On Writing Well...Today

Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content – Ann Handley (Wiley)

I remember very vividly the looks I received from a classroom of eighth graders as a spoke at a career day gathering back when I was working as a disc jockey at a local radio station. My cousin, the assistant principal at the school had asked me to come a speak and it was as if I had grown a second head when I advised the collected students that they should first and foremost learn how to write well, because it would serve them no matter what they chose to pursue for a career.

Guess they were hoping to hear how cool it was to get free CDs and concert tickets. Now many years later, I know my comment to be more true than ever; the ability to write will set you apart from the others in the work place, no matter what your chosen field. With the ongoing evolution of marketing, content and a growing range of platforms the ability to write and write well is more important than ever.

Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer for MarketingProfs and one of the most influential players in the world of content marketing offers up equal doses of gentle guidance, prodding inspiration and thoughtful stimulation on the subject of writing in her latest outing, Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content.

Handley does offer up straight up thoughts on grammar and usage, but without turning into the nasty grammar scold. There is an amazing level of first hand, been there, don that knowledge that Handley brings to chapters covers content, blogs, and the creative side of the content equation.

Having left the world of free CDs and concert tickets behind and moving into the world of marketing to earn my keep, I have found myself turning with some regularity to the pages of Everybody Writes when I seek clarification and advice on my next action steps for a wide range of projects. It is that utility that separates those books that are great from those the just merely good; Everybody Writes is clearly one of those that will find a prominent place, within easy reach, on my credenza.

Business Motivation on Steroids

ME, Inc. – Build and Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business – Gene Simmons – (Dey Street Books)

Like most kids who came of age in the 1970s, I was became a fan of the band Kiss…granted not a Kiss Army level fan, but did wear out a vinyl copy of Kiss Alive. Later a became a fan of the band’s bassist, Gene Simmons; he of the un-naturally long tongue and fire breathing fame. It wasn’t Simmons musical ability that drew me to him, but line from and interview where he spoke about all the musicians that came along when he did wanting to be “like the Beatles” while he wanted to be like McDonalds…billions served.

As far as business side of things here was a guy who clearly got it. So I was surprised to see Simmons finally after decades of success land in the business section of the book store. In ME, Inc. – Build and Army of One, Unleash Your Inner Rock God, Win in Life and Business, Simmons espouse his thoughts on business and entrepreneurialism in a wide range of ventures.

I had to remind myself that the book is broken down into two distinct sections; the ME Section in which Simmons piles on the tales of his life, his successes and his multitude of business ventures. Clearly no one could accuse this guy of not having a high opinion of himself; some might say he’s cocky, but as he points out later in the book, self-confidence can go along way when you’re starting a business venture.

It is in the second half of the book, the YOU section that this book really hits its stride. While Simmons certainly doesn’t offer up any earth shattering, new secrets to business success; what he does do is offer a clear headed approach to both life and business with a palpable sense of urgency.

It’s easy to see why Simmons has become a favorite with the cable business and conservative news networks. Don’t expect a Harvard Business Review white paper; this is common sense based, pretty straight forward and at times hard hitting advice on business and success.

Simmons isn’t shy about stirring the pot when offers up his take on success and the impact of marriage and children. He dovetails a chapter on honing the ability to tell your own story and the impact that can have on your business success with a chapter on the importance of speaking English. I doubt Simmons would sit still very long a phone menu that includes; “Press one for English.” The case he makes is absolutely on target; English is the language of success.

While the ME section can wear a little thin as it runs on; I found the YOU section to be a real shot in the arm, its business and life motivation on steroids.   

Works for Google, but…

How Google Works – Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg (Grand Central Publishing)

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former Senior Vice President of Products Jonathan Rosenberg offer up an insider’s view of what is not only one of the world’s most successful tech companies, but clearly one of the world’s most successful companies, period; in their new book How Google Works.

While Schmidt and Rosenberg offer up a veritable gold mine of Google’s often different world view on business topics ranging from culture to strategy and innovation to talent hiring, the question I am left with is while clearly this is a “business” book, are these insights and strategies transferable to the “real world.”

Start ups and the tech sector can clearly learn from principles espoused by these Google leaders, but in long established businesses were change, if it comes, it occurs at glacial pace and is often accompanied with a heavy dose of pain; I’m not so sure these principles are transferable.

Certainly this isn’t to say that more traditional business models can’t learn from How Google Works. The sections on problems being information related and communications can teach even the stodgiest of businesses how to operate in a more open and inclusive manner when it comes to sharing information both internally and externally.

The Leadership Playbook – Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Teams - Nathan Jamail (Gotham Books)

In probably one of the most seminal, most utilized and often quoted business books of all time, Good To Great, author Jim Collins gave us the theory of the bus and the importance of having the right people in the right seats. Anybody who has ever run a business knows this analogy is right on; but the unanswered, truly hard part is how you go about getting those right people.

When it comes to building a truly great organization, a team, going the free agent route and hiring on proven, often high priced talent is not always an option and quite frankly doesn’t always work. Playing the revolving door game of hiring people that you think will be a good fit isn’t always a guarantee of success and talent roulette can be expensive and cause other issues. So rather than managing and massaging to build your team what’s a better choice? How about coaching that talent to become a winning team?

That is the theory bestselling author, business coach and motivational speaker Nathan Jamail’s latest, The Leadership Playbook – Creating a Coaching Culture to Build Winning Teams. Jamail goes much deeper than just wrapping common sense business principles in a whole bunch of sports analogies and clichés; he offers up practical principles and backs them up with actionable steps that you can plug into your business today.

Jamail may ruffle a few feathers with his direct approach to handling personnel issues and attitudes that probably won’t win him many friends down in HR, but he’s right on when it comes to the assessing the damage that can be done both internally to your employees and externally to your customers if you don’t deal with these problem children issues head on.

Superstar talent is not born; Jamail preaches with the fervor of a Texas high school football coach that it’s nurtured, developed, honed through practice and heck yeah I’ll say it, its coached to greatness! He also reminds us that expectations are set, outcomes are measured and accountability has to be part of the mix.   

Your Summer Reading List

As we wind our way through summer and you’ve hit the beach or the links got in a little R & R and you may start thinking about the Fall and the start of planning season for next year. Here are a handful of books that may come in handy as you work on your leadership skills and planning needs.

One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life – Mitch Horowitz (Crown Books)

The power of positive thought may seem as old as time itself, but that’s not the goal of author/speaker Mitch Horowitz’s new book, One Simple Idea; rather than re-hashing or re-packaging the principles, this weaves together a cogent history of positive thought.

Horowitz doesn’t just espouse the thought process, but creates a historical biography of the those who contributed to the positive thinking movement and avoids that hokey sentimentality of the “you can be anything you want to be” types. I have said for years that there is a reason way bookstores have entire sections on motivation; because no one needs a guide on negative thinking because it’s so easy. This would make for an interesting starting place if you’re looking for and attitude shift.

When Buyers Say No – Tom Hopkins and Ben Katt (Business Plus)  

ABC – always be closing. The sale starts when the customer says no. I could go on and on with a laundry list of sales clichés; like my all time favorite from Glengarry Glenn Ross, “coffee is for closers.” Over the course of time there have been shelves of books written on the art of selling chock full of ideas about overcoming objections and closing the deal.

With When Buyers Say No, veteran sales trainers Tom Hopkins and Ben Katt, aren’t necessarily breaking new ground, offering up techniques for making the sales they do offer some insight into the process of uncovering and responding to unstated objections or unasked questions or concerns that buyers may have. There is a great deal of psychology at play when it comes to buying and selling and Hopkins and Katt offer some useful strategies to keep the sales process moving forward.

The Opening Playbook: A Professional’s Guide to Building Relationships That Grow Revenue – Andrew Dietz (McGraw Hill Publishing)

With NFL training camps in full bloom, rookies and veterans alike are not only breaking a sweat during two a day practice sessions, but are spending plenty of time with their nose stuck firmly in their playbooks and study film to get a handle on their coaches approach to playing the game. Anyone who is paying attention knows that the business world is rife with sports analogies, so why not a business strategy book that literally borrows from the sports playbook?

That’s exactly what Andrew Dietz, president of the Creative Growth Group serves up with his new book, The Opening Playbook: A Professional’s Guide to Building Relationships That Grow Revenue. Dietz articulates a series of foundational principles and then illustrates clearly how to execute a more effective approach to relationship building that realizes the goal of growing your business. This one is useful across a broad spectrum of businesses, but if you are in the professional services end of things, this book is essential reading for your continued growth and success.

Step Up – Lead in Six Moments That Matter – Henry Evans and Colm Foster (Josey Bass Publishing)

Leaders…true leaders are those folks that answer the call when the situation demands. So much of what separates a great leader from the run of the mill is those moments or situations that when you as a leader are hit with the choice of stepping up and taking charge or sitting back and letting someone else deal with it. Call it grace under fire or doing the right thing, it really boils down to those leadership moments.

That is the focus of Henry Evans and Colm Foster’s new book, Step Up – Lead in Six Moments That Matter. Rather than trying to define the traits of great leadership, Evans and Foster detail broad situations that we all face on a daily basis and how leadership respond to those challenges and offer actionable strategies to be a more effective leader. Step Up is chock full of QR codes that lead to a plethora of additional insights and techniques and even offers an online assessment tools to gauge your leadership skillset.

Do You Have What It Takes to Take It To The Next Level?

Executive Presence – The Missing Link Between Merit and Success – Sylvia Ann Hewlett (Harper Business)

The old boys club. It is a comment that is old as the hills when it comes to business. The thought process for too long has been that the only reason why some people, notably women, don’t seem to climb the ladder of success to the highest levels is that they are held back by the unseen hand of the old boys club.

Turns out, it may be an unseen hand, but based on a collection of hard data, and the conclusions drawn from a number of nationally conducted surveys, there actually is something holding people back from taking that next step. That is the hypothesis proffered by author and president of the Center for Talent Innovation, Sylvia Ann Hewlett in her new book, Executive Presence – The Missing Link Between Merit and Success.

Hewlett drills down into the data and lays out the core pieces that make up Executive Presence and how perceptions of it can vary based on gender. Things like communication skills, and executive gravitas seem like pretty basic starting points for gauging executive presence, but appearance does matter; but physical attractiveness doesn’t carry the same weight as many might think scoring just 16% for the ladies and 14% for the men based on the research.

Hewlett goes on to offer up advice on how to improve one’s executive presence. While her focus tends to lean towards the ladies, certainly much of what she suggests throughout the book can be adapted for use by men. Things like grace under fire, confidence, taking decisive action, emotional intelligence and great speaking skills can cut across both genders and impact executive presence.

Disruptive Genius

Michael Jackson, Inc: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire – Zack O’Malley Greenberg (Atria Books)

Before the likes of Russell Simmons, P-Diddy and Jay Z ever came along to build empires based not only on their music business savvy; spinning of wide ranging and diverse business empires there was there was Michael Jackson.

Forbes Magazine senior editor, Zack O’Malley Greenburg tracks Jackson’s musical genius, which spawned his business genius, from the beginning days of his career in Gary, Indiana; being managed by the Jackson family’s hard-nosed patriarch, Joe Jackson, and the start of the Jackson 5. Michael Jackson, Inc: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of a Billion-Dollar Empire takes us forward through his meteoric solo/business career, his financial downfall and his after death, rebirth of the Jackson empire.

Greenburg recounts the King of Pop’s financial downfall, which can be tied to legal troubles and confrontations with the likes of slimy “journalists” like Martin Bashir who focused on Jackson’s at times less than stellar life choices. While his undeniable musical genius could not always over-shadow the ills and allegations that Jackson faced during his period of financial and personal difficulty, his untimely passing could.

 

While so may find it hard to comprehend, Greenburg recounts that since his death five years ago, the Jackson estate has generated nearly half of his life time career earnings, which exceed one billion dollars.

With the current and future projects on the drawing board it is easy to speculate that Michael Jackson, Inc, will easily and quickly usurp that figure within the next few years. Without new personal foibles to derail any progress and his popularity still intact, the Jackson estate is on stable footing to continue that rapid growth position.  

How Much Is Enough?

Conform – Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education – Glenn Beck (Threshold Editions/Mercury Radio Arts)

For years when it comes to public education, I have been asking the question; how much is enough? That simple question has now taken on a much greater meaning; while I was asking it about from the straight forward financial perspective, with the advent of Common Core, that question has now expand to include government control of our and our students lives.

Media mogul Glenn Beck offers up the second installment in his Control series; Conform – Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education, which offers up a basic primer not only on the roots and breadth of Common Core, but also spells out a broad based break down of systemic problems with the U.S. public education system.

Naturally, because Beck is who he is, this will no doubt engender howls of protest and name-calling, but the fact of the matter is he does arm folks with the basic understanding they need to fight back against Common Core before it becomes deeply engrained in the education system. While the career path training may sound good and has certainly proven the strange bedfellows analogy by drawing interest and support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and business organizations across the U.S., the longitudinal computer tracking of students through out there educational career and on into their career path is downright scary.

Clearly, anyone with even a modicum of common sense will recognize that Common Core’s twisted approach to education will do nothing to improve outcomes and sets up the perpetual argument that the only reason why it failed is of course, because we didn’t spend enough money! Not that it was doomed to fail from the start.

The U.S. education system is beyond repair until we address the systemic issues that have become deeply seated and are protected by education fiefdoms and teachers unions. Taxpayers are saddled with too many school districts that duplicate too many administrative functions at too great a cost. The city that I grew up in upstate New York is divided into four separate school districts in a relatively small geographic area. There are 500(!) school districts spread across the 67 counties that make up Pennsylvania; that means 500 school superintendents, 500 district administrative staffs and the high costs inherent to these systems.

Unions are designed to do two things; perpetuate unions and protect the worst teachers, keeping them in the classroom and subjecting students to their mediocre skills. Until we create a system that properly measures and rewards highly skilled teachers and frees those less than stellar teachers to pursue their true career path, we will continue to lag behind the rest of the world in educational outcomes.

Business at The Beach - Summer Business Reads

Traditional thinkers will tell you that “beach reads” are realm of thrillers, mysteries and other lighter fare. While I love a good thriller, I for one think sand between my toes should not limit my ability or desire to learn. Here are a stack of my recommendations for business books to take along on your next jaunt to a sandy stretch or wherever you choose to relax and unwind; some might even give you inspiration for when you head back to the grind.

The Obstacle Is The Way – Ryan Holiday (Portfolio Books)

I love the basic concept of this book and the fact that I think anybody in business can relate to the idea putting maybe too much effort into avoiding that issue, project, or report that stares at us from the corner of the office. As much as we hope, wish, ignore or just generally try to avoid it, it never really goes away and with the passing of time it starts to loom even larger.

In The Obstacle Is The Way, author Ryan Holiday shows us how to avoid the traps of fear, frustration, confusion, helplessness and even anger and find our way to the answer that more often than not is part and parcel of the issue that we are stymied by. Simply put, you can’t avoid your way to success, but you can apply the same principles have put into play by successful leaders stretching back to the Roman Empire.

This is a great read for wherever you are in your leadership career; just starting out on the leadership track, mid-cycle looking to take that next step or a seasoned pro seeking new inspiration to fuel your fire.

Mistakes I Made at Work – Edited by Jessica Bacal (Plume Books)  

I am always intrigued by trends or what I perceive as a trend and their seems to be a noticeable movement in the business world to celebrate…failure! Well maybe celebrate is a strong word, but recently there have been a number of pretty solid books that at the very least highlight, the opposite of success.

While not necessarily focusing on failure, Jessica Bacal has done an admirable job of getting 25 women from widely varied fields with equally diverse levels of success to sit down and talk on the record about some of their less than stellar moments in the workplace in Mistakes I Made at Work. Along the way Bacal also avoids falling into a rut of all too similar areas of business misadventure.

I found her approach of doing a brief set up of each of the participants background/careers, followed by the subject putting things in their own words and then wrapping the short essays with a handful of bullet point takeaways to be easy to digest and an effective tools for sharing useful information.

The Elements of Journalism – Bill Kovach & Tom Rosenstiel (Three Rivers Press)

Certainly not a “traditional” business book, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel are the authors of The Elements of Journalism, what is widely considered one of the definitive treatises on journalism. In this revised and updated third edition of the book Kovach and Rosenstiel have accounted for the changing journalistic landscape to include the exponential growth of social media.

With the rise of content marketing, native advertising and business news operations, this makes for a great primer for those who are approaching content development and production from a non-journalism background. Re-reading this classic provided me with a handful of aha moments that I can put to use in my own content marketing operation.

Essentialism – The Disciplined Pursuit of Less – Greg McKeown (Brown Business Books)

If you’re old enough to remember The Ed Sullivan Show, then you likely also remember the amazing talents of Erich Brenn, a regular on the show, famous for his act where he kept a set of plates spinning on sticks. (You can search YouTube if you’ve never seen it.) Anyone who is part of the current, “do more with less approach” to business can probably relate to Mr. Brenn’s often frantic, frenetic challenge to keep the plates spinning.

Now Greg McKeown, cited as a “leading essentialist” offers up Essentialism – The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, but don’t confuse this with a way to get more things done in less time, or to better manage your calendar; it really boils down to a new approach to thinking that focuses your efforts only on what truly matters. Those essentials are where the wins are and are the things that produce your highest level of satisfaction.

Imagine a world where all of the extraneous (for lack of a better word) bullshit that so often bogs us down was cast out and your energy could be focused on those essential elements. It’s an appealing thought, but it possible to be within reach? That’s where the biggest challenge lies for most of us.

Duct Tape Selling – Think Like A Marketer – Sell Like a Superstar – John Jantsch (Portfolio Books)

Does the thought of picking up the phone and making a cold call leave you shaky and busting out in a cold sweat? Does trying to make a sales script sound “natural” push you to the brink of your sanity? Then John Jantsch may have the perfect solution to your woes in the form of Duct Tape Selling -Think Like A Marketer – Sell Like a Superstar.

Jantsch plays a high value on becoming a subject matter expert and then connects the dots between developing and executing a platform and converting that expertise into sales. While there are plenty of books detailing content marketing and platform, Jantsch makes the missing connection to actual conversion. Content without conversion is just more stuff and nobody is looking for more stuff! This is truly where the rubber meets the road.

 

 

   

Smart Money Smart Kids - Dave Ramsey and Rachel Cruze (Lampo Press)

Full disclosure up front; while programming a talk radio station over a decade ago, I “hired” Dave Ramsey, by signing on as an affiliate station to his radio program. In the intervening time, other than his continued growth and success, not much has changed with Dave; he still offers up straightforward, no nonsense advice to his listeners, readers and program participants.

Joined by his adult daughter, Rachel Cruze, Ramsey has put together Smart Money Smart Kids to offer parents a winning road map to educating/raising their kids to be smart about the basics of personal finance.

It may seem utterly odd that the duo write about going to work and earning a living, but given the current circumstance that finds 20% of families in the United States don’t have one member of the brood who gets up and goes to a job on a daily basis, that might be some winning advice. Other basics include spending, saving, saving up towards a purchase and it wouldn’t be a Dave Ramsey message if it did not include advice on charitable giving.

Any parent who has had a sleepless night worrying about paying for college will want to take in Ramsey and Cruze’s advice on how to take on that challenge. While the information here is clearly built on the model of training kids, but I can clearly discern light bulbs going on above the heads of a lost generation of young parents.

What concerns me is that the folks who pick up Smart Money Smart Kids probably have a good foundation and this will be a useful tool, but those who really need this foundational advice are more likely to buy a DVD or video game for their kids.

How to be Brilliant

Talk Like TED: The Nine Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds – Carmine Gallo (St. Martin’s Press)

What started out as the cult of TED, a group of folks who got together at an annual conference to hear/see presentations on a range of topics that fell into the broad categories of technology, education and design, as morphed and grown to be a worldwide phenomenon that has generated tens of millions of online video views. Along the way it as spun off regional organizations (TED X) that host their own conferences/speakers.

Bestselling author and business coach Carmine Gallo has studied not only the growing impact of TED presentations, but also spent countless hours dissecting what it is that makes some of the most viewed TED speeches so impactful in his latest effort, Talk Like TED: The Nine Public-Speaking Secrets of the World’s Top Minds.

While some of the most viewed videos fall in to a wide range of topics, Gallo focused on what elements these presentations had in common that made them so impactful. Along the way he uncovered 9 common things, secrets if you will, that make them stand out from the pack, and how you as a presenter can include them in your presentations to increase your impact.

The “secrets” include:

1.   Unleashing the master within

2.   Mastering the art of storytelling

3.   Having a conversation

4.   Teaching something new

5.   Delivering jaw-dropping moments

6.   Lightening up

7.   Sticking to the 18 minute rule

8.   Painting a mental picture with multisensory experiences

9.   Staying in your lane

Gallo explores the business value of TED presentations. I found that it was very useful to read the book with a notebook close at hand and a laptop dialed into the TED presentations Gallo was detailing, to see firsthand the examples he cites.

Even as an experienced public speaker and business presenter I found a variety of new and useful tips throughout the book. One common theme that Gallo hits on was that successful TED presenters clearly spend plenty of time practicing and refining their craft before they ever set foot on the stage; while this may seem like common sense, but it’s winning advice on how to be brilliant.

 

Even Superheroes Have Sidekicks

Virtual Freedom – Chris Ducker – (BenBella Books)

Upfront confessions: My name is Jeff and I suffer from Superhero Syndrome. As someone who is working fulltime, operating a startup business, helping my wife with her startup and in my “spare time” writing for my four blogs I can totally relate to the tight grip, control issues and burnout that Chris Ducker writes about in Virtual Freedom.

I can certainly relate to the frustration of have an overflowing plate and simply not enough time to get done the big picture tasks that most business owners strive to achieve to help grow their businesses. You feel trapped in the…yes I’ll say it, mundane day-to-day tasks that are a huge part of administrating your operations.

Ducker not only makes the case, but gives you a guide to the action steps that you can take today to get the help you need and get back to focusing on the strategies and tactics that you can use to grow your business. Instead of wishing for a magical clock to give you just a few extra hours every day, Ducker clearly spells out exactly where to find that extra time by utilizing a virtual staff.

He also makes the case for how easing back on the control grip will not only allow you to refocus your business efforts, but also free you up to have more of a life outside your business endeavors. While all entrepreneurs believe that they know what’s best for their business, most bring some limitations in skillsets to the process and Ducker offers a range of suggestions where virtual staff can fill those skills deficits and you the business owner will benefit by getting not only the time, but by ending up with a better work product.

The yardstick I use to measure business books is really based on how useful the action steps they offer are and how quickly I can put them into operation; in the case of Virtual Freedom, Ducker could not have made it any easier to get started today on putting these plans in to play.

Millennials Seeking Purpose

The Promise of a Pencil – How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change - Adam Braun (Scribner)

One of the biggest challenges facing experienced leaders and managers is to bring the necessary skillsets to bare to properly develop and lead millennial generation employees. Millenials bring not only a unique set of challenges to the work environment given their everybody gets a trophy upbringing and helicopter parents, but also their desire to affect lasting change on the world they live in.

While The Promise of a Pencil – How an Ordinary Person Can Create Extraordinary Change, by Adam Braun is the perfect guidebook for millenials to follow their dreams, but also a solid tools for those leaders and managers who are facing that leadership challenge.

Braun is the founder of the education organization Pencils of Promise, that was founded with $25 and has since gone on to develop and build a development model to tackle worldwide education issues and in the process build 200 schools. Braun’s is a unique story; a new to the fold business advisor for Bain Capital who chucked all of the capital gain and lifestyle associated with the position based on an overwhelming desire to pursue and worthwhile work.

Each chapter of the book details a lesson that Braun learned and brought to the pursuit of his dream. This makes for an ideal leadership toolkit for mentoring and developing millenials and designing a leadership process that will meet not only your needs, but their needs as well.

Business, Right to the Point.

The Executive Checklist – A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change – James M. Kerr (Palgrave)

There are literally hundreds of business books that bring a singular focus to one segment of a business or another. Many deliver an in depth approach to tackling those segmented problems, issues and strategies, but I find that the most useful are those that offer up action steps that are easy to put into play.

Author and management consultant James Kerr brings a broad base of experience in a variety of industry sectors. He applies that broad base of knowledge to a variety of business approaches to change management in his new book The Executive Checklist – A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change.

During my career I have worked in a variety of industries including entertainment, broadcasting, manufacturing, sports, and healthcare and no matter what the sector and no matter what the project, I have seen that a large percentage of problem solving and change management really boils down to effective communications. Many of the strategies and tactics that Kerr outlines in book offer guidance to effectively communicate about goals and process.

The checklist approach that Kerr lays out, prove to be an effective roadmap that can be applied and adapted to any business or project at any stage of development, be it a start up, a company looking at transformational change or a complete overhaul. The Executive Checklist is not an in depth, here’s what you should do book, but offers a structural framework to apply to your project and for you build upon. It proves to be a very effective tool for any leaders toolbox.  

Get To the Point

Brief – Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less – Joseph McCormack (Wiley)

The upfront no brainer on this one is that any one in business is being blasted on a daily basis with a fire hose of information; we are literally being inundated with e-mails, text messages, reports, updates, white papers, mounds and mountains of information.

While we have newer and better tools than ever before for carrying out business, trying to have or make an impact is getting harder and harder in the face of this overload. Author Joseph McCormack makes the solid business case that it’s not just what you say, but how you say it that improve the impact of your information.

In Brief – Make a Bigger Impact by Saying Less McCormack offers up workable solutions and tactics that you can put to use today for a lean communications strategy. Often times communicating with clarity and brevity comes done to discipline and choice; why offer up 2500 words when a few hundred focused and impactful words can have a better impact with an information drenched executive? Part of your message can certainly be the offer to serve up more detail only if needed.

McCormack has devised a straightforward approach to utilizing the skills he offers, by breaking the book down into easy to digest and use bites. The layout makes it easy to pick and choose the sections that apply to your needs in a plug and play approach.

Really Move the Ball Forward

Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change – Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon (Simon & Schuster)

Call me old school, but I turn off my cell phones during meetings…both of them. There’s nothing I find more annoying than colleagues and business associates who place their phones down on the table only to have them vibrate spasmodically in circles or chirp some ridiculous ring tone in the middle of a thought or who can’t seem to make it through the meeting without crooking their neck down to check for the latest bit of junk email.

So it wasn’t a surprise that my phones started to sound off immediately when I turned them back on following a particularly grueling series of back to back meetings. One message from my son required an immediate response, so I apologized for the delay by mentioning that I was in meetings; to which he replied, “you’re always in meetings…how do you ever get anything done?” 

Clearly my offspring’s time spent recently earning a Penn State, Business Management degree did not go wasted; the lad clearly gets it. Business meetings, webinar broadcasts, and training sessions have become a huge time suck that often produce less than stellar results and act as roadblocks to actually getting things done.

Authors Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon are hoping to change the conversation and the way we get things done with their new book; Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. Ertel and Solomon offer up workable solutions that can be implemented quickly to move an organization forward quickly by breaking down silos, engendering collaboration and deliver results.

I applied the action steps that Ertel and Solomon spell out in the book to look back at a recent small team project that I helped to lead that had a truly impactful result on customer service. Without realizing it I had hit on utilizing strategic conversations with the small group that I was later able to roll out to the wider organization by working in concentric circles and expanding the scope and the impact the group had created.

The “Starter Kit” that is included in the book is a true road map to accelerating real change that can be adapted and applied to any business model.

 

Rage With The Machines

The Second Machine Age – Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies – Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W W Norton Books)

Authors Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, a pair of MIT business technology gurus offer up interesting perspectives on how technology impacts not only our lives, but also the economics of it all in The Second Machine Age – Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies.

The pair make the case that not only is there the tangible impact of the improvements on our lives that technological advancements in many fields have brought us, but also that technology has elevated the level of even the those at the lowest end of the economic scale.

While politicians and many economists have argued that the widening spread between the haves and the have-nots is somehow a fatal flaw of capitalism, Brynjolfsson and McAfee posit the theory of “the bounty” that technology has delivered to us all in that “spread.” They also offer up some suggestions for policy makers to address some of the problems created in society by the rapid advancement of technologies as we prepare for what will continue to be an evolving workforce, that we are merely in the early stages of currently.

One problem that the authors do not address is the valuation of many of the technological “advancements” that we have seen rapidly create new millionaires and billionaires while not really creating much in the way of new value. Websites and apps that allegedly “improve” our lives, really don’t have the same impact as say the creation of the automobile or the refrigerator from a prior machine age. We aren’t taking base raw materials and creating something of greater value with the advent of Facebook; where rather than creating an increased value, we have further diluted a static pool of dollars. The size of the pie hasn’t increased, there are just more people looking for a slice and it’s only natural that some will take a larger hunk while others are left with crumbs.

The Brand of a Great Brand

What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand Building Principles That Separate the Best From the Rest – Denise Lee Yohn (Josey-Bass Books)

Over time I have heard brand defined as a name, a strategy, a logo, a design, a term, an image, advertising, a look and feel, a personality and even an aura of a company or business. While each one of those distinct element may play a role in a businesses overall brand, they aren’t truly what defines a company brand.

In What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand Building Principles That Separate the Best From the Rest, author/consultant Denise Lee Yohn comes close to delivering the broadest, most accurate definition of brand. Yohn describes a brand as “a bundle of values and attributes that define the value you deliver to people through the entire customer experience and the unique way of doing business that forms the basis of your company’s relationships with all of its stakeholders.” While that may seem wordy, it does latch directly on to the essence of what great brands should be. Yohn boils down the approach to brand building to seven broad categories with a number of actionable steps that comprise a link in the chain.

The Seven Principles

1) Great Brand Start Inside
2) Great Brands Avoid Selling Products
3) Great Brand Ignore Trends
4) Great Brands Don’t Chase Customers
5) Great Brands Sweat the Small Stuff
6) Great Brand Commit and Stay Committed
7) Great Brands Never Have to Give Back

While each of the principles plays an integral role in the brand process, it is the first principle that is the most critical in my judgment; great brands start inside. To begin process of building a great company and a brand extension of that company, it critical that there be an internal buy in from all of the constituencies that make up the whole. It is those internal players that will help drive the outward extension of any brand. I found myself nodding in agreement when Yohn writes about great brands ignoring trends, avoiding selling products and chasing customers.

These clearly should never be manifestations of a great brand. By committing to the process and carefully monitoring every step in the process, great brands will reap the benefits of what they sow.

The Cleveland Clinic Way – Lessons in Excellence From One of the World’s Leading Healthcare Organizations – Toby Cosgrove, M.D. (McGraw Hill Education)

Imagine…you have built what easily ranks as one of the most respected, world renowned brands/institutions in healthcare, noted for its delivery of medical excellence in a wide range of service lines. One day a patient arrives at the facility and in the course of receiving that world class care they have a negative experience with a hospital technician or a housekeeper or food service staff – what are they likely to remember about their time at your facility? You probably guessed correctly.

As a professional healthcare marketer I have personally experienced the frustration of developing and marketing centers of medical excellence within a healthcare organization only to have patients have a terrible experience resulting in them leaving the facility outright and taking their business with them or losing future business based on the bad experience. I took the initiative to make customer service and customer experience, a function of the marketing department to help ensure a positive patient experience every step of the way from door to discharge.

It is that pursuit of excellence, not only on the medical side, but also the total patient focused experience the Dr. Toby Cosgrove, the president and CEO of the Cleveland Clinic writes about in The Cleveland Clinic Way – Lessons in Excellence From One of the World’s Leading Healthcare Organizations. Cosgrove details the innovative strategies that the Cleveland Clinic has undertaken to utilize a team work approach to the delivery of care and the unique care models it employees in that process.

Cosgrove offers insight into patient focused efforts to meet and exceed patient needs and an emphasis on customer service. In the book Cosgrove talks about a trip to the Harvard Business School where during the course of an interaction with a student he was asked if the Cleveland Clinic “taught empathy.” He tells how that brief interaction resulted in a shift in focus for care delivery to account for the patient’s perception of care. To reinforce the empathy approach to care the Cleveland Clinic’s communications department has put together one of the most effective, most shared and most often downloaded pieces of content marketing in the healthcare industry in the form of a video simply titled Empathy.

 

Utilizing a combination of innovation, collaboration, customer centric focus, and technology; while Cosgrove’s focus is on healthcare, the innovative approach he writes about can certainly be adapted to any customer facing industries.

The DNA of Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence – Getting More Without Settling for Less – Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rau (Crown Business)

Think about your business. Are there pockets of excellence, departments or sections of your business that perform at a higher level, deliver better results and just seem to get it? You’ve tried everything short of cloning to try to duplicate those outcomes only to come up short?

It was that frustration that was at the genesis of a seven year search for answers conducted by a pair of Stanford professors on a quest if you will, to map the DNA of Excellence. The results come in the form of Scaling Up Excellence: Getting More Without Settling for Less from Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rau.

 

 

While Sutton and Rau may not have succeeded in drawing up that scientific road map, but they have delivered an important and unique business edition that is based on hard evidence and proven tactics to tackle the challenge of scaling up excellence across an organization.

Sutton and Rau have boiled  scaling excellence down to seven principles:

1. Spread mindset, not just footprint.
2.  Engaging all the senses.
3. Link short-term realities to long-term dreams.
4. Accelerate accountability.
5. Fearing the clusterfug.
6. Scaling requires both addition and subtraction.
7. Slow down to scale faster - and better - down the road. 

They offer useful guidance and examples for a wide variety of business ranging from healthcare to financial sectors and retail and hospitality to social media and web-based businesses.