The Achiever Newsletter
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Encouraging our clients to read books has always been an integral part of our business. As a result, we’d like to periodically share 10 books that we feel should be included in your business and/or personal library. These books are not listed in order of sales, popularity, or recommendation. The numbers are used only for reference purposes.
The White Collar Revolution is upon us, and 90% of jobs are in danger of major reconfiguration — or extinction. This ground-breaking new series aims at nothing less than a total re-invention of work (how we think about it, undertake it, bring ourselves to it). The books are in the form of "50 lists" — The Brand You 50, The Project 50, and The Professional Service Firm 50. Each contains 50 essential ideas for making this revolution an opportunity for dramatic change in our own working lives. The Brand You 50 The fundamental unit in today’s economy is the individual, a.k.a. YOU! Someone who is savvy, informed, always learning and growing, who knows how to sell himself/herself, and — most important — does work that matters! This book lays it all out: from designing your business card to landing jobs, from building your Rolodex to crafting an image, from transforming your skill portfolio to delivering WOW! Results every time.
Tasks are things of the past. To win today you must master the art of The Project! Technology has changed all the rules. Rigid hierarchies, departments, and job descriptions are history. Today companies are fluid, transformative, organized around temporary networks focused on the WOW! Project... a superbly executed, high-impact piece of work with a beginning, an end, a Client and specific deliverables, and an outcome you’ll be bragging about 5 years from now!
The economy is evolving at cyberspeed. The new game: leveraging knowledge. And the new organizational model: the Professional Service Firm! These project-driven dynamos long ago mastered the art of doing work that matters — and they have the profits and bragging right to prove it. Learn how to generate urgency and excitement, partner with your clients (and fire them if necessary), master information flow and timelines, and deliver WOW! results... every time. This book is a millennial must!
Here is the third in Nelson’s 1001 Ways Series. Whether you’re an entry-level assistant or a VP working with the CEO, there’s only one person responsible for your career — you. This unique motivational manual will help you realize your potential for success. This book brings together hundreds of real-life examples, advice from business leaders, and the author’s own techniques and exercises to show readers how to draw on inner creativity, develop self-leadership, set goals, take risks, and sell ideas. Learn how to take action, question authority, think outside the box and trust your intuition in this practical, timely book that will make an excellent addition to any business library.
Here’s another management parable in the spirit of Raving Fans, Gung Ho!, and Who Moved My Cheese? Fish! draws it’s lesson from an unlikely source — the fun-loving fishmongers at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. The authors have done a masterful job of capturing the essence of how to infuse any workplace with high energy, positive attitudes, and a passion for performance. This book is destined to become the authority on how to change the workplace into a powerhouse of productivity, personal satisfaction, and bottom-line performance. Fish! offers wisdom that is easy to grasp, instantly applicable, and profound — the hallmarks of a true business classic!
Why did crime in New York drop so suddenly in the mid-90's? How does an unknown novelist end up a best-selling author? Why is teenage smoking out of control, when everyone knows smoking kills? What makes TV shows like Sesame Street so good at teaching kids how to read? Why did Paul Revere succeed with his famous warning? In this brilliant and groundbreaking book, the author looks at why major changes in our society so often happen sudden and unexpectedly. Ideas, behavior, messages, and products, he argues, often spread like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave, or a satisfied customer fill the empty tables of a new restaurant. These are social epidemics, and the moment when they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the Tipping Point. This book is written with an infectious enthusiasm for the power and joy of new ideas. Most of all, it is a road map to change, with a profoundly hopeful message — that one imaginative person applying a well-placed lever can move the world!
The retention of talent has been identified by numerous resources as the #1 business issue of the 21st Century. There is no issue with greater urgency, or with more far-reaching consequences, than the issue of retention. The authors have done Corporate America a great favor by focusing a laser beam on the subject. They have skillfully blended wit, humor, charm, research and common sense to grab the reader’s attention and inspire action. This book provides easy to implement answers for everything you always wanted to know about retention, but were afraid to ask. So how do you keep talented people? How do you get them to stay while others try to entice them away? Read the 26 strategies in this book and you will know what to do!
The market for business knowledge is booming, as companies looking to improve their performance pour billions of dollars into training programs, consultants, and executive education searching for ways to improve. Did you ever wonder why so much education and training, management consultation, organizational research and so many books and articles produce so few changes in actual management practice? The authors wondered, too, and so they embarked on a quest to explore one of the great mysteries in organizational management: why knowledge of what needs to be done frequently fails to result in action or behavior consistent with that knowledge. The authors describe the most common obstacles to action — such as fear and inertia — and profile successful companies that overcome them. The book, based on four years of research, is broken into chapters with titles such as "When Talk Substitutes for Action," "When Fear Prevents Acting on Knowledge," "When Internal Competition Turns Friends into Enemies," and "Turning Knowledge into Action." Each chapter contains tips on what to do and what to avoid, and provides examples of how a lethargic company culture can be transformed. The Knowing-Doing Gap is a useful how-to guide for managers looking to make changes. Yet, as the authors point out, it takes more than reading their book or discussing their recommendations. It takes action.
Instead of focusing, as most leadership tomes do, on who leaders are, their character, style, charisma, and so on, this book looks closely at what great leaders actually do. As the title implies, Leadership A to Z is organized alphabetically by topic, from Apologia to Zenith, in bite-sized chunks of two to four pages that are meant to be pondered between meetings or while waiting for a plane. However, the author crams a lot of great information in here, drawing on examples from Gandhi to Abraham Lincoln to Roger Enrico of PepsiCO to pro basketball coach Pat Riley. A leadership coach in a book, this essential reference guide features over 90 lessons covering an alphabet of leadership topics. Author James O'Toole, a 30 year veteran of leadership coaching, gives specific how-to's drawn from great leaders' success stories and challenges. Leadership A to Z challenges readers to learn what leaders do on a case-by-case basis, and to incorporate their styles into their own day-to-day leadership practices.
The former CEO of Burger King blows the cover on corporate incompetence — and uncovers the secrets of good business — in his sharp-tongued, riotously funny book. Why are so many businesses such depressing, poorly directed messes? Ask Barry Gibbons, enlightened capitalist, high-spirited wit, and the man who nearly single-handedly pulled Burger King out of a long, disparaging slump, rendering it robust and dynamic (without cutting heads). In this rollicking, easy-to-read book, Gibbons blasts apart the thick wall of arrogance, hierarchy, regimentation, and exaggerated complexity so often contributed to the corporate world — and lays bare his 101 "Universal Laws of Business," commonsense truths about how to run a business profitably and well. His sage witticisms and sensible opinions cover motivational theory, limited terms for business leaders, being big but acting small, hurdling marketplace barriers, unhealthy profit, new branding, innovation, information technology, and more. And Gibbons deftly answers nagging questions, such as: why mediocre products litter a hyper-competitive marketplace that demands distinct ones, why the workforce is supremely alienated, exactly at a time when businesses need savvy, motivated employees and why the most meticulously crafted business plan contains the one and only scenario guaranteed not to happen. These 101 business truths will grab readers by the gut and make them gasp in relief. Because they're the things that most everyone (especially the folks laboring in the trenches) knows to be true — and wonders why the top dogs don't have a clue. |
Harry K. Jones is a professional speaker and consultant for AchieveMax®, Inc., a firm specializing in custom-designed keynote presentations, seminars, and consulting services. Harry has appeared all over North America addressing topics such as change, customer service, creativity, employee retention, goal setting, leadership, stress management, teamwork and time management for a number of industries, including education, financial, government, healthcare, hospitality, and manufacturing. He can be reached at 800-886-2MAX or by visiting http://www.AchieveMax.com.
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