After ten years of owning a Blackberry, I’ve decided to switch. I really, really, really want an iPhone. Sadly, it’s not available outside of AT&T for at least another year, and I don’t want to wait.
People say droid-based phones are excellent. What do you recommend? There are a gazillion droid-based phones. How do I choose?
A listener recently wrote in asking how to stay motivated at a really undesirable job, especially given that are job hunting and ready to bail the moment a good opportunity comes along.
How do you stay motivated when you have to do something you don’t like on an ongoing basis? (Even something like taking out the trash weekly.) Please note that I may use your answers/suggestions in the episode based on this question.
I had a great interview with Shelly Palmer on NBC today! It airs today at 6:30pm and 10pm. Here’s a quick guide for finding the correct channel in your area:
| Service Provider | Channel |
| Cablevision | 109 |
| Cablevision – Fairfield County, CT | 118 |
| Time Warner | 161 |
| Comcast | 248 |
| Comcast – Western NJ | 158 |
| Verizon Fios | 248 |
| RCN | 28 |
| Antenna (over the air) | 4.2 |
I was extremely foolish. During my book launch, I auditioned for Guys and Dolls and landed the part of one of the male leads, Nathan Detroit. This is my first acting role with substantial dialog (read: more than one line), and I’ll be singing parts with the ensemble, and dancing. These are all new or very young skills for me.
Being unbelievably self-absorbed and analytical, I pay close attention to what helps me learn and do everything I can to speed my learning whenever possible. For example, I’ve noticed when singing parts, I like to hear (a) my part alone with the music, (c) my part in all quarter notes (to purely “get” the intervals), and (d) the whole piece with all parts in place so I can hear the context. With that toolkit, my brain can quickly learn a part.
What’s rather mind-blowing is that my conscious mind is very visual. When it comes to music, everything happens in my subconscious mind. So we’ll rehearse a part, I’ll have trouble with an interval or an entrance, and we’ll go over it slowly. Then my brain will just suddenly get it. Only I don’t know when I’ve got it. I have no sense of “knowing” the part; it just happens that next time through the song, it comes out of my mouth correctly.
This doesn’t exactly do wonders for my confidence, since my “knowing that I know” feeling doesn’t go off when it comes to auditory learning. But apparently, I am reasonably good at learning in that system. Wow.
Have you ever had anything similar happen?
Wow, I told myself before the book came out that I wouldn’t be one of those authors who obsessed about their book’s ranking. This just goes to prove that the critical skill in life isn’t predicting the future, but adapting to whatever future comes to pass. Because my prediction was wrong.
I’ve recently had several people write, asking me to sign their audiobook. After much head-scratching (how do I do that?), my operations manager extraordinaire Matt came up with the idea of me recording a personalized message to each person as an “audio signature.”
This is pretty labor intensive, however, so I’m being selective. I’ll tell you what: if you post an honest review of the audiobook on Audible.com or iTunes, then fill in the form below, I’ll do a mega audio-signature-recording session in mid-October (the exact date will depend on my interview schedule) to record and send all the audio signatures.
You can buy the audiobooks on iTunes or from Audible.com.
Thanks for all your support!
Click the book name for details about a book. Click buy to order a book.
The books listed here are all books I have found valuable. They have either enabled me to accomplish more in my life, or given me important ways of approaching problem solving, management, business, and life. The books are listed by topic. Books which fall into more than one topic are listed under each topic.
Stever’s book, It Takes a Lot More than Attitude…to Lead a Stellar Organization.
Made to Stick is a book about stories. Specifically, stories that are memorable, and what makes them memorable. In an amazing–and I’m sure unplanned–coincidence, their framework is memorable, as it spells “SUCCESS.” Messages that stick are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, stories. Though each of their points seems like common sense, the power of their framework comes from having the checklist so you can make sure to bring every one of the tools to bear on crafting a memorable message. The book is easy to read, fun, and has lots of examples. It’s a real keeper.
This is the book that introduced the concept of marketing “positioning.” It approaches brand building and marketing dominance in a powerful way. Ries and Trout look at the psychology behind product recognition, and lay out some simple principles for building strong, enduring brands.
This book is good for marketers, and probably even better for non-marketers. It’s very readable, makes a ton of sense, and sure matches what I’ve noticed about the world. I am not at all sure that traditional marketing curriculae make senses or correspond much to the real world. Many, many Internet companies need this book badly. Some of the multi-million dollar brand-building efforts out there are … scary, to say the least.
Order “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind”
Book about branding and how to build strong brands. Speaking of branding, the title is clearly building on the successful 22 Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout.
This book was written after Ries and Trout ended their collaboration. It lays out succint principles about brand building and marketing in an updated format from the early Ries & Trout books. The book is in late-20th-century checklist/sound byte format. Great for traveling, when you want something you can read when you have 5 minutes free at a time.
An excellent book which will walk you rigorously through the steps you need to turn an idea into a real business plan. The 1995 edition is a workbook which gives you the questions to ask to find out if your idea is a true business opportunity. If you do, indeed, have a business opportunity, the book then steps you through the creation of all major sections of a business plan.
Teresa Esser brings an engaging, funny perspective on entrepreneurship from the men and woman of Boston’s entrepreneurial community who are (and sometimes aren’t) building great companies.
Order “The Venture Cafe: Secrets, Strategise, and Stories from America’s High-Tech Entrepreneurs”
Gladwell presents many of the ways in which people do and don’t make excellent snap decisions.
Some conversations just aren’t easy to have. Whether it’s because you let someone down, or they let you down, or the news is unpleasant or whatever… This book lays out a framework for having the conversation and is packed with specific tips for helping things go smoothly.
For all people managers and anyone who ends up having to mediate difficult situations, this book is a must-read. It’s written in clear, concise English, and has great content that I haven’t seen presented elsewhere.
Order “Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most”
This is a somewhat dry book, but quite good. Ekman spent several decades studying the relationship between emotion and facial expressions. He looked across a wide range of emotions, across many different languages and cultures. With a variety of pictures, the book illustrates and distinguishes the involuntary muscle movements that accompany strong emotion.
Frogs into Princes presents many of the underlying concepts in neuro-linguistic programming. The sections most useful to businesspeople: establishing rapport and understanding and using communication styles.
Pat Heim lays out the rules of politics step-by-step. This book is aimed mainly at women and concentrates on how men and women are brought up differently, and those differences come out later as political behaviors in organizatons. In fact, the book is pretty good for anyone who doesn’t quite get the rules by instinct. Dr. Heim is a bit wordy in places, but the content is worth the read.
Order “Hardball for Women: Winning at the Game of Business”
Ever complained? Ever wanted to do something but just weren’t doing it? Kegan and Laskow guide you through a process of changing the language you use to think about issues to uncover the unconscious assumptions that drive (and override!) your behavior. The techniques work, and work well! I’ve used them with clients and with my own issues, and very quickly have developed an understanding of the beliefs and assumptions I’m making about the world that are holding me back.
While the book is great at helping you uncover your Big Assumptions, it falls down a bit at telling you what to do with them. The authors’ message seems to be, “understand and appreciate your mental dynamics and eventually breakthrough insight will be achieved.” For better or worse, I’m action-oriented once mental dynamics are uncovered, and would have liked more guidance on how to address my Big Assumptions.
(That’s why I’m a fan of cognitive psychology and neuro-linguistic programming. Both are pretty good at helping you change, once you’ve found your core beliefs.)
Order “How the Way We Talk Can Change The Way We Work”
Dr. Seligman discusses the phenomena of optimism and pessimism, and how one can explicitly adopt each attitude where it’s most needed. The book includes detailed discussions of the business, health, creativity and productivity effects of optimism and pessimism. The reading can get a bit dry at times; Seligman sometimes gives more background than needed about the politics of the scientific world, but the results are worth it. This book presented a (scientifically-validated) framework for understanding how to shape your attitude and what effects you can expect.
For business leaders, understanding optimism and pessimism is not academic. Too much pessimism and people won’t perform well, persistance will lag, and things grind to a halt. Too much optimism and a brick wall just might be headed your way at 1,000 miles per hour [Seligman says there is considerable evidence that pessimits, despite all their problems, are more accurate judges of reality than optimists]. You’ll need to master both to be able to motivate your workforce, keep them going through tough times, yet do so in a way that’s responsible and real.
Order “Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life”
The appendices that form the second half of this book present the best summary I’ve ever seen of using language for artful communication. The book itself concentrates on presenting a model of how Milton H. Erickson, widely considered one of the best medical hypnotists in history, used language to help people make powerful changes.
Order “Patterns of the Hypnotic Techniques of Milton H. Erickson”
This book presents several common fallacies in how we make decisions, snap judgments, and let irrational forces guide us to do, well, really stupid things. Most of what’s covered in this book has been covered elsewhere as well, but I found this presentation unusually accessible. Several of the concepts were framed in a way that had instant action implications for me. For example, people care as much about fairness of process as goodness of outcome. Knowing that, I can now take care to use full transparency and participation in designing the process, as well as making actual deciisons.
Order “Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior”
Two experts in business management show how to avoid the ten common pitfalls that trap decision makers. The book is based on research into social and coginitive psychology and managerial decision making. The authors do a superb job of translating the results into practical “how-to” information that you can use immediately to improve your decision making.
This book is a wonderful companion to Influence by Robert Cialdini.
Order “Decision Traps: Ten Barriers to Brilliant Decision-Making and How to Overcome Them”
A real research-based book on superb management techniques! The Gallup organization looked at 80,000 managers across 400 organizations and did extensive statistical research to figure out what the truly high performing managers did differently from the merely good managers. The results are often counter-intuitive, and this book presents them all.
One of the most intriguing notions in the book is that people’s behavior patterns don’t fundamentally change, and the best managers find ways to fit employee behaviors to jobs, rather than trying to develop “weak areas.” This result is explored in depth in the sequel, “Now, Discover Your Strengths.” Check out this book. I learned a lot from it, and given that it’s actually based on extensive, statistically sound research, its advice is likely to produce results.
One warning: the book is dry in places. It was clearly written by statisticians, not by great business writers. So skim the boring parts. The gems are well worth it.
Order “First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently”
Gilovich explores a number of ways in which humans reason incorrectly and reach faulty (though often emotionally-satisfying) conclusions. He draws examples from phenomena where people develop strong belief systems unsupported (and often contradicted) by data: ESP, UFO sightings, winning the lottery, etc.
This book, along with Influence by Cialdini and Decision Traps by Russo & Schoemaker make a great trilogy for anyone interested in understanding how we’re miswired.
Order “How We Know What Isn’t So”
This book outlines social psychology phenomena which are responsible for all kinds of irrational behavior. This book is a must-read for marketers, to learn compliance tactics that will manipulate the masses into mindlessly buying their combination electric toothbrush / toenail clippers.
For managers and leaders, this book gives important insight into the origins of motivation, and how you and those around you might be influenced by the marketplace, the media, and your competition.
For everyone, Cialdini points out several ways in which our mental “shortcuts” interferes with our ability to make good decisions.
This book is a good companion to “Decision traps.”
What a great book!
My background is in engineering and science, then business. As an engineer, I really liked that there’s a “right answer.” Or at least, there are clear wrong answers (the bridge will collapse if we make it out of tissue paper, period). In business, things aren’t so easy. Most situations have too many factors to identify, let alone consider deeply. Shareholders interact with managers who interact with technology and customer service people and engineers and operations and … it’s tough to know how to think about all this.
Make Your Own Luck lays out a 12-step process (hmm…) for taking risks. Some of the steps sound simple: Know your big goals before you begin, so when you make bets in your life, you’re betting on what you actually want. Sounds obvious? Yeah, but in my own work with executives, I’ve found that people easily lose sight of their real goals(1). The power from Shapiro and Stevenson’s approach comes from having a rigorous checklist to consider when making risky bets.
Some of their tools help evaluate risks that I’ve never known how to tackle. For example, the authors reject the conventional wisdom that “reward requires risk,” and give us “prediction maps,” a tool for identifying low-risk, high-reward opportunities. Simple, elegant, and practically useful.
Their other big new tool is “uncertainty grids.” Uncertainty grids let you quickly test your plans against combinations of uncertainties to realize whether you’ve unconsciously anchored yourself to a single scenario, or whether your plans can survive multiple uncertain events.
The writing style is fun, with thought experiments between the chapters, a final chapter of scenarios to analyze using the 12 steps, and haiku or other verse at the start of each chapter. I found it a pleasant change from the overly heavy style of most substantive business books, and it was an easy read cover-to-cover that did justice to its excellent content.
(1) Being a professional, of course, I never, ever lose sight of my own goals. *grin*
Nudge is one of those books I like so much that documents all the little things that cause us to make decisions, and how to influence them without resorting to such inconvient things as, say, logic. Nudge talks about how the way we present and frame choices (our “decision architecture”) dramatically changes the way we finally decide.
The material is mostly different from the decision fallacies literature. The authors cover things like physical presentation of choices, deferred gratification, structuring complex choices, incentives, and deferred contribution plans. Examples were drawn from very real, relevant examples like helping people choose health plans wisely, organ donation, and presenting fuel estimates to make it easy for people to understand environmental impact.
Order “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Weath, and Happiness”
The best book I’ve ever read on rigorous decision making. As much as I like to believe I make decisions based on data, I don’t. I gather lots of data and then ignore it all and rely on my gut.
Hammond, Keeney, and Raiffa outline a structured process for making decisions that can help reduce uncertainty and increase the likelihood that you’ll make better decisions under uncertainty with incomplete data. Like anything else, you have to practice to get good at their technique. But once you’ve learned how to make a high quality decision, many of the techniques begin to become second nature.
Order “Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions”
Order “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions”
This half-philosophical, half-practical book does a superb job at presenting a challenging, engaging perspective on how to create community and openness in (workplace) groups. Block gives specific questions that can be used in bringing a group together and transforming a conversation into one of responsibility and accountability.
Order “The Answer to How is Yes”
Tony Buzan has written several books bringing recent discoveries in brain science to practical application. His various books concentrate on speed reading, increasing comprehension, and improving your memory. In this book, he brings his understanding of the brain and applies it to leadership.
This book lays out a simple framework for making effective decisions. The real power of this book is that it addresses the emotional side of decision making as well as the rational side. Whether you make decisions based on your head or your heart, this book will help you learn to use the other. Written by the co-author of the One Minute Manager, Yes or No is a quick read.
My recommendation is to start with Yes or No and use Johnson’s framework for a while. Then read Decision Traps to learn how to avoid common mistakes your brain makes. Then finish up with Smart Choices: A Guide to Better Decisions, which will give you very high-powered research-validated techniques for beating a decision to death.
Order “Yes or No: The Guide to Better Decisions”
Keith Ferrazzi started life as a working class child. He learned early that opportunities came as much through who he know as through what he knew. So he began cultivating relationships as one of his life cornerstones. By his 30s, he was the Chief Marketing Officer and youngest partner ever proposed at Deloitte & Touche. Shortly thereafter, he became the youngest Chief Marketing Officer at a Fortune 500 company.
Keith’s book is part autobiography, part “how to” manual for networking. I ran into Keith when we were both presenting at a conference in mid-2004. I applied a few of his principles and they worked. Well. I became such a convert that I went to work with him for several months. Watching him in action is … astonishing, to say the least. He is truly one of the most amazing networkers I’ve ever met.
Some of Never Eat Alone’s techniques can be found in lots of the networking literature. But I’ve found tremendous value in internalizing his attitudes about giving without keeping score, using my network as a tool to help my associates become more successful, and realizing that it’s possible to do business with friends and make friends with business associates. Never Eat Alone got me thinking of success as a community sport, not just a lone-wolf endeavor.
This book is the finest research-based discussion of what makes people happy that I’ve yet to come across. Seligman quickly moves past the fairly trite (does money even correlate with happiness at all?) into an examination of what makes for truly happy people.
Surprisingly, I was reading this almost as a business book. Happy people make for great culture and environments, which make it easier to attract and retain good people. And it turns out one of the keys to happiness is having the opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way using your best and highest skills. This is a nice complement to “Now, Discover Your Strengths,” which was purely a business book, and it shows that creating an environment where poeple can play to their strengths is not only good business, but also good for everyone as human beings.
Every chapter of the book has an associated online inventory you can take at Seligman’s web site, so it become more than just an examination of what makes happiness—it’s a self-reflective exercise as well.
In this book, Mark Forster lays out reasons why the standard time management systems all fail. He debunks “quadrant 2” planning (important-but-not-urgent), prioritization, do-it-now, touch-everything-once, etc. What he presents instead is a system based on understanding why we resist things we know we have to do, and how we can start doing them while making sure that the urgent and the important all get handled.
Mark’s system is rather unusual, and I’ve found it a bit challenging to retrain myself, but every time I use it, I get more done in 2-3 hours than I would typically get done in 2-3 days.
Combine this with Getting Things Done by David Allen, and you have the best time management / inbox management combination I’ve found.
Order “Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play”
David Allen’s book is the best book I’ve ever read on dealing with the overwhelming barrage of incoming email, voice mail, faxes, etc. He lays out a system for dealing with everything in your life and keeping your inbox, desk, and mailbox clear and empty. While I found the book a bit convoluted at times, I’ve been using his system for two years now and it works like a charm. Even when I fall off the wagon occasionally, I can get my life back in order in a couple of hours with this book.
The one failing is that he gives very poor guidance for how to decide how to use your time. The book covers inbox management, but not moment-by-moment action steps. For that, check out Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play by Mark Forster, which deals beautifully with the moment-by-moment.
Order “Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity”
Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr review how your energy level actually drives productivity. They present research showing that managing energy is more important than managing time in becoming productive. Of course, if you follow their advice, you’ll become much more productive… and will promptly find all that newly acquired free time filled with even more demands from daily life. But hey, at least you’ll experience a period of great productivity.
Order “The Power of Full Engagement”
Michael Neill’s book is a step-by-step guide to adopting an attitude of fun, enjoyment, and joy in your life. Michael puts forth a whole series of techniques and ideas that help you let go of stress and reorient to the things that cause you deeper satisfaction. He is a friend of mine, and I can attest that he is a living model of the principles, as well. Along with Are You Ready to Succeed and The Power of Now, Michael’s book has been one of the most impactful books in my own personal development. (I read it in draft form in mid-2005 and dramatically changed my life and business afterwards.)youcanhavewhatyouwant
Order “You Can Have What You Want (UK edition)”
Michael Neill’s book is a step-by-step guide to adopting an attitude of fun, enjoyment, and joy in your life. Michael puts forth a whole series of techniques and ideas that help you let go of stress and reorient to the things that cause you deeper satisfaction. He is a friend of mine, and I can attest that he is a living model of the principles, as well. Along with Are You Ready to Succeed and The Power of Now, Michael’s book has been one of the most impactful books in my own personal development. (I read it in draft form in mid-2005 and dramatically changed my life and business afterwards.)
Order “You Can Have What You Want (US edition)”
They say that having written goals greatly increases your chances of achieving them. This book isn’t about far-reaching goals; it’s about making the next year of your life the best year you’ve ever had. Ms. Ditzler leads you through a structured goal setting process designed to help you clarify what you want, and set out a path to get there.
Who to hire is one of the most important decisions facing managers and entrepreneurs. Yet few know how to do it or do it well. A professional psychologist, Pierre Mornell takes a different tack to hiring altogether: he gives tips for designing behavioral tests for candidates, which give you indications of how someone will actually act on the job.
Personally, when I hire people, I do only a so-so job. I tend to be influenced far too much by whether I like the person, and not nearly enough by whether they can/will do the job. This book gave me a whole set of tools to use to make the decision a bit more rigorous.
Order “Forty Five Effective Ways for Hiring Smart!”
Chris Resto, Ian Ybarra, and Ramit Sethi have created an excellent book that helps you romance top recruits as successfully as you romance your top customer prospects (or maybe more!). Written from over 1,000 student interviews, they’ve captured the mindset of graduates at top universities and how to win over the candidates who would otherwise fall prey to the consulting firms and investment banks of the world. They cover the entire recruiting process, from pre-contact to post-hire, with specific how-to information for recruiting on top campuses, reaching top students, and doing it all on whatever budget you have available.
A rather dry book that nevertheless presents several techniques for changing belief systems. The book presents material and then illustrates the material with transcripts from workshops. The emphasis is very much on teachnig therapists to assist others in changing beliefs, but I’ve found that with a bit of flexibility, you can use the techniques to change your own belief systems as well.
Order “Changing Belief Systems with NLP”
This volume is a fascinating introduction to the psychological principles underlying training and behavior shaping. Pryor is an animal trainer, and it turns out that many of the underlying attitudes and theories of animal behavior also apply to humans. Such principles as positive reinforcement, spending time building the trainer/learner relationship, and shaping behavior incrementally are all tools that can be used to build high performing human organizations. For anyone whose job includes motivating people or building culture, this book will provide an excellent set of tools.
This is a great management book for people serious about doing an exceptional job at business. A bit dry, the authors critique what passed for business knowledge (fads, buzzwords, etc.) and point out how much of the conventional wisdom spouted as common sense is, in fact, just plain wrong. The book discusses adopting “evidence-based management” as a way of doing better in business. To get the reader started, they address six dangeous Half-Truths:
* Work and life should be (or are) somehow separate. * Hiring the best people will lead to the best organizations. * Financial incentives drive company performance. * Strategy is destiny. * Change is an imperative! * Great leaders are in control of their companies.
In each case, the conventional wisdom just doesn’t hold. For details, proof, and other fascinating tidbits (such as why merit-based pay for teachers and schools doesn’t improve learning), grab this book!
Order “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Utter Nonsense”
This book present leadership skills framed as the ability to coach employees into their best possible performance. A companion to Development First, this book is about how to help others through the professional development process.
Order “Leader As Coach: Strategies for Coaching & Developing Others”
Two of the world’s foremost social psychologists explore how we distort our lives via cognitive dissonance, commitment and consistency, and self-justification. principles. The authors explore how these principles impact politics, law, medicine, and predjudice. If you’ve read Influence or other social psychology books, you won’t learn about new prinicples here. What you will learn (which is well worth it) is the measurable impact these have on the policies and professions that are critical to our lives.
This is a pretty scary book. There’s substantial evidence, for example, that once someone is convicted of a crime, even DNA evidence and confessions by the true perpetrator won’t change the minds of police and judges.
Order “Mistakes Were Made (but not by me)”
This is the book for the extraordinarily popular course Srikumar Rao teaches at Columbia Business School and London Business School. In the book, Sri examines how our mental models affect the way we approach the world and our success. He does a great job offering new ways to engage our lives that produce more satisfaction and fun. I found this book highly impactful in my own life (along with The Power of Now and You Can Have What You Want).
Order “Are You Ready to Succeed?”
Mark Forster’s books on time and life management are a great read. He starts by noticing that no matter how hard we try, we always seem to fall behind. Then he applies a great deal of common sense, uncommon psychology, and intriguing systems to lay out alternative ways of working that will get everything done. This book, his third, returns to the question of time management, and leads you through simple exercises to confront your limits, your demands, and balance the two so you’ll be able to catch up with your own life.
Michael Neill’s book lays out many different way to achieve happiness. This is a very tactical book in which Michael gives exercises, mental frameworks, and techniques for making yourself happy. In some ways, I find his underlying assumption most powerful of all: that we can feel happy regardless of circumstance, and much of our challenge is simply giving ourselves permission.
Order “Feel Happy Now (UK edition)”
Loving What Is lays out a simple and effective techniques I’ve used for detaching from negative thoughts and reorienting on the positive and on what’s present in the moment by questioning the thoughts you have that keep you in pain. I’ve been training myself to use the four questions automatically, and have been happier, more peaceful, and more forgiving than I’ve been in a long time.
(Except when it comes to “helpful” automated phone trees. But by the end of the century, I will have made my Peace with those, too.)
You can view Byron Katie’s work on YouTube (seach for “Byron Katie”) and at http://www.TheWork.com.
This best-seller has just one message: the more present you are in your life, the most fulfilling and powerful your life will be. The book was transcribed from workshops in which Eckhart mainly answers questions, taking the reader through different scenarios where it would seem impossible to apply “The Power of Now.” In each case, he shows how to remain present yet still effective. I’ve found this to be one of the most personally valuable books in my own development (along with You Can Have What You Want by Michael Neill and Are You Ready To Succeed by Srikumar Rao).
Are you driven/stressed/confused about money? I am. And as much as I enjoy having money, I can’t say my relationship to it is especially healthy.
Reading this book helped, a lot. It’s more than a book to read. The authors lay out a program for figuring out exactly how to maintain your current standard of living, and save enough so you can know the specific date at which you’ll retire with no drop in your standard of living.
Not only has the program been helpful, but the attitudes and beliefs about money that the authors pointed out to me helped me untangle some of my own hang-ups about making the Big Bucks (at which time I quit my high paying job and went to pursue my dreams instead…much less lucrative, but infinitely more rewarding!)
This book helps you put together a plan and tactics for developing in your professional life. It is quite short, but packed with plain-English prescriptions for how to break self-development into small enough chunks that you can actually find time to do it. I use this book with many of my coaching clients.
Order “Development First: Strategies for Self-Development”
This book is a sequel to the excellent “First, Break All the Rules.” It delves much more deeply into the principle that you’ll build much more solid organizations by developing strengths rather than concentrating on shoring up weaknesses.
Buckingham and Clifton used Gallup’s research of over a million people to identify 34 core strengths that you might have. Strengths aren’t skills. Strengths are rooted in talents developed early in life. Talents are behaviors so innate that they come effortlessly and enjoyably. You can ultimately go much farther with your natural talents than with skills you learn. The neat thing about talents is that they’re automatic and they feel good to use. So designing a life based on maximizing your talents is likely to be a lot more fun than trying to learn skills that don’t grab your interest.
The book really doesn’t stand on its own. You must take the web-based StrengthsFinder assessment to identify your strengths, and then read the latter part of the book with your strengths in mind. But be warned: you can take the assessment just once for each copy of the book you buy, and you can’t buy additional licenses without buying the book. (Perhaps the best way to think of this is as a one-time $22 skills assessment with a free book thrown in.)
The assessment was useful to me. Everything it told me, I already knew. In fact, it pointed out characteristics so pervasive in my life that everyone around me will be equally unsurprised. And therein lies the power: it gave me names for strengths that I take so much for granted that I would never have identified them as strengths. And furthermore, it let me know that those are strengths that others may not share. Not until reading this book did I consider that my ability to focus and my achievement-based motivation might be talents others may not share.
Now as for using than information… the book was weak. Very weak. Each skill gets one page of description, and one page of “how to manage someone with this skill.” There’s little to help you appreciate the richness of the model or apply the knowledge in any deep way.
That said, however, find yourself a friend strong in ideation to brainstorm uses for the material, an activator to put the ideas into motion, and a good focus person to carry the ideas out.
In short, the assessment gets five stars and the book gets two stars. The self-knowledge was useful, as was the overarching concept, “You’ll go farthest by building your strengths rather than shoring up weaknesses.” Otherwise, the assessment gave me good information that it’s now up to me to use.
Order “Now, Discover Your Strengths”
This book is required reading at several top business schools, and for good reason. Goldratt lays out an approach for thinking about your business’s operations in terms of operational constraints and measures. He shows why traditional cost accounting skews your ability to manage well, and how many organizational problems come from a misunderstanding of how a well-balanced system operates. If you’re an operational manager, read this! If you’re not an operational manager, please, please, please read this!
In “Bottom-Up Marketing,” Reis and Trout address the need for marketing to be driven as much by tactics as by strategy. They make the case that marketing strategy is intrinsically linked to an understanding of how tactics drive behavior.
What a great book. Moore asks why so many companies suddenly stall just when they seem to be taking off. He lays out stages of adoption for high tech products, and notes that as a product makes its way into the mass market, the market’s buying behavior radically shifts. Companies who fail to make the shift as well… will fail.
Moore’s experience is in high tech marketing, but I suspect his concepts apply across the board.
Order “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers”
This isn’t as good as the other Ries and Trout books. Focus is too wordy (not focused enough?), and relies a bit more on simply telling stories. The logic is a bit harder to verify. That said, the basic point of the book is that Focus is good in many areas of running a business.
It took me a year of struggling against my deep desire to preserve all options and keep myself as broad as possible, but I adopted a “focus” attitude towards my own business. Within three months, the business was doing better than I’d ever dreamt. Many of the results were directly traceable to the newfound focus in the business. Now, I’ve found that the more I focus, the more, bigger opportunities arise. Yes, I have to say “No” to some things, but at the end of the day, the focus strategy has created bigger and better opportunities, faster, than anything I’ve done before.
Order “Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It”
This companion to Positioning presents how a marketer can think about competition. Once again, Ries and Trout manage to present sophisticated concepts clearly and simply. For example, the book opens with a concise discussin of “The Law of Force.” They show that superior numbers will win on a battlefield, even in the face of higher hit rates by the smaller force. A simple concept, yet often overlooked.
You’ll probably hear people say that Marketing Warfare is outdated, and the New Economy changes all that, yada, yada, yada. Ignore those people. While specific prescriptions may be outdated, the underlying approach to thinking about the nature of competition is right-on.
Al Ries and Jack Trout, marketing strategy consultants, lay out some of the principles of marketing—including the Law of the Mind and the Law of Hype—with many, many examples of what has and hasn’t worked in the international marketplace.
Order “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk”
A very easy-to-read book giving lots of guidelinens for becoming a high-performing salesperson. This won’t be the only book on sales you’ll ever need, but its short chapters make it good reading when you have a few minutes here and there. I picked up a few good ideas and mindset shifts that could be immediately applied to sales efforts.
Order “How to Become a Rainmaker”
Brandenburger and Nalebuff’s book does a marvelous job making a new brand of corporate strategy accessible: strategy based on game theory. They examine various tactics used in business, such as the “we’ll match lowest price” strategies, and reveal how those strategies can change the industry structure in such a way as to result in the unexpected effect of higher prices. The authors also give rigorous definitions of competitors and complementors, which broadened my thinking about competition and cooperation considerably.
[This is my all-time favorite book on strategy.]
Wow, what a pretentious title for this note. I hope it lives up to its promise.
THE SCENE BEGINS IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL:
Last weekend, I saw Signs of Life, the Off-Broadway play about life in Terezin, the model concentration camp the Nazis created to show how well the Jews were being treated. My collaborator Joel Derfner composed the show. The acting and singing was excellent. It was very emotional, and left us in a state of profound … profundity. They announced an after-show talk, and my first thought was, “I hope the cast isn’t there.”
My reaction surprised me. I usually love hanging out with creative types, and really love my actor friends. But in this case, despite the actors’ skill, I wanted to preserve the distance. What was up with that?
CUT TO:
I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years. Whatever “it” is, I have it. Crowds respond to me. Recently, a speaker with a microphone was trying to get the attention of a room. I stood up, looked around, and said “let’s sit down now” in a slightly louder-than-normal voice. Everyone turned around and sat down. At one speech a few years ago, the tapes of my session sold out while the session was still in progress.
Right now, I’m in my first show since forever. I’m an ensemble member with a full five or six speaking lines. Acting someone else’s line and characters is very different from public speaking. We’ll see how it goes.
CUT TO:
My friend Jamie Kent is building a career as a musician. He’s done a lot of theater and is now learning to perform as a musician in venues where some people are attentive fans, while others are drunken revelers. He and I spoke for a while today about the nature of being on stage. He’s found that doing theater is very different from performing music live, and life music seems different from public speaking. He’s still going up the learning curve. I’m watching.
WHAT I’M LEARNING ABOUT STAGE
Acting, public speaking, and performing music are all ways for one person to engage hundreds or thousands of others. There are critical differences that demand different skills in all three. Yet all three depend on the nature of the relationship between performer and audience.
Stage is story.
One-on-one conversation is easy. We adapt to each other and react to each other’s points. It’s conversation. When one person is engaging an audience, I find it helps me be more powerful to think in terms of story. There’s always a story.
Actors. In acting, there’s a story being told. The actors are the medium. They’re an odd medium, since their skill is in knitting their own authentic emotions into building blocks for characters who they aren’t. The audience’s reaction is to the story, not the actors. The story is made more real through the skill of the actors, but the best actors are the ones who create a character so strong you forget the actor. Sean Penn in MILK was this amazing.
The audience is voyeur, watching the story without being part. Though some stories occasionally break the fourth wall and a character talks directly to the audience, the characters don’t expect an answer, and the audience doesn’t expect to give one. Even the breaking of the fourth wall is, itself, part of the story. (If you’ve seen Avenue Q, you’ll recognize the awkwardness of what happens when the fourth wall breaks. We wonder: are we supposed to participate, or continue our part outside the production?)
For the actor, the challenge is to create a character and story without directing it at the audience. The completeness of the character and the power of the direction is the compelling event that makes the audience want to watch. An actor uses their authenticity to create the character, but their job is to create a fiction with that authenticity.
The actors in Signs of Life did such a good job that I didn’t want to meet them in person. The story was too powerful; I didn’t want to meet them not as their characters.
Public speakers. Public speakers tell the story, and their role is narrator. Since they’re outside the story, the audience can interact with the narrator about the story. The audience is in conversation with the speaker about the story.
For the speaker, the challenge is engaging in a conversation with the entire audience as a whole. The speaker must align themselves with the audience and share the audience’s discovery of the material the speaker is providing. Authenticity works well in public speaking, because people can often pick up when someone’s faking or restraining themselves, and people like to have conversations with people who are interesting and real.
My “it” when public speaking is maybe a mild form of autism spectrum disorder that I’ve managed to turn into a huge asset (joking… I think): like many geeks, I can’t maintain a social facade. What you see is what you get. I suffer from involuntary authenticity.
Leaders. Leaders also tell the story as narrator, but there’s an additional level: there’s the story of what it means to be together, sharing that story. When an audience gathers to be led by Lori Leader, Lori tells stories that bring up emotion in the followers. But the more powerful story is the story of why people are listening to Lori in the first place.
Oprah might tell a story about an abused child. She’s narrator, aligned with the audience to discover truths about abuse. The larger story that many of her followers hold, however, is that by allowing Oprah to be their narrator, they will have richer, more fulfilling lives.
For the leader, the challenge is working both of these messages at once. The leader must have a conversation with the audience about the material, just as a public speaker must. The leader also needs to have a separate conversation, about what that conversation means. “Join me to talk about race relations. [I’ll narrate.] Just by being here, you’re showing your commitment to help change the world. [The conversation about the relationship.]”
Musicians. For musician, the challenge is being both actor and speaker. The songs and what they mean to the audience are what forms the story. People see live music because they want to be in conversation with the musician, yet they want a conversation they know: the music that tells the story the audience wants to experience. Audiences can sometimes even get upset if the musician performs a song differently from how they performed it on their album. The audience wants the story (song) they know, plus the emotional connection they get with a narrator. The musician must create both the narrator relationship and provide the story to engage the audience.
Jamie’s learning curve is likely related to the challenge of the duel relationship of actor and speaker/narrator. His pre-music performing experience was all as actor, and he’s just beginning to wrestle with the need to be with the audience even as he’s acting in the story of the music.
SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
My larger story is that sometimes, my insights can help others get clarity on issues in their life. I’m hoping you find something useful, or at least entertaining, in these ideas. Let me know.
I’m just playing with these ideas, as I delve into performing more than I’ve ever done. I’d be curious to know how you think about being on stage. What stories do you tell? How do you relate to your leaders, actors, teachers, and musicians?
P.S. I’m available as a public speaker and performer, by the way… 🙂
I’m Twittering today. And I’m Facebooking. And I’m blogging. And I’m writing my newsletter and my podcast. In pursuit of building my so-called personal brand, I’m getting my name out there and sharing my brilliance with the world. Once I get some decent lighting, 2010 will see me introduce a video blog as well. Yessiree, I’m building that brand right on up. Yup. Building that brand. Look at it go. Right on up there…
What’s striking, however, is that none of this pays a cent. Not only does it not pay, but it conditions people to want my content for free. I had the audacity to pose a question to my Twitter subscribers last week, to get some suggestions for an upcoming episode. One happy person responded, “Dude, STOP ASKING US how to get stuff done and START TELLING US how to get it done!” I have hundreds of pages of free articles. I have written close to 500 pages of podcasts, all freely available, and apparently that’s not enough.
The theory is that social media lets people discuss my products and services without my intervention. I can now enter into a dialog with my customers, that will let me optimize my products, respond to my markets, and manage my reputation real time. The magically I’ll be successful and have a thriving business. That sounds really good on paper.
Then I think for a moment. I’ve always been able to read reviews of my products. I’ve always been able to survey my customers. And if I’m at all smart about handling customer queries and support calls, I can even optimize my products and design in solutions for my customers based on their problems. In short, pretty much everything social media can do for me, I could do in a pre-social media world. So what’s the difference?
One big difference is the cost. Maintaining an ongoing social media presence is a huge use of time and effort. If I were a big company, I might hire someone full time to do nothing but tweet, twitter, Yelp, Blorp, and Blubber. But as a one-man shop, I have to do all this myself. Then I have to track the responses and figure out which channels are actually getting attention (that will change in six months, requiring another full round of marketing research), and then generate content content content.
At some point, I’m apparently supposed to develop products and services, which is where I make the money. And by the way, those products and services better contain content I haven’t given away for free in the process of generating all this social media.
Where will this go? Based on my own experience, I think social media will continue to be important as a channel for monitoring end consumer needs, wishes, and experiences using products. At the end of the day, it’s a giant gossip network, and your reputation is part of your brand, so you’ll have to manage it.
When it comes to content from businesses to customers, I don’t think it’s sustainable. The free content generation will die down over time, unless there’s a clear return on investment to it. Quality content is hard to produce. Companies that can afford to hire someone to be a web presence will do so. They’ll be able to produce high-quality content on an ongoing basis.
Small businesses and solopreneurs will gradually drop out of the fray, simply because the demands are too great and the returns too small. It takes good education and/or experience to be able to generate huge amounts of quality content, and those things are expensive. How much time should a smart, capable, good person with great writing skills spend giving away their knowledge for free without expecting a return? If there’s a demand for high-quality content (which there may not be), it will mainly be on a subscription model.
The few who manage to attract large followings will do great, of course, but that’s always been the case. And attracting a large following seems to be a function of direct marketing skill, more than high quality content creation skill.
Bottom line: in five years, by 2014, we’ll see the quality of free content dropping as the high-quality content creators turn their attention to activities that actually drive their business. Social media will remain important for reputation management, however, and as a tool for monitoring our customers and what they’re thinking.