Books:
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It's Your Ship
Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
Even though this audio book is of military origin, the lessons learned are applicable to all organizations. Learn about leading and motivating your employees, and doing the "little things" that make such a big difference in your organization's effectiveness, morale, and turnover.
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Good To Great
Jim Collins
Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11--including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens and Wells Fargo--and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn't require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner.
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7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Stephen R. Covey
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.
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The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You
John Maxwell
What would happen if a top expert with more than 30 years of leadership experience were willing to distill everything he had learned about leadership into a handful of life-changing principles just for you? It would change your life.
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The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work
Michael Gerber
In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business?from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed?and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in. your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.
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The On-Time, On-Target Manager: How a Last-Minute Manager Conquered Procrastination
Ken Blanchard
The On-Time, On-Target Manager tells the highly recognizable story of Bob, a middle manager who tends to put things off to the last minute. He misses deadlines, rationalizes, justifies, and tries to explain. Luckily, Bob is sent to his company's CEO ? a new kind of CEO ? the "Chief Effectiveness Officer" ? who helps him deal with the three negative side effects of procrastination: lateness, poor work quality, and stress to himself and others. Bob learns how to overcome procrastination, and transforms himself into a productive On-Time, On-Target Manager through the Three P strategy.
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The World is Flat
Thomas Friedman
For Thomas Friedman, cheap, ubiquitous telecommunications have finally obliterated all impediments to international competition, and the dawning "flat world" is a jungle pitting "lions" and "gazelles," where "economic stability is not going to be a feature" and "the weak will fall farther behind." Rugged, adaptable entrepreneurs, by contrast, will be empowered. The service sector (telemarketing, accounting, computer programming, engineering and scientific research, etc.), will be further outsourced to the English-spoken abroad; manufacturing, meanwhile, will continue to be off-shored to China. Friedman agrees with the transnational business executives who are his main sources that these developments are desirable and unstoppable, and that American workers should be preparing to "create value through leadership" and "sell personality." The last 100 pages, on the economic and political roots of global Islamism, are filled with the kind of close reporting and intimate yet accessible analysis that have been hard to come by. This book should end up on the front seats of quite a few Lexuses and SUVs of all stripes.
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Now Discover Your Strengths
Marcus Buckingham
Did you know that your brain makes over 1000 decisions everyday? And almost all those decisions are based on your top five talents? Identify your top five, hone the corresponding skills, and you will be even more successful. Buckingham's great book shows us how to identify those talents, neutralize weaknesses, and do the things we like to do. People like Colin Powell, Cal Ripken, and Charles Schultz were great at what they did because they loved it AND had the talents for it. Everyone in business should listen to this book and take the talent test.
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Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable
Pat Lencioni
Imagine running into the ultimate management mentor late one night on an otherwise deserted commuter train, and walking away from the strange encounter with an encapsulated guide to success in the corporate world. That's exactly what screenwriter and business coach Patrick Lencioni has done in The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable, placing his tale in an easy-reading and thought- provoking kind of self-help novel. Designed to be read in a single sitting, this book uses the unexpected meeting between troubled high-tech honcho Andrew O'Brien and a mysterious old man named Charlie to explore a series of common traps that can unwittingly ensnare any hard-driven executive. Lencioni hones in on the five "temptations" of the workplace: desires to jealously guard career status, consistently remain popular with subordinates, unfailingly make correct decisions, constantly strive for an atmosphere of total harmony, and always appear invulnerable. A discussion of the story's events and their real-world implications follows, as Lencioni shifts from screenwriter mode to business coach to help answer some of the questions he raises. --Howard Rothman
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Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
T. Harv Eker
Eker's claim to fame is that he took a $2,000 credit card loan, opened "one of the first fitness stores in North America," turned it into a chain of 10 within two and a half years and sold it in 1987 for a cool (but somewhat modest-seeming) $1.6 million. Now the Vancouver-based entrepreneur traverses the continent with his "Millionaire Mind Intensive Seminar," on which this debut motivational business manual is based. What sets it apart is Eker's focus on the way people think and feel about money and his canny, class-based analyses of broad differences among groups. In rat-a-tat, "Let me explain" seminar-speak, Eker asks readers to think back to their childhoods and pick apart the lessons they passively absorbed from parents and others about money. With such psychological nuggets as "Rich people focus on opportunities/ Poor people focus on obstacles," Eker puts a positive spin on stereotypes, arguing that poverty begins, or rather, is allowed to continue, in one's imagination first, with actual material life becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. To that end, Eker counsels for admiration and against resentment, for positivity, self-promotion and thinking big and against wallowing, self-abnegation and small-mindedness. While much of the advice is self-evident, Eker's contribution is permission to think of one's financial foibles as a kind of mental illness?one, he says, that has a ready set of cures.
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Mastering the Rockefeller Habits
By Verne Harnish
Many of our audio books tell us what to do to operate a business. The Habits tells us HOW. This three-hour audio could change the way you operate your business, nonprofit organization, or even your church. From 90-day goal setting to the daily 15 minute "huddle," this book will assist you in keeping your teams in alignment, meet or exceed your goals, and work your plan flawlessly. Companies that use Verne Harnish's concepts as a template to operate their organizations are the most enthusiastic promoters of the book.
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Cash-Flow Quadrant
Robert T. Kiyosaki
This is one of the best of the Rich Dad Poor Dad audios. The core idea in this series is that being an investor or business owner gives one more freedom and a higher upside than being someone else's employee or being an owner-operator of a business. With vivid personal stories, the authors show that many people, including the author's "poor" dad (an educational administrator), choose working for others because of insecurity or misguided trust in organizations. One builds true financial freedom by accumulating assets that make money, especially rental property. Though others have offered this advice, it's clearer and more potent here, and worth listening to many times if your financial insecurity or complacency needs a push.
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Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare
By Alan Axelrod
General George Patton may have been the most controversial military man in the history of warfare. Patton on Leadership is one the finest books on leadership, goal setting, and execution ever written. Patton had few rules, no exceptions to his rules, and his people loved him. After the war, many soldiers were asked where they served. Most answered the "Pacific," or "Europe." Patton's men proudly said, "I served with Patton!" This is not just a military book. It relates even more to the business world.
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E-Myth Mastery
Michael Gerber
Small business guru and best-selling author Gerber is an enthusiastic champion of small business owners, and his constant cheering underlies this latest attempt to provide a comprehensive plan for entrepreneurial success. The key messages here are similar to those of his previous books (The E-Myth Revisited, etc.): that "knowing how to do the work of a business has nothing to do with building a business that works"; that entrepreneurs learn their skills through practice, practice, practice; and that anyone willing to adopt that same kind of discipline can be successful too, all sound and practical practices. Gerber's volume provides a wealth of practical guidelines, charts, forms (available online) and instructions on how to run, improve and manage a business of any size. And, by the end, readers will feel as though they've been given a full course of one-on-one coaching sessions with Gerber. This is a book with a business plan that anyone could implement...and should want to.
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The One Thing You Need To Know
Marcus Buckingham
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Death by Meeting
Pat Lencioni
Meetings are boring and everybody hates them- but it doesn't have to be that way. Pat Lencioni's book shows us how meetings can be fun, productive, short, and the life blood of any organization. Written in narrative form, Death by Meeting shows us that the use of drama and conflict can actually make people look forward to attending, and make meetings very effective.
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Doing It Now
Edwin C. Bliss & David Allen
Doing It Now offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.) As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper and throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket." That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it gets a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with).
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Winning
Jack Welch
While different from the steadier stream of war stories and real-life examples of Welch's first book, Winning is a very worthwhile addition to any management bookshelf. It's not often that a CEO described as the century's best retires, and then chooses to expound on such a wide range of management topics. Also, aside from the commentary on always-relevant issues like employee performance reviews and quality control, Welch suffuses this book with his pugnacious spirit. The Massachusetts native who fought his way to the top of the world's most valuable company was in many ways the embodiment of Winning, and this spirit alone will provide readers an enjoyable read.
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Execution
Larry Bossidy
Disciplines like strategy, leadership development and innovation are the sexier aspects of being at the helm of a successful business; actually getting things done never seems quite as glamorous. But as Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan demonstrate in Execution, the ultimate difference between a company and its competitor is, in fact, the ability to execute. Execution is "the missing link between aspirations and results," and as such, making it happen is the business leader's most important job. Bossidy and Charan point out that without it, breakthrough thinking on managing change breaks down, and they emphasize the fact that execution is a discipline to learn, not merely the tactical side of business. Supporting this with stories of the "execution difference" being won (EDS) and lost (Xerox and Lucent), the authors describe the building blocks that need to be in place to manage the three core business processes of people, strategy, and operations. Both Bossidy, CEO of Honeywell International Inc., and Charan, adviser to corporate executives, present experience-tested insight into how the smooth linking of these three processes can differentiate one company from the rest. Developing the discipline of execution isn't made out to be simple. Bossidy and Charan offer good advice on a neglected topic, making Execution a smart business leader's guide to enacting success rather than permitting demise.
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Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending
Muhammad Yunus
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Getting Things done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity
David Allen
Getting Things Done is a great book about organizational skills.
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You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself
Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith
This husband and wife team help you to be able to sell yourself in any situation, from picking your favorite to selling products for your company.
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The Tao of Warren Buffett
Mary Buffett and David Clark
Anna Fields does an expert job of spinning out the down home rules of investing and life that have made Warren Buffett the most successful investor in history. Basically, companies produce high returns over the long term when their management team has integrity, which then gives the company an enduring competitive advantage. It is easier to stay out of trouble than it is to get out of trouble is just one of the Zen like insights that make this audio so much fun. Written by a true insider, its an intimate portrait of the great man's solid operating philosophies, a thoughtful analysis of how to pick good companies, and a hugely entertaining array of Buffetts many kitchen table aphorisms.
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The Travelers Gift
Andy Andrews
Andrews effectively combines self-help with fiction to catch readers interest, sustaining momentum while simultaneously passing on instructions for positive thinking. With his can do style, Andrews (Storms of Perfection; Tales from Sawyerton Springs) tells the allegorical tragedy of one David Ponder, whose woes begin when he loses his job, his confidence and essentially his drive for living. After a succession of losses, Ponder is rendered unconscious after a car accident, and is magically transported into seven key points in history. At each stopping point, he is met by historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, King Solomon, Harry Truman and Christopher Columbus, each of whom imparts one of the seven key decisions that Andrews asserts are essential for personal success.
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Leadership
Rudolph Giuliani
Through much of his tenure as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani was a controversial figure whose personal weaknesses often overshadowed his political strengths. After September 11, however, the world focused on Giulianis ability to lead with courage and controlled emotion. In LEADERSHIP, Giuliani demonstrates through vivid, practical examples how he used an aggressive, hands-on management style to deal with everything from petty crime to terrorism.
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You Can Negotiate Anything
Herb Cohen
Every day, you negotiate for something: prestige, money, security, love. This straight talking guide will show you how to get what you want by dealing successfully with your mate, your boss, MasterCard, your children, your best friends and even yourself. As Herb Cohen counsels, Power is based upon perception-- if you think you have got it then you have got it. Be patient, be personal, be informed-- and you can bargain successfully for anything. Based on his book that spent over nine months on the New York Times bestseller list, the author presents specific guidelines, personal anecdotes and practical advice drawn from his three decades of successful negotiating experience. Here is a wealth of information and the motivation that you need to succeed.
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Freakonomics
Steven D. Levitt
Economics is not widely considered to be one of the sexier sciences. The annual Nobel Prize winner in that field never receives as much publicity as his or her compatriots in peace, literature, or physics. But if such slights are based on the notion that economics is dull, or that economists are concerned only with finance itself, Steven D. Levitt will change some minds. In Freakonomics (written with Stephen J. Dubner), Levitt argues that many apparent mysteries of everyday life dont need to be so mysterious: they could be illuminated and made even more fascinating by asking the right questions and drawing connections.
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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick M Lencioni
Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55.
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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Charles Kahlenberg
Unabashedly inspired by Malcolm Gladwells bestselling The Tipping Point, the brothers Heath—Chip a professor at Stanfords business school, Dan a teacher and textbook publisher—offer an entertaining, practical guide to effective communication. Drawing extensively on psychosocial studies on memory, emotion and motivation, their study is couched in terms of stickiness—that is, the art of making ideas unforgettable. They start by relating the gruesome urban legend about a man who succumbs to a barroom flirtation only to wake up in a tub of ice, victim of an organ-harvesting ring. What makes such stories memorable and ensures their spread around the globe? The authors credit six key principles: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories.
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The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life, writes Malcolm Gladwell, is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do. Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwells The Tipping Point has quite a few interesting twists on the subject.
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Tough Choices
Carly Fiorna
For her six years as CEO of technology giant Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina was one of the most public faces in business, consistently chosen as the most powerful woman in corporate America. But after being ousted by the HP board of directors in early 2005, she stepped away from the spotlight. She returns to the public eye with her new memoir, Tough Choices, the story of her tenure at HP and of her unprecedented--and unexpected--rise to the top. While much of the early attention to the book will no doubt focus on her battles with the HP board and her dismissal--and she lays out her side of that story in full detail--what is more likely to give her book a wide and lasting readership is her account of the choices she made to get to that point. As she says, she never expected to become a captain of industry; she never planned to go into business at all. But what she found, as she tells in a straightforward, personal style, was that she had a talent and a taste for working with people and making the kinds of decisions that business leadership requires. In a series of tough choices that give her book its name, she gravitated toward the most challenging paths that were offered her. Those choices, which many around her told her not to make, were what led her to the top in record time.
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Book Yourself Solid
Michael Port
The Fastest, Easiest and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even If You Hate Marketing and Selling
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Selling The Invisible
Harry Beckwith
The transformation from a manufacturing-based economy to one that is all about service has been well documented. Today it is estimated that nearly 75 percent of Americans work in the service sector. Instead of producing tangibles--automobiles, clothes, and tools--more and more of us are in the business of providing intangibles--health care, entertainment, tourism, legal services, and so on. However, according to Harry Beckwith, most of these intangibles are still being marketed like products were 20 years ago.
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The Speed of Trust
Steven M. R. Covey
Trust is so integral to our relationships that we often take it for granted, yet in an era marked by business scandals and a desire for accountability this book by leadership expert Covey is a welcome guide to nurturing trust in our professional and personal lives. Drawing on anecdotes and business cases from his years as CEO of the Covey Leadership Center (which was worth $160 million when he orchestrated its 1997 merger with Franklin Quest to form Franklin Covey), the author effectively reminds us that there is plenty of room for improvement on this virtue. Following a touching foreword by father Stephen R. Covey (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and related books), the junior Covey outlines 13 behaviors of trust-inspiring leaders, such as demonstrating respect, creating transparency, righting wrongs, delivering results and practicing accountability. Coveys down-to-earth approach and disarming personal stories go a long way to establish rapport with his reader, though the books length and occasional lack of focus sometimes obscure its good advice.
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