Debunkery: Learn It, Do It, and Profit From It—Seeing Through Wall Street’s Money-Killing Myths
By Ken Fisher
Investors often rely on intuition and conventional wisdom, but Ken Fisher explains that “markets are inherently counterintuitive” and things “everyone knows” are often unreliable. Flawed assumptions lead to overconfidence or fear.
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Turnaround: How America’s Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic
by William J. Bratton
I think of Turnaround as a management book by a highly-accomplished chief executive (police) officer. The book reads like an autobiography, from Bill Bratton’s childhood in Boston, until after his falling out with Rudy Guiliani. Through his experiences, I learned a lot about police work and his management style
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Words That Work: It’s not what you say, it’s what people hear
By Dr. Frank Luntz
Frank Luntz is a communication strategist for corporate and political clients. Although he’s done a lot of work for Republicans (including the Contract with America) this is not a book about political ideology. It’s about persuasive communication in political campaigns, product marketing, and labor disputes.
Words that work do not happen by chance. Luntz uses market research techniques (polls, focus groups, dial sessions) to test how audiences respond.
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The Thank You Economy
by Gary Vaynerchuk
The Thank You Economy is about connecting with customers through social media, but it is not a book about Facebook, Twitter, or any other specific technology. It’s about creating a culture of caring relationships, like when your great-grandmother shopped with local merchants. Those relationships disappeared as the economy evolved from mom-and-pop shopkeepers to big box stores, but social media offers a means of restoring that human touch in a scalable way.
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18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done
by Peter Bregman
Peter Bregman writes, “The world doesn’t reward perfection. It rewards productivity.” 18 Minutes is a book about choosing your priorities and getting things done.
The author suggests finding your focus based on your strengths, weaknesses, differences, and passions. “Assert your differences… Don’t waste your year trying to blend in… Understand your obsessions and you will understand your natural motivation.”
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Idiocracy
DVD starring Luke Wilson, directed by Mike Judge, 84 minutes.
Idiocracy, a portmanteau of idiot democracy, is a satirical look at the future of American culture and politics. What makes this funny is that it is grounded in contemporary reality, just pushed to an (even more) absurd level.
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Lapsing Into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print—and How to Avoid Them
by Bill Walsh
The Internet and print-on-demand technology have enabled almost everyone to become a publisher. In traditional media, professional journalists and authors have their writing cleaned up by copy editors before it is published. The average blogger does not have this luxury. In Lapsing Into a Comma, Bill Walsh shares his advice on how to handle many common problems that he has encountered as copy editor of the business section at the Washington Post.
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The Impact Equation: Are You Making Things Happen or Just Making Noise?
by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
The Impact Equation explains how to rise above the clutter, particularly in the cluttered world of social media. Here’s the formula:
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Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business
by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss
Customer service is not an afterthought. In order to provide consistently excellent service, it must be baked in to the business model. In Uncommon Service, authors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss explain that great service is “made possible—profitable, sustainable, scalable—by designing a system that sets everyone up to excel.”
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The Paradox of Excellence: How Great Performance Can Kill Your Business
by David Mosby and Michael Weissman
When a company consistently provides excellent service it can become “invisible” to the client until something goes wrong. This book illustrates the problem through a parable about a trucking company. Their largest and most profitable customer has given notice to terminate their contract due to a botched delivery. Management is shocked, as there had been no previous problems with this client over the many years they have done business together.
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The Key Point 