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Understanding Business Values and Motivators is a brief and powerful little book written by Dr. Ira Wolfe (Creative Communication Publications, Atlanta, GA, 2004), a dentist who changed careers and now focuses on building excellence in the business world by supporting the improvement of management skills, employee motivation, and personnel improvement.

Dr. Wolfe’s focus is in helping to understand motivation and to poke the reader to realize they are motivated and what we can do to focus on motivators in our own lives. The focus for Dr. Wolfe’s book includes variations on Spranger’s six motivators (conceptual, aesthetic, economic, power & authority, social, and doctrine). Dr. Wolfe’s use of current issues and today’s world is refreshing and the text is “dotted” with quotations that are helpful motivators in themselves! Dr. Wolfe states:

“When explaining values and motivation to clients and workshop participants, I found this 'bucket analogy' the most helpful:

"Each morning, you subconsciously pick up two, or perhaps three, buckets. Each bucket represents a motivating value. During the day, your goal is to fill up those buckets. If you don’t fill them, at the end to the day, you may go home dissatisfied, or unsatisfied. If this happens day after day, you might even burn out and become disenchanted with your job �" or even with your spouse. There are times when other people don’t help you fill your bucket at all �" in fact, they take out what’s in it! During your life, which buckets you carry and want to fill are determined by your beliefs and shaped by your experiences. You value some buckets positively and judge others negatively. Some you want to fill and others you’d just as soon pour out and leave behind. And there are times you have no clue why others value what they carry in their buckets.” (p. 25)

This is a book that can be very useful for directors and staff members, something for the resource room! And taking a quote from Dr. Wolfe’s chapter one, “The books which help you most are those which make you think the most.” �" Theodore Parker.

Submitted by William H. Strader

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