This book isn’t just about being in business; it’s about the business of being. But when you stop to think about it, each of us is like a small business. Successful business owners implement strategies that improve their prospects for success. Similarly, as human beings, it serves us well to implement guiding principles that inspire us to live our purpose and reach our goals.The rich ganache … goals.
The rich ganache filling that flows through the center of this book is the story of La Mandarine Bleue, a delicious depiction of how nine individuals used twelve steps of a business plan to find their vocation and undergo a transformation (with some French recipes thrown in for good measure).
From a business plan and metrics to mission and goals with everything between—investors, clients and customers, marketing strategies, and goodwill development—this book clearly maps how to create personal transformation at the intersection of business and spirituality. Merging the language of business and self-help, The Business of Being will teach you how to enhance “profitability”—body, mind, and spirit.
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This book was enlightening, inspiring, and thoroughly enjoyable. Through stories, research, and her own experience and wisdom, Laurie Buchanan shows readers how to build a successful and responsible business while at the same time assuring that they live a satisfying and purposeful life. Woven in to illustrate many of her points is the delicious tale of how an eclectic group of friends envisioned and launched a charming French restaurant—from inception, to opening, to sustained success. Buchanan is a teacher/guide who combines business acumen with spiritual awareness and masterful storytelling.
You’ll want to keep a pad of sticky notes at hand while reading this book, crammed as it is with pearls of clarity, motivation, reinforcement and gentle catharsis too numerous to consider in one reading. After a long corporate career followed by an even longer freelance career, the tenets of a business plan were familiar to me. But Buchanan’s application of a heart-based approach places a hoary old tool firmly in the 21st century where sole-minded pursuit of profit alone isn’t going to be sustainable. Melding the new age business plan with the lifelong process of constantly becoming a better version of who we are makes for an interesting journey. I’m a firm believer that the human tendency to see everything in dualities is a sad limitation, so I enjoyed the book’s explorations of those constraints. Example: we all know what givers and takers are and how we feel about them. But what is a “matcher,” how do those qualities exist in each of us, and to what advantage/disadvantage? Answers both expected and unexpected are why Buchanan calls rightly herself a “transformational life coach.”
The book contains a hefty amount of attribution to other thinkers (some might be referred to “experts” but I don’t find the word useful) including businesswomen/men, chefs, artists, educators. A pilot, a comedian. And that all-knowing purveyor of wisdom, “Unknown.” It all adds up to a highly relatable whole.
I want to be the bean! If you know the “parable” about the carrot, the egg, and coffee, you know why, but until I read Dr. Laurie Buchanan’s The Business of Being: Soul Purpose In and Out of the Workplace, I was clueless. I’d seen her colorful and expressive GIFs on social media, all proclaiming, “Be the Bean,” but I had no idea what it was all about. Now, after having read her enlightening and thoroughly engaging book, I want to be the bean. And thanks to her book, I have a blueprint for how to do it.
One of the many unique features of The Business of Being is the author’s ability to wed the basic tenets of a business plan to life lived outside the corporate world: to our lives, yours and mine, no matter who we are or what we may aspire to. Each of the 12 steps of a business plan is laid out clearly with solid bullet points and indelible quotations from business leaders to timeless sages. From an illustrative case study of a French restaurant, La Mandarine Bleue, implementing the business plan, to examples Dr. Buchanan offers from her own life, to her repeated imperative: “For a moment, think of yourself as a business,” she demonstrates that this is no ordinary “how to.”
A business guide may show business leaders how to achieve corporate goals, but Dr. Buchanan’s book does this and more: it allows readers to contemplate and then to implement a clearly constructed blueprint for life. It may sound like magical thinking, but Dr. Buchanan’s blueprint is achievable. Here is a woman who tells us in the preface, “I ran away from home . . .when I was fifteen.” Lying about her age, she lands a job at a “superstore” that would in some ways set the course for the rest of her life but only because she began her journey with an uncanny sense of the possible.
There is a larger story there, but the one she chooses to tell, to share, is how a purposeful life is possible for all. It’s not magic, but there’s magic in it.
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The author has a beautiful ability to create a flowing and articulate literary work as in “The Business of Being.” I found it to read as smooth as a novel, even though every page is full of thought-provoking gems of knowledge. It is a timeless reference book, carefully constructed for its readers’ ease. While reading the book, I felt like I was being swept away on a life-changing journey.
After meeting Laurie Buchanan through Twitter, I anxiously awaited for her latest book The Business of Being to arrive. As a psychology major, I’ve always enjoyed self-help books, but this was so much more. I found myself pausing and reflecting on certain passages. My once clean copy is now marked with post-it notes and highlighted tips and tools for living a fulfilling and purposeful life. Packed with advice, quotes and recipes sprinkled throughout, this is an enjoyable must read filled with principals anyone can adapt to their everyday life in order to develop a plan to succeed not only in business but in life.
Fantastic book on business, but on applying those principles to everyday life as well. Well done, and highly recommended.