The Bicycle Book

This new, genre-busting meld of memoir, business how-to, and loving tribute to a socratic dad is unlike any in the annals of parenting—and, a fun ode to a purple Schwinn Sting-Ray bike!

As a 12-year-old budding business nerd (his words) Steve loaded his little hand-me-down bike with huge bags of newspapers and rode a paper route that three siblings had before him.

Steve grew up to be a multi-success entrepreneur who leads a dozen diverse companies and is an internationally known thought leader, author, and in-demand presenter on business practice and principals. His clear, imminently understandable and do-able systems for communication and organizational culture have impacted professionals and the teams they lead across North America, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Steve’s signal area of expertise—management and culture building in healthcare practices—is founded on decades of coaching professionals and their teams and tracking results.

Basically, Steve’s systems make healthcare more caring, at the same time more businesslike and profitable. Facile warm and fuzzy this is not. Nor is this data-driven thought leader just another business motivator.

Steve’s work is a unique fusion of proven business practices and behavioral science. For sound, science-based reasons, Steve goes out of his way to make laughter part of the mix, too. He often cites research showing that people learn more, retain and use more of what they learn, when they’re having fun.

Now, in his most personal book, he repays a debt to his own past. He gets on the Sting-Ray, rides his old route and delivers an amazing load, in a friendly modest-size book, of reading pleasure and practical, profit-making guidance about service to others in business and all of life. The Bicycle Book delivers visual treasure, too, in drawings by the internationally-known illustrator and artist Peter Arkle.

Now, in his most personal book, he repays a debt to his own past. He gets on the Sting-Ray, rides his old route and delivers an amazing load, in a friendly modest-size book, of reading pleasure and practical, profit-making guidance about service to others in business and all of life. The Bicycle Book delivers visual treasure, too, in drawings by the internationally-known illustrator and artist Peter Arkle.

The book, like Steve himself, makes hardnose business instruction warmly human and fun. He smiles at his newbie paperboy fails and glows at wins like becoming an ace paper pitcher balanced on a ridiculously overburdened bike. The human challenges never let up, though, not with customers’ quirks and demands, a route manager both nice and brutally by-the-book, and a world that refuses to accept a baby-face 12-year-old as a for-real businessperson. (Talking to you, snotty people down at the bank).

Fortunately, for Steve back then and everybody else now, he had a father who took his youngest child and the paper route very seriously. Arthur S. Anderson, a top advertising executive, knew the human side of business and life and loved to share all with his seven children. Dad drew lessons from Steve’s paper route travails in running Q-and-As at the dinner table. In the course of this book, they add up to a business-school-level education in customer relations and a life of service. The dinner seminars are funnier than B-School. Then Dad blisses out over dessert by his family co-leader Janice Anderson. The book pays tribute to her managerial and personal power.

From the past, the author pivots squarely to the present in “Get Pedaling” sections that end each chapter. Here Steve lays out precisely what readers need to know and do to get the absolute most out of the story’s embedded lessons. These tightly written sections are clear, do-able calls to action. As a whole, the book is nothing less than a 12-point strategic plan for world-class customer service for entire organizations, for the C-suite and the frontline service teams alike. It also has especially powerful applications in organizational units. Steve recommends that business teams read and discuss, a chapter at a time, the business-side lessons and commit to their own Get Pedaling action plans. As always with this author’s prescriptive information, the takeaways are action and positive results.

Real business. Real Life. Real-Time. If it isn’t crystal clear, humane, decent, do-able – and producing positive results right now – it didn’t come from Steve Anderson. Many thousands have benefited from all he shares. He started doing it barely a dozen years after he became a paperboy, presenting at training seminars at a ranch in the Texas Hill Country. His Dallas-based management firm and consultancy continues to grow and diversify, and he presents and teaches worldwide and writes online and in print. The Bicycle Book continues his series of compact, conversational titles focused on vital areas of business and personal growth. The previous, Nearly Everything I Learned in Kindergarten Screwed Me Up! gets old, school-taught habits out of grownups’ heads. Earlier titles include The Culture of Success: 10 Natural Laws For Creating The Place Where Everyone Wants To Work and The 13 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make And How to Avoid Them.

“The Bicycle Book was a ride I went along on. I had no choice,” Steve writes. He gives readers no choice but to get caught up in this one-of-a-kind reading experience. In these pages are balm for the spirit and medicine for the mind in troubled and deeply troubling times. It’s a comfort to go back with Steve to his growing-up years, watched-over and loved in a near-idyllic place and time when people were a lot nicer to each other. We can be that way now, and we ought to be, says Steve.

For supremely results-directed Steve, feeling good and doing good are one in the same. A portion of The Bicycle Book’s purchase price supports needs-based scholarships to attend Eagle U., a week of intensive group mentoring to jump-start career choice and advancement for college students and college-bound high schoolers that Steve founded and leads. Smiles for Life, a nonprofit that Steve co-founded, has raised more than $50 million, which has supported thousands of healthcare and humanitarian initiatives around the world. These include pop-up clinics that provide front-line dental care, foundational to all health, and training of locals to continue providing care.