Reading List
The Goal
By: Eliyahu Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Alex Rogo is the manager of a failing manufacturing plant who receives an ultimatum from corporate headquarters: Turn the situation around in three months or the plant will be scrapped. With help from a mysterious mentor, Rogo discovers a revolutionary new way to do business—a way for people in any field of endeavor to increase productivity, profitability, and personal fulfillment.
A business book disguised as a novel, a love story about the manufacturing process, and an exhilarating adventure in human potential, The Goal is changing how America does business. First published in 1984, it became an underground bestseller; today it’s used by thousands of companies and taught in hundreds of business schools. Includes the author’s personal story, “My Saga.”
This third edition includes case study interviews. Professional readers recreate interviews that David Whitford, Editor at Large with Fortune Small Business, conducts with the author Eli Goldratt and with business professionals from General Motors, Thomson-Shore, Security Federal Banks and others who put the principles of The Goal into action.
Younger Next Year
By: Chris Crowley and Henry S. Lodge
Turn back your biological clock. A breakthrough book for men–as much fun to read as it is persuasive–Younger Next Year draws on the very latest science of aging to show how men 50 or older can become functionally younger every year for the next five to ten years, and continue to live like fifty-year-olds until well into their eighties. To enjoy life and be stronger, healthier, and more alert. To stave off 70% of the normal decay associated with aging (weakness, sore joints, apathy), and to eliminate over 50% of all illness and potential injuries. This is the real thing, a program that will work for anyone who decides to apply himself to “Harry’s Rules.”
Comment by Nathanial Bronner: This book is about having your body in shape at 80 and feel and perform as though you are 50. Starting at 50 you can be in better shape each year until you are 80.
It has the most comprehensive and update to date practical medical and health advice that I’ve come across.
An ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure.
It is available in hardback, paperback, eBook (Kindle) and audio format. I prefer the audio format. It is excellently narrated.
The body is arguably our most valuable material possession and without health we cannot enjoy the benefits that successful businesses can offer.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Best Practices for Small Business
By: Gina Abudi and Brandon Toropov
•Illustrates how to make money and keep it with time-honored strategies.
•Insightful real-life anecdotes to illustrate key concepts
The Slight Edge
By: Jeff Olson
Why is it that some people make dream after dream come true, while others just continue dreaming and spend their lives building dreams for someone else?
One simple reason: those that are “successful” have found their SLIGHT EDGE!
The Slight Edge is not just another self-help, motivation tool of methods you must learn in order to make it up the path of success. It simply shows you how to create powerful results from the simple daily activities of your life, by using tools that are already within you.
What do you need to make that happen? Discover that one thing that will help you achieve that goal, realize a life-long dream or propel you up the ladder to success.
Once you’ve got it, then you will discover how your philosophy… creates your attitude… creates your actions… creates your results… creates YOUR LIFE!
The Slight Edge is a way of thinking, a way of processing information that enables you to make the daily choices that will lead you to the success you desire. The Slight Edge is the key that will make all the other how-to books and self-help information that you read, watch and hear actually work.
Our favorite endorsements are from our readers:
I have read personal-development books for over 20 years and I can say this is the one that tied them all together. It is so easy to read and understand, and so powerful in the simplicity.
–Mike Bishop, Wilsonville, OR
I use this philosophy throughout my day. I’ve become a better person all around. I was able to correct my negative outlooks. I m a better role model for my children, my health is getting better, I’m more connected spiritually, my relationships are improving, and my business is thriving. It is a must-have and a must-read.
–Pedro Garcia, Middletown, NY
The Big Book of Small Business
By: Tom Gegax and Phil Bolsta
Your shoes are charred from stomping out brush fires. You have nightmares about UFOs—Unreachable Financial Objectives. All-star interviewees turn into duds. Meetings cause more problems than they solve. The office is a ghost town at 5:01 p.m. Does this sound familiar?
Tom Gegax knows what that is like. Years after running his Tires Plus franchise by the seat of his pants, blissfully unaware of how little he knew about getting the most out of people and managing a world-class organization, Tom was faced with a cancer diagnosis and a business at the brink of disaster. Resolved to change things around, he improved his mental clarity, health, and relationships and noticed that the more he profited on a personal level, the more his company profited. Tires Plus grew into a $200 million business with 150 upscale locations. He had learned the first lesson in Enlightened Leadership 101: Focus on the well-being of your employees and customers—as well as your own—and success will follow naturally.
In The Big Book of Small Business, Tom shares his hard-earned lessons on how to become an enlightened, effective leader, and on how to do the small things right so the big decisions work. This all-in-one toolbox for small businesses is jammed with warm-hearted, tough-minded practices and street-smart tips, covering every aspect of a growing business:
- Starting, funding, and getting your new business off the ground
- Crafting a mission and growing a corporate culture that works
- Hiring the best people and maximizing their potential
- Communicating and negotiating with your employees, customers, and suppliers
- Creating processes for continuous innovation and growth
- Protecting your business from unforeseen dangers
- Planning for growth
- And much more . . .
As thorough as a textbook and as lively as a news magazine, The Big Book of Small Business is the most comprehensive and practical book on how to take a small business to the next level, and an indispensable slingshot for the millions of scrappy Davids taking on corporate Goliaths.
Every Family’s Business: 12 Common Sense Questions to Protect Your Wealth
By: Thomas William, Ph.D. Deans
Comment by Marc Lewyn: “This book is a must read for anyone serious about protecting their wealth, securing their retirement and building an inspiring legacy.”
Perpetuating the Family Business: 50 Lessons Learned from Long Lasting, Successful Families in Business
By: Craig E Aronoff
John L. Ward, a leading world expert on family business, offers the best practices of the most successful and long-lasting families in business, including Ford Motors, Marriott Hotels, Levi-Strauss, and the New York Times. He provides a framework of five insights and four principles in which to position his fifty “lessons learned” for family business longevity. This is a comprehensive book on sustaining family businesses that contains international examples, cases, essential tools, and checklists of best practices; a how-to every entrepreneur should have.
Comment by Nathanial Bronner: This book is the best book that James found for businesses that will move into the second generation and beyond.
It is invaluable for the case histories and procedures that need to be setup to help the succeeding generations of a family business. Many founders have themselves together but it is the succeeding generation where the problems arise. This book is a big help. Available in hard copy and Kindle editions
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?
By: Louis Gerstner
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? sums up Lou Gerstner’s historic business achievement, bringing IBM back from the brink of insolvency to lead the computer business once again. Offering a unique case study drawn from decades of experience at some of America’s top companies – McKinsey, American Express, Rjr Nabisco – Gerstner’s insights into management and leadership are applicable to any business, at any level. Ranging from strategy to public relations, from finance to organization, Gerstner reveals the lessons of a lifetime running highly successful companies
Entreleadership
By: Dave Ramsey
Your company is only as strong as your leaders. These are the men and women doing battle daily beneath the banner that is your brand. Are they courageous or indecisive? Are they serving a motivated team or managing employees? Are they valued?
Your team will never grow beyond you, so here’s another question to consider. Are you growing? Whether you’re sitting at the CEO’s desk, the middle manager’s cubicle, or a card table in your living-room-based startup, EntreLeadership provides the practical, step-by-step guidance to grow your business where you want it to go. Dave opens up his championship playbook for business to show you how to:
• Inspire your team to take ownership and love what they do
• Unify your team and get rid of all gossip
• Handle money to set your business up for success
• Reach every goal you set
• And much, much more!
Boundaries for Leaders
By: Dr Henry Cloud
In Boundaries for Leaders, clinical psychologist and bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud leverages his expertise of human behavior, neuroscience, and business leadership to explain how the best leaders set boundaries within their organizations–with their teams and with themselves–to improve performance and increase employee and customer satisfaction.
In a voice that is motivating and inspiring, Dr. Cloud offers practical advice on how to manage teams, coach direct reports, and instill an organization with strong values and culture.
Boundaries for Leaders: Take Charge of Your Business, Your Team, and Your Life is essential reading for executives and aspiring leaders who want to create successful companies with satisfied employees and customers, while becoming more resilient leaders themselves.
Billion Dollar Lessons
By: Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui
”This book is your chance to learn from others’ mistakes.”– Entrepreneur
In the 1960s, IBM CEO Tom Watson called an executive into his office after his venture lost $10 million. The man assumed he was being fired. Watson told him, “Fired? Hell, I spent $10 million educating you. I just want to be sure you learned the right lessons.”
There are thousands of books about successful companies but virtually none about the lessons to be learned from those that crash and burn. Now Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui draw on research into more than 750 flameouts to reveal the seven biggest reasons for business failure.
Killing Lincoln
By: Bill O’Reilly
A riveting historical narrative of the heart-stopping events surrounding the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and the first work of history from mega-bestselling author Bill O’Reilly
The anchor of The O’Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic stories in American history—how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America’s Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln’s generous terms for Robert E. Lee’s surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln’s dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not appeased.
In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Booth—charismatic ladies’ man and impenitent racist—murders Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the country’s most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a smart but shifty New York detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth, while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery shootout and a series of court-ordered executions—including that of the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. Featuring some of history’s most remarkable figures, vivid detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller.
Catalytic Coaching: The End of the Performance Review
By: Gary Markle
After two decades of hands-on experience with performance management systems in some of the world’s most well recognized organizations, Markle has come to propound what he calls a universal law of modern business. People hate performance reviews. Drawing upon his studies of and experience with systems theory and illustrating his points with real-life examples, Markle explains why employees and managers both have come to regard the ubiquitous performance evaluation as industry’s poorest performing, most ineffective, and least efficient personnel practice. By digging down to its roots, he helps us understand why attempts to correct the flawed system fail. He provides an innovative way to measure their ineffectiveness and inefficiency and then introduces his catalytic coaching to replace them.
Markle shows how his system is superior to others in five key business outcomes: 1) positive behavioral change; 2) motivation to work hard; 3) retention of key contributors; 4) internal promotions and succession; and 5) prevention of and protection from lawsuits. Not only is catalytic coaching more effective, it is also more efficient: it requires far less time and paperwork to implement and maintain. Markle gives his readers all of the forms, instruments and detailed instructions they need to operationalize his system. Business executives, senior HR professionals, and organization development specialists will benefit particularly from his presentation, as will other managers, executives, and supervisors, all of whom must learn to take ownership of their responsibilities to their organizations and themselves.
Good Great
By: James Collins
The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The Findings:
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
- Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
The Energy Bus
By: John Gordon
The Energy Bus, an international best seller by Jon Gordon, takes readers on an enlightening and inspiring ride that reveals 10 secrets for approaching life and work with the kind of positive, forward thinking that leads to true accomplishment – at work and at home. Jon infuses this engaging story with keen insights as he provides a powerful roadmap to overcome adversity and bring out the best in yourself and your team. When you get on The Energy Bus you’ll enjoy the ride of your life!
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