The Dollarization Discipline: How Smart Companies Create Customer Value… and Profit from It
by Jeffrey J. Fox and Richard C. Gregory
Dollarization “is figuring out what your offering is really worth—in dollars and cents—to your customer.” The book discusses the role of dollarization in sales, marketing, and product development.
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Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
by David Weinberger
In the past, physical limitations led to classifications systems in which everything was forced into a single category. A library patron needed to know which shelf contained a particular book, so each book was assigned a category within the Dewey Decimal system. In the digital world, it is more useful for things to have multiple classifications.
“Reality is multifaceted. There are lots of ways to slice it. How we choose to slice it up depends on why we’re slicing it up.”
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The Kindness Revolution: The Company-Wide Culture Shift that Inspires Phenomenal Customer Service
by Ed Horrell
Ed Horrell writes about poor customer service in American business. “What is really surprising, however, is the number of companies that view service as the item to cut in order to make more money. They decide to focus on getting new customers at the expense of keeping existing customers loyal… They lose sight of the fact that it usually costs around five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. ”
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The Truth about Search Engine Optimization
by Rebecca Lieb
The Truth about Search Engine Optimization explains what will improve your website’s visibility within organic search results. Just as importantly, it explains what can get your site penalized by the search engines. If you are looking for a programming manual with lots of sample code, this is the wrong book for you. Think of it as an overview of SEO for the CEO.
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The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
by Chris Anderson
The Long Tail refers to the shape of the graph with high sales volume of a few hit products in the head, and low volume of many products in the tail. The book is about the shift from an economy of mass-market hits to an economy of niches.
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Confessions of an Accidental Businessman: It Takes a Lifetime to Find Wisdom
by James A. Autry
James Autry worked his way up from copy editor of Better Homes and Gardens to president of the magazine division. This memoir gets off to a slow start talking about his childhood and military service, but it gets more interesting when he starts to focus on his publishing career.
There are some memorable lines in this book:
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What Keeps Leaders Up at Night: Recognizing and Resolving Your Most Troubling Management Issues
by Nicole Lipkin
In this excellent book, clinical psychologist Nicole Lipkin explains the psychology behind many of the human behaviors that affect productivity and sound decision making in the workplace. “Good leadership requires dealing effectively with messy, quirky, unpredictable, confusing, irrational, and clumsy people. That is what makes the business of leadership so insanely difficult and complex.”
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The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan
This book is about finding your focus and making it your top priority in order to achieve extraordinary results. Identifying your focus comes from asking The Focusing Question: “What’s the ONE Thing you can do this week such that by doing it everything else would be easier or unnecessary?”
“The Focusing Question is a double-duty question. It comes in two forms: big picture and small focus. One is about finding the right direction in life and the other is about finding the right action.”
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No Bull Selling
by Hank Trisler (1937-2012)
No Bull Selling offers practical sales advice with a sense of humor. Hank Trisler writes, “I’ve been going to sales seminars all my adult life. That’s how I got so misinformed.”
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Get to the Point: Painless advice for writing memos, letters, and e-mails your colleagues and clients will understand
by Elizabeth Danziger
Elizabeth Danziger’s advice on using clear, clutter-free language is consistent with the classic On Writing Well by William Zinsser, but this book is more useful as manual, whereas Zinsser’s book is more conceptual.
When is it appropriate to use which or that? The author provides an informal “just do it” rule and a formal “grammar police” rule.
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The Key Point 