After a short hiatus, our Readers’ Choice Poll is back! You know the drill: Out of these four titles, we want to know which business book YOU want us to summarize in February. Voting concludes Friday, January 25th at 11.59pmEST.
<a href="http://polldaddy.com/poll/6845913/">What business book do you want us to summarize next?</a>
<a href=”http://polldaddy.com/poll/6845913/”>What business book do you want us to summarize in February?</a>1. Outwitting the Devil: The Secret to Freedom and Success by Napoleon Hill
Napoleon Hill wrote this book in 1938, just after publication of his all-time bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. This powerful tale has never been published, considered too controversial by his family and friends.
Using his legendary ability to get to the root of human potential, Napoleon Hill digs deep to identify the greatest obstacles we face in reaching personal goals: fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy, as tools of the Devil. These hidden methods of control can lead us to ruin, and Hill reveals the seven principles of good that will allow us to triumph over them and succeed.
Annotated and edited for a contemporary audience by Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Three Feet from Gold co-author Sharon Lechter, this book is profound, powerful, resonant, and rich with insight.
2. Working for You Isn’t Working for Me: How to Get Ahead When Your Boss Holds You Back by Katherine Crowley
Sooner or later, we all have to work for someone we can’t stand-whether it’s an inept supervisor, an undermining department head, or an overly demanding client. When that happens, some people quit, some suffer in silence, and others cope by sulking, obsessing, or retaliating.
But you can take charge of this crucial workplace relationship. In this book, Katherine Crowley and Kathi Elster, authors of the bestseller Working for You Is Killing Me, offer concrete examples of bad boss scenarios and a proven four-step program for improving each situation:
•Detect – Identify how this person drives you crazy.
•Detach – Discover concrete actions you can take to reclaim your power.
•Depersonalize – Learn how to take a boss’s actions less personally.
•Deal – Devise a plan to get what you need and move your career forward.
3. Degrees of Strength: The Innovative Technique to Accelerate Greatness by Craig W. Ross & Steven W. Vannoy
Improve performance, increase responsibility and accountability, build agile, capable teams, and do it with one quick read. What would you pay for greater responsibility and performance momentum within your team? Degrees of Strength shows you how. Short enough to read in one plane ride, your team will be inspired to solve the problems that have slowed success, even those tenacious ones that have plagued your team or family for years. This is a story rooted in the professional and personal life. A regional VP’s job is on the line, and her family is, too. She needs to find a way to turn her team’s performance around and has no money to throw at the problem. It’s real. We’ve worked with these people. What follows is the struggle of change as her team fights with each other—and with themselves—to implement the new technique. In the end, they win more than they could have imagined.
4. Affinity: Beyond Branding by Martin Goldfarb and Howard Aster
Affinity is a new concept: a way of thinking. This book examines cultural consumer anthropology. It is about observing and understanding consumer behaviour and influencing that behaviour. Affinity is all about culture and the way we live, about the objects around us and how we feel about them; it is the reconnection between business and the street, between the story-teller and the listener. Story-telling is fundamental to creating affinity and leadership in our society. Brands come and go and try often to re-create themselves. Good brands attach themselves and propagate values that are enduring. They can outlast the many economic cycles that are part of social transformation. How does a product tap into the enduring features of a culture so that people want to hear the story again and again, go back to the product year after year, and are even eager to re-tell that story to others?
