Dance Lessons

In this summary you will learn

• How to build great partnerships – at home and at work
• Why partners must quickly own up to mistakes for the sake of the relationship
• How to establish, maintain and end partnerships

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Why you should read Dance Lessons

Chip R. Bell and Heather Shea take a crack at a much overlooked business skill: partnering. While many management gurus espouse the growing importance of partnerships and alliances to modern business, advice on how to actually implement and manage these relationships is much harder to find. Dance Lessons uses simple, emotional language in mapping out guidelines for successful partnering. These guidelines tend more toward general, interpersonal relationships than specific business cases. In fact, much of the book’s content could be re-titled "How to Have a Successful Marriage" without changing so much as one word. Despite this lack of hard business focus, getabstract recommends this book on the strength of the intelligent exercises that the authors suggest for use in each stage of the partnering process. While Dance Lessons might be light on the numbers and factual examples that business readers have come to expect, the passion that the authors bring to the subject will leave you highly conscious of the critical, but often neglected, personal aspects of business partnerships.

About the Authors

Chip Bell  is a senior partner at Performance Research Associates in Dallas. He has been a trainer or consultant to companies including IBM, Microsoft, Cadillac, Motorola, Sprint and Harley-Davidson. He is author of 11 books, including three bestsellers. Heather Shea  is CEO of Inspiritrix, Inc., a training and consulting firm in Orlando, Florida. She has been a speaker, trainer or consultant for many firms, including 3M, Ford, Hewlett Packard and Walt Disney World.