John uses dog-ears. Bren uses a pen. Jack uses those little Avery sticky tabs.
I thought this was another interesting idea.
Prashanth Rai at Lets Talk is mindmapping his way through Winning by Jack Welch. He is listening to the book via audible.com and is taking notes as he goes.
Here is his mindmap of Chapter 1.
I haven’t done this in awhile, but I thought I would publish the Table of Contents from a new book. This gives you a little favor for the content and structure of a book. Some time you find out the book is about something completely different than what you thought.
The book we are doing today is Why Some Companies Emerge Stronger and Better from A Crisis: 7 Essential Lessons for Surviving Disaster by Ian Mitroff.
(click through to see the table of contents)
The Likeability Factor : How to Boost Your L-Factor and Achieve Your Life’s Dreams by Tim Sanders, Crown Business, 224 Pages, $23.00, Hardcover, April 2005, ISBN 1400080495
It can’t be stated more plainly: Unlikeability doesn’t work. Easy as that, folks. With that established Tim Sanders has kindly followed in the steps of his previous bestseller, Love is the Killer App, with a book that gives us the tools on how to be likeable. He didn’t pull it out of thin air either. Nope, it’s based on solid research; Sanders cites thousands of pages to prove it.
The author states that a morning show deejay asked him to give a lecture on how to be more likeable. After studying a particularly rude deejay, he came up with four things necessary to improve one’s likeability. This of course is effective in both professional and personal environments. This is what he came up:
Friendliness: seems like a no-brainer, but many people don’t think being friendly makes such a big difference. It does.
Relevance: try to matter to other people. Don’t just see what you can get out of them but rather what you can do for them.
Empathy: Care for people. Try to get behind what matters to them etc. Be interested in them first.
Realness: Likeability will not work if you try to fake it. Once people realize that your friendliness, empathy and relevance is real, you will see changes.
After he discusses the four elements of likeability, he moves on to share detailed guidelines on every single element. This is a very useful part of the book, with tips and examples on how to improve one’s likeability. This book will teach anyone how to bring out the best in others. Who doesn’t want that win-win situation? Pick up a copy today.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE MONTHLY BOOK REVIEWS, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO JACK AT 800-CEO-READ.COM.
I have quite a list for this post:
We have had quite of few authors visit us over the last year. I have a list below. Clicking on their name will take you to the first entry of their visit. You can page forward through their entries using the links at the top of the page.
Seth Godin
Barry Moltz
James Surowiecki
Jeff Blackman
Lakshman Achuthan
John Putzier
John Winsor
Ann Crittenden
Marc Gunther (he hosted for a whole week)
Laurence Haughton
Rosa Say
Good Morning and Happy Monday!
We don’t have big events planned this week. We are still recovering from the bash on Friday (and you can still get in on the galley giveaway if your interested).
I thought I would go back into the archives this week and pull out some the gems for the newer readers. I am going to do some of that digging today and see what we find.
There will Jack Coverts Selects that are going to match up with an audiobook excerpt. So, watch for that later in the week.
Otherwise, enjoy your week!
Yes, this book is excellent. Rossotti never claims to have saved the agency, and is fairly candid about the challenges of trying to remake the IRS. Here’s a review I did of his book last week.
To coincide with our birthday, it is also Tax Day.
The book connection would be Many Unhappy Returns: One Man’s Quest To Turn Around The Most Unpopular Organization In America by by Charles O. Rossotti.
No one believed the IRS could ever run like a twenty-first-century business. Until it did.
When Charles O. Rossotti became Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in 1997, the agency had the largest customer base-and the lowest approval rating-of any institution in America. Mired in scandal, caught in a political maelstrom, and beset by profound management and technology problems, the IRS was widely dismissed as a hopelessly flawed enterprise.
In Many Unhappy Returns, Rossotti-the first businessperson to head the IRS-recounts the remarkable story of his leadership and transformation of this much-maligned agency. In the glare of intense public scrutiny, he effected dramatic changes in the way the IRS did business-while it continued to collect $2 trillion in revenue.
Through fascinating accounts of heated Congressional hearings, encounters with Washington bigwigs, frank exchanges with taxpayers and employees, and risky turnaround strategies, Rossotti serves up a colorful story of leadership and change against daunting odds. He also underscores why every honest taxpayer should demand reform in the broader U.S. tax system.
Infused with keen wit and hard-won business wisdom, Many Unhappy Returns illuminates the perils and possibilities of leading large, complex organizations in a transparent world.
I should have started the day with this, but the 800-CEO-READ Blog is one year ago today.
[cheering]
I personally have really enjoyed it. I hope you have too. There is much more planned for the coming year, so stay tuned.
To celebrate, we are going to do a galley giveaway. We get LOTS of books and we thought we would give you a sneak peak at some of the stuff we are seeing.
It is simple to participate:
*Send me an email (todd [at] 800ceoread [dot] com) with the subject line “Happy Birthday”.
*All you need to include is your street address (we send everything by UPS) and I will send you a galley.
*If you want to specify a topic area, feel free. I will try to match up as many requests as possible.
*I’ll take as many people as I have galleys (and I am betting I will still have galleys left over).
*We will do nothing with your information other than send you a book.
[playing Beatles' Birthday]
I also liked this quote from The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman:
“In 1977, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping put China on the road to capitalism, declaring later that to get rich is glorious. When China first opened its tightly closed economy, companies in industrialized countries saw it as an incredible new market for exports. Every Western or Asian manufacturer dreamed of selling its equivalent of 1 billion pairs of underwear to a single market. Some foreign companies set up shop in China to do just that. But because China was not subject to world trade rules, it was able to restrict penetration into its market by those Western companies through various trade and investment barriers. And when it was not doing it deliberately, the sheer bureaucratic and cultural difficulties of doing business in China had the same effect. Many of the pioneer investors in China lost their shirts and pants and underwearand with Chinas Wide West legal system there was not much recourse.
Beginning in the 1980s, many investors, particularly overseas Chinese who knew how to operate in China, started to say, Well, if we cant sell that many things to the Chinese right now, why dont we use Chinas disciplined labor pool to make things there and sell them abroad? This dovetailed with the interests of Chinas leaders. China wanted to attract foreign manufactures and their technologiesnot simply to manufacture 1 billion pairs of underwear for sale in China but to use low-wage Chinese labor to also sell 6 billion pairs of underwear to everyone else in the world, and at prices that were a fraction of what the underwear companies in Europe or America or even Mexico were charging.
