Originally published in 1979, Wishcraft is a classic bestseller about “how to get what you really want.” It asks the hard questions about who you really are and what you want to be doing with your life. It also offers numerous examples of real-world people, their struggles, and how they made significant life changes for [...]

Coaches and consultants use multiple techniques for brainstorming and solving problems, including the “Five Whys” technique, the “Fishbone” diagram, and mindmapping. Adding to those ideas, Dan Roam published his own problem-solving system in a book called The Back of the Napkin.

The main idea of the book is the usefulness of drawing simple pictures when analyzing [...]

Keith Ferrazzi’s Who’s Got Your Back was published in 2009 and won positive critical acclaim. Although I agree with the book’s primary messages, I think all of them have already been covered by other materials well before 2009. Here are the book’s key points as I understand them:

Business people are more likely to succeed through [...]

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers reminded me of John Donne’s famous words, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

Outliers points out that none of us reached this point in our lives by ourselves; we are all part of an interconnected web of political, [...]

Ron Willingham’s Integrity Selling was the inspiration for an internal multi-week sales training course that I helped develop at a global Fortune 500 company. The book offers ideas to optimize a salesperson’s mindset as well as their sales skills.

The book does a good job of integrating a number of different ideas from psychology, ranging from [...]

In 2006, B2B CFO founder Jerry Mills self-published The Danger Zone: Lost in the Growth Transition. The 200-page book touches on topics ranging from triangular business relationships and common entrepreneur personality traits, to maximizing your chances of getting a business loan/line and preventing internal theft. Critics of the book might assert that each of those [...]

Always interested in the intersection between psychology and business, I picked up a copy of Earning What You’re Worth? The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance. I almost put the book right back down again after reading the first sentence: “The pulsating beat of modern industry does not easily yield the time that is necessary [...]

Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science is an award-winning bestseller offering leadership lessons inspired by scientific research. The book also weaves in philosophical ideas ranging from ancient Sufi teachings, to the writings of Chuang Tzu, to Deepak Chopra’s “Quantum Healing.” As a whole, it offers the reader a rich tapestry of ideas that could [...]

Lencioni’s bestselling “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” offers what might be the most succinct information ever published on assessing and overcoming dysfunctions within a team. If you’re not interested in reading the “fable” presented through page 184 of the book, you can jump right to the final 35 pages of the book. In those final [...]

I thought Ken Fisher’s The Ten Roads to Riches was refreshingly original, frank, and thought-provoking. It reminded me a little of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in its clear and unapologetic message that individuals (and perhaps all of society collectively) would be better off if each person strove to become rich. Not just financially comfortable, but [...]