The Dream Manager, by Matthew Kelly – Business Book Review

Reviewing Matthew Kelly’s book, The Dream Manager and touching on people’s need for purpose in the work they do.

Transcription

Business book review, The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I am a business investor who I have these talks on a nightly basis. And so most of the time, it’s me talking, sometimes I’ll have someone with me, sometimes I’ll have someone that I’m interviewing, and I’m hardly doing any of the talking at all.

Tonight, I wanted to talk to you about The Dream Manager.

This is a good book. It’s a short book, it came out in 2007. And it’s one of these that I had never read. I don’t think I’d ever heard of it, honestly.

I may have heard a podcast, I believe it was a podcast where I heard Matthew Kelly being interviewed.

There was made mention of this book, I looked it up, I put it on my wish list. And it was just one of these things that eventually I knew I’d, I’d want to purchase. Finally, I ended up purchasing it quick read, it’s a really nice read, it’s one of these books, if you’ve read many business books, it’s one of these that takes the area of creating kind of a fictional story, to be able to teach the lesson.

The whole concept is that a person in the story is working at a company and trying to overcome the tuition issues with just the fact that they can’t keep people in the workplace, which is funny, because it’s something that’s affecting everybody right now.

They can’t keep workers on.

It’s a janitorial company and he starts going through how he has this concept of creating a dream manager, having somebody that is hired directly to the company, that their only job is to work with all the employees and see if there’s anything that they can do to help them achieve their dreams.

Dreams, what’s a dream, right?

It defines it, it goes into it of anything that people are looking for, in the future, you know, anything that they’re looking to get out of life, any places they’d like to travel to any things that they’d like to have any careers they’d like to have any experiences they’d like to have.

It’s stuff that we all have, but we don’t talk about very often, we don’t want to get our hopes up. We don’t want to overthink this, we may think we deserve all these different concepts.

It’s very common in employment circles, if you’re employed if you’re an employee, you’re not going to have a whole lot of people and there goes my book, I’ll talk to you about that in a minute.

But you’re not going to want to talk to people about where you’d like to go. And a lot of times people will laugh, a lot of times it will seem, you know, outrageous that you would ever want anything like that.

It could be something as simple and as common as owning a home. But if you’re making the salary of a janitor, you may not feel like you ever have the ability to do something like that. So they talk about that.

And they talk about the transformation that happens to this company because they start paying attention to each individual’s dreams, and helping them to come true in the simplest ways, you know, helping them to budget where necessary and actually map out how long it’s going to take for them to be able to achieve what they want.

If it’s a financial goal, or a financial-based goal if they’re looking to get into I don’t even remember all the examples.

But if someone’s looking to get into college, actually have them start looking into the details of that having them talk to a counselor on what it would take to get into that college, you know, whatever it is helping someone along the pathway to seeing that what they want to do, might actually be possible. And bringing a kind of excitement to life, if you will, and to a lot of people who would normally have it.

Now I’ve worked in scenarios where I’ve worked with business partners and work with potential partners and doing similar things, which is why this was a book that was interesting to me.

This takes it from the perspective of an employer to an employee, but it also makes it much wider than that and talks about how this is something we could all be doing for each other.

A lot of great points in this book and I’m not going to hit on all of it or really do it justice.

I love this section on boldness he has a lot of great quotes from other places. Don’t be afraid to take a big step, if one is indicated, you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.

I love this, be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.

The measure of your life will be the measure of your courage, so much of life having to do with this whole concept of dreaming and having things that you’re you’re interested in pursuing.

Takes boldness, it takes courage to actually start the process and move in that direction and think that it might be possible, which is a huge piece of the whole pie. And he has a section here on it.

He also had a piece in here where they’re talking to that what ends up happening, I’m going to ruin the story a little bit for you is a little bit of a spoiler, but a way won’t, it won’t mess up the book for you.

He starts developing other people to be dream managers and training them up to be able to do the same thing. And so he’s talking to his, his team, and he says, I’m gonna skip around here.

This isn’t verbatim, that he’s saying, okay.

So what do people need? And one person said, meaningful work?

And it says the sense that they’re progressing and advancing, or, well, the belief that they’re moving toward the fulfillment of their dreams?

And what your job, yes, well, to help people articulate their dreams and assist them in formulating a plan for the achievement of the short term, medium-term, and long term goals.

How do you know if it’s a good plan?

What has to be manageable and measurable and at the same time, it needs to stretch them?

Why is a plan important?

And I kind of go back and forth, and someone says, well, but those who fail to plan can plan to fail.

So why do we do what we do?

And someone spoke up and said because people spend most of their lives working, so they should enjoy it, or at the very least know that it’s moving them in a direction of their dreams.

Obviously, you can take this the wrong way, obviously, a person can have dreams that are going in the wrong direction.

Sometimes people beat each other up with their own dreams, a spouse will push their dreams on, on the other spouse or a parent will push their dreams on a child. And they talk about that in here that there are always ways that these things can go wrong.

But without a sense of a dream without an idea of where you’re going, then you’re you may have the feeling that you’re not going anywhere. Or you may have the feeling that you have all these impulses on the inside that aren’t meant to be where they might be.

And so that these are questions and concepts that need to be discussed. I think this is a great starter book, especially for a lot of people.

But if you’re dealing with people that you’d like to be able to help them to get what they want out of life. It’s a good book to read.

Go check this out, The Dream Manager, Matthew Kelly.

I really appreciate it. I’m gonna check out some of his other stuff too.

Hopefully, that makes sense to you.

I also wrote a book The one that jumped off earlier, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. So hardbound copy. It’s a thin, quick read if you’re looking for a book that’s all about business strategy, and how to make yourself competition-proof.

That’s what I call Amazon-proof competition proof even to someone as large as Amazon.com. Go check it out.

You can buy it wherever books are sold, or go to AmazonProofBook.com for a free copy.

That’s all I got for tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow night.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.