If you checked out our podcast this week, you'll know that we're about to begin our new 'book club' series next week! You'll also know that I highlighted 30 excellent books I've read from a plethora of categories that might help you, too! Today, I'm going to give you a brief overview, and tell you where to find, each book.
Books for Sales
Gap Selling: Getting the Customer to Yes
Gap Selling is a game-changing book designed to raise the sales IQ of selling organizations around the world. In his unapologetic and irreverent style, Keenan breaks down the tired old sales myths causing today's frustrating sales issues, to highlight a deceptively powerful new way to connect with buyers.
Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide for Starting Sales Conversations
Fanatical Prospecting gives salespeople, sales leaders, entrepreneurs, and executives a practical, eye-opening guide that clearly explains the why and how behind the most important activity in sales and business development: prospecting.
The Mindset of a Sales Warrior is your ticket to silence your inner critic and unleash the power within you now. Dive into 42 simple, easy-to-apply strategies, with FPG CEO Jason Forrest, and FPG President, Mary Marshall Forrest. You’ll join with some of the top entrepreneurs in the world to free your mind, so you can earn what you re truly worth. Each strategy comes with a powerful real-world application to bring each one to life with your real-life prospects in your industry today. It’s time to unleash the most authentic version of yourself.
Books for Self Improvement
Principles: Life and Work
Ray Dalio, one of the world's most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he's developed, refined, and used over the past 40 years to create unique results in both life and business - and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
The Power to Thrive!: Building the Foundations of a Thriving Career & Life
The Power to Thrive! draws on proven research to show how we all can reach beyond the superficial meaning of success to help us achieve a meaningful impact - in our homes, in our offices, and in everyday life. Kay provides the formula for achieving better results, fulfillment, and appreciation in everything we do.
Overcome: Crush Adversity with the Leadership Techniques of America's Toughest Warriors
Triumph over adversity using proven Special Operations habits and mindsets with this inspiring guide from retired Navy SEAL and New York Times best-selling author Jason Redman. Adversity can often catch you by surprise and leave you struggling with what to do next. What if you could confront any adversity, from the biggest challenges - the loss of your job, divorce, health issues, bankruptcy - to normal daily challenges - a late flight, a disappointing phone call, a missed promotion, a bad day - and not just survive it, but thrive afterwards?
2 Chairs: The Secret That Changes Everything
In this world you will have trouble. Count on it! It might be something small or something big, but you know you don't have an answer. You've come to a realization: There is a limit to what you can do alone. Bob Beaudine offers several practical steps to help you walk courageously, faithfully, and cheerfully through your trouble, whether it is a minor issue or a major crisis.
You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life
Packed with humor, inspiration, and advice, You Are a Badass is the number one New York Times best-selling self-help book that teaches you how to get better without getting busted.
In this refreshingly entertaining how-to guide, bestselling author and world-traveling success coach, Jen Sincero, serves up 27 bite-sized chapters full of hilariously inspiring stories, sage advice, easy exercises, and the occasional swear word.
The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work
Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive at work. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
Books for Business Improvement
The Walk-On Method To Career & Business Success: 31 Underdogs Who Became Extraordinary (And So Can You!)
The Walk-On Method features 31 underdog athletes who parlayed their college experience into habits that led to career and business success. While each walk-on’s individual path is unique, the mindset, skills, and behaviors they developed and the post-college outcomes they achieved are similarly remarkable. These athletes applied The Walk-On Method first to college football, basketball, rowing, golf, or track & field, and then they parlayed that behavior pattern into success in business ownership, engineering, coaching, law, finance, broadcasting, medicine, insurance, film, management, education, banking, acting, and ministry. These former walk-ons were behaving subconsciously, unaware that scrambling to make a college sports team and fighting to keep their roster spot was foundational to their life’s work. Going the extra mile in their profession is second nature, and they wonder why others don’t take that same (and seemingly obvious) path. Most people don’t realize they’re in control of their career trajectory. When we read about a successful person, their accomplishments are often painted as a one-in-a-billion anomaly, a lightning strike of genius or opportunity. This book destroys those myths one walk-on success story at a time and reveals this important reality: your professional success is within your control. Ordinary people will accomplish extraordinary feats when their energy is properly channeled. The Walk-On Method To Career & Business Success shows you how through inspiring stories and the proven five-step Walk-On Method.
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
In this intriguing business novel, which illustrates state-of-the-art economic theory, Alex Rogo is a UniCo plant manager whose factory and marriage are failing. To revitalize the plant, he follows piecemeal advice from an elusive former college professor who teaches, for example, that reduction in the efficiency of some plant operations may make the entire operation more productive. Alex's attempts to find the path to profitability and to engage his employees in the struggle involve the listener; and thankfully the authors' economic models, including a game with matchsticks and bowls, are easy to understand. Although some characters are as anonymous as the goods manufactured in the factory, others ring true. In addition, the tender story of Alex and his wife's separation and reconciliation makes a touching contrast to the rest of the book. Recommended for anyone with an interest in the state of the American economy.
Smart people do dumb things. Here's the proof: How much money would you have right now if I gave you the ability to unwind any three financial decisions you have ever made?
Years ago, after suffering a humiliatingly large dumb tax, it dawned on me that I have a seemingly unlimited ability to hit unforced errors and sabotage my business and financial success. I suspect you do, too. It turns out that the key to getting rich (and staying that way) is to avoid doing stupid things. I don't need to do more smart things. I just need to make fewer dumb mistakes. The vast majority of our dumb tax is a direct result of emotional, overly optimistic, and poorly thought out decisions. Every one of those three decisions you would love to unwind was an avoidable mistake.
The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure
Extreme success, by definition, lies beyond the realm of normal action. If you want to achieve extreme success, you can’t operate like everybody else and settle for mediocrity. You need to remove luck and chance from your business equation, and lock in massive success. The 10X Rule shows you how! Success is your duty, obligation and responsibility, and this audio book gives you step-by-step guidance on how to achieve phenomenal success for yourself!
Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It
If your company has lost the focus it once had, here are clear solutions for moving your organization back to its key service and discarding everything else. Ries, coauthor of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, gives clear examples from a variety of industries and demonstrates how crucial focus can be. Focus, he offers, is the key component to the successes of on-track companies such as Coca-Cola, Volvo, Sun Microsystems, and Little Caesars. He defines a new standard of corporate competitiveness for companies both big and small and passes on his extensive marketing experience and cutting-edge managerial advice. Get focused: your future depends on it.
Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies
In 1967 Charles Koch took the reins of his father's company and began the process of growing it from a $21 million start-up into a global corporation with revenues of about $115 billion, according to Forbes. So how did this MIT engineer manage to grow Koch Industries into one of the largest private companies in the world today, with growth exceeding that of the S&P 500 by almost 30-fold over the last five decades? Through his unique five-dimensional management process and system called Market-Based Management. Based on five decades of cross-disciplinary studies, experimental discovery, and practical implementation across Koch companies and their 100,000 employees worldwide, the core objective of Market-Based Management's framework is as simple as it is effective: to generate good profit.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
Built to Last, the defining management study of the '90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there those that convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? If so, what are the distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? Over five years, Jim Collins and his research team have analyzed the histories of 28 companies, discovering why some companies make the leap and others don't.
This beloved classic presents a principle-centered approach for solving both personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and practical anecdotes, Stephen R. Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity - principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.
When I was a young manager, I thought I understood the importance of hiring top-notch people. Then, at age 32, I got cancer. Being forced to step away from my co-workers for an extended period of time (with one of the options being stepping away forever) made me realize that the people you hire truly make or break your business. In Hire Like You Just Beat Cancer, you'll read short, easy-to-digest chapters filled with detailed examples and time-tested best practices that you can implement immediately at your organization. The lessons I learned when cancer knocked me down helped build me up as a hiring manager, and I apply those lessons aggressively every time I interview a potential employee.
Books for Marketing
Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen
Donald Miller's StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides listeners with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching listeners the seven universal story points all humans respond to, the real reason customers make purchases, how to simplify a brand message so people understand it, and how to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media.
Books for Communications
ROE Powers ROI: The Ultimate Way to Think and Communicate for Ridiculous Results
A common sense guide to thinking and communication styles that will help readers improve business performance. Business is complicated even in the best of times. We are not in the best of times, and it’s more complicated than ever. ROE Powers ROI de-complicates business and provides for clear insight at every level of its organization. As a business owners, consultant, and advisor, Michael has had the advantage of observing both successful and failed businesses and comparing results from the experience. He brings his own empirical, science-based approach to simplify business utilizing the ROE Methodology. ROE, or Return on EnergyTM, was developed to get the right people into the right seats and maximize your organization’s success, or return on investment.
Books on Business Operating Systems
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you? In Traction, you’ll learn the secrets of strengthening the six key components of your business. You’ll discover simple yet powerful ways to run your company that will give you and your leadership team more focus, more growth, and more enjoyment. Successful companies are applying Traction every day to run profitable, frustration-free businesses - and you can too.
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't
It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture.
Business Made Simple: 60 Days to Master Leadership, Sales, Marketing, Execution, Management, Personal Productivity and More
Is this blue book more valuable than a business degree?
Most people enter their professional careers not understanding how to grow a business. At times, this makes them feel lost or, worse, like a fraud pretending to know what they’re doing. It’s hard to be successful without a clear understanding of how business works. These 60 daily entries are crucial for any professional or business owner who wants to take their career to the next level. New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-selling author Donald Miller knows that business is more than just a good idea made profitable - it’s a system of unspoken rules, rarely taught by MBA schools. If you are attempting to profitably grow your business or career, you need elite business knowledge - knowledge that creates tangible value.
Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine
The author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability. Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: sales - expenses = profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.
Books on Leadership
Radical Candor: Fully Revised & Updated Edition: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity
Featuring a new preface, afterword, and Radically Candid performance-review bonus chapter, the fully revised and updated edition of Radical Candor is packed with even more guidance to help you improve your relationships at work. The idea is simple: You don't have to choose between being a pushover and a jerk. Using Radical Candor - avoiding the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy - you can be kind and clear at the same time.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving - every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.
Books on Transitioning
This business fable is set in the magnificence of Glacier National Park as a successful business owner celebrates with his deal team, one year after the successful sale of his business. The Seller's Journey presents a philosophy that will help you or your clients sell their company with integrity, humanity and understanding - of your own needs, behavior and emotions and those of the others involved in the process. Transition expert Denise Logan offers the only credible solution to tackling one of the most significant causes of deal failure - seller's remorse. This counter-intuitive approach will measurable turn the dial on the ratio of deals that reach successful conclusion and will dramatically improve any owner's journey to and through the successful sale of their business. The Seller's Journey unravels the emotion-fueled obstacles to closing a sale and shows us how to resolve them. This book is a must read for both business owners and their advisors as they navigate one of the most vexing chapters in their lives as they sell their business. Advisors who understand that a business owner's transition is more than a transaction will buy this book by the truckload and change the world one deal at a time.
Walking to Destiny: 11 Actions An Owner MUST Take to Rapidly Grow Value & Unlock Wealth
For Business Owners. By a Business Owner. Walking to Destiny is not only your essential resource to understand what makes your business attractive and ready for transition; it is a business owner's handbook to know HOW TO rapidly grow value and ultimately unlock the personal wealth trapped in your most significant financial asset: Your Business.
Maximize Business Value: Begin with the Exit in Mind
Most business owners run their businesses without giving business value much thought. Building business value and ultimately transitioning that business is a process that is very different from running a business. Roughly 83 percent of businesses that attempt a transition never complete a transaction. That means that only 17 percent of business owners exit successfully - and most of those have one thing in common. They are prepared. This book provides the road map business owners need to build massive value and start moving toward a successful transition.