 | Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward |
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Product Description
End Pain.
Foster Personal and Professional Growth.
Live Better.
While endings are a natural part of business and life, we often experience them with a sense of hesitation, sadness, resignation, or regret. But consultant, psychologist, and bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud sees endings differently. He argues that our personal and professional lives can only improve to the degree that we can see endings as a necessary and strategic step to something better. If we cannot see endings in a positive light and execute them well, he asserts, the "better" will never come either in business growth or our personal lives.
In this insightful and deeply empathetic book, Dr. Cloud demonstrates that, when executed well, "necessary endings" allow us to proactively correct the bad and the broken in our lives in order to make room for the professional and personal growth we seek. However, when endings are avoided or handled poorly—as is too often the case—good opportunities may be lost, and misery repeated. Drawing on years of experience as an executive coach and a psychologist, Dr. Cloud offers a mixture of advice and case studies to help readers
- know when to have realistic hope and when to execute a necessary ending in a business, or with an individual;
- identify which employees, projects, activities, and relationships are worth nurturing and which are not;
- overcome people's resistance to change and create change that works;
- create urgency and an action plan for what's important;
- stop wasting resources needed for the things that really matter.
Knowing when and how to let go when something, or someone, isn't working—a personal relationship, a job, or a business venture—is essential for happiness and success. Necessary Endings gives readers the tools they need to say good-bye and move on.
- Amazon Sales Rank: #5852 in Books
- Published on: 2011-01-18
- Released on: 2011-01-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Hardcover
- 256 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780061777127
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
From Publishers Weekly
Endings are not a tragedy to be first feared and later regretted but a necessary stage on the way to growth, says clinical psychologist and bestselling author of The One-Life Solution. Endings are a crucial way to get what we desire by shedding those things whose time has passed. The author addresses the benefits of concluding unsatisfying work or personal relationships, and he advises readers on diagnosing when the situation can be resuscitated or must be shut down. This "pruning" process can spark readers out of passivity or paralysis, getting them motivated and energized for change. With many examples of people moving on from untenable circumstances and through specific strategies for ending things well, Cloud advocates for powerful personal changes just in time for the New Year, and will give many readers the fresh start they crave. (Jan.) (c)
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Review
"If you're hesitant to pull the trigger when things obviously aren't working out, Henry Cloud's Necessary Endings may be the most important book you read all year." (Dave Ramsey, New York Times bestselling author of The Total Money Makeover )
"Much of what we do each day is an unnecessary waste of time and energy. This book will challenge you put a stop to things that have been getting in your way for a long time." (Tom Rath, bestselling author of Strengths-Based Leadership )
"Through specific strategies for ending things well, Cloud advocates for powerful personal changes...and will give many readers the fresh start they crave." (Publishers Weekly )
"Having written five books about the seasons of life, I can tell you that necessary endings are the hard part. Henry Cloud is a wise, experienced, and compassionate guide through these turbulent passages." (Bob Buford, bestelling author of Halftime and Finishing Well; founder, Leadership Network )
About the Author
Dr. Henry Cloud is a leadership coach to CEOs and business executives, and a clinical psychologist with an extensive background in both the clinical and professional consulting worlds. An internationally popular speaker, he is also the bestselling author of Integrity; The One-Life Solution; Boundaries; Nine Things You Simply Must Do; and numerous others. Dr. Cloud lives in Los Angeles, California.
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
By John W. Pearson
OK. I admit I'm going out on a limb, but I've already found a contender for my Top-10 book list for 2011. The chapter titles are powerful enough. The actual chapters are pure dynamite. Example:
--The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: Identifying Which Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust (Chapter 7)
--Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or Superfluous (Chapter 2)
--When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason (Chapter 4)
--Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What Is Depleting Your Resources (Chapter 13)
Dr. Henry Cloud, a leadership coach to CEOs and business executives, and a clinical psychologist, has introduced a new term into the leadership lexicon: the pruning moment.
He defines the pruning moment as "that clarity of enlightenment when we become responsible for making the decision to own the vision or not. If we own it, we have to prune. If we don't, we have decided to own the other vision, the one we called average. It is a moment of truth that we encounter almost every day in many, many decisions."
Cloud melds the personal and the professional in this pruning manual of memorable stories and principles and shows why they must go hand-in-hand--and why lack of character on the personal side is often the unseen obstacle to "necessary endings" on the business side.
"Getting to the next level," Cloud writes, "always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on." He takes Peter Drucker's "planned abandonment" and "sloughing off yesterday" themes (see my Results Bucket chapter) and delivers a detailed road map for arriving at your preferred destination.
Necessary endings, he adds, "are the reason you are not married to your prom date nor still working in your first job." Leaders get that, so what's new and fresh? How about his list of the 11 reasons why leaders and managers avoid necessary endings? Here are just four of the preferred avoidance strategies:
--"We are afraid of the unknown."
--"We do not possess the skills to execute the ending."
--"We have had too many and too painful endings in our own personal history, so we avoid another one."
--"We do not learn from them, so we repeat the same mistakes over and over."
If your gut says it's time to end a relationship, help an employee exit, dismount a dead horse, say farewell to a sacred cow, or drop a loser program, product or service, this just-in-time pruning book will show you how.
Cloud uses a simple rose bush illustration to explain the pruning process. Pruning is "removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous." It's also a process of "proactive endings." He coaches leaders to prune in three categories (think rose bushes):
1) Prune healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones.
2) Prune sick branches that are not going to get well.
3) Prune dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to survive.
He likes Jack Welch's view that a leader must discern whether a business or a division needs to be fixed, closed or sold.
"All of your precious resources--time, energy, talent, passion, money--should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable and are indispensable."
"Leaders by nature," Cloud adds, "are often optimistic and hopeful, but if you do not have some criteria by which you distinguish optimism from false hope, you will not get the benefits of pruning. Sometimes the best thing a leader can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying."
Then, this zinger: "Wise people know when to quit."
And effective leaders know when to ask people to exit. Commenting on Welch's "Neutron Jack" style of pruning the bottom 10 percent of employees each year," Cloud nudges the timid leader with this wisdom: "And I can understand why many people were upset with a fixed strategy like that for firing employees. But I do believe that there is some number of people in every organization and every life who will be routinely `let go' if leadership is doing its stewardship job."
Cloud also delivers fresh ideas in other management buckets, including three practical questions to ask in the Meetings Bucket. If a routine meeting is "sick and not getting well," he offers this example: "We have tried repeatedly to use these times for forecasting, and it just never works. We can't get the information we need as the discussion progresses, and even though we have tried, it is confusing and a waste. Let's stop using this meeting to do that."
I underlined a lot of pages in this book. It's filled with gems...I mean, it's a bouquet of roses that will brighten your day and lengthen your career.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
By Anne Randall
This book could not have come at a better time. I am an extremely positive person. I always try and make the best of it, turn it around, fix it, change it, morph it...essentially, I do everything but end it! I have never been good at letting things go because it's painful to me, to the other person, I have invested so much time/energy, and of course I hope that they or it, will change. Dr. Cloud illustrates in such a straightforward way, how there is such a thing as "good hopelessness". In this book, Dr. Cloud gives you the tools to decide wether you are dealing with a wise, foolish, or evil person. These tools helped me see reality clearly, and realize that until I let go of what is not good, I am not going to find what is good...and sometimes this means letting go of what is good to find great. Bottom line...this book made me realize that always being too positive, can actually have negative consequences if you don't know when or how to get to a "good hopelessness". Negative can be positive! Wether it's business or personal, the illustrations in this book will help you diagnose and make the proper endings.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
By Jan. Gary
Too many people dislike confrontation, so they let wrong behavior continue for far too long. This book points out how there can be no growth in certain situations until the problem is confronted. There are examples of how to do it with kindness.
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