Every good businessperson knows that what you say has never been as important as how you say it. Even when you are not speaking, you are still communicating, even if you are not aware of it. By becoming aware of your body language and what you are saying with it, you can begin to control it and put forward the impression that will most help you in your business. By using these techniques you will save yourself time – and ensure that you succeed.

10. Use Eye Contact

Meeting someone’s eyes has long been seen as a mark of honesty and good faith. This does not mean that you should enter a staring contest: maintaining too much eye contact can seem aggressive, and unless that’s something you want to achieve, it should be avoided. Make sure that you do not look away as someone is speaking about something they feel is important, as this is a sign that you are dismissing their opinion.

9. Develop Good Posture

Hunching your shoulders forward or holding your arms in across your chest can make you seem defensive and intimidated. Shoulders should be held back, with your arms hanging loosely by your sides. This open posture makes you seem relaxed and confident.

8. Cultivate a Good Handshake

Entire books have been written about the importance of a good handshake. Whether or not any of the analysis on what different kinds of handshakes mean is true, what is important is that many people believe a handshake can tell a lot about a person. The best handshakes are firm without being crushing, brief but not terse, and of course, free from nervous sweat. To create a good first impression, ensuring you have a good handshake could be crucial.

7. Keep Eyes Level

Looking upwards or to the side before you speak or as you’re speaking can make people suspicious of your integrity. Some people believe that these are signs of lying and indicate that you are fabricating elements of your story. Make sure to keep eyes level when speaking, to avoid this suspicion – otherwise everything that you are saying could be going to waste.

6. Take Ownership of Space

When you have established a position in the room, consider it to be your territory. You can expand this territory and appear more in control and powerful by widening your stance or moving around the room. If someone attempts to invade your space, don’t allow them to intimidate you into moving or diminishing your presence.

5. Never Fidget

Fidgeting, whether by tapping on a table with your fingers, shredding paper, stroking hair, doodling or tapping your foot, is a cardinal sign of nervousness or boredom. It’s associated with displacement activity, where someone tries to distract themself from an uncomfortable thought or situation. When fidgeting, you not only look unsure and nervous, you also appear as if you are not giving the situation your full attention.

4. Establish Authority Before You Smile

You can use a smile to convey that you are pleased or to attempt to please others. You can use a delayed smile to show that you are confident, in control and expect to be pleased rather than please. By waiting to smile until you are confident that you have been noticed in the meeting or other business facility, you show that you bestow your smiles as you see fit.

3. Move Confidently

The way that you move speaks volumes about your confidence and how people will perceive your capability. Don’t hesitate in your movements or you will appear as if you second guess yourself. Should something go wrong and you trip, stumble, or accidentally collide with someone, make sure to brush it off; you will appear much more confident than if you become angry or overly embarrassed.

2. Position Yourself Appropriately

When you are speaking to someone, make sure that you are neither too far away from them nor too close. Leaning in indicates interest, but move too far into someone else’s personal space and they will feel nervous and under siege. Leaning away will show that you have heard enough and is a non-verbal way to quieten an overenthusiastic speaker.

1. Control Your Facial Expressions

Your face is where most people will be looking when they are speaking to you. If you are unaware of your expressions, you may give away more than you intend to. Twisting your mouth or pursing your lips may give the impression that you are holding something back. A smile shows that you are pleased, while you may be unaware of a slight frown that shows that you are unsure of what you’re saying.

We were held down by AK47 fire in the middle of a crowded city. All the civilians scattered while the bullets whizzed and cracked into walls, gouging holes in the mortar and sandstone. For a moment all was chaos, we didn’t know where the fire was coming from. In the haze and noise we heard the booming voice of our captain yelling out orders.

Suddenly our training kicked in, and we fell into defensive formations. Each step of the way, we were guided by his strong and present voice. We gathered the wounded, started suppressive fire, and evacuated the area. Thanks to our captain’s leadership, we all made it out that day.

A good leader holds the same principles whether they are in charge of a platoon of soldiers, or if they’re the CEO of a company. Generals and CEOs need to have the same sense of vision, drive, and planning in order to make their teams survive and thrive.

In today’s economy, a sense of battle in the marketplace is apparent, as competition for customers and profits is high. In battle, it’s the goal of an army to make enemy attacks less effective, and eventually conquer.

This lesson is especially apparent to me as I’ve gone from being a soldier on the front lines to a supervisor of a small group of office workers. In my efforts to learn more about strong leadership I find myself going back to my former commanding officers, as well as famous American generals, for lessons and guidance.

Here are some pearls of wisdom from the military world that can readily be applied to the workplace:

“I cannot trust a man to control others who cannot control himself.” Robert E. Lee

The strength of an Army can be seen from the strength of its leaders. Your team will follow you, and will only work as hard as you show them too.

If you tell your team you expect absolute excellence from them, you have to show absolute excellence in everything you do. You put in the extra hours, you’re the last one to leave, and nothing surprises you because you’re commanding every aspect of your operation.

“The friend in my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with
me the sunshine of my prosperity.” Ulysses S. Grant

A great leader also has to have great lieutenants. These are people who you know you
can rely on when situations become hectic or stressful. In a battlefield they can take command when need be, watch your flanks from attack, and scout ahead of the unit. They naturally possess an element of self-motivation and tenacity.

In the office, they are the people who are Johnny-On-The-spot, who have the files you’re about to ask for in their arms and your appointments scheduled. You want to try and encourage individuals that show this promise by giving them more responsibility.

CEO Bill Gates put it best when he said, “As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.” By encouraging growth, your team stay competitive in the market, and you help the company grow as a whole.

“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.” George S. Patton

Growth happens when you are challenged. Maintaining the status quo means you’re giving someone else the chance to blaze right by you.

In larger corporations, this can be evident. I know friends that work in teams competing on the same projects for approval. You can guess that the teams whose projects get chosen most often are the first pick when its time for promotions.

If your team becomes relied upon, then you are seen as the hardest working group. Thus, you produce the most value for the company and you’ll quickly make a name for yourselves. You won’t be doing it through office politics or rumors, but through the simple, hard, and constant application of firepower and force on your goals and projects.

Bill Gates is the master of staying ahead of the pack. He says of the software world, “In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.” Those who aren’t growing are falling behind. Rather, if you’re not shooting, you end up being the one getting shot at.

“Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.” George Washington

“We need to learn to set our course by the stars, not by the light of every passing ship.” Omar N. Bradley

The successful leader is the one whose goals encompass the longer term. They measure success in years and campaigns, rather than days and individual battles.

For example, there’s the young and talented doctor who made it through medical school years younger than her peers. Or the CEO who started a company from scratch and became a millionaire before reaching the age of 35. That medical student had to study countless late night hours to earn her degree. The CEO had to travel all over the United States in order to network and bargain for every dollar of profit. Through persistence and dogged determination, they pushed themselves inch by inch into their success.

As a manager you need to keep that sense of scope. If you make mistakes, that’s fine too. CEO Jack Welch says, “Mistakes can often be as good a teacher as success.” You can learn from your mistakes and adapt.

Now that I’m somewhere in the middle of the chain of command, I can see the progress of those new recruits just starting out. One of my former commanders told me, “To lead an army you must never forget what it feels like to be a soldier on the ground.” With all these lessons in mind and my own experience, I try to lead my staff, my soldiers, into battle to win.

John Durfee is a Gulf War veteran and the marketing manager for Airsplat, the nation’s largest retailer of Airsoft Guns including Spring Airsoft Rifles.

Focus on your core competency. Prioritize. Do one thing at a time. Business has used these mantras for at least the past 20 years. But Cisco SVP Inder Sidhu wants to ask you this: What if you can do both?

As in, pursue both new and existing business models. Be disciplined and flexible. “Invent like a startup” while you “grow like a giant.” Focus on your customers while nurturing your partnerships.

Sidhu’s new book, Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth explores this strategy of mutual reinforcement. This practical book, which Sidhu describes as being “for practitioners, about practitioners, and by practitioners,” explores not only how Cisco has succeeded by “doing both,” but uses case studies from a host of other blue-chip companies to underline its main points.

I caught up with Sidhu to talk more about what doing both means, Cisco’s successes and failures, what companies should be using the strategy, and exciting projects inside of Cisco.

BP: Could you describe to me what doing both means?

When an organization has to wrestle with two different choices, I think the tendency is to choose one option over the other, and pursue it to fruition.

While there’s nothing wrong with focusing on things to get them done per se, I think that making trade-offs can sometimes be a false choice. I’ve been in dozens of situations like that.

For example, even in meetings with our own CEO, somebody will come up and they’ll say, “, John, we could give you this business that will grow dramatically and rapidly but unfortunately the margins are not going to be great.”

A lot of times, the message back is that there are a lot of people who can do growth without margins. There are also a lot of people who can do margins without growth. We need to figure out a way to actually deliver both.

Believe it or not, 9 times out of 10 these people will come back, when forced to do so, and find a more creative solution where they actually get results on both. It really works when you can find the multiplier between A and B. As opposed to saying “I’ll do A rather than B,” you do both A and B. The next thing you find is the multiplier that makes each side better.

It runs a little counter to the notions of you have to stick to your knitting, you need to focus on your core competencies. Most of us, when we go to business school, get programmed into a trade-off, you have to pick one thing or another.

Yet when it comes to our personal lives, we use the notion of doing both very easily. It’s like saying if you’re a gymnast, you need strength and flexibility. If you’re a carmaker, you need performance and safety. If you’re a parent, you need to give your kids roots that will keep then grounded and wings that will help the soar. You try to balance your personal life, be a parent and a worker.

We do all those things very seamlessly, because that seems to be the natural way. But when we put on our armor and go to work, we get into this mode of we have to pick this or that. We do that in such a focused manner that we forget that there’s a multiplier effect that can happen when we do two things in conjunction.

BP: How do you find that multiplier effect?

You have to force yourself to look for it consciously. Perhaps a way to illustrate it would be in the domain of innovation. Cisco was going along with its routers and switches, and we were doing that quite well, and making good money from it. But then we said we really need to do a lot more disruptive innovation even though were getting to be a big company.

We created a unit and started to do some disruptive activities within it. That unit helped us get into the voice business. We leveraged the voice technology and created technology that helped our mainstream engine. Then when we created the next generation of routers and switches, we took the technology from that, moved it over to the disruptive side, and entered the storage market, a whole new market. We then used the hardware and software from our storage market to create the next generation of switches. We used the operating software from the switches to go back into the computing market.

So we’ve got a scenario where we have the disruptive innovation and the sustaining innovation curve. On the sustaining side, we’ve got routers and switches that keep getting better and better. On the disruptive side, we’ve entered the voice market, storage market, compute market, etc. Each time we give one side’s technology to the other side, it results in a multiplier effect.

BP: Could you give me an example of a company or industry right now that is not doing both, but could really benefit from doing both?

Dell’s a great example. Dell’s a bit of a one-trick pony, but they were very good at process innovation and getting great efficiencies out of their product line. What they were not focused on was innovation.

So here’s a company that was doing a lot of operational excellence and not enough innovation. They eventually suffered as a result of that. Other people started coming up with more innovative offerings. Dell was trying to change that, but that’s hard to do overnight. Eventually Michael Dell came back and started to invest a little more in innovation. But they still struggle, I fear, with that challenge.

The flip side of it would be Apple, which seems to be everyone’s favorite example these days. Apple does sustaining and disruptive innovation. When you look at the iPods, iPhones and so on, the unique new device that comes out every year means they’re sustaining innovation, because it’s faster, better, cheaper.

At the same time, they do disruptive innovation with things like the iTunes platform, Apps Exchange, the mobile cloud service. Things like that have turned them from a product company into a platform company.

Apple is doing sustainable innovation, they’re doing disruptive innovation, they found the multiplier effect and they’re blending it all together. You have your iPod, you have your iTunes, you’re leveraging their platform because you’re on their platform, you buy their next device, and on and on.

It’s really the multiplier that has really worked for them, whereas for Dell, it’s been kind of the opposite, where they haven’t done both.

I think the contrast between Apple and Dell is quite striking.

BP: Could you tell me a little bit about Cisco’s $2 billion supply chain disaster and what you learned from it?

Back in the late 1990s, we were growing very rapidly. When the dot-com bust happened, we had a very dramatic slowdown of our business, because the equipment we were selling was being used by many dot-com companies. We went from a growth rate of more than 60% to -40% in about 30 days. It was a dramatic shift.

During the boom, we could barely keep up with the demand we had, including some people that were saying “look, I want one of these products from Cisco, and if I order three of them, then I’ll hopefully get one.”

We also thought that we were better than what we really were. There were managers, myself included, who probably had a little bit of hubris and so on–but we were challenged. And when the bubble burst, there were tons of components that nobody wanted. So we had to turn things around.

After the bubble burst, we started looking at our operations. They were not as good as we thought. We had to go down from 1300 suppliers to 300. We used to run our entire manufacturing on spreadsheets, even though we were a multi-tens of billions dollar company. We had to really optimize that. We had 20 different contract manufacturers and we had to optimize that down to four.

We did all those things. That helped increase the inventory turns by over 50% over a 3-4 year period. We had to do this optimizing, just to make sure that we were at the right place.

Even after we did that, we had still had to reinvent ourselves. That’s when we went from a supply-push model to a demand-pull model. We worked to reorganize all our roles in manufacturing so that it was much more centered around customers and synchronized.

Once we did all that and learned all the lessons around, such as, make sure your demand is real, make sure your customers are credit-worthy, make sure your component suppliers are not too many, make sure contract manufacturers are not proliferating, make sure your systems are synchronized with each other and driven off the customer, etc. Once we learned all those lessons, then things started to improve.

Also, although existing management was good enough to go into a phase of optimization, we needed new management to really take us through a reinvention. We had a goal, set by Angel Mendez our head of Supply Chain Operations, which was that we wanted to become world leaders of supply-chain management. I think I mentioned in the book that AMR Research, which ranks people for supply-chain excellence across all industries, has a list of the top 25 supply chain companies in the world.

We had never been on it, even though we thought we were the cat’s meow. So we started working at it. The first year, we got onto the list at number 18. The next year, we went to #11. The next year to #8, and then #5, and this year, we actually made it to #3.

That’s a list that has Wal-Mart in there, it’s got Toyota in there, it’s got Apple, and all these world class supply chain companies. So our story is kind of like a phoenix rising from the ashes.

But that was an interesting story in the book. It was a chapter that started out very grim. With a $2 billion write-off, the biggest company with the biggest supply-chain disaster anywhere was Cisco Systems. To recover from that in less than a decade to be the third-best supply chain company in the world…it was a lot of work, but that was the interesting element to the story.

BP: What’s Cisco working on right now that you are most excited about?

If I had to pick a couple, one is Smart and Connected Communities, and the second is our Council and Board structure, which is not understood very well in the business community right now, but which is yielding dramatic results for us.

Read Inder’s remarks on Smart and Connected Communities here.

The second thing I’m excited about is the council and board structure that Cisco has. Most companies have a formal organization structure that looks kind of like a pyramid. You’ve got the CEO at the top, and reporting to the CEO are different people who run sales and marketing and engineering, the different divisions. For us, these are different functions. Then, underneath those functions, you have the sub-functions and so on.

For nearly the last ten years at Cisco, we’ve created a parallel structure, another pyramid. If you want to call the first one the authoritative leadership pyramid, the second one would be the collaborative leadership pyramid.

That second pyramid is much more informal. Instead of the CEO at the top, it has the operating committee that sits at the top. This is a group of about a dozen people, including John’s direct reports and a few other other people, etc. Underneath the operating committee we have nine different councils.

A council is a collection of people we bring together from various functions. Their job is to go after a particular segment, or cross-functional opportunity. We make them responsible for real numbers. In order to be a council, you must run a $10 billion business. We measure you on all the usual financials for that segment, such as revenue, margins, profitability, customer satisfaction–all those kinds of things.

We’re able to get the best of both worlds because we’ve got both the pyramids operating at the same time. The pyramid on the left side of the page in the book, the classical pyramid, gives us a lot of efficiency, because we’re organized by function. Our customer service is very efficient, our sales is known to be world class, and so forth. That gives you speed and agility and so on.

Then, parallel to that, we have the cross-functional pyramid that gives you the ability to quickly make decisions that are very customer-centric. It allows literally hundreds of people to be on these councils, which are worth $10 billion each, and then underneath them the boards, which are $1 billion each, and underneath that our working groups to inform the boards. Because of this structure, there’s opportunity for hundreds and hundreds of people to basically come up with decisions and engage on projects.

It sounds a little bit like matrix management, but it’s very different. In matrix management, decisions generally degenerate to the lowest common denominator. With us decisions form around the highest possible aspiration. In our organization, we actually try to have everyone on the same incentive structure. Instead of holding off resources for functional benefit, people are therefore actually sharing the resources. We ask and require every person to make decisions at the table as opposed to having to seek permission from their bosses.

So you end up getting these councils and these boards making mega-decisions for the company. We could find a business problem that needs to be addressed. Traditionally, that would wait until it got percolated to the top of the corporation. Now, we just take a couple of executives and throw them at it. They put together a board around it, they execute on that.

Within forty five days, we’re standing in front of the Board of Directors with a plan, ready to execute, and then a bunch of empowered and motivated people actually executing it.

It’s given us a lot of agility. What’s interesting about it is that it’s very much an example of doing both. On the operating committee, I can’t tell you the number of times when we’ll be sitting and John or someone will say well, for this particular topic, which we’re going to discuss for the next 30 minutes, we’re operating in command and control mode. The next one after that, we’re in collaboration mode, etc. So you get that flexibility to deal with issues as you need to.

That’s given us tremendous acceleration in how the work gets done, how many people are involved in the work, and how we can systematically and rapidly drive change through the organization.

We have this structure, and it’s operating really, really well. We’ve removed management time as the scarce resource bottleneck that was previously constraining us. People have become huge fans of it inside the company. We’re getting a lot of benefit and we’re pursuing so many opportunities that we couldn’t.

The other thing that happens is you expose so much talent when you do that. I ran two councils at Cisco, the Emerging Countries Council and the Enterprise Business Council, and have seen first-hand how you get people bubbling up from the bottom and across the company who really want to engage in these things. You open up so much new management talent, it’s amazing.

Inder Sidhu is senior vice president of Strategy & Planning at Cisco and author of the forthcoming book, Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit & Drives Tomorrow’s Growth. Read more about his book and check out his blog at DoingBoth.com.

Transparency. Alignment. Relationship building. Culture.

Many companies struggle to incorporate today’s new business memes. But some companies have embodied these ideas for years. Zappos, the online shoe store known for its tribal culture and customer service, is one of those companies.

Zappos’ CEO, Tony Hsieh, tells his story in Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. The book covers both Tony’s personal entrepreneurial story and that of his company, Zappos. Delivering Happiness offers a feel-good look at the passion, culture, and, yes, happiness that could drive the next generation of companies.

Inside the Book

Delivering Happiness starts with a look at Tony’s childhood. Like many of today’s successful businesspeople, Tony was an entrepreneur, innovator, and achiever from a young age. You follow Tony into high school, through his Harvard undergrad education, and then through the inception and buyout of his first major company, LinkXChange, which made him millions.

After selling LinkXChange, Tony dabbled in new projects, from poker to investing, before realizing that building companies was his passion. At this point, he jumped into a young, struggling Zappos, betting most of his fortune on the company’s success. After several trials, Tony and his team get Zappos off the ground and growing.

The second part of the book leaves Tony’s personal biography aside to focus more on Zappos’ inner workings. Zappos has three priorities: customer service, culture, and employee training and development. Tony describes how Zappos uses each, and how each is a competitive advantage. Then, the same chapter goes through each of Zappos’ ten core values in detail, with employee anecdotes along the way.

The third part of the book describes the public relations and speaking lessons Tony learned, as well as what alignment means to Zappos. It then covers the Amazon buyout. Tony finishes the book with a chapter on happiness, what it means for both humans and business, and the questions you should ask yourself in order to find it in your own life and career.

Thoughts

If you’re a regular business book reader, some of the concepts inside of Delivering Happiness—building on your core values, learning what to outsource, impressing customers through service—won’t sound new. The character-building trials Tony describes are also a theme of any biographical business book.

Yet Delivering Happiness is timely. Buzzwords like alignment and culture are smoking hot in today’s business language. Zappos is emblematic of many such “conscious” qualities. If you haven’t yet immersed yourself in new corporate culture, Tony and Zappos’ story is a fun place to start.

Tony’s verve, passion, and openness also differentiate Delivering Happiness from your average business biography. He describes a wide array of experiences, including having an epiphany at a warehouse rave. Tony’s engaging writing style makes the book feel conversational, even in some of the more technical, business-y sections.

Should You Read It?

If you’re already familiar with today’s new corporate qualities, and are scratching your head about whether to pick up this particular book, I’d say skip it. I found it good, but not mind-blowing. Nothing really stuck with me after I closed it, because I’d learned about the importance of spectacular customer service and company culture elsewhere.

Still, I do think that some people would benefit. Delivering Happiness would make a great starter business book for Gen Y-ers. Tony sounds like a Red Bull-chugging, whip-smart kid at heart. Today’s 20-somethings can probably relate much more closely to him than to old-school titans like Jack Welch. I also recommend Delivering Happiness if you’re curious about Zappos (or a fan), or you want a primer on today’s new-school business qualities.

Disclosure: We received a free promotional copy of Delivering Happiness.

Leadership is an art. Keeping your workers happy and maximizing their potential while attaining company goals is not for the faint of heart. We’ve compiled 50 tips that cover the mental, physical, and management aspects of being a leader.

General Leadership Tips
These tips will give you an all-around leadership boost. From leading like a child to accessing your brain chemistry, here’s how to lead well.

Here’s a list of skills you should have to be a leader.

Good leadership vs. effective leadership.

If you want to be a successful leader, crunch time is all the time.

Exceptional leaders start with why, not what or how.

Build your leadership skills on a solid foundation.

Is your company playing follow the leader?

How to get yourself out of the work doghouse.

Unlock brain chemistry to learn new leadership skills.

Leadership always has a pinch of fear–and it has to.

Lead like a child.

Redefine failure to be a better leader.

Lead first, then manage the numbers.

Rehearse dealing with distractions.

Leading and restarting business growth: Don’t just wait for someone to fix your elevator.

Why you shouldn’t hire the best and brightest candidate.

Great leaders should move to a cubicle.

Rapid change tests leaders. How do you stand?

How to get back on track when things get crazy.

Leadership and Team Building
When you’re managing a team, certain skills come into play. How do you keep employees motivated? What about dealing with excuses, or setting an example? Learn more below.

Build a competent, self-reliant team by being human.

How to create core values for your team.

7 ideas to help leverage different perspectives on your team.

Help your people perform better, and they’ll care more.

Avoid these toxic words while communicating with your team and superiors.

Having difficult conversations with members of your team.

How to regularly acknowledge your direct reports.

What to do when your team is protecting you from bad news.

How to develop a great culture within your team.

How to keep your workers happy.

Why you shouldn’t accept excuses from your employees.

Defining Leadership Success
Before you can become a successful leader, you need to know what leadership success–let alone leadership–is.

2 things you absolutely must do to be an effective leader.

What is leadership?

What persistence has to do with leadership.

The true measure of your greatness as a leader is to develop better leaders than yourself.

What’s the mark of a great leader?

What’s the one thing leaders can do to become more successful? Nothing.

A Q&A on leading without a title.

How to tell a who-do from a guru.

You want to be a leader? Then lead.

Who do you really work for? And who works for you?

The management uncertainty principle.

Short, useful daily quotes on leadership and business.

Mistakes to Avoid
Every good leader makes mistakes. That doesn’t make those mistakes any less painful. See what you can avoid ahead of time.

Are you mismanaging talent?

8 traits of ineffective leaders.

Ignoring unpleasant truths is often encouraged in the leadership world.

Avoid the nonsense in leadership.

How not to implement change in your organization.

Leadership Stories
The world is full of powerful, effective leaders. Learn by example.

3 leadership lessons from the military.

Hillary Clinton’s leadership secrets.

Goldman Sachs’ leadership lesson in addiction.

Lessons for leaders from the world’s highest mountains.

Let’s say you and a group of friends have a killer business idea. You create a startup. After a lot of elbow grease, you scrounge up enough funds to get the startup off the ground.

Next, you aggressively market, hire, and expand enough to ensure your little company’s survival. Once you’ve gained enough traction to do that, you work like a dog to ramp up your company’s growth with new products, services, and markets.

Years later, you’re a sizable corporation. Congratulations! Just don’t grow complacent or egotistical. You’ll threaten your own survival if you do that. Your challenge now is to thrive as an institution.

Handful enough for you? It is. That’s why few companies make it from fanatical startup to established institution.*

Growing up can be complicated.

That’s also why it’s hard for your average author to effectively chronicle a company’s growth. You have to draw out lessons and patterns from decades of details. You have to put your own biases aside to tell the story as it was. At the same time, you need to make readers understand the importance of how the company handled the challenges inherent to its evolution.

It takes the right combination of mind and skills to pull this kind of thing off. And that’s exactly what authors Anthony F. Smith and Keith Hollihan manage to do in ESPN: The Company.

Good job, guys.

ESPN: The Company pulls you into life at ESPN through vivid character and company descriptions. You learn by vicariously participating.

That’s what consultant Anthony F. Smith did during his 20+-year tenure with ESPN, though he experienced the company firsthand. He joined with McKinsey just as ESPN was gaining traction as a startup. He stayed all the way through to its current incarnation as a $30 billion sports media giant.

In those years, he grew intimate with the people, culture, and strategy of ESPN. He and cowriter Keith Hollihan chronicle the highlights of those years: The prominent personalities within the company, the victories and losses, and the lessons learned.

ESPN: Corporate Success. Teacher.

Each of the book’s eight chapters covers a guiding principle to ESPN’s success. Those guiding principles helped ESPN evolve from idea to empire, but could be applied to any company wanting to stay competitive and creative while ascending competitive ladder.

Individually, each principle can be applied to any company. Taken together, though, they are the unique formula that led to ESPN’s success.

Principles include:

Turn Fanatics into Fans: Make your business all about the customer, and hire fanatics to work for you.

Expand your brand: Let your mission drive your brand, not vice-versa. Protect the brand more aggressively than you expand it.

While chronicling ESPN’s story, Smith also explains how it developed and kept its winning formula. For example, ESPN started up with a hungry, passionate, hardworking culture. Smith explains how they were able to keep it intact even after they grew large.

Smith also explains how the company created the markets it now dominates. In another, especially strong chapter, he describes how each of the company’s leaders contributed to the right growth at the right time. He also breaks down how ESPN harnessed its employees’ and fans’ passion to gain business wins.

These are lesson every business should learn.

ESPN: The Company rewards readers with company intimacy and wisdom. The authors incorporate tidbits from a variety of sources to add nuance to the story. These include quotes, anecdotes, cable TV industry history, anthropology, and organizational science.

This richness helps you feel like you’re participating in ESPN’s story. You come out of each chapter having learned through your reading experience. The authors recap lessons in a short summation at the end of each chapter. The book’s tone, while deeply respectful of ESPN, doesn’t make bones about the contentious aspects of the company’s growth.

Conclusion: The book’s a winner.

A book is a success when it makes you respect a company you formerly knew little about. It is a success when you feel like you’ve experienced, rather than read, the story within. Ditto if it makes you want to read more of the authors’ work.

ESPN: The Company did all three for me. I highly recommend it.

*These four stages are taken from the book, where they are chronicled in more detail.

Disclosure: We were sent a copy of ESPN: The Company for free.

Time Magazine has named Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke its Person of the Year 2009, just days before the Senate Banking Committee votes on his renomination. The timing, while probably not deliberate, is interesting. According to one Research 2000 poll, 47% of Americans think Bernanke cares more about Wall Street than Main Street. The Atlantic has details:

One of the main complaints is that Bernanke has been too friendly to banks under the government’s bailout regime. According to a new poll, Americans agree. 47 percent of respondents said Bernanke cares more about Wall Street; 20 percent said he cares more about “Main Street”; 33 percent weren’t sure. The poll was commissioned by the Progressive Campaign Change Committee.

It is, however, an important question in politics. The administration can’t be seen as too friendly to Wall Street as it carries out the overarching economic rescue–otherwise it will face a backlash of venomous public opposition to financial institutions and a mistrust of the government as it deals with them.

For perception’s sake, Bernanke was named Person of the Year at an ideal time. In its cover story, Time refers to Bernanke as a “mild-mannered economic overlord.” Here’s why they claim to have chosen him:

Bernanke didn’t just learn from history; he wrote it himself and was damned if he was going to repeat it. Bernanke decided to do the opposite of what the Fed did back in the ’30s: he would loosen the money supply as far as it would go, he would save as many banks as he could, and he wasnt going to hector the American public about pulling up their socks.

As Bernanke said when we interviewed him this month, he did not see the crisis coming, and he probably did not react as fast as he should have reacted. His defense against the criticism that he rescued bloated banks and their overpaid execs is that the system itself is the problem: no bank should be too big to fail, but when it is, the alternative to saving it is destroying the livelihood of millions. There is an enormous difference between the financial system and the economy, but if the financial system fails, it takes the economy down with it.

In reality, Time also picked Bernanke as a way to stir up controversy–and sales. MarketWatch has more:

The magazine’s managing editor, Richard Stengel, has delighted in previous years to stir the pot, even if it makes people angry. He is doing his job.

It does matter, though. The fact that the media have reacted this morning shows that Time still has some vitality left.

It also can’t hurt that Time’s parent company, Time Warner, has close ties with the Obama administration. Former Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons, now Chairman of Citigroup, served on Obama’s economic advisory team.

So what does Time’s Person of the Year pick mean? Time gets publicity. Bernanke wins a better public perception. Readers, meanwhile, are quietly primed to like Bernanke, approve of the Fed, and avoid questioning Time’s choice.