Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward

This is the kind of book that’s easy to read, but hard to get through quickly. The reason is that I found myself putting the book down and taking a few days to really think about the chapter, and how to apply the concepts to my life. Some chapters I didn’t particularly like… but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good advice anyway!

I used to think "Boundaries: When to Say YES, When to Say NO, To Take Control of Your Life," was Cloud's best book. I just changed my mind. This is possibly the most powerful book I've read in the last three years. If you are co-dependent, a recovering co-dependent or anyone who grew up or is in dysfunctional relationships, you will truly appreciate this book. If you are a boss, manager, CEO, supervisor or anyone who works with people you will LOVE this book. Even the healthiest person runs into dysfunctional people wherever they go. Cloud gives you great tips on how to spot a "fool," a "wise man" and the evil people among us; as well as tips on how to deal with them.* * *Looking back at the time I left an alcoholic partner "for MY OWN GOOD," I can see some seed of sanity and an understanding that some endings were necessary. This book simply validates what I've suspected all along - better to cut your losses as soon as you see they're losses - and run. It's more than that of course, but the theme is the same. Endings are beginnings in disguise.* * *I literally wept with relief when I read his VERY SIMPLE and extremely practical and FOOLPROOF method for dealing with "fools." It so works. It so works!! Just so you know, Cloud considers a fool someone who refuses to accept or look at feedback. Being a fool has NOTHING to do with intelligence, skills or capabilities and everything to do with not being able to accept reality. Some of the smartest men and women on the planet are "fools" and some of the least intelligent are wise. It all has to do with whether you can listen and accept feedback (not critical shaming criticism - but real FEEDBACK). If you buy this book for no other reason than to learn how to shut down a fool, it's well worth the price!!* * *Quotes I LOVED:"Successful leaders ALL have one thing in common: They get in touch with reality. If you comb the leadership literature, one theme runs throughout everyone's descriptions of the best leaders. The great ones have either a natural ability, or an acquired one, to 'confront the brutal facts... especially when it comes to seeing a necessary ending.'""The mature person meets the demands of life, while the immature person demands that life meet her demands.""You cannot deal with everyone the same way. There are evil people, fools and wise people. When truth presents itself, the wise person sees the light, takes it in and makes adjustments. The fool tries to adjust the truth so he doesn't have to adjust to it. Evil people are not reasonable and truth means nothing to them. They simply want to hurt you and do destructive things. Don't have anything to do with them. NOTHING. Protect yourself in the manner of the Warren Zevon song, with "Lawyers, Guns and Money." (Attorneys, Police and Resources to keep them away from you.)Cloud talks about the "hoarder mentality." If you thought hoarders only stockpiled crap in their homes - just wait. Cloud exposes the "business hoarder" and explains, "The hoarder mentality thrives not only in garages, but in business and people's lives as well." Hoarders, in one way or another Cloud says, "Always say I might need that." CEOs and business owners cling to people, resources, businesses in the same way - saying "If things turn around we might need that division next year."My other favorite sections were:Internal Maps that Keep You From Succeeding.Cloud sets out the five most common "maps" or thought patterns that keep us from necessary endings:(1) Having an abnormally high pain threshold. Common apparently for those of us with lousy childhoods who learned to endure horrific emotional, physical or mental pain. We're so used to numbing ourselves we don't recognize when something really is abnormal pain. He shows us how/why we do this and how to change it. Pain ended!!(2) Covering for Others. Growing up in an alcoholic home I learned to assume responsibility for everything. If someone got sick, fell down the stairs, got into a fight, spent all their money it was up to me to "make it work" or "fix it." That's a WRONG map/thought pattern that kept me co-dependent all my life. I'm now 55 and know I'm only responsible for myself and not for the adults, addicts, fools and losers around me.(3 Believing that Quitting means you Failed. I think anyone who has been abused, bullied or belittled has this map. Whoever said, "Winners never quit and quitters never win," wasn't thinking about when quitting is sometimes a good thing, a necessary thing.(4) Misplaced Loyalty - how being "loyal" to someone to the extent we hurt ourselves is misplaced loyalty and not good for us or the person we think we're being loyal to.(5) Codependency Mapping - Need I really say more? Cloud nails this too - pointing out how our co-dependency keeps us feeling responsible for the other person's pain when we stop enabling them. He says:"There is a difference between helping someone who is disabled, incapable, or otherwise infirm versus helping someone who is resisting growing up and taking care of what every adult (or child for that matter) has to be responsible for: herself or himself. When you find yourself in any way paying for someone else's responsibilities, not only are you stuck with a delayed ending, but you are probably harming that person.I could go on for pages. All I can say is that this book is life changing. BUY IT!! And buy a copy to give a friend because you're going to want to after you read it.

OK. I admit I'm going out on a limb, but I've already found a contender for my Top-10 book list for 2011. The chapter titles are powerful enough. The actual chapters are pure dynamite. Example:--The Wise, the Foolish, and the Evil: Identifying Which Kinds of People Deserve Your Trust (Chapter 7)--Pruning: Growth Depends on Getting Rid of the Unwanted or Superfluous (Chapter 2)--When Stuck Is the New Normal: The Difference Between Pain with a Purpose and Pain for No Good Reason (Chapter 4)--Sustainability: Taking Inventory of What Is Depleting Your Resources (Chapter 13)Dr. Henry Cloud, a leadership coach to CEOs and business executives, and a clinical psychologist, has introduced a new term into the leadership lexicon: the pruning moment.He defines the pruning moment as "that clarity of enlightenment when we become responsible for making the decision to own the vision or not. If we own it, we have to prune. If we don't, we have decided to own the other vision, the one we called average. It is a moment of truth that we encounter almost every day in many, many decisions."Cloud melds the personal and the professional in this pruning manual of memorable stories and principles and shows why they must go hand-in-hand--and why lack of character on the personal side is often the unseen obstacle to "necessary endings" on the business side."Getting to the next level," Cloud writes, "always requires ending something, leaving it behind, and moving on." He takes Peter Drucker's "planned abandonment" and "sloughing off yesterday" themes (see my Results Bucket chapter) and delivers a detailed road map for arriving at your preferred destination.Necessary endings, he adds, "are the reason you are not married to your prom date nor still working in your first job." Leaders get that, so what's new and fresh? How about his list of the 11 reasons why leaders and managers avoid necessary endings? Here are just four of the preferred avoidance strategies:--"We are afraid of the unknown."--"We do not possess the skills to execute the ending."--"We have had too many and too painful endings in our own personal history, so we avoid another one."--"We do not learn from them, so we repeat the same mistakes over and over."If your gut says it's time to end a relationship, help an employee exit, dismount a dead horse, say farewell to a sacred cow, or drop a loser program, product or service, this just-in-time pruning book will show you how.Cloud uses a simple rose bush illustration to explain the pruning process. Pruning is "removing whatever it is in our business or life whose reach is unwanted or superfluous." It's also a process of "proactive endings." He coaches leaders to prune in three categories (think rose bushes):1) Prune healthy buds or branches that are not the best ones.2) Prune sick branches that are not going to get well.3) Prune dead branches that are taking up space needed for the healthy ones to survive.He likes Jack Welch's view that a leader must discern whether a business or a division needs to be fixed, closed or sold."All of your precious resources--time, energy, talent, passion, money--should only go to the buds of your life or your business that are the best, are fixable and are indispensable.""Leaders by nature," Cloud adds, "are often optimistic and hopeful, but if you do not have some criteria by which you distinguish optimism from false hope, you will not get the benefits of pruning. Sometimes the best thing a leader can do is to give up hope in what they are currently trying."Then, this zinger: "Wise people know when to quit."And effective leaders know when to ask people to exit. Commenting on Welch's "Neutron Jack" style of pruning the bottom 10 percent of employees each year," Cloud nudges the timid leader with this wisdom: "And I can understand why many people were upset with a fixed strategy like that for firing employees. But I do believe that there is some number of people in every organization and every life who will be routinely `let go' if leadership is doing its stewardship job."Cloud also delivers fresh ideas in other management buckets, including three practical questions to ask in the Meetings Bucket. If a routine meeting is "sick and not getting well," he offers this example: "We have tried repeatedly to use these times for forecasting, and it just never works. We can't get the information we need as the discussion progresses, and even though we have tried, it is confusing and a waste. Let's stop using this meeting to do that."I underlined a lot of pages in this book. It's filled with gems...I mean, it's a bouquet of roses that will brighten your day and lengthen your career.

Drs. Cloud and Townsend have a wealth of wisdom that have helped me process through and make sense of my personal journey toward emotional health. Their books are among some of my favorites to repeatedly revisit at different stages of growth. The title of this book caught my attention because I have an unhealthy default of staying the course even if the other person’s behavior is harmful to my own wellbeing. My avoidance to a necessary ending is rooted in how disposable I have felt to others. In this regard, this book has been somewhat helpful, but not my favorite because there is a lot of information that covers business related issues. Although I’m able to translate the information into how it can be applied to personal relationships, I wanted more content that spoke to my situation. I have yet to finish reading this book even though I’ve had it for a while. However, I’ve found that it gets better toward the last third of the book.