Summer is winding to its inevitable Labor Day close and
school is back in session, so it’s time to put away the books for the beach and
turn our attention back to getting down to business.
Visibility
Marketing – David Arvin (Career Press)
Marketing guru David Arvin is a popular business
consultant/coach and keynote speaker who is widely recognized as the Visibility
Coach. Arvin’s new book, Visibility
Marketing, will be an eye opening for both marketers and business owners
alike.
While so many marketing books espouse the latest trick,
trend or gimmick to supposedly help your business standout from the pack, Arvin
takes a dramatically different approach by helping businesses and marketers
alike to do a better job of identify what competitive advantages they have that
are the starting point to build upon.
From that cornerstone Arvin will guide you through the
process of developing and honing effective messaging and the tactics to get
those messages heard and seen. He illustrates both effective and failed
approaches for a wide array of business categories which makes this book more
relatable to a range of businesses.
I am always a fan of business and leadership books that
give you useful tools that you can put to work today, and Arvin delivers with Visibility Marketing.
75
Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop and Keep Great Employees – Paul Falcone
(AMACOM)
My day job is in the healthcare field and aside from
the ever-changing regulatory challenges the number one issue facing hospitals,
physician practices and healthcare delivery is STAFFING. The need for competent
providers far exceeds the available talent pool so it is incumbent upon those
managers in the field to develop and implement a strategic approach to finding
and almost more importantly holding onto great employees.
For business owners if you don’t think that having and
keeping great staff, and turnover comes with a great cost, don’t worry, you
won’t be in business much longer to have the concern. If you, like many folks
are looking for tools and resources to help you identify, hire, develop and
hang onto great employees, then Paul Falcone’s new book, 75 Ways for Managers to Hire, Develop and Keep Great Employees, will
go a long way towards giving you strategies that you can put to work today to
help you over the HR hump.
Falcone hits it on the head when he talks about the
hiring process being as much, if not more about you and your company’s brand as
it is about salary and benefits when it comes to hiring. Things like measuring
and improving employee engagement, effective communication and yes even
accountability make a HUGE difference in the process.
Falcone makes a strong case that every manager, not
just the HR manager play an important role in the hiring and onboarding process
and even one glitch can impact the results of recruitment and retention of
great staff. This is stuff that can have an impact on your bottom line and your
ultimate success or failure.
Hiring
& Firing (The Brian Tracy Success Library) – Brian Tracy (AMACOM)
I’ve got to say, I have loved the opportunity to read,
review an utilize the books in the Brain Tracy Success Library series. Tracy, a
nationally recognized business and leadership development professional has
authored dozens of books on a wide array of business and leadership success
topics and this series of handy guides have distilled the topics of leadership,
management, creativity, marketing and more into useful editions that business
leaders can reach for to get ideas, inspiration and useful guidance as the need
arises.
The last installment in the series is Hiring & Firing, offers guidance
into two of the most critical skills when it comes to the success of your
business. They are two critical skills that many of us struggle with the most.
As always, Tracy offers up nuts and bolts things like how to write accurate job
descriptions (ENOUGH WITH THE OTHERS DUTIES AS ASSIGNED STUFF ALREADY!) how to
develop a set of strong interview questions, how to dig deep into references an
prior job experience and results and the negotiation process.
I look upon this series as a go to resource for tested
and proven tools that I can use every day. Any business owner will be better
with these books within reach.
The
Effective Manager – Mark Horstman (Wiley)
Mark Horstman is a management consultant and the
co-founder of Manager Tools, which produces one of the most often downloaded
business/ management podcasts in the world, with over a staggering quarter of a
billion downloads.
Horstman gathers the collective research from hands on
business encounters and countless interactions during training sessions and seminars
in, The Effective Manager, a book
that is a solid read for those new to the realm of management or a well
seasoned veteran. Horstman quite literally serves up tips and tricks based on
the collected experience and offers downloadable forms to assist in the
implementation of these tactics.
I read with great interest Horstman’s thoughts on what
he dubs O3s, one on one meetings. He outlines what regularly scheduled sessions
with your direct reports means and how to make this time more effective so it
doesn’t become a dreaded part of both your and their week.
It is the added structure to the management process
that will help newbies get started and increase the impact of veterans in being
more effective.
