Book Short: On Employee Engagement The first time I ever heard the term “Employee Engagement” was from my colleague David Sieh, one of the better managers I’ve ever worked with. He said it was his objective for his engineering team. He explained how he tried to achieve it. I Quit, But forgot to Tell You, by Terri Kabachnick, is a whole book on this topic, a very short but very potent one (the best kind of business books, if you ask me). It’s got all the short-form stuff you’d expect…a checklist of reasons for disengagement, an engagement quiz, the lifecycle of an employee that leads to disengagement, rules for dealing as a manager. But beyond the practical, the book serves…
Category
Books
Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter
Book Short: Stick Figures That Matter I have read a bunch of books lately to try to improve my presentation skills. The latest one, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, was good, and quite different from some of the others I’ve read recently like Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points, both of which are much more focused on effective use of Powerpoint. The Back of the Napkin takes a different approach. The focus is much more on creating compelling visuals. It’s not about Powerpoint so much as it is about teaching how to crystallize concepts into tight and compelling schematics. Roam creates two pretty good frameworks for thinking about this: one…
Book Short: How, Now
Book Short: How, Now Every once in a while, I read a book that has me jump up and down saying “Yes! That’s so right!” How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything in Business (and in Life), by Dov Seidman, was one of those books. But beyond just agreeing with the things Seidman says, the book had some really valuable examples and two killer frameworks, one around culture, and one around leadership. It’s a book about the way the world we now live in — a world of transparency and hyper-connectedness — is no longer about WHAT you do, but HOW you do it. It’s about how you can have a great brand and great advertising, but if your…
Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short)
Inbox = Zero = Satisfying (Quasi Book Short) I’m a big David Allen fan. Amazingly enough, I haven’t blogged about him and his books yet, probably for the most part because I read the books before I started blogging. But here they are. The first one, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, is probably a little better than the sequel, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, but both are worth reading. When I first read them, they didn’t revolutionize my thinking about productivity and workflow management (I was already at least decent at those things), but they did really sharpen my thinking around the edges and give me a great framework to plug all…
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs?
Do Business Books Suck for Entrepreneurs? Ben thinks they do. Some of his reasons are pretty good, but I’d challenge a few of them, or at least his finer points. My experience over the years is that while most business books are not geared toward entrepreneurs, a good entrepreneur will figure out how to milk them for what they’re worth quickly and apply key learnings to his or her company. The reality is that running a startup or high growth company is a multi-faceted and incredibly dynamic experience, and having a bunch of outside inputs in the form of business book examples and theories can be really helpful. Even bad ideas can spur good thinking.
Book Short: A SPIN Selling Companion
Book Short: A SPIN Selling Companion At Return Path, we’re big believers in the SPIN Selling methodology popularized by Neil Rackham. It just makes sense. Spend more time listening than talking on a sales call, uncover your prospect’s true needs and get him or her to articulate the need for YOUR product. Though it doesn’t reference SPIN Selling, Why People Don’t Buy Things, by Kim Wallace and Harry Washburn is a nice companion read. Rooted in psychology and cognitive science, Why People Don’t Buy Things presents a very practical sales methodology called Buying Path Selling. Understand how your prospect is making his or her buying decision and what kind of buyer he or she is, be more successful at uncovering…
Book Short: Presentation Zen
Book Short: Presentation Zen A few years ago, I blogged about Cliff Atkinson’s book Beyond Bullets. I don’t know whether it’s a better book, or whether the timing of reading it just made a deeper impression on me, but I just read and LOVED Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds. The concept is similar — a bad Powerpoint presentation kills your message as much as that horrendous high school physics teacher turned you off from the natural sciences. Reynolds’s examples are rich, and there are tons of “before and after” slides in the book for the visual learners among us. In addition, he articulates very clearly what I’ve always thought, since my consulting days, made for an excellent presentation: offline storyboarding….
Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short)
Wither the News? (Plus a Bonus Book Short) It’s unusual that I blog about a book before I’ve actually finished it, but this one is too timely to pass up given today’s news about newspapers. The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen, at least the first 1/2 of it, is a pretty intense rant about how the Internet’s trend towards democratizing media and content production has a double dirty underbelly: poor quality — “an endless digital forest of mediocrity,” no checks and balances — “mainstream journalists and newspapers have the organization, financial muscle, and and credibility to gain access to sources and report the truth…professional journalists can go to jail for telling…
Book Short: Smaller is the New Small
Book Short: Smaller is the New Small Last month, it was Microtrends. This month, it’s MIT Professor Ted Sargent’s The Dance of Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives. It seems like all the interesting things in life are just getting smaller and smaller. (Note to self: lose some weight.) Sargent’s book is geeky but well-written. He dives into a couple dozen examples across many fields and disciplines of how nanotechnology holds extraordinary promise for solving some of mankind’s toughest scientific challenges — while creating a few new ethical and economic ones. The science is for the most part beyond me, but the practical applications are fascinating: – making solar power the sole source of global energy needs a possibility…
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership
Book Short: Chock Full O Management & Leadership I just finished The Better People Leader, by Charles Coonradt, which was a very short, good, rich read. It was a pretty expansive book on management & leadership topics — 100 short pages of material that are probably covered by 1,000 pages in other books. What separates this book from the pack is the rich examples from non-business life that Coonradt sprinkles throughout the book. They include the tale of a special ed kid who became a mainstream student within a year because his teacher had the courage to ask his fellow students to treat him normally, and the story of how Korean War POWs died in massive numbers not from physical…
Book Short: Tech Founder? Varsity Basketball Captain? Both! At the Same Time!
Book Short: Tech Founder? Varsity Basketball Captain? Both! At the Same Time! Ben Casnocha’s My Startup Life has some of the same appeal as The Mousedriver Chronicles (which I reviewed years go here) in its tale of a startup, its successes, failures, and lessons learned. If you like that kind of book or are starting a company and are looking for kindred spirits, it’s a good book for you. Ben’s story is more remarkable in some ways because he started his eGovernment software (SaaS of course) company Comcate at the age of 13. That’s right, 13. When I was learning how to shave, having a bar mitzvah, and dealing with acne and a voice dropping at terminal velocity. Starting a business was the…