Articles
Understanding How Your Customers Think | read this article
John Zogby on how business owners can use polling to better understand their customers.
Cheap Ways to Motivate Your Team | read this article
Keeping morale high is essential to your business.
Why Should Your Employees Like You? | read this article
Use these 5 tips to gain respect from your team and boost your bottom line.
The People’s Marketing | read this article
Why more marketers are daring to let customers take charge of their advertising.
How to Boost Sales in a Deflated Economy | read this article
Introduce new products or services to help your small business beat the recession in ways that cost-cutting can’t.
5 Ways to Actually Make Money on Twitter | read this article
Some companies have figured out how to use Twitter for old-fashioned things. Like, you know, making money. Here are five strategies.
3 Steps to Effective Sales Promotions | read this article
Get customers out of a holding pattern with a top-notch campaign.
Create a Bonus Program That Generates Business | read this article
Motivate employees with a system that’s good for them–and for your bottom line.
Create a Positive Corporate Culture | read this article
Examine your beliefs, goals and values to create a positive atmosphere in your business.
Create a Lasting Legacy | read this article
For real estate and design mogul Jeff Lewis, success is about longevity–sprinkled with a touch of control.
Books
First, Break All the Rules | buy this book on Amazon
The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. They differ in sex, age, and race. They employ vastly different styles and focus on different goals. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. And, yes, they even play favorites. First, Break All the Rules explains why.
SPIN Selling | buy this book on Amazon
Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation’s massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy.
The One Minute Manager | buy this book on Amazon
For more than twenty years, millions of managers in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses nationwide have followed The One Minute Manager’s techniques, thus increasing their productivity, job satisfaction, and personal prosperity. These very real results were achieved through learning the management techniques that spell profitability for the organization and its employees.
The One Minute Manager is a concise, easily read story that reveals three very practical secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands.
The Success Principles | buy this book on Amazon
The Success Principles™ will teach you how to increase your confidence, tackle daily challenges, live with passion and purpose, and realize all your ambitions. Not merely a collection of good ideas, this book spells out the 64 timeless principles used by successful men and women throughout history. Taken together and practiced every day, these principles will transform your life beyond your wildest dreams!
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership | buy this book on Amazon
If you’ve never read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, you’ve been missing out on one of the best-selling leadership books of all time. If you have read the original version, then you’ll love this new expanded and updated one.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team | buy this book on Amazon
Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team.
The Happiness Advantage | buy this book on Amazon
Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, who spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, draws on his own research—including one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG—to fix this broken formula. Using stories and case studies, Achor explains how we can reprogram our brains to become more positive in order to gain a competitive edge at work.
Goals! | buy this book on Amazon
Author Brian Tracy explores the seven key elements of goal setting and the 12 steps necessary to set and accomplish goals of any size. Using his trademark simple language and real-life examples, Tracy shows how to do the crucial work of determining one’s strengths, values, and true goals. He explains further how to build the self-esteem and confidence necessary for achievement; how to overpower every problem or obstacle; how to overcome difficulties; how to respond to challenges; and how to continue moving forward no matter what happens.
Crucial Confrontations | buy this book on Amazon
Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you’ll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly–and nobody steps up to the issue. Or they do, but do a lousy job and create a whole new set of problems. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. New research demonstrates that these disappointments aren’t just irritating, they’re costly–sapping organizational performance by twenty to fifty percent and accounting for up to ninety percent of divorces. Crucial Confrontations teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand, and doesn’t harm the relationship–and in fact, even strengthens it.
Duct Tape Marketing | buy this book on Amazon
Let’s face it, as a small business owner, you are really in the business of marketing. The problem for most small business owners is that they suffer from “marketing idea of the week” syndrome instead of implementing a systematic approach to the problem of small business marketing. In Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch shows you how to develop and execute a marketing plan that will give your business the life and longevity you knew you could have.