbox Wisdom is with your child mind -- free of the prejudices, cynicisms and doubts that encumber our adult minds much of the time. Peter Senge, author of the Fifth Discipline, says that to have the best chance of surviving as we are buffetted about in the "sea of complexity", companies must become "learning organizations." In this delightful little book, Asacker invites us into the world of a child for some very useful learning.David Wolfe Reston, Virginia