Book Review: Hard-Won Wisdom—True Stories from the Management Trenches

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Hard-Won Wisdom: True Stories from the Management Trenches

by Jathan Janove

Copyright 2017

Price $17.95

Pages: 221 and Index 

A Management Book with a Starkly Different Perspective

Author Jathan Janove is a workplace litigation lawyer. He has spent the bulk of his career litigating workplace relationships, which gives his book a completely fresh and different perspective to workplace management techniques. 

Drawing from his own experiences and cases he has worked on during his career, Janove uses real-life cases to show the reader what to do, what not to do, what to avoid and how to navigate the unavoidable when it comes to workplace litigation.

Besides being very informative, this book filled with interesting real stories rather than hypotheticals, including how to fire an employee; how to properly document poor performance; how to deal with workplace sexual harassment. 

I especially appreciated it when Janove talked about how to best avoid litigation in the first place by using several tools he has developed over the years. 

His MIDAS touch apology program is priceless and should be used by everyone in business today:

“When apologizing to an employee or peer for a real or perceived infraction the apologizer should use the following MIDAS touch apology method:” 

“M” is for “Mistake”: Acknowledge you made a mistake.

“I” is for “Injury”: Admit that you caused the person pain.

“D” is for “Differently”: Tell the person what you will do differently going forward.

“A” is for “Amends”: Do something meaningful to make amends.

“S” is for “Stop”: After you finish the first four parts, stop talking. Don’t say another word. 

There are numerous other great guidelines like this for the reader. If you are in a management position, or headed to a management position, I would urge you to buy and read this book. And by the way, get one for your HR department as well.