A few weeks ago I attended the Dave Ramsey Live! event in Long Beach. Here is just one of the many great comments he had:
If you are in business, you should be reading these three authors:
- Jim Collins
- Seth Godin
- Malcolm Gladwell
I wholeheartedly agree.
I have read all of the following books and heartily endorse them. If you want to grow and learn and stretch your brain, dive in anywhere! Here’s a few titles to check out:
Jim Collins
- Good to Great – great study of the common factors amongst businesses that grew and thrived and survived after the departure of the star. One big idea – the flywheel – your business is like a flywheel it’s very slow to get started you have to keep pushing I constantly. But once it gets going it will keep going very strong. You have to keep pushing it.
- Good to Great and the Social Sectors – looks at the previous concepts in the context of the nonprofit community.
- How the Mighty Fall – flip side of Good to Great. How companies start the slide to bankruptcy. You can use the 5 stages to assess your industry, your company, or your ministry. You could even use it to assess your career.
Seth Godin
- Small is the New Big – Having been written in 2006, this is ancient in internet time. Check it out anyway. You will find it to be remarkably up to date on the underlying concepts.
- Tribes – Today, anyone can lead from anywhere in the organization. Don’t need to have “enough” time, power, influence, or money. Just lead. Today, like-minded people will find you and follow you.
- The Dip – Learn to tell the difference between a dip (keep pushing), a cul-de-sac (it’s not going anywhere, so get out), and a cliff (jump before you fall off the quickly approaching edge). I discussed this here.
- Linchpin: Are You Indispensible – If you are an indistinguishable drone in the ‘factory’ of your business, you can be outsourced, replaced, or the factory can just do without you. If you are a linchpin, you will have a future. So make yourself a linchpin.
There are several newer books that would be worth your time as well: We are all Weird, Poke the Box, or Permission Marketing.
Malcolm Gladwell
- Outliers: The Story of Success – how those astoundingly successful people got that way. One component: 10,000 hours of practice.
- Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – Your can make a great decision in the first two seconds of seeing something or someone.
- The Tipping Point – the factors that make an idea or product catch on and pass the tipping point to extreme popularity.
- What the Dog Saw– collection of his previous magazine articles. Just a few of the fun chapters: The Dog Whisperer can spot someone who won’t be able to train their dog because they love their dog more than their children. FBI profilers help by identifying you are looking for someone who is outgoing or withdrawn, married or maybe single, and either smooth with the ladies or afraid of them. Here’s how you have a great success rate as a profiler – include everyone in your profile. The power distribution. You know the accounting distribution rule: 20% of items have 80% of the dollars or activity. The power distribution is more extreme: 5% make up 95% of the population. In a power distribution, if you want to change things, don’t scold everyone. Go after the very few that are almost all the problem.
P.S. Don’t have anything to make full disclosure of – – In case you are wondering, I don’t make anything if you buy from the above links. Since I’m in California, that option is not available to me!