Posts tagged Business

AUDIOBOOK read by Tony Hsieh

I love Zappos.  If you’ve never bought anything from them, you really should give it a shot.  They offer free shipping both ways, typically upgrade your shipping to 2-day, and go above and beyond to make sure you are satisfied.  A couple of weeks ago, I order two different pairs of hiking boots, was upgraded to 2-day shipping, tried both on, selected the pair I really wanted, and returned the second pair with a prepaid label from Zappos.  Super easy and I didn’t have to slog through the mall or a shoe store.  I’m hooked.  All of that is to say that if you have interest in business culture or how a company can best focus on customer service, you should read this book.  Part autobiography and part discussion of the Zappos culture, Hseih (the CEO of Zappos) crafts an easy to read and enjoyable book.  I highly recommend it.

ACTUAL BOOK

This book was required reading as part of my Emerging Leaders program at work as we prepare for our “stretch” projects.  The basis of the book is an online strengths assessment called StrenghtsFinder 2.0.  With the purchase of the book, you get a code to take the online assessment, which returns five strength areas based on your answers.  The book has a reference section where it discusses each strength and what they really mean.  The crux of the whole book is that you should play to your strengths and surround yourself with people with contrasting strengths instead of trying to improve your weaknesses.  Overall, I think the assessment and strength descriptions are informative and could be of good use.  The rest of the book seemed to be more filler and rah-rah stories of how various leaders have played to their strengths.  If you’re interested in the assessment, I recommend just picking up the StrengthsFinder 2.0 book as you can do without the additional stories in this expanded edition.

AUDIOBOOK read by Jesse Boggs

Holy crap this book is frightening.  I’ll go into some more detail here, but if you have any interest in the financial markets or what happened leading up to the 2007 financial crisis, go read this book.  I’ll admit that I’m not the best at keeping up with the news and am typically so disgusted with the newsmakers and newscasters, that I don’t spend much time getting into the details of what really happened.  Add to that the fact that the only direct impact of the crisis to me was putting a large dent in my 401k (which always seems a little abstract since I don’t really “see” the money yet), and I just chalked the crisis up to corruption and greed, shook my head, and moved on.  After reading this book, I found that I was half right.  The crisis did stem from a lot of corruption and greed, but also hinged on a whole lot of stupidity.  

ACTUAL BOOK

This is by far the best book that combines a penguin fable and proper change management that I’ve ever read.

I “won” this book in a raffle at my office (no AppleTV for me).  I’ve read Kotter’s work before and his eight steps to leading change are standard reading for most corporations and business schools.  Our Iceberg is Melting is a telling of Kotter’s eight principles using a fable of a group of penguins and the changes they’re forced to face.  The fable presents the concepts in a more illustrative way that helps the reader to put some concrete examples around why each principle is important.  The book is pretty cheesy, but a good intro to Kotter’s work and I’d recommend it as a entry to change leadership to anyone interested (or forced into) the subject.

ACTUAL BOOK

Do More Faster is a collection of short essays focused on technology startups by people involved in the TechStars program.  Cohen and Feld are the co-founders of TechStars, a startup incubator that has had tremendous success in getting startups off the ground and funded.  This book includes essays from both startup founders and mentors to the program across a wide range of topics.  While not all of the essays apply to my new venture, there were quite a few that are now dogeared in my copy.  The book is a quick read and the layout allows the reader to skim over topics that aren’t of interest and focus on those that are most applicable.  I’d recommend this book to anyone who is getting involved in a startup.

ACTUAL BOOK

You’re going to start seeing a theme here.  While I’m still listening to audiobooks for pleasure, my actual reading time is consumed with books on startups for my new project.  There are a million books out there on all of the things that you need to do when starting a business.  Most of them read like textbooks and your eyes start to glaze over after the first few pages.  Not this one.  Kawasaki has put together a fantastic book that speaks more in generalities, but has an unbelievable amount of insight.  The book is designed to help anyone starting anything (project, business, career, etc), but given Kawasaki’s background (Macintosh and Garage Ventures), it’s tailored to startups that will ultimately seek funding.  Each chapter is well organized, starts with a quick “GIST” of the topic, and ends with a FAQ section.  I imagine I will be reading the book a number of times and highly recommend it.