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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 230 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas–business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others–struggle to make their ideas “stick.”

Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the “human scale principle,” using the “Velcro Theory of Memory,” and creating “curiosity gaps.”

In this indispensable guide, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds–from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony–draw their power from the same six traits.

Made to Stick is a book that will transform the way you communicate ideas. It’s a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures)–the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of “the Mother Teresa Effect”; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice. Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas–and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.


From the Hardcover edition.

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

Mark Reiter

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 205 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

What’s holding you back? Your hard work is paying off. You are doing well in your field. But there is something standing between you and the next level of achievement. Perhaps one small flaw–a behavior you barely even recognize–is the only thing that’s keeping you from where you want to be.

Who can help? Marshall Goldsmith is an expert at helping global leaders overcome their sometimes unconscious annoying habits and attain a higher level of success. His one-on-one coaching comes with a six-figure price tag. But, in this audiobook, you get Marshall’s great advice without the hefty fee!

What is the solution? The Harvard Business Review asked Goldsmith, “What is the most common problem faced by the executives that you coach?” Inside, he answers this question by discussing not only the key beliefs of successful leaders, but also the behaviors that hold them back. He addresses the fundamental problems that often come with success–and offers ways to attack these problems. Goldsmith outlines twenty habits commonly found in the corporate environment and provides a systematic approach to helping you achieve a positive change in behavior.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 391 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fooled by Probabilities 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

The ideas in this book have created more controversy than they deserve, and it might have something to do with the title of the book. Given the number of people who equate "random" with "equiprobable", "Fooled by Probabilities" would have been a more appropriate title for the book, though not as provocative as "Fooled by Randomness". There is a finite chance that there is a black cat in every dark room, but when you switch the light on, there is no black cat in the room. Both are correct statements - mathematically and practically. This book must be read in the same light.

It seems to me that the transition from an average to good investor (probabilistically speaking) happens as soon as you internalize the concept of expected values and invest by it. My favorite story from the book is where Taleb is asked which way the market is expected to go next week, and he says slightly up with a high probability (70%). Then someone intervened that Taleb had just made a big bet on the S&P going down next week, and he said that indeed he did. The one lesson this book teaches is that the two statements are not inconsistent with each other. 70% chance of a +1% change and 30% chance of a -10% change sums upto -2.3, a strongly negative expected value. Good investors always shadow the expected value (trend and magnitude), although market sentiments are always driven by either the expected trend of upward or downward movement, or expected magnitude of upward and downward movement.


Four key insights that I received from the book about how we all get fooled by probabilities in our everyday lives are the firehouse effect, survivorship bias, endowment effect and Wittgenstein's ruler. Firehouse effect is characterized by a clique of people with much downtime (firemen) who end up strongly agreeing with each other about things that would seem incorrect to any rational observer - something that many investors suffer from. The survivorship bias talks about exclusion of failures from "objective" after-the-fact performance studies - something that many business books suffer from. Endowment effect suggests that people value something more after they own it or get familiar with it - something that many businesses suffer from. Wittgenstein's ruler says that when an unreliable ruler is used to measure a table, the table is measuring the ruler and not the other way around. Reliability of the ruler determines what is being measured - something that consumer reviews and stock recommendations suffer from. For these and many such, read Fooled by Randomness.

Editorial Review:

“[Taleb is] Wall Street’s principal dissident. . . . [Fooled By Randomness] is to conventional Wall Street wisdom approximately what Martin Luther’s ninety-nine theses were to the Catholic Church.”
–Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker

Finally in paperback, the word-of-mouth sensation that will change the way you think about the markets and the world.This book is about luck: more precisely how we perceive luck in our personal and professional experiences.

Set against the backdrop of the most conspicuous forum in which luck is mistaken for skill–the world of business–Fooled by Randomness is an irreverent, iconoclastic, eye-opening, and endlessly entertaining exploration of one of the least understood forces in all of our lives.

Now, Discover Your Strengths

Donald O. Clifton

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 336 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Most Americans do not know what their strengths are. When you ask them, they look at you with a blank stare, or they respond in terms of subject knowledge, which is the wrong answer."

-- Peter Drucker

Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths. Instead, guided by our parents, our teachers, our managers and psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.

At the heart of Now, Discover Your Strengths, is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success.

This audiobook contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder® Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful themes. Once you know which themes you lead with, you can leverage them for powerful results for personal development, for management success, and for the success of the organization.

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

Amazon Price: $19.79 List Price: $29.99 Not yet published By: Simon & Schuster Audio

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 82 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Small changes can make a big difference in your powers of persuasion

What one word can you start using today to increase your persuasiveness by more than fifty percent?

Which item of stationery can dramatically increase people's responses to your requests?

How can you win over your rivals by inconveniencing them?

Why does knowing that so many dentists are named Dennis improve your persuasive prowess?

Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, it is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction. Based on more than sixty years of research into the psychology of persuasion, Yes! reveals fifty simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too.

Cowritten by the world's most quoted expert on influence, Professor Robert Cialdini, Yes! presents dozens of surprising discoveries from the science of persuasion in short, enjoyable, and insightful chapters that you can apply immediately to become a more effective persuader. Why did a sign pointing out the problem of vandalism in the Petrified Forest National Park actually increase the theft of pieces of petrified wood? Why did sales of jam multiply tenfold when consumers were offered many fewer flavors? Why did people prefer a Mercedes immediately after giving reasons why they prefer a BMW? What simple message on cards left in hotel rooms greatly increased the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways?

Often counterintuitive, the findings presented in Yes! will steer you away from common pitfalls while empowering you with little known but proven wisdom.

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.

Blood Brothers (Sign of Seven) (Sign of Seven)

Nora Roberts

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 132 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Every seven years, on the seventh day of the seventh month, strange things happen. It began when three young boys - Caleb, Fox, and Gage - went on a camping trip to the Pagan Stone. And twenty-one years later, it will end in a showdown between evil and the boys who have become men - and the women who love them…

This modern-day legend draws reporter and author Quinn Black to Hawkins Hollow with the hope of making the eerie happening the subject of her new book. It is only February, but Caleb Hawkins, descendent of the town founders, has already seen and felt the stirrings of evil. Though he can never forget the beginning of the terror in the woods twenty-one years ago, the signs have never been this strong before. Cal will need the help of his best friends, Fox and Gage, but surprisingly he must rely on Quinn as well. She, too, can see the evil that the locals cannot, somehow connecting her to the town – and to Cal. As winter turns to spring, Cal and Quinn will shed their inhibitions, surrendering to a growing desire. They will form the cornerstone of a group of men and women bound by fate, passion, and the fight against what is to come from out of the darkness…

Merle's Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog

Ted Kerasote

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 190 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A Book Every Dog Lover Will Enjoy. 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I bought Merle's Door because the sub-title "Lessons from a Freethinking Dog" caught my eye. I was in Pet Smart buying a bag of Eukaneuba kibble for my nine-month old Standard Schnauzer puppy named Otto, who is about as freethinking a dog as you are ever going to meet.

Ted Kerasote leads the reader/dog owner-lover on a wonderful adventure into the hidden life of dogs; not simply "what dogs think," from a Pavlovian standpoint, but why dogs are the way they are.

On more than one occasion, this book brought a smile to my face, or tears to my eyes as I learned something new about dogs. This book will bring you closer to your companion animal in a way you never dreamed possible. Dogs are a lot more than pets we shape, mold, and train to our liking; they can be companions with whom we can connnect and share experiences with, if we will let dogs be themselves.

Editorial Review:

A deeply touching portrait of a remarkable animal, Merle's Door explores the issues that all animals and their human companions face as their lives intertwine. Author Ted Kerasote presents the latest research into animal behavior as well as the origins and evolution of human-dog interaction. Kerasote's adopted Labrador mix, Merle, showed the author how dogs might live were they free; the author suggests how they should be allowed to live and the doors that should always remain open to them.

Economic Facts and Fallacies

Sowell, Thomas

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Further your economic education 4 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I decided that as a responsible citizen I should try to learn a few things about economics. I found that this book is a great aid in that endeavor. Dr. Sowell is a master in making the complex principles of economics easy for the layman. Although my favorite is his book, "Basic Economics," this book is an excellent further examination into some of the principles he brought up in that one. My favorites here were the chapters on college education, income disparity, and the third world. For those that wonder about some of the economic statistics that are so easily thrown around by the media--Dr. Sowell takes some of them on and clearly shows where they are wrong. Every informed citizen should read this book!

Required Reading for candidates 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

My fantasy of having great wealth is to start a foundation that would give a book a week to every member of Congress, every state legislator, every government policymaker, every opinion columnist and every candidate. This would be the second book we'd give out. First would be Sowell's "Basic Economics." Yes, it might not do any good. I recently cited to a newspaper columnist Sowell's history of what happens to government revenues when you increase the Capital Gains tax (hint: the opposite of what's expected). The columnist told me those were "right wing facts" and he wasn't interested in any facts that supported business. Really. Too many people want to discard any facts that don't support their cherished illusions, preferring comfortable lies, which is why politicians of both parties get elected promising to do things that sound good, but hurt the majority of people they claim to be helping.

Reading Thomas Sowell would at least make it harder for them to do with a straight face. And if every voter read Sowell, it would be much harder for politicians to pander to their uninformed prejudice.

Editorial Review:

In this lively primer, Thomas Sowell exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues, including many that are widely disseminated in the media and by politicians.

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

Guy Kawasaki

Amazon Price: $50.39 List Price: $79.99 Not yet published By: Tantor Media

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 25 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Initial Review -- 14 Pages Into Guy's "Reality Check" 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

I'm just 14 pages into Guy Kawasaki's "Reality Check" and am now as certain as ever about my 28 years "under the hood" and 16 years altruistic fanaticism.

Lovin' it. Fantastic reference (will read it cover to cover).

Very timely.

(full followup-review to come)

Unless you are my competition, read this book! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

In the world of business books there are just a few that stand out as premier resources that should be re-read again and again. Reality Check is the newcomer to that category. I'm currently reading through it for the third time so by now the pages in my copy have been dog-eared, written on and so forth. There are a lot of excellent books out there but most will serve you well by finding them at your local library, read once, and return. Not Reality Check - this one must be owned. I hope it will be as helpful to you as it has been to me.

Editorial Review:

Venture capitalist and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki, the author of the bestselling The Art of the Start, has compiled his best wit, wisdom, and contrarian opinions to show listeners how to ignore fads and foolishness while sticking to commonsense practices.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Ori Brafman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Like the bestsellers Blink and Freakonomics, this lively narrative is a fresh view of the world, explaining the previously inexplicable and revealing hidden influences on human decision-making.

A Harvard Business School student pays over $200 for a $20 bill. Washington, DC, commuters ignore a free subway concert by a violin prodigy. A veteran airline pilot attempts to take off without control tower clearance and collides with another plane on the runway. Why do we do the wildly irrational things we sometimes do?

Drawing on cutting-edge research from the fields of social psychology, behavioral economics, and organizational behavior, brothers Ori and Rom Brafman reveal the dynamic forces that act on us repeatedly over time, affecting nearly every aspect of our personal and business lives. They show how we are sabotaged by loss aversion (going to great lengths to avoid perceived losses), the diagnosis bias (ignoring evidence that contradicts our initial take on a person or situation), and commitment (even when a plan isn't working, we are reluctant to change course). Weaving together colorful stories— about dot-com millionaires, game show audiences, NBA coaches, and the US Supreme Court—Sway tours the flip side of reason and points us toward a more rational life.