Newsday.com
Business
Inside Stories
A.J. Carter
January 2, 2007

By all means, cut to the chase

Stuart Levine is cutting to the chase, Marc Silverstein is still cutting the crap, Lynn Blumenfeld may be cutting out the middleman, and Brian Rosenberg has something to occupy his spare time, even if the search for Vivi the whippet is cut off.

Those are some of the highlights of our annual effort to update the situations and people we've written about in the past year, even as we look ahead to what they - and others - plan for 2007.

Stuart Levine, chief executive and founder of Jericho-based Stuart Levine & Associates and author of the bestseller "The Six Fundamentals of Success," has a new treatise that just hit the stands. Next week he begins a publicity tour on the "Today" show, where an off-camera conversation with host Matt Lauer about people wasting his time provided some inspiration for the new work.

"Cut to the Chase" (Currency/Doubleday, $19.95) is a compendium of 100 suggestions on how you can regulate your professional life, as the subtitle notes, to "liberate yourself and gain back the gift of time."

"I started to hear a lot of frustration in the workplace about work-life balance, about increasing productivity, which a lot of people felt was defined by working harder," Levine said. "And in our client base, it became apparent to me that people were working pretty hard, that they really had to figure out a way to work more effectively....You have to approach life in a little more disciplined way because you make better decisions that way."

Some of our favorite suggestions: Arrive at work early, but leave on time - which, as Levine noted, debunks the notion that "you're only valid if it's eight o'clock at night and you're still in your office"; and not being afraid, when someone is making a point to you, to hold up your hand and say, "I get it," to truncate meetings. Levine feels the target audience is larger for this book than his previous one, aimed at top executives or wannabes, noting, "It's for everybody in the workplace today." Recognizing that, Doubleday's initial print order is 25,000, large for a nonfiction hardcover.

Levine said he spent about 11 months writing the book, more than for "The Six Fundamentals." Why? "If you're going to write a book that says 'cut to the chase,' then you have an obligation to say things more directly, with more impact... you have an obligation to waste not one word."

We get it.