I’ve done a lot of reading this year. I’m a bit of a business bookworm. When others are deep in novels, I’m scouring the (virtual) bookshelves for what’s new in business books. This year, in preparation for the BOOKED for Lunch webinar series where I interview top business book authors, I had the divine pleasure of reading and enjoying what I deem some of this year’s BEST books for business. Here are the 10 books we featured this year. They’re not in order of preference. I recommend you add them all to your library. You can access the recordings of the interviews in the HerBusiness online store.
Launch: How to quickly propel your business beyond the competition – Michael Stelzner
“Any business can defy gravity, especially in this uncertain economy,” says Michael Stelzner about his new book, Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition. Launch contains a proven roadmap for any business, large or small, seeking to launch an effective growth strategy with content marketing. You can instantly download the first chapter (no registration required) at www.elevationprinciple.com. — The ABN’s advisory board is reading this over the holidays so that we can use the great information strategically in the new year
Enchantment: Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds and Actions – Guy Kawasaki
Enchantment is Guy’s tenth book. In it, he explains how to influence what people will do while maintaining the highest standards of ethics. The book explains when and why enchantment is necessary and then the pillars of enchantment: likability, trustworthiness and a great cause. The topics are launching, overcoming resistance, making enchantment endure and using technology. There are even special chapters dedicated to enchanting your employees and your boss. — Guy was such a charm to work with. Funny and easy going. He presented a second webinar with us ‘How to enchant with social media” which you’ll also find in our store.
Content Rules – Ann Handley and CC Chapman
Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other publishing platforms are giving everyone a “voice,” including organisations and their customers. So how do you create the bold stories, videos and blog posts that cultivate fans, arouse passion for your products or services and ignite your business? How do you attract the right audience? How do you create content that converts? What is the best way the most popular tools to get the greatest results? — If you publish tweets, Facebook updates, a blog, a newsletter – anything, really then content can be your friend or enemy. No business today can get away with shoddy content and this book walks you through what you need to know.
The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and more Social — Jay Baer and Amber Naslund
This book isn’t about how to “do” social media. Instead, The NOW Revolution outlines how you must retool your organisation to make real-time business work for you rather than against you. Read about seven shifts that will help you make your company faster, smarter, and more social:
- Engineer a New Bedrock
- Find Talent You Can Trust
- Organise your Armies
- Answer the New Telephone
- Emphasise Response-Ability
- Build a Fire Extinguisher
- Make a Calculator
The NOW Revolution is pushing you to adapt the way you do business, from the inside out. It impacts your organisation culturally, operationally and functionally. This book is your guide to making the changes you need and to harnessing the potential of this new communication era. — Amber was so generous with her information and provided easy to implement tips. It’s so seldom we get women business authors that we were thrilled when she agreed to be interviewed.
Niche – James Harkin
Our cultural consumption is no longer controlled by the giants of the mainstream market. Many giants have become weak and defensive – hovering around the middle of the market and striking out wildly in search of new audiences. In Niche, James Harkin explains that no size fits all and that anyone who tries to be all things to everyone ends up as nothing to anyone. James argues that innovation and profitability are quietly moving from the middle of the market to a series of tightly defined but globally scattered niches, bound together by the reach of the net. — James joined us from the UK (it was about 6am local time) and we had a lot of fun on this interview.
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies — Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li
Corporate executives struggle to harness the power of social technologies. Twitter, Facebook, blogs, YouTube are where customers discuss products and companies, write their own news and find their own deals, but how do you integrate these activities into your broader marketing efforts? It’s an unstoppable groundswell that affects every industry yet it’s still utterly foreign to most companies running things now. — Josh knows this area SO well. We were delighted to have him tell us how the book was more relevant now than when the original edition was published a couple of years ago.
Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything
In Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything, Chris Brogan guides you through using Google+ for promotion, customer service, community building, referrals, collaboration and a whole lot more. You won’t just master innovative new tools like Circles and Hangouts; You’ll use them to generate more customers and more cash! — We held this event just before the book was due to launch. Google+ hadn’t yet launched pages for businesses. Chris gave us a your of the new social network and we taught him a little about Australian music.
Predictable Success — Les McKeown
If you own, manage or work for any kind of organisation, you have one goal above all else – success. And not just occasional, elusive or temporary success. You’re looking for:
- Success that you understand and can control
- Success you can maintain indefinitely
- Success you can replicate
- Success you can scale
- Success that isn’t dependent on you alone
In short, you’re looking for Predictable Success. — Les’ Scottish humour went down a treat with the Australian audience. The book was recommended to us by member Alycia Edgar. It really made me think about the stage of business we are in and what to do to stay at the peak part of Les’s Predictable Success model.
We First : How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World – Simon Mainwaring
Is technology teaching us to be more human? Could the future of profit actually be purpose? A social media expert with global experience with many of the world’s biggest brands, including Nike, Toyota and Motorola, Simon Mainwaring offers a visionary new practice in which brands leverage social media to earn consumer goodwill, loyalty and profit, while creating a third pillar of sustainable social change through conscious contributions from customer purchases. — I met Simon in the US earlier this year. A fellow Aussie living in the US he’s nailed the fact that those that will win in the future of business are those that make a contribution to more than their customers and shareholders. We can all learn from the messages in this book.
A Complete Idiot’s Guide to Crowdsourcing — Aliza Sherman
If two heads are better than one, then imagine how great 200 or 2,000 or 20,000 could be for helping you get something done. That’s the potential power of crowdsourcing – tapping into the global talent pool and using an “open source” approach to bringing in more people to participate together to reach a common goal. the book looks at all the tools you’ll need to begin crowdsourcing, how to define your goals and target different crowds, how to design the best project or campaign to share, how to organise and analyse the input you receive from the crowd to get results and how to apply the crowd’s output directly to your business — Aliza is known as a web pioneer and social media innovator. We’ve caught up in the US the last two years and she’s very committed to supporting women to understand and make use of technology. I applaud her efforts.
If I’m honest, more times than not I crammed the reading into the days before the interview reading or rereading to prepare sensible questions. The winner in the equation was me. I’ve been the recipient of the best business education money can buy. I trust those that listened in to the webinars also felt like they’d received a gift of education from these talented and generous authors. And, that the authors themselves derived a sense of satisfaction from having their book featured to our national community of inspiring businesswomen. I hope you’ll take my recommendation and get a hold of these books. I also recommend you take a listen to the webinar recordings. 9,200+ people registered for the BOOKED for Lunch series during 2011.
