Terrific Book Reviews

To help you make a difference in your work life in 2011 I’ve prepared for you a list of the 10 top books I’ve read in the last couple of years.

Select at least one book from this list and read it over the next couple of months.

Too busy? How about half an hour 3 or 4 times a week, just a chapter or two at a time? Skip watching the News (especially the early morning News) or reading the newspaper and spend less time on emails and surfing the net. You’ll get far more insightful information from some of these books.

Invest the time to read your chosen book with a highlighter pen and a notebook handy. In fact take Stephen Covey’s advice in ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ when he says, “Read with the purpose in mind of sharing or discussing what you learn with someone else within 48 hours after you learn it.”

It’s a technique I’ve used for many years. I hope it works for you too. Let me know how you go.  Click here to read more .....

Traditional satisfaction surveys simply don't work; they don't measure what companies really need to know. In The Ultimate Question – driving good profits and true growth loyalty expert Fred Reichheld introduces a simple measurement tool, Net Promoter Score (NPS) that can focus all elements of an organisation on improving every customer's experience. The process is straightforward, easy to apply and it’s being taken up by leading companies around the world.

Companies that actively use this process can manage customer loyalty and the growth it produces just as rigorously as they can manage the other key performance indicators in their organisation.  Click here to read more .....

The vast majority of the thinking that drives what we and our customers do happens at an unconscious level. That was the key message I got from the highly respected Prof Gerald Zaltman, at the European Conference on Customer Management. It led me to delve into his groundbreaking book, ‘How Customers Think – Essential insights into the mind of the market’.

Gerald Zaltman is professor of Marketing at Harvard Business School and a Fellow at Harvard University’s interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, Behaviour Initiative.  Click here to read more .....

I’ve included here for you some quotes to ponder from John Timpson’s terrific book ‘The Complete Guide To Upside Down Management’

“Whenever I visit one of my shops and find something wrong I think it’s great. Every blemish gives us a chance to improve. If we know we have faults, there is a chance we can get better.”

“I hope we never believe we are good enough. If we think we have cracked it we will stop wanting to be better. In five years time I hope we will look back in disbelief at how badly we do things today.”

“New customers don’t know how good we are, but housekeeping gives them an indication. If we can’t look after our shops, why should they think we can look after their shoes?”  Click here to read more .....

This book delves into the most recent insights on neuroscience and how it affects the factors that stimulate people to pay more attention to one message rather than the countless others they are being bombarded with and to buy a certain product or service rather than the many alternatives being touted to them.

The title ‘The Buying Brain - Secrets for selling to the subconscious mind’ may give the impressions that it’s about how to manipulate people to buy. It isn’t. This book is about what fascinates the human brain. In an engaging way, backed by scientific evidence, author Dr. A.K. Pradeep explains how neuroscience findings are able to hone in precisely on what attracts, engages and delights consumers. The results of this research often contradict past best practice in marketing, advertising and selling... and the results of focus groups, opinion based surveys and more traditional forms of consumer research.  Click here to read more .....

Doing a job well yourself is one thing; persuading and motivating others to do it well is the real challenge. Using his years of experience, Max Hitchins has written this e-book to give you ideas to develop your own format so you can effectively persuade and motivate your team to help you run your business. While ‘25 Ideas to Motivate and Incentivise Your Staff’ was written for the hospitality sector it has ideas and examples on how to motivate and incentivise your team that can be adapted to many industries.

Max Hitchins is acknowledged throughout the world as an expert on motivation, marketing and management in the hospitality sector. His learning curve in hospitality began at the age of 17 in Australia when he was pitched into running a heavily indebted family hotel because of the untimely death of his father.  Click here to read more .....

Innocent drinks is a wonderful UK success story. From their beginnings in 1999, they have become the fastest growing company in the UK’s food and drink industry. They are a well recognised brand associated with fun and health... and a healthy way of doing business. Somewhat similar to the more recent Nudie brand in Australia.

The brand and its people give the appearance of effortless ease and relaxation. Yet as the book shows, this is based on intense hard work. They do get across the message well on the labelling of their bottles. Here are two examples –   Click here to read more .....

Most of us have been led to believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake according to Daniel Pink. In his new book ‘Drive – The Surprising Truth About Motivation’ he will raise your awareness to other motivational drivers and the way that incentives can actually work against performance improvement in a range of situations.

The author argues that rewards can perform a weird sort of behavioural alchemy that can turn an interesting task into a drudge and even play into work. He draws on four decades of scientific research on human motivation to emphasise the mismatch between what science knows and what business does.  Click here to read more .....

“You can’t really control what the customer thinks and feels about any given experience. Only the customer has that power. What you can control and manage toward a predetermined goal or end frame are the individual clues that customers process on both a conscious and an unconscious level so you create an experience that better meets their need and desires.”

So says Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering in his book, ‘Clued In – How to keep customers coming back again and again’. Lou was one of the outstanding presenters at the 2008 European Conference on Customer Management and I subsequently attended a one day workshop Lou co-presented on designing and managing the customer experience.  Click here to read more .....

Interested in what science tells us about how to be persuasive? Then invest in Yes! 50 secrets from the science of persuasion, a wonderful little book by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin and Robert Cialdini.

The authors say that everyone’s ability to persuade others can be enhanced by learning persuasion strategies that have been scientifically proved to be successful. Small, easy changes to our messages can make them vastly more persuasive.   Click here to read more .....