Get Down to Business

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.