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As a business owner, I know you are busy and stretched. Here are some reads that are worth your time.
7 Habits of Highly Effective People – Stephen Covey – Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are frequently from family situations as well as from business challenges.
Seven Secrets of Great Entrepreneurial Masters: The GEM Power Formula For Lifelong Success – Allen E. Fishman, founder and CEO of The Alternative Board TAB®, interviewed top entrepreneurs, identifying their common traits and practices to create the GEM Power formula. As a business leader, speaker, and Great Entrepreneurial Master himself, he has taught the formula to thousands of businesspeople. Now, in Seven Secrets of Great Entrepreneurial Masters, he shares these secrets with you. Filled with thought-provoking written exercises, savvy advice, and inspiring anecdotes, the book takes readers on a journey of guided introspection to help them balance work and life for maximum success and happiness.
Raving Fans – Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles – “Your customers are only satisfied because their expectations are so low and because no one else is doing better. Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. If you really want a booming business, you have to create Raving Fans.”
Built to Last – Jim Collins – Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day — as start-ups, as midsize companies and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: “What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?”
Who Moved My Cheese? – Spencer Johnson, M.D. – With Who Moved My Cheese? Dr. Spencer Johnson realizes the need for finding the language and tools to deal with change – an issue that makes all of us nervous and uncomfortable. Most people are fearful of change because they don’t believe they have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, Spencer Johnson shows us that what matters most is the attitude we have about change.
One Minute Manager – Kenneth Blanchard, Spencer Johnson – For more than twenty years, millions of managers in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses nationwide have followed The One Minute Manager’s techniques, thus increasing their productivity, job satisfaction and personal prosperity. These very real results were achieved through learning the management techniques that spell profitability for the organization and its employees.
The One Minute Manager is a concise, easily read story that reveals three very practical secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings and One Minute Reprimands.
The book also presents several studies in medicine and the behavioral sciences that clearly explain why these apparently simple methods work so well with so many people. By the book’s end you will know how to apply them to your own situation and enjoy the benefits.
That’s why The One Minute Manager has continued to appear on business bestseller lists for more than two decades, and has become an international sensation. There is a revised version available as well, FYI: The New One Minute Manager.
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It – In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise.
Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.
Hunting in a Farmer’s World: Celebrating the Minda of an Entrepreneur – John F. Dini – Hunting in a Farmer’s World examines why business owners are different from the people who work for them. John F. Dini draws on thousands of hours of face to face coaching with entrepreneurs, using the personal true stories of successful owners to drive home the challenges, rewards, exhilaration and terror of being a business owner. Hunting in a Farmer’s World celebrates the differences that drive entrepreneurs. It is filled with the stories of real business owners who overcame real challenges including those that accompany success.
You deserve to run a business in a way that makes sense to you. It s time to stop reading management books, and read an ownership book. It s time to be proud that you are Hunting in a Farmers World.
By Blair Koch
