Books
Author(s): Jim Collins
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Business
Description:
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another ground breaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, butt ressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.
Author(s): Walter Isaacson
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Biography
Description:
Walter Isaacson's "enthralling" (The New Yorker) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs—the inspiration for the movie Steve Jobs starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.
Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson's portrait touched millions of readers.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. He himself spoke candidly about the people he worked with and competed against.
His friends, foes, and colleagues offer an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.
His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
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Author(s): Simon Sinek
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Motivation
Description:
THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO INSPIRE OTHERS, AND ANYONE WHO WANTS TO FIND SOMEONE TO INSPIRE THEM.
Simon Sinek is leading a movement to build a world in which the vast majority of us are inspired by the work we do. Millions have already seen his video on TED.com about the importance of knowing why we do what we do. Start with Why takes the concept even deeper.
Any person or organization can explain what they do; some can explain how they are different or better; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not about money or profit – those are results.WHY is the thing that inspires us and inspires those around us.
From Martin Luther King, Jr. to Steve Jobs to the Wright Brothers, Start with Why shows that the leaders who inspire all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired and it all starts with WHY
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Author(s): Alfred Lansing
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Expeditions & Discovery World History
Description:
In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and set sail for Antarctica, where he planned to cross the last uncharted continent on foot. In January 1915, after battling its way through a thousand miles of pack ice and only a day's sail short of its destination, the Endurancebecame locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men.
For ten months the ice-moored Endurance drifted northwest before it was finally crushed between two ice floes. With no options left, Shackleton and a skeleton crew attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization. Their survival, and the survival of the men they left behind, depended on their small lifeboat successfully finding the island of South Georgia - a tiny dot of land in a vast and hostile ocean.
In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.
Author(s): Patrick Lencioni
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Business
Description:
Another extraordinary business fable from the New York Times bestselling author Patrick Lencioni
- Offers a key resource for gaining competitive advantage in tough times
- Shows why the quality of vulnerability is so important in business
- Includes ideas for inspiring customer and client loyalty
- Written by the highly successful consultant and business writer Patrick Lencioni
This new book in the popular Lencioni series shows what it takes to gain a real and lasting competitive edge.
Author(s): Bob Burg and John David Mann
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Business
Description:
"Most people just laugh when they hear that the secret to success is giving. . . . Then again, most people are nowhere near as successful as they wish they were."
The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. Desperate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by his many devotees simply as the Chairman.
Over the next week, Pindar introduces Joe to a series of "go-givers": a restaurateur, a CEO, a financial adviser, a real estate broker, and the "Connector" who brought them all together. Pindar's friends teach Joe the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success and help him open himself up to the power of giving.
Joe learns that changing his focus from getting to giving-putting others' interests first and continually adding value to their lives-ultimately leads to unexpected returns.
Imparted with wit and grace, The Go-Giver is a classic bestseller that brings to life the old proverb "Give and you shall receive."
Nearly a decade since its original publication, the term "go-giver" has become shorthand for a defining set of values embraced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Today this timeless story continues to help its readers find fulfillment and greater success in business, in their personal lives and in their communities.
This expanded edition includes the text of the original business parable, together with a foreword by Arianna Huffington, a new introduction, a discussion guide, and a Q&A with the authors.
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Author(s): Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Marketing & Sales
Description:
What's the secret to sales success? If you're like most business leaders, you'd say it's fundamentally about relationships-and you'd be wrong. The best salespeople don't just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.
The need to understand what top-performing reps are doing that their average performing colleagues are not drove Matthew Dixon, Brent Adamson, and their colleagues at Corporate Executive Board to investigate the skills, behaviors, knowledge, and attitudes that matter most for high performance. And what they discovered may be the biggest shock to conventional sales wisdom in decades.
Based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies,The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions. The authors' study found that every sales rep in the world falls into one of five distinct profiles, and while all of these types of reps can deliver average sales performance, only one-the Challenger- delivers consistently high performance.
Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challengers approach customers with unique insights about how they can save or make money. They tailor their sales message to the customer's specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer's every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.
The things that make Challengers unique are replicable and teachable to the average sales rep. Once you understand how to identify the Challengers in your organization, you can model their approach and embed it throughout your sales force. The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers' expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.
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Author(s): Michael E. Gerber
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Business
Description:
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. 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. He then 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.
Author(s): Cameron Herold
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Business
Description:
A step-by-step guide to enjoying the roller-coaster ride of growth -- while getting the most out of life as an entrepreneur. A growth-focused approach: The book is divided into three sections, which cover planning for fast growth, building a company for fast growth, and leading for fast growth. Each topic the author covers -- from creating a vision for the company's future to learning how to generate free PR for a developing company -- is squarely focused on the end goal: doubling the size of the entrepreneur's company in three years or less. A down-to-earth action plan: Herold's experienced-based advice never gets bogged down in generalities or theory. Instead, he offers a wealth of practical tips, including: How to design meetings for maximum efficiency; How to hire top-quality talent; How to grow in particularly tough markets; How to put together a board of advisors -- even for a smaller company; How even the busy entrepreneur can achieve a work/life balance.
Author(s): Steve J. Martin, Noah J Goldstein and Robert B. Cialdini
Suggested by: Jack Daly
Category: Management
Description:
At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - your boss, a co-worker, a customer, client, spouse, your kids, or even your friends. What is the smallest change you can make to your request, proposal or situation that will lead to the biggest difference in the outcome?
In The small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice -- Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini -- describe how, in today's information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences.
In the last few years more and more research - from fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and behavioral economics - has helped to uncover an even greater understanding of how influence, persuasion and behavior change happens. Increasingly we are learning that it is not information per se that leads people to make decisions, but the context in which that information is presented.
Drawing from extensive research in the new science of persuasion, the authors present lots of small changes (over 50 in fact) that can bring about momentous shifts in results. It turns out that anyone can significantly increase his or her ability to influence and persuade others, not by informing or educating people into change but instead by simply making small shifts in approach that link to deeply felt human motivations.
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