cover image Referral of a Lifetime: The Networking System That Produces Bottom-Line Results...Every Day!

Referral of a Lifetime: The Networking System That Produces Bottom-Line Results...Every Day!

Tim Templeton, Timothy L. Templeton, Lynda Rutledge Stephenson. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $19.95 (132pp) ISBN 978-1-57675-240-1

Like Who Moved My Cheese?, this book is a management tome in the form of a simple, readable narrative. This first title in the Ken Blanchard Series weaves a handful of business principles into the story of a disheartened businesswoman, Susie McCumber, and her desperation to boost her career. Along the way she meets a spiritual and corporate mentor, David Highground, who spews various prescriptions that aren't all that shocking: business is about relationships; create a massive network;""Keep in touch, consistently, personally and systematically""; and so on. Templeton, CEO of San Diego-based training firm MasterTrack, engagingly uses fiction to espouse his own company's principles (a system named High Ground, natch). It's a basic story, occasionally trite, but it's slickly written and works beautifully as something that's easy to gobble down in one sitting.