Issue No. 142 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a CliffsNotes-type book with summaries of the 100 best business books of all time (in the opinion of two legendary book reviewers). And this reminder, check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
100 Best Biz Books
If a college-age intern asked you this summer to name the 100 best business books of all time, I have a cheat sheet for you. Some of your favorites won’t be on this list and you’ll likely be unfamiliar with several dozen—but that’s a good thing.
The co-authors run 800-CEO-READ and have been recommending business books for years—so buying the book was a no-brainer. It called out to me. Reading the book was both mandatory and motivating. The 100 best business books are categorized in 12 sections including: you (strengths, etc.), leadership, strategy, sales and marketing, rules and scorekeeping, management, biographies, entrepreneurship, narratives, innovation and creativity, big ideas and takeaways.
I’ve read 21 of the 100 books. I’m familiar with another 25—and have always wanted to read about half of those. So the value of this book, for me, is having at my finger tips a two-page morsel on each of the 54 books I’ve never read. If your favorite book is missing, you can recommend it on their website like I did. (Click on my book here, or on the book cover, to visit their website.)
Click here to go to:
My Favorite Business Book
Buy the book on Amazon
Each book summary includes a memorable quote in big, bold type, like “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” from The Balanced Scorecard. Or, this from Moments of Truth, the classic customer service book by Jan Carlzon, who led the Swedish airline, SAS: “An individual without information cannot take responsibility; an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility.” And how about this line from The Partnership Charter: How to Start Out Right With Your New Business Partnership (or Fix the One You’re In), “A charter is a necessary tool because few people have been taught how to be partners.”
The co-authors are like fine surgeons in the art of reviewing business books: no wasted words, get to the heart of the matter, get out. Each two-page review delivers the diagnosis and enough medicine to get you moving. Even reading the summary of The Effective Executive, by Peter Drucker (one of my personal Top-20 books), gave me new insight and a new one-liner, “Effective executives solve problems once.”
This book is a treasure, and besides the 100 book summaries, it’s jammed with delightful full-page sidebars including a readers’ Top-10 poll (The Goal was No. 1), conferences to attend (like the TED conference), an interesting chart on the differences between fables, modern books and classics (with examples), the Top-10 bestselling business books from 2004 to 2008 (Good to Great was No. 1 with 1.4 million sales), six leadership movies, and why The Economist is the only magazine you need to read.
To order this week’s book from Amazon, click on this title: The 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You, by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) About 11,000 business books are published in the U.S. every year. How do you decide which books to read? What is the most important business book you have ever read?
2) Speaking of GM, when Alfred Sloan was chairman of General Motors, he wrote an article on management for Fortune magazine in 1953. That turned into his book My Years With General Motors. What book would you recommend that President Obama read, now that he owns this car company?
Comfort Zones Matter - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the People Bucket, Chapter 7, in Mastering the Management Buckets, is to find your comfort zone and help your team members find their comfort zones. By understanding the four social styles (analyticals, drivers, amiables and expressives), you can help your staff (and family and friends) be more effective in people relationships.
For example, each of the four social styles will address budget-cutting decisions at your organization four different ways:
• Analyticals will avoid risks, based on facts.
• Drivers will take risks, based on intuition.
• Amiables will avoid risks, based on opinion.
• Expressives will take risks, based on hunches.
Important! Analyticals and drivers have similar priorities (tasks) and amiables and expressives have the same priorities (people). Analyticals and amiables have the same pace (slow) and drivers and expressives share the same pace (fast). But watch out! Analyticals and expressives have neither pace nor priority in common and ditto for drivers and amiables. You’ll often find conflict between those social styles—usually because a team member doesn’t understand her comfort zone and has not become a student of the comfort zones of her direct reports.
For more help, download Worksheet #7.2: General Overview of the Four Social Styles from the People Bucket page at my Management Buckets website. Plus, check out the book recommendations listed for this bucket.
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