3 Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable about Restoring Sanity to the Most Important Organization in Your Life by Patrick M. Lencioni

From Barnes & Noble

A brief tutorial for parents more concerned with after-school schedules and pickup times than with business cycles: Patrick Lencioni, the author of this book, is a prominent management consultant responsible for half a dozen sales-stoked books on making organizations runs smoothly and effectively. In The 3 Big Questions to a Frantic Family, he throws caution aside and tackles the most daunting challenge of all: the average American household. Using the leadership fable model that has served him and his readers so well, Lencioni describes how the dysfunctional organization we call a family can be tweaked into a purring machine.

From the Publisher

In this unique and groundbreaking book, business consultant and New York Times best-selling author Patrick Lencioni turns his sights on the most important organization in our lives—the family. As a husband and the father of four young boys, Lencioni realized the discrepancy between the time and energy his clients put into running their organizations and the reactive way most people run their personal lives. Having experienced the stress of a frantic family firsthand, he and his wife began applying some of the tools he uses with Fortune 500 companies at home, and with surprising results.

Publishers Weekly

Lencioni (The Three Signs of a Miserable Job) makes an eloquent case for applying business tools to manage scattered and stressful home lives. He observes that even successful people who apply strategies and long-term thinking at work neglect to implement plans and goals for their own families, noting that "family chaos is just part of life and so we accept levels of confusion and disorganization and craziness at home that we would not tolerate at work." Lencioni invites readers into the lives of a fictional family, describing how overwhelmed stay-at-home mom Theresa brings greater serenity into her home by integrating business pointers into a three-step plan in which her family identifies what makes them unique, their top priority or "rallying cry" (a big project that can be worked on in two to six months) and a regular time to discuss their progress, preferably 10 minutes a week. Although Lencioni admits that his own family's experience using these tools has been limited, his book is a worthwhile if brief attempt to grapple with a particularly thorny problem facing overextended families. (Sept.)

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents