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A Recipe for Change

Guest post by: Rebel Brown

Article Overview: When we challenge the status quo, we do so for one reason… to bring change. We are driven to solve a personal challenge, a business challenge, or something bigger. Moving from where we are to where we need to be is the goal. Recently, a friend sent me a copy of a new book called The Recipe: a fable for leaders and teams by Amilya Antonetti. This is not your typical business book full of leadership theory or case studies and models.

A Recipe for Change



When we challenge the status quo, we do so for one reason... to bring change. We are driven to solve a personal challenge, a business challenge, or something bigger. Moving from where we are to where we need to be is the goal. Recently, a friend sent me a copy of a new book called The Recipe: a fable for leaders and teams by Amilya Antonetti. This is not your typical business book full of leadership theory or case studies and models. It is the fictional story of six brothers coming together as leaders to create a winning team. Each brother has his own unique personality and skill set and each wants to be "in charge". Through a tale filled with dialog and humor, the reader learns "the recipe" for building their own winning team. Then to reinforce the message in the fable, the book is sprinkled with exercises called "Little Spoonfuls" that can be used to further develop our own skills as leaders and teammates.

Doing a little digging, I looked into Amilya's personal story and found that here is a woman who had been challenging the status quo for over 20 years. As a serial entrepreneur, she has owned restaurants, a construction company (not exactly the norm for a young woman in her twenties) and then, when faced with a life changing personal challenge, went into problem solving mode and launched a company that not only overcame her personal challenge, it started a movement for better product choices to use in our homes that benefits millions. You can see her story in this YouTube clip. Wanting to know more, I reached out to Amilya and asked her a few questions about her experiences and about The Recipe...

Rebelations: You‘ve been involved in a lot of different things. What's your goal with The Recipe?

AA: Too often the status quo thinking is "I can do it all by myself". We need to change the status quo. "I can do it all myself" thinking slows us down. The Recipe was written specifically to illustrate how much more effective we can be with a team mentality. If you want to be successful at anything... raising kids, having a great relationship, launching a product, starting a business or keeping one growing, you need your team. Success is NOT a solo act. Success is a result of leadership and teamwork.

After spending more than 20 years starting, building, and exiting businesses, the same word keeps popping up... HOW? How did you start? How did you know? How can I do it too? So The Recipe was written to answer some of these questions. There are a lot of really good business books on the market but so many of them tell you what to do, they don't show you how. By illustrating HOW with a story that we can relate to and identify with, hopefully readers can develop their own ideas on HOW they can be a better leaders and teammates in their own life and while addressing their own challenges.

Rebelations: So you created a recipe for leaders and teams. What are the components of a good recipe?

AA: Every recipe has three main parts: the ingredients, the tools you will need, and easy to follow directions. In the book we try to pull these three things together.

The right ingredients

When we are talking leaders and teams, the ingredients are people. We have been taught that there is ONLY ONE leader on a team and that a successful leader looks and feels a certain way. In real life, there is no single leadership mold or recipe. Part of the message in the story is that people are different and finding the right combination for your mix makes all the difference. Each of us, in our way, can contribute to the team and have an opportunity to lead. We just need to recognize it.

The right tools

Just as a baker assembles her tools of the trade to bring the mix together and create something wonderful, a leader needs the right tools too. Since our ingredients are people, the tools that they bring are their unique and diverse skill sets. If everyone on your team has the exact same skills and talents, you often find that you do not have all the tools you need to get the job done. This is especially true when you are trying to create something new or do something differently than it has been done before.

Easy to follow directions

Wouldn't it be great if life came with directions? Even with things that do, often they don't go far enough. So the book has Little Spoonful sections where you can dig deeper on skill sets like building trust or dealing with conflict and confrontation. Again, it does not follow the standard format of telling you what to do. Instead each section challenges you with questions to get you thinking and creating the directions that work for you.

Rebelations: What's next for you and The Recipe?

AA: As I have been doing the media tours and interviews that are common when you launch a new book, our team has been working on the development of The Recipe Interactive. These learning groups are forming now and begin this fall. The sessions will combine traditional learning tools with web based solutions to help people who want to go one step further to apply the lessons in The Recipe in their lives and in their businesses. 

______________

Click here to check out The Recipe on Amazon. com

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Article Tags: business growth strategy, Zero Gravity Business



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