One of my greatest mentor’s Jim Rohn said “Earners are Learners and if you want to grow your income, then you need to grow yourself.” So here are my recommendations for must read books in 2016 and trust you will find them full of rich content to help you grow personally and professionally in the coming year.
Rookie Smarts
by Liz Wiseman
Is it possible to be at your best even when you are underqualified or doing something for the first time? Is it still possible, even after decades of experience, to recapture the enthusiasm, curiosity, and fearlessness of youth to take on new challenges? With the right mindset—with Rookie Smarts—you can.
In a rapidly changing world, experience can be a curse. Careers stall, innovation stops, and strategies grow stale. Being new, naïve, and even clueless can be an asset. For today’s knowledge workers, constant learning is more valuable than mastery.
In this essential guide, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explains how to reclaim and cultivate this curious, flexible, youthful mindset called Rookie Smarts. She argues that the most successful rookies are hunter-gatherers—alert and seeking, cautious but quick like firewalkers, and hungry and relentless like pioneers. Most importantly, she identifies a breed of leaders she refers to as “perpetual rookies.” Despite years of experience, they retain their rookie smarts, thinking and operating with the mindsets and practices of these high-performing rookies.
Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: “Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up?” The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie.
Rookie Smarts isn’t just for professionals seeking personal renewal; it is an indispensible resource for all leaders who must ensure their workforces remains vital and competitive.
Overworked and Overwhelmed
by Scott Eblin
Leverage mindful awareness and intention to achieve better outcomes.
Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative offers practical insights for the executive, manager, or professional who feels like their RPM is maxed out in the red zone. By making the concepts and practices of mindfulness simple, practical and applicable, this audiobook offers actionable hope for today’s overworked and overwhelmed professional. New research shows that the smartphone equipped professional is connected to work 72 hours a week. Forty-eight percent of Americans report that their stress level is up and that the number one source of stress is the job pressure of a 24/7 world. What’s the alternative? Top leadership coach and educator Scott Eblin offers one in Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. While mindfulness is one of the “Top Ten Trends for 2014 and Beyond”, many professionals think it’s just too hard to give it a try.
In this book, Eblin shows that mindfulness that makes a difference doesn’t require meditating like a Buddhist monk. Overworked and Overwhelmed is a handbook for more mindful work and living that offers:
• “Must know” mindfulness basics that today’s professional needs to thrive in a 24/7 world.
• Inspiring examples of mindfulness in action from dozens of leaders ranging from a U.S. Coast Guard Commandant to the CEO of Hilton Worldwide.
• A self-assessment for listeners to understand how they perform at their best.
• Simple routines to reduce stress and sustain peak performance.
• A personal planning framework for creating the outcomes that matter most at home, at work, and in the community.
Even small increases in mindfulness can lead to big changes in productivity and quality of life for the overworked and overwhelmed professional. Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative is a guide for doing just that.
Bringing Strategy Back
by Jeffrey Sampler
Reconsider Strategy and Make Planning Relevant In Bringing Strategy Back, strategy expert Jeffrey Sampler cuts through the clutter to reveal exactly why the usual tools of strategy are so sorely out of sync with our needs: windows of opportunity close far faster than they once did, many of these opportunities are smaller than they once were, growth rates are uneven across markets, and today’s competition is more asymmetrical than ever. The upshot for managers is that they need to reorient their approach to absorb the shocks and surprises that strike at a moment’s notice. Only then can strategic planning reliably play its part.
Leaders all around the world at organizations of any size and type will benefit by shedding their obsolete notions about strategy and becoming more resilient. Bringing Strategy Back rises to the challenge and presents a new prescriptive model. It introduces four “strategic shock absorbers” that enable leaders to build resilient organizations that can withstand even the most unexpected global turbulence. Based on the author’s in-depth research in the world’s most tempestuous markets, the model delivers several must-have qualities that interact and work together in an ongoing process: Accuracy, Agility, Momentum, and Foresight. With this new framework, Bringing Strategy Backshows how to be prepared and proactive, rather than reactive, even when the future is uncertain.
The 5 Choices
by Kory Kogon, Adam Merrill & Leena Rinne
The time management experts at FranklinCovey share their five critical techniques for avoiding distractions and paying focused attention to our most important goals and tasks in our daily lives.
Every day brings us a crushing wave of demands: a barrage of texts, emails, interruptions, meetings, phone calls, tweets, blogs—not to mention the high-pressure demands of our jobs—that can be overwhelming and exhausting. The sheer number of distractions can threaten our ability to think clearly, make good decisions, and accomplish what matters most, leaving us worn out and unfulfilled.
Now FranklinCovey offers powerful insights drawn from the latest neuroscience and decades of experience and research in the time-management field to help you master your attention and energy management through five fundamental choices that will increase your ability to achieve what matters most to you. The 5 Choices is time management redefined for the twenty-first century: it increases the productivity of individuals, teams, and organizations and empowers you to make more selective, high-impact choices about where to invest your valuable time, attention, and energy.
The 5 Choices are:
1. Act on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
2. Go for Extraordinary, Don’t Settle for Ordinary
3. Schedule the Big Rocks, Don’t Sort Gravel
4. Rule Your Technology, Don’t Let It Rule You
5. Fuel Your Fire, Don’t Burn Out
The 5 Choices will not only increase your productivity, it will also provide a renewed sense of engagement and accomplishment. You will quickly find yourself moving beyond thinking, “I was so busy today, what did I actually accomplish?” to feeling confident, energized, and extraordinarily productive.
Triggers
by Marshall Goldsmith
In his powerful new book, bestselling author and world-renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith examines the environmental and psychological triggers that can derail us at work and in life.
Do you ever find that you are not the patient, compassionate problem solver you believe yourself to be? Are you surprised at how irritated or flustered the normally unflappable you becomes in the presence of a specific colleague at work? Have you ever felt your temper accelerate from zero to sixty when another driver cuts you off in traffic?
As Marshall Goldsmith points out, our reactions don’t occur in a vacuum. They are usually the result of unappreciated triggers in our environment—the people and situations that lure us into behaving in a manner diametrically opposed to the colleague, partner, parent, or friend we imagine ourselves to be. These triggers are constant and relentless and omnipresent. The smell of bacon wafts up from the kitchen, and we forget our doctor’s advice on lowering our cholesterol. Our phone chirps, and we glance instinctively at the glaring screen instead of looking into the eyes of the person we are with. So often the environment seems to be outside our control. Even if that is true, as Goldsmith points out, we have a choice in how we respond.
In Triggers, his most powerful and insightful book yet, Goldsmith shows how we can overcome the trigger points in our lives, and enact meaningful and lasting change.
Change, no matter how urgent and clear the need, is hard. Knowing what to do does not ensure that we will actually do it. We are superior planners, says Goldsmith, but become inferior doers as our environment exerts its influence through the course of our day. We forget our intentions. We become tired, even depleted, and allow our discipline to drain down like water in a leaky bucket. In Triggers, Goldsmith offers a simple “magic bullet” solution in the form of daily self-monitoring, hinging around what he calls “active” questions. These are questions that measure our effort, not our results. There’s a difference between achieving and trying; we can’t always achieve a desired result, but anyone can try. In the course of Triggers, Goldsmith details the six “engaging questions” that can help us take responsibility for our efforts to improve and help us recognize when we fall short.
Filled with revealing and illuminating stories from his work with some of the most successful chief executives and power brokers in the business world, Goldsmith offers a personal playbook on how to achieve change in our lives, make it stick, and become the person we want to be.
The High-Speed Company
by Jason Jennings & Laurence Haughton
The only way to ensure your company’s success is to change faster on the inside than the world is changing on the outside
No one knows the ins and outs of successful companies better than bestselling author Jason Jennings. Back in 2001, with It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small, It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow, Jennings proved that speed was the ultimate competitive advantage. But in 2015, companies of all sizes still struggle to adapt quickly. They know it’s crucial to their future but need help to get everyone implementing speed and urgency at all levels.
Jennings and his researchers have spent years up close and personal with thousands of organizations around the world—figuring out what makes them successful in both the short and long term. He understands the real challenges that keep more than eleven thousand CEOs, business owners, and executives up at night. And he knows how the best of the best combine speed and growth to deliver five times the average returns to shareholders.
The High-Speed Company reveals the unique practices of businesses that have proven records of urgency and growth. The key distinction is that they’ve created extraordinary cultures with a strong purpose, more trust, and relentless follow-through. These companies burn less energy, beat the competition, and have a lot of fun along the way.
Jennings shows how you can implement the same strategies that have made companies such as CoBank, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Grainger, Henry Schein, Google, and Johnson & Johnson great, including:
• Encouraging employees to make the right moves without hesitation. J.M. Smucker has done this well by creating five guiding principles that employees at every level can apply to faster individual decision making.
• Doing more to constantly innovate and bring in new customers. Besides spending more than $2 billion on research and development, Procter & Gamble sends its senior executives to the homes of families who use their products in one hundred different countries, to learn their stories and connect with them, gaining fresh insights for new products.
• Being transparent about management decisions. Sonic Corp. knows this is the best way to drive trust and engagement with both employees and customers.
Breathe easier. Handle any hurdle. Get things done faster. That’s the way of the high-speed company . . . and Jennings shows you how to build and sustain your own.
The Attackers Advantage
by Ram Charan
The forces driving today’s world of structural change create sharp bends in the road that can lead to major explosions in your existing market space. But exponential change also offers exponential opportunities. How do you leverage change to go on the offense? The Attacker’s Advantage is the game plan for winning in an era of ambiguity, volatility, and complexity, when every leader and every business is being challenged in new and unexpected ways.
Ram Charan, harnessing an unequalled depth and breadth of experience working with leaders and companies around the globe, provides tested, practical tools to help you:
•Build the perceptual acuity to see around corners and detect, ahead of others, those forces—especially people, who are the catalysts of change—that could radically reshape a company or industry
•Have the mindset to see opportunity in uncertainty
•Commit to a new path forward despite the unknowns, positioning your business to make the next move ahead of competitors
•Break the blockages that can hold your company back
•Know when to accelerate and when to shift the short-term and long-term balance
•Make your organization agile and steerable by aligning people, priorities, decision-making power, budgeting and capital allocation, and key performance indicators to the new realities of the marketplace
The Attacker’s Advantage provides a stark and simple challenge: stay in a legacy world of incremental gains or defensiveness, or be an attacker by creating a new world, scaling it up quickly, ahead of the traditional players.
The Achievement Habit
by Bernard Roth
The co-founder of the Stanford d.School introduces the power of design thinking to help you achieve goals you never thought possible.
Achievement can be learned. It’s a muscle, and once you learn how to flex it, you’ll be able to meet life’s challenges and fulfill your goals, Bernard Roth, Academic Director at the Stanford d.school contends.
In The Achievement Habit, Roth applies the remarkable insights that stem from design thinking—previously used to solve large scale projects—to help us realize the power for positive change we all have within us. Roth leads us through a series of discussions, stories, recommendations, and exercises designed to help us create a different experience in our lives. He shares invaluable insights we can use to gain confidence to do what we’ve always wanted and overcome obstacles that hamper us from reaching our potential, including:
• Don’t try—DO;
• Excuses are self-defeating;
• Believe you are a doer and achiever and you’ll become one;
• Build resiliency by reinforcing what you do rather than what you accomplish;
• Learn to ignore distractions that prevent you from achieving your goals;
• Become open to learning from your own experience and from those around you;
• And more.
The brain is complex and is always working with our egos to sabotage our best intentions. But we can be mindful; we can create habits that make our lives better. Thoughtful and powerful The Achievement Habit shows you how.
Peers Inc
by Robin Chase
When Robin Chase cofounded Zipcar, she not only started a business but established the foundation for one of the most important economic and social ideas of our time: the collaborative economy. With this important book, she broadens our thinking about the ways in which the economy is being transformed and shows how the Peers Inc model is changing the very nature of capitalism.
When the best of people power is combined with the best of corporate power to form “Peers Inc” organizations, a potent creative force is released. The “Inc” in these collaborations delivers the industrial strengths of significant scale and resources, and the “Peers” bring together the individual strengths of localization, specialization, and customization, unlocking the power of the collaborative economy. When excess capacity is harnessed by the platform and diverse peers participate, a completely new dynamic is unleashed.
In Peers Inc, Robin Chase brings her provocative insights to work, business, the economy, and the environment, showing:
•How focusing on excess capacity transforms the economics of what’s possible and delivers abundance to all
•How the new collaboration between the Inc and the Peers enables companies to grow more quickly, learn faster, and deliver smarter products and services
•How leveraging the Peers Inc model can address climate change with the necessary speed and scale
•How the Peers Inc model can help legacy companies overcome their shortening life cycle by inviting innovation and evolution
•Why power parity between the Peers and the Inc is a prerequisite for long-term success
•How platforms can be built within the existing financial system or outside of it
•What government can do to enhance economic possibility and protect people working in this new decentralized world
Chase casts a wide net, illuminating the potential of the Peers Inc model to address broader issues such as climate change and income inequality, and proves the impact that this innovative economic force can have on the most pressing issues of our time.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Have you ever found yourself stretched too thin?
Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?
Are you often busy but not productive?
Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?
If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy – instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
Essentialism is not one more thing – it’s a whole new way of doing everything. A must-read for any leader, manager, or individual who wants to learn who to do less, but better, in every area of their lives, Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.
We Are Market Basket: The Story of the Unlikely Grassroots Movement That Saved a Beloved Business
by Daniel Korschun
What if a company were so treasured and trusted that people literally took to the streets―by the thousands―to save it? That company is Market Basket, a popular New England supermarket chain. After long-time, CEO Arthur T. Demoulas was ousted by his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas, the company’s managers and rank-and-file workers struck back. Risking their own livelihoods to restore the job of their beloved boss they walked out, but they didn’t walk far. At huge protest rallies, they were joined by loyal customers―leaving stores empty. Suppliers and vendors stopped deliveries―rendering shelves bare. Politicians were forced to take sides. The national media and experts were stunned by the unprecedented defense of an executive. All openly challenged the Market Basket board of directors to make things right. And, in the end, they prevailed. With its arresting firsthand accounts from the streets and executive suites, We Are Market Basket is as inspiring as it is instructive. What is it about Market Basket and its leader that provokes such ferocious loyalty? How does a company spread across three states maintain a culture that embraces everyone―from cashier to customer―as family? Can a company really become an industry leader by prioritizing stakeholders over shareholders? Set against a backdrop of bad blood and corporate greed, We Are Market Basket chronicles the epic rise, fall, and redemption of this iconic and uniquely American company.
Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family
by Bob Chapman, Raj Sisodia
Starting in 1997, Bob Chapman and Barry-Wehmiller have pioneered a dramatically different approach to leadership that creates off-the-charts morale, loyalty, creativity, and business performance. The company utterly rejects the idea that employees are simply functions, to be moved around, “managed” with carrots and sticks, or discarded at will. Instead, Barry-Wehmiller manifests the reality that every single person matters, just like in a family. That’s not a cliché on a mission statement; it’s the bedrock of the company’s success.
During tough times a family pulls together, makes sacrifices together, and endures short-term pain together. If a parent loses his or her job, a family doesn’t lay off one of the kids. That’s the approach Barry-Wehmiller took when the Great Recession caused revenue to plunge for more than a year. Instead of mass layoffs, they found creative and caring ways to cut costs, such as asking team members to take a month of unpaid leave. As a result, Barry-Wehmiller emerged from the downturn with higher employee morale than ever before.
It’s natural to be skeptical when you first hear about this approach. Every time Barry-Wehmiller acquires a company that relied on traditional management practices, the new team members are skeptical too. But they soon learn what it’s like to work at an exceptional workplace where the goal is for everyone to feel trusted and cared for—and where it’s expected that they will justify that trust by caring for each other and putting the common good first.
Chapman and coauthor Raj Sisodia show how any organization can reject the traumatic consequences of rolling layoffs, dehumanizing rules, and hypercompetitive cultures. Once you stop treating people like functions or costs, disengaged workers begin to share their gifts and talents toward a shared future. Uninspired workers stop feeling that their jobs have no meaning. Frustrated workers stop taking their bad days out on their spouses and kids. And everyone stops counting the minutes until it’s time to go home.
This book chronicles Chapman’s journey to find his true calling, going behind the scenes as his team tackles real-world challenges with caring, empathy, and inspiration. It also provides clear steps to transform your own workplace, whether you lead two people or two hundred thousand. While the Barry-Wehmiller way isn’t easy, it is simple. As the authors put it:
“Everyone wants to do better. Trust them. Leaders are everywhere. Find them. People achieve good things, big and small, every day. Celebrate them. Some people wish things were different. Listen to them. Everybody matters. Show them.”
The Revenue Growth Habit: The Simple Art of Growing Your Business by 15% in 15 Minutes Per Day by Alex Goldfayn
Grow your business by 15% with these proven daily growth actions. Do you have trouble finding time during your hectic day to grow your business? Is your company stalled because you are too busy reacting to customer problems? Do you lack the funds to jumpstart an effective marketing plan?
The Revenue Growth Habit gives business owners, leaders, and all customer facing staff a hands-on resource for increasing revenue that is fast, easy, and requires no financial investment. Alex Goldfayn, CEO of the Evangelist Marketing Institute, shows how to grow your organization by 15% or more in 15 minutes or less per day—without spending a penny of your money.
Forget about relying on social media. Posting on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn doesn’t grow revenue, especially for business-to-business companies. The Revenue Growth Habit shows how to request and collect testimonials and how tocommunicate these testimonials to grow your business. You will discover how to write powerful case studies, ask for (and get!) referrals, grow your lists, and send a revenue-growing newsletter. Goldfayn also includes information for teaching your customer service people how to inform your current clients about what else they can buy from you. This proven approach revolves around letting your customers tell your story. There is nothing you can say about your products and services that is more effective than what your paying customers say.
How does it work? Each day, take one quick, proactive communication action that tells someone about how they’ll be improved after buying from you. Choose from the 22 actions Goldfayn details in The Revenue Growth Habit. Each technique is fast, simple, and free. It only requires your personal effort to communicate the value of your product or service to someone who can buy from you. Personal communication—the key to the 22 action steps—will make your company stand head-and-shoulders above the competition.
Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age
by Sherry Turkle
Renowned media scholar Sherry Turkle investigates how a flight from conversation undermines our relationships, creativity, and productivity—and why reclaiming face-to-face conversation can help us regain lost ground.
We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection.
Preeminent author and researcher Sherry Turkle has been studying digital culture for over thirty years. Long an enthusiast for its possibilities, here she investigates a troubling consequence: at work, at home, in politics, and in love, we find ways around conversation, tempted by the possibilities of a text or an email in which we don’t have to look, listen, or reveal ourselves.
We develop a taste for what mere connection offers. The dinner table falls silent as children compete with phones for their parents’ attention. Friends learn strategies to keep conversations going when only a few people are looking up from their phones. At work, we retreat to our screens although it is conversation at the water cooler that increases not only productivity but commitment to work. Online, we only want to share opinions that our followers will agree with – a politics that shies away from the real conflicts and solutions of the public square.
The case for conversation begins with the necessary conversations of solitude and self-reflection. They are endangered: these days, always connected, we see loneliness as a problem that technology should solve. Afraid of being alone, we rely on other people to give us a sense of ourselves, and our capacity for empathy and relationship suffers. We see the costs of the flight from conversation everywhere: conversation is the cornerstone for democracy and in business it is good for the bottom line. In the private sphere, it builds empathy, friendship, love, learning, and productivity.
But there is good news: we are resilient. Conversation cures.
Based on five years of research and interviews in homes, schools, and the workplace, Turkle argues that we have come to a better understanding of where our technology can and cannot take us and that the time is right to reclaim conversation. The most human—and humanizing—thing that we do.
The virtues of person-to-person conversation are timeless, and our most basic technology, talk, responds to our modern challenges. We have everything we need to start, we have each other.
Agile Selling: Get Up to Speed Quickly in Today’s Ever-Changing Sales World
by Jill Konrath
Sales expert Jill Konrath offers powerful strategies for sales proficiency in ever-changing situations When sales people are promoted, change jobs, or face new business environments, they inevitably need to learn new skills quickly. This rapid change is often overwhelming, and sellers face an intense pressure from their bosses to deliver immediate results. Their livelihoods are totally dependent on their ability to get up to speed quickly. Sales guru Jill Konrath offers both new and experienced salespeople a plan for rapidly absorbing new information and mastering new skills by becoming agile sellers. Readers will learn the mindsets, learning strategies and habits that they can use in crazy-busy times to start strong and stay nimble. From time management tools to personal motivation, creativity, and gamification strategies, Konrath teaches sellers how to get more done in less time, regardless of the environment. To succeed in today’s sales world, having go-to systems for rapid information and skill acquisition isn’t only useful, but absolutely required. Konrath focuses on the meta-skills that will get sellers to high levels of sales and proficiency – and ultimately mastery – much faster than their usual methods. Readers who loved the no-nonsense advice in SNAP Selling and Selling to Big Companies will find Agile Selling equally valuable. Jill Konrath is a sales strategist whose clients include IBM, Microsoft, Accenture, Staples, Hilton, and numerous midmarket firms. She’s a frequent speaker at sales conferences and kick-off meetings. Her previous books include Selling to Big Companies (one of Fortune’s “Must Reads” for sellers) and SNAP Selling. Over 100,000 people read her weekly sales newsletter.
Please leave a comment below with a book you’d recommend for our community.
Hope you get some life and business changing material from these books.
Strength and courage,
Wade
check out www.agentsboost.com for more free tips and ideas.
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