Resources for Humans:
Hot List: Bestselling “Management and Leadership” books on Amazon.com
Mon, 07/26/2010 - 11:41Amazon.com updates its list of the bestselling books every hour. Here is a snapshot of what is hot right now, this Monday morning, July 26, in the “Management and Leadership” section of the “Business and Investing” category.
1. Doing Both: How Cisco Captures Today’s Profit and Drives Tomorrow’s Growth by Inder Sidhu. Cisco’s Senior Vice President encourages readers to look at every decision as an opportunity to seize, not a sacrifice to endure.
2. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh. The visionary CEO of Zappos explains how an emphasis on corporate culture can lead to unprecedented success.
3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. A groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas.
4. StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath. Are you unsure where your true talents lie? Do you feel that you are both a person who gets things done and someone who offers penetrating analysis? Well, you can discover whether you are truly an “achiever” or an “analytical” by completing the online quiz. Then, the book will give you “ideas for action” and tips for how best you can work with others. More of a patiencetester than Strengthsfinder, the quiz/book is probably best for those who have lots of time on their hands.
5. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell The best-selling author of Outliers: The Story of Success and Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking defines a tipping point as a sociological term: “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point.” The book seeks to explain and describe the “mysterious” sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, “Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do.” The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the precipitous drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990.
6. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell. Blink is about the first two seconds of looking–the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of Outliers: The Story of Success and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling.
7. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Fried and Hansson argue that plans are actually harmful, you don’t need outside investors, and you’re better off ignoring the competition.
8. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. The author of A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future says the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today’s world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
9. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. The author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Collins concludes that it is possible for a good company to become a great company, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11–including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo–and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success.
10. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. Methods for reducing stress and increasing performance.
Categories: Blogs
Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
Wed, 07/21/2010 - 09:00Employment law attorney Michael Maslanka reviews the book Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd: Succeeding in a World Where Conformity Reigns but Exceptions Rule by Youngme Moon.
Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon has turned out one of the best-written business books I’ve read in a long time. Her big idea: Companies compete by imitating each another. The more they compete, the more alike they become. Example: McDonald’s offers fancy coffee; Starbucks offers breakfast. As companies ape one another, the products they offer become more of a commodity, meaning the price that can be charged goes down, not up.
Moon nails it when she discusses the mentality of the average consumer: “Once consumers realize that all airlines offer frequent flier programs, that all detergents offer enhanced stain-fighting, that all companies offer good warranties, they have less reason to be picky in their selections.” She says that the remedy is to make a consumer’s expectations irrelevant. Provide them an alternate reality, not the expected one. Look at Google ― it didn’t clutter its home page; it kept it clean. Ikea tossed the traditional idea of home delivery and turned customer expectations on their head by providing a beautiful showroom (not massive warehouses), on-site childcare, and a cafeteria that serves excellent Swedish meatballs for less than the price of a Big Mac.
Moon has produced a wonderful, extraordinarily well-written book. She makes an interesting point at the end, stating that nobody knows “the way.” Why? Because we’re dealing with human beings. She writes:
I’ve decided it’s not that the truth is elusive, it’s that it is liquid. It comes at you from all sides, swinging at you from every possible angle. What this means is that the danger for the scholar is not in confusing what is true with what is false, it’s in allowing yourself to get seduced into thinking that’s it’s possible to be definitive about anything. Because when it comes to human behavior, the truth is more expansive than that. When it comes to human behavior, the truth is an ocean.
Michael Maslanka is the managing partner of Ford & Harrison LLP’s Dallas, Texas, office. He has 20 years of experience in litigation and trial of employment law cases. He is the editor of Texas Employment Law Letter, and he also authors the “Work Matters” blog for Texas Lawyer.
Categories: Blogs
Hot List: New York Times Bestselling Hardcover Business Books
Mon, 07/19/2010 - 10:04The following is a list of the bestselling hardcover business books as ranked by the New York Times on July 19.
1. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. The people who saw the real estate crash coming and made billions from their foresight.
2. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. Why some people succeed — it has to do with luck and opportunities as well as talent — from the author of Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
3. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. How everyday people can effect transformative change at work and in life.
4.The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: The Four Forgotten Needs That Energize Great Performance by Tony Schwartz with Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy. Advice on re-energizing and re-engaging yourself on the job and off.
5. Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. How the global financial system broke down in 2008, and what may happen if new regulations are not embraced.
6. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink. What really motivates people is the quest for autonomy, mastery and purpose, not external rewards.
7. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss. Because life isn’t all about work.
8. 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. A call for the restructuring of the banking industry.
9. Strengths-Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. Three keys to being a more effective leader.
10. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Counterintuitive rules for small-business success, like “Ignore the details early on” and “Good enough is fine.”
11. The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey. Debt reduction and fiscal fitness for families, by the radio talk-show host.
12. The End of Wall Street by Roger Lowenstein. A journalist’s account of the financial collapse, from origins to bailout.
13. How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff. Through wit, humor and illustrations, the complex financial system is explained.
14. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves by Andrew Ross Sorkin. The 2008 financial implosion on Wall Street and in Washington, by a New York Times reporter and columnist.
15. SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. A scholar and a journalist apply economic thinking to everything: the sequel.
Categories: Blogs
