Business Life Books

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs

Craig Stull, Phil Myers, David Meerman Scott

Amazon Price: $15.37 List Price: $27.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Wiley Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $10.50

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Marketing & Sales -> Marketing -> Product Management
Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Marketing & Sales -> Sales & Selling

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Tuned In argues that the key to business success lies in understanding and connecting with what consumers and markets want most. Being tuned in to the needs of buyers, whether those needs are expressed outwardly or not, is the ultimate secret to creating and marketing products and services that people want to buy. For anyone who markets a product, service, or ideas in any business, industry, or organization, Tuned In delivers a simple six-step process for discovering real and deep insights into any market: finding unsolved problems, understanding buyer personas, quantifying impact, creating breakthrough experiences, articulating powerful ideas, and establishing sustainable connections. Tuned In shows readers how to stop guessing what consumers need and stop wasting time and money building, marketing, and selling solutions that the market doesn't value. This insightful book shows readers how to connect with their market in order to create products and services that truly resonate with people.

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Timothy Ferriss

Amazon Price: $11.97 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Crown Amazon Marketplace: 75 new & used starting at $7.99

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Self-Help -> Success

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Total reviews: 708 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

“I race motorcycles in Europe.”
“I ski in the Andes.”
“I scuba dive in Panama.”
“I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

• How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
• How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
• How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
• How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent "mini-retirements"
• What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income
• How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair
• What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks
• How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet
• What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are
• How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off
• How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

You can have it all—really.

StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths

Tom Rath

Amazon Price: $11.97 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Gallup Press Amazon Marketplace: 84 new & used starting at $8.49

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Management & Leadership -> Management

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DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT YOU DO BEST EVERY DAY?

Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents.

In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself -- and the world around you -- forever.

AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE NEW & UPGRADED EDITION OF STRENGTHSFINDER 2.0
(using the unique access code included with each book)

* A new and upgraded edition of the StrengthsFinder assessment

* A personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide for applying your strengths in the next week, month, and year

* A more customized version of your top five theme report

* 50 Ideas for Action (10 strategies for building on each of your top five themes)

* The more user-friendly StrengthsFinder 2.0 companion website, with a strengths community area, library of downloadable discussion guides and activities, a strengths screensaver, and a program for creating display cards of your top five themes

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

David Allen

Amazon Price: $9.00 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin (Non-Classics) Amazon Marketplace: 142 new & used starting at $5.48

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Skills -> Time Management
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Mental Health

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 432 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow," "mind like water," and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.

Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-do's clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organized, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines. (To wit, Allen, whom the New Economy bible Fast Company has dubbed "the personal productivity guru," suggests that instead of meditating on crouching tigers and hidden dragons while you wait for a plane, you should unsheathe that high-tech saber known as the cell phone and attack that list of calls you need to return.)

As whole-life-organizing systems go, Allen's is pretty good, even fun and therapeutic. It starts with the exhortation to take every unaccounted-for scrap of paper in your workstation that you can't junk, The next step is to write down every unaccounted-for gotta-do cramming your head onto its own scrap of paper. Finally, throw the whole stew into a giant "in-basket"

That's where the processing and prioritizing begin; in Allen's system, it get a little convoluted at times, rife as it is with fancy terms, subterms, and sub-subterms for even the simplest concepts. Thank goodness the spine of his system is captured on a straightforward, one-page flowchart that you can pin over your desk and repeatedly consult without having to refer back to the book. That alone is worth the purchase price. Also of value is Allen's ingenious Two-Minute Rule: if there's anything you absolutely must do that you can do right now in two minutes or less, then do it now, thus freeing up your time and mind tenfold over the long term. It's commonsense advice so obvious that most of us completely overlook it, much to our detriment; Allen excels at dispensing such wisdom in this useful, if somewhat belabored, self-improver aimed at everyone from CEOs to soccer moms (who we all know are more organized than most CEOs to start with). --Timothy Murphy

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton

Amazon Price: $19.80 List Price: $30.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Free Press Amazon Marketplace: 398 new & used starting at $1.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 323 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Effectively managing personnel--as well as one's own behavior--is an extraordinarily complex task that, not surprisingly, has been the subject of countless books touting what each claims is the true path to success. That said, Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton's Now, Discover Your Strengths does indeed propose a unique approach: focusing on enhancing people's strengths rather than eliminating their weaknesses. Following up on the coauthors' popular previous book, First, Break All the Rules, it fully describes 34 positive personality themes the two have formulated (such as Achiever, Developer, Learner, and Maximizer) and explains how to build a "strengths-based organization" by capitalizing on the fact that such traits are already present among those within it.

Most original and potentially most revealing, however, is a Web-based interactive component that allows readers to complete a questionnaire developed by the Gallup Organization and instantly discover their own top-five inborn talents. This device provides a personalized window into the authors' management philosophy which, coupled with subsequent advice, places their suggestions into the kind of practical context that's missing from most similar tomes. "You can't lead a strengths revolution if you don't know how to find, name and develop your own," write Buckingham and Clifton. Their book encourages such introspection while providing knowledgeable guidance for applying its lessons. --Howard Rothman

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life

Spencer Johnson

Amazon Price: $13.57 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: G. P. Putnam's Sons Amazon Marketplace: 1083 new & used starting at $1.29

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1445 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Change can be a blessing or a curse, depending on your perspective. The message of Who Moved My Cheese? is that all can come to see it as a blessing, if they understand the nature of cheese and the role it plays in their lives. Who Moved My Cheese? is a parable that takes place in a maze. Four beings live in that maze: Sniff and Scurry are mice--nonanalytical and nonjudgmental, they just want cheese and are willing to do whatever it takes to get it. Hem and Haw are "littlepeople," mouse-size humans who have an entirely different relationship with cheese. It's not just sustenance to them; it's their self-image. Their lives and belief systems are built around the cheese they've found. Most of us reading the story will see the cheese as something related to our livelihoods--our jobs, our career paths, the industries we work in--although it can stand for anything, from health to relationships. The point of the story is that we have to be alert to changes in the cheese, and be prepared to go running off in search of new sources of cheese when the cheese we have runs out.

Dr. Johnson, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and many other books, presents this parable to business, church groups, schools, military organizations--anyplace where you find people who may fear or resist change. And although more analytical and skeptical readers may find the tale a little too simplistic, its beauty is that it sums up all natural history in just 94 pages: Things change. They always have changed and always will change. And while there's no single way to deal with change, the consequence of pretending change won't happen is always the same: The cheese runs out. --Lou Schuler

What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

Marshall Goldsmith, Mark Reiter

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hyperion Amazon Marketplace: 67 new & used starting at $11.98

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 180 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

If you're thinking of buying this book... 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

... do it! This book was a real eye-opener for me on how a successful person can hit her own developmental 'tipping-point'. Using Marshall's checklist of twenty habits, I was shocked to discover I have performed at least twelve of the twenty! Thank you Marshall for the self awareness and the roadmap to help me get out of my own way.

If you want practical advice, with tangible next steps to take you to the next level in your career, I highly recommend this book.

Editorial Review:

America's most sought-after executive coach shows how to climb the last few rungs of the ladderThe corporate world is filled with executives, men and women who have worked hard for years to reach the upper levels of management. They're intelligent, skilled, and even charismatic. But only a handful of them will ever reach the pinnacle -- and as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith shows in this book, subtle nuances make all the difference. These are small "transactional flaws" performed by one person against another (as simple as not saying thank you enough), which lead to negative perceptions that can hold any executive back. Using Goldsmith's straightforward, jargonfree advice, it's amazingly easy behavior to change.Executives who hire Goldsmith for one-on-one coaching pay $250,000 for the privilege. With this book, his help is available for 1/10,000th of the price.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

Amazon Price: $19.77 List Price: $29.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvard Business School Press Amazon Marketplace: 43 new & used starting at $16.00

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Total reviews: 29 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you ll learn how to:



-Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge

-Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas

-Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy

-Build social technologies into your business including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers

Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company s public image.

"Groundswell is jammed with big ideas, useful stories, and quotable stats. This is the new industrial revolution. Are you on board?"

-Seth Godin, author, Meatball Sundae

"This book will rock your world, if social technology hasn't rocked it already. It's a tsunami of unstoppable force. Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, Google, and Dell are profiting from the crest of the wave. Are you? Li and Bernoff are the apostles of the tsunami. This book will be your bible."

-Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.

-Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines

"The first phase of the Internet was about getting everyone connected. In this next phase, which changes the way we work, live, play, and learn, we re starting to realize the value of those connections as well as the new communications and experiences those interactions lead to the human network. Groundswell effectively documents this shift and underscores the opportunities available to all from this major market transition."

-John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

"Heed the Groundswell! It's critical reading and helped us master the new dynamics of social media."

-Christina Norman, President, MTV

"Groundswell is a comprehensive look at the tidal wave of change engulfing marketers. Nobody should attempt to engage the newly empowered and emboldened consumer without first hearing what Li and Bernoff have to say on the subject."

-Clark Kokich, CEO, Avenue A | Razorfish

"Social technologies and the groundswell impact every business and organization worldwide. Li and Bernoff have written an insightful book that takes a refreshing research-driven approach to helping businesses transform themselves and successfully navigate this new dynamic landscape."

-Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital, and columnist for Advertising Age

The SPEED of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything

Stephen M.R. Covey

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Free Press Amazon Marketplace: 31 new & used starting at $9.08

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 58 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Trusting the Speed of Trust 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

When I read 'Speed of Trust' I had many "ah hah" moments. Either I had just read an explanation for something that had bothered me in the past, or I understood just why I had trusted someone or that person had trusted me. For both the realizations of what worked in the past and the realizations having to do with things that had not worked and why, this book is fabulous! It also pointed out to my just why trust is so essential, and why some relationships are absolutely doomed to failure -- because the trust levels don't match. This book is not about blame, it's about what is and what a person can do to create more trust (provided that is what you want). I recommend it very highly!

Editorial Review:

From Stephen R. Covey's eldest son comes a revolutionary new path towards productivity and satisfaction. Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high-performance, successful organization.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time-killing, bureaucratic check-and-balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller--Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century

Napoleon Hill, Arthur Pell

Amazon Price: $8.00 List Price: $10.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Tarcher Amazon Marketplace: 51 new & used starting at $5.60

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Total reviews: 43 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The bestselling success book of all time is updated and revised with contemporary ideas and examples.

Think and Grow Rich has been called the "Granddaddy of All Motivational Literature." It was the first book to boldly ask, "What makes a winner?" The man who asked and listened for the answer, Napoleon Hill, is now counted in the top ranks of the world's winners himself.

The most famous of all teachers of success spent "a fortune and the better part of a lifetime of effort" to produce the "Law of Success" philosophy that forms the basis of his books and that is so powerfully summarized in this one.

In the original Think and Grow Rich, published in 1937, Hill draws on stories of Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and other millionaires of his generation to illustrate his principles. In the updated version, Arthur R. Pell, Ph.D., a nationally known author, lecturer, and consultant in human resources management and an expert in applying Hill's thought, deftly interweaves anecdotes of how contemporary millionaires and billionaires, such as Bill Gates, Mary Kay Ash, Dave Thomas, and Sir John Templeton, achieved their wealth. Outmoded or arcane terminology and examples are faithfully refreshed to preclude any stumbling blocks to a new generation of readers.