Read this.
By Rieva Lesonsky
Are you having trouble getting the key players in your business to work together? Then you could benefit from reading Amilya Antonetti’s new book The Recipe: A Fable for Leaders and Teams.
The Recipe tells the story of Prosperous Bakery, founded by an elderly couple who leave the business to their grandsons after they die. The six Givvantake brothers are eager to make the business even better, but each brother has a different personality, different skills and different ideas on how to improve the bakery. Unless they learn to work together instead, the bakery is in trouble.
A long-time employee helps the brothers out by giving each of them one day to run the bakery the way he wants to. As you might expect, each brother is convinced his way will work best—and each is sadly disappointed. The brothers learn that only by combining all of their unique talents and skills can they create the perfect “recipe.”
I have to admit, I’m not normally a big fan of the “business fable” genre, but The Recipe won me over with its simple, but hard-hitting lessons. As you read, you’ll undoubtedly cringe to recognize elements of yourself in the six squabbling brothers. But as the brothers learn, conflict—while it can be painful—is necessary to growth, and differences make for a stronger team.
There’s a difference, Antonetti notes, between a team of champions and a championship team. Your team needs innovators, motivators, communicators, researchers, planners and implementers, but only by creating the perfect blend of all these qualities will you have built a championship team where each player works in harmony with the others and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Antonetti earned her entrepreneurial stripes with Soapworks, a line of earth-friendly soaps, which she later sold to start AMA Enterprises (www.Amilya.com) and focus on speaking and motivation. Told in story format because Antonetti believes that’s the best way to learn, the book includes “Little Spoonfuls”–ideas, tools and exercises that you can use to take the next step.
“All of us struggle in life and in business to find just the right mix of people, with the right talents and the right attitude, to help us along the journey so that we are not just reacting to life but becoming the leaders in our life,” Antonetti writes. “In my own journey, I learned a key lesson: As a leader, I am nothing without my team. Learning how to come together in teams can be the secret ingredient that makes the difference in reaching your goals and that supports you in creating something great.”
