The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
This book is about time perspective. The authors say that time-balanced people are “more successful in work and career and happier in relationships with family and friends… [and] live more fully in the here and now. Such a person is able to tie the past and the future to the present in meaningful continuity.”
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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
by Jim Collins
Jim Collins previously co-authored Built to Last, which studied common attributes of enduringly great companies. Good to Great studies companies which made a transition to greatness: 15 years of lagging stock performance followed by 15 years of cumulative stock returns 3 times the overall market.
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Learned Optimism
by Martin E. P. Seligman
“Explanatory style” is the way we think about life’s events. We can have either an optimistic or a pessimistic explanatory style. Seligman’s research found that changing pessimism into optimism relieves depression.
A pessimistic explanatory style frames negative events in terms that are personal, permanent, and pervasive—I’m a failure, This always happens to me, This screws up my whole life. Seligman offers the ABCDE technique to reframe explanatory style. The letters stand for adversity, belief, consequences, dispute (your negative beliefs), and energize.
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The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book
by Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves
The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book is a concise and easy to absorb introduction to the topic. “Emotional intelligence is the product of two main skills: personal and social competence. Personal competence focuses more on you as an individual, and is divided into self-awareness and self-management. Social competence focuses more on how you behave with other people, and is divided into social awareness and relationship management.” The authors credit Daniel Goleman with introducing the four-skill model in the book Primal Leadership.
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In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
by Michael Pollan
“Most nutritional advice we’ve received over the last half century has actually made us less healthy and considerably fatter…[Americans] suffer substantially higher rates of cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity than people eating any number of different traditional diets.”
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Rethinking Reputation: How PR Trumps Marketing and Advertising in the New Media World
by Fraser P. Seitel and John Doorley
This book gets off to a weak start. Chapter one is not about reputation management. It’s about how a couple of NYU students launched a shoe company on a shoestring budget. (Hint: Find a patent attorney who will work for you without charge.) Chapters three and five sound like they could have been written by publicists for Merck and Johnson & Johnson. In fact, coauthor John Doorley has held positions at both firms (and he teaches at NYU). The chapter on T. Boone Pickens’ energy independence campaign states that he spent $100 million “with more than half focused on paid media.” That seems to undermine premise of the subtitle.
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Strength Training Anatomy
by Frédéric Delavier
Is your New Year’s resolution to hit the gym, but you don’t really know what to do once you get there? With Strength Training Anatomy, a picture really is worth 1000 words.
Each page features an illustration of an exercise being performed, with the targeted muscles drawn in red and labeled. Most of the exercises use either free weights or a weight-training machine; there are some exceptions, such as crunches. Each page also includes written instructions. See the sample page below.
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You Can’t Win a Fight with Your Client and 49 Other Rules for Providing Great Service
by Tom Markert
This book is about managing client relationships in a service economy, with a focus on the role of the account manager. The author was CEO of a market research firm serving Fortune 500 clients. To illustrate the importance of the account manager role, he quotes the CEO of a consumer goods company which derives 40% of its business from Wal-Mart: “If we are not servicing them just right… our business is dead.” The book offers 50 tips, each presented in an easily digestible two or three page chapter.
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Making Ads Pay: Timeless Tips for Successful Copywriting
by John Caples (1900-1990)
John Caples was a pioneer of direct-response copywriting. In Chapter 8 he presents as series of paired ads which were tested, followed by analysis of why the winning ads outperformed. The winner often outperformed the other by a wide margin—up to five times as many responses.
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Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing
Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing offers good advice about writing fiction, although the implicit theme pertains to any writing. Essentially, don’t let your writing style distract from what you are trying to say.
My favorite tip is #10: “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”
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