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New Business Book Summary Available for The 10 Laws of Trust

Posted in Book Summaries, Ethics, tagged , , , on September 29, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The 10 Laws of Trust.jpgIn The 10 Laws of Trust, Joel Peterson examines the importance of trust in the corporate world and beyond. He presents 10 easily followed concepts to building, maintaining, and even repairing trust. Peterson differentiates between high- and low-trust organizations and, through case studies and examples, shows that it is the high-trust environment that is the most successful. He asserts that not only does trust work, but it makes for good business.

The image of the take-no-prisoners, exceed-at-any cost, Machiavellian businessman may not represent the best corporate leader. Trust as a basis for business comes naturally for some, and integrity, while a morally comfortable way to do business, might also be the most effective way. The following are the 10 laws of trust in business:

  1. Start with personal integrity. Integrity should be practiced at work and in all other interactions, both personal and professional. True integrity involves syncing words with actions, avoiding hypocrisy, and doing the right thing habitually.
  2. Invest in respect. Leaders must model and freely give respect, which is another component of trust. It builds reciprocity and should be extended to all employees.
  3. Empower others. Respect can mean allowing others the room to make mistakes, which helps them grow and achieve. If employees know that they are free to explore and will still be trusted even if they fail, they will push themselves.
  4. Measure what should be achieved. If employees or others know what is expected from them, then they have a way to measure their achievements. Uncertainty breeds distrust.
  5. Create a common dream. In addition to individual goals, everyone should be aware of the long-range, shared goals of the organization. Knowing that every individual plays a part toward achieving the communal goals promotes trust between team members.
  6. Keep everyone informed. Leaders need to clearly convey information to those working alongside them. Some of the most successful companies are transparent to a fault.
  7. Embrace respectful conflict. Conflict, if encountered in trust, should be viewed as an opportunity for growth. If the aims of the business are paramount, all interaction moves toward the common goal.
  8. Show humility. Humility encourages the free exchange of ideas. Sometimes the best ideas come from those lower on the company ladder. While this fuels innovation, trust is needed for employees to air their ideas and for management to hear them.
  9. Strive for win-win negotiations. Each party should not come to a discussion with an aim to win, but instead see it as an opportunity for both sides to win. A working relationship should be viewed as ongoing, not something to be ended on the battlefield of the conference table.
  10. Proceed with care. Betrayals will likely happen, and when they do, the leader of a high-trust organization should find that its previously built alliances sustain the organization. Rebuilding trust can occur, and it happens more easily when an atmosphere of trust has been well established.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Becoming the Best

Posted in Book Summaries, Career Development, tagged , , on September 23, 2016| Leave a Comment »

career-courageKatie C. Kelley was a driven professional living out the dream she carefully constructed as a teenager: to have her own psychotherapy practice in Manhattan. Despite that success, she grew increasingly dissatisfied with her personal and professional life. In Career Courage, Kelley shares the knowledge she gained by transforming her life and finding true satisfaction. Kelley’s key message is that every person has the power to create a fulfilling career and personal life–it just takes time, courage, and careful planning. Each of the book’s chapters is designed to help readers find their true callings, and presents true stories of people who worked hard to make their own dreams come true.

People seeking to transform unfulfilling careers can create more satisfying lives by focusing on 10 keys to success:

  1. Motivation. People find true satisfaction when they figure out what really motivates them, and create a vision for their lives based on that knowledge.
  2. Confidence. Change is scary. Overcoming the fear of change requires self-confidence. Professionals can build up their confidence by exposing themselves to their fears in controlled doses.
  3. Risk. To find true satisfaction, professionals must think like entrepreneurs and take calculated risks. To increase their tolerance for risk, professionals should accept that bold moves are inherently risky, prepare in advance for setbacks, and not take setbacks personally.
  4. Character. Character is an essential ingredient for career success. Influential professionals should cultivate three key character traits: trustworthiness, transparency, and loyalty. These traits enable successful professionals to attract and hold people within their spheres of influence.
  5. Harmony. Harmony reinforces the balance between a successful career and happy home life. To create more harmony in their lives, professionals must learn to say no, delegate responsibility, and set boundaries.
  6. Strategic thinking. Implementing a vision requires careful step-by-step planning. Professionals can use strategic thinking to go from dreaming about changing careers to living lives that make them truly happy.
  7. Community. Most people long for more meaning in their lives, and being part of a community is one of the most effective ways to fill that need. Having a strong network of family, friends, and colleagues provides a powerful sense of belonging.
  8. Influence. The ability to influence people plays a vital role in personal and professional success. Although influencer styles vary, influencing is a skill that professionals should hone–or they will lose opportunities to more influential people.
  9. Fortune. While everyone should have a fulfilling career, short- and long-term financial security is also important. Professionals should keep money and emotions separate and determine what their values are regarding financial success.
  10. Pivots. Critical junctures, or pivot points, occur when professionals must decide whether to change directions or stay the course, such as after being laid off. Successful professionals learn to recognize pivot points and listen to their gut instincts.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Smarter Than You Think

Posted in Book Summaries, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on September 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »

smarter-than-you-think

In Smarter Than You Think, tech journalist Clive Thompson argues that digital technology is dramatically changing the ways people think and act. While he is not the first person to make such a claim, Thompson’s perspective on the matter is unique in that he believes these cognitive behavioral changes are largely positive. By investigating some of today’s most cutting-edge innovations and the transformative effects they have on work, relationships, education, and society as a whole, Thompson demonstrates that the rise of intelligent machines should be embraced rather than feared.

According to Thompson:

  • Technology is transforming people’s cognitive behaviors. By providing new ways for people to store memories, collaborate, and communicate, digital technology is upending existing mental habits.
  • The rise of intelligent machines should not be feared. Despite the fear that digital technology will render the human brain obsolete, it is actually making people smarter and society stronger.
  • The more connected people are to one another, the more they can accomplish. By facilitating widespread collaboration, the Internet enables people to tap into the power of collective intelligence and develop innovative solutions to some of the world’s biggest problems.
  • Technology is drastically improving literacy. In addition to creating a culture of avid writers, the Internet has facilitated the rise of data, video, and photo literacies.
  • For technology to create lasting social change, people must fight for their digital rights. Online activists need safe spaces on the Internet to conduct civic discourse.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Swiped

Posted in Book Summaries, Technology, tagged , , , , on August 25, 2016| Leave a Comment »

ASwipedIn Swiped, Adam Levin warns that while identity theft may not be completely preventable, people can mitigate the dangers through the Three M Strategy: minimizing risk, monitoring their identity, and managing the damage. A nationally recognized expert on identity management, Levin offers practical advice and real-life lessons to individuals and corporations on spotting, thwarting, and recovering from identity theft.

According to Levin:

  • A person should not wait to become a victim. Nearly everyone’s most sensitive data is already accessible, and perhaps already compromised, so identity theft needs to be thought of as a likely scenario–but one that can be handled.
  • Convenience should not outweigh security. A system is only as secure as its weakest link, and the weakest links are generally people, whether through carelessness, ignorance, or deliberate malice.
  • Identity theft cannot be stopped. People should focus on making themselves narrower targets and on establishing recovery plans before anything happens.
  • A cultural change. The world needs change at the enterprise level in how data is stored, but people also need to change how they handle their personal information.
  • Be smart about social media. People should never reveal anything online that they would not share in front of a scam artist, and should always assume the bad guys are listening.
  • Tax ID theft and medical/healthcare-related scams are on the rise. These are easier to conduct than some financial/credit-related scams, and usually carry shorter prison times (if any).
  • Build the possibility of postmortem identity theft into every estate plan. The lag time between death and estate closings makes carefully thought out plans a necessity.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for The Power of Fifty Bits

Posted in Book Summaries, goal setting, Personal Development, Productivity, tagged , , , , on August 16, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The Power of 50 BitsPeople’s natural inclinations when making decisions tend to default to patterns that do not help them in the long run. While there is broad agreement among researchers about the science underpinning these tendencies, people need more solutions to help overcome the gap between what they really want to do and what they actually do. In The Power of Fifty Bits, Bob Nease offers a seven-pronged strategy to deal with common decision-making failures. He explains why people struggle with inattention and inertia and demonstrates how simple changes in environment can nudge people toward better overall outcomes.

People typically have good intentions, but they often struggle to act on them. This is because people’s brains have evolved in a way that makes inattention and inertia the two primary obstacles to action. Fifty bits design acknowledges the brain’s natural limitations and addresses them with the following seven strategies:

  1. Require choice: Interrupting a process, usually an existing one, and forcing a person to make a decision before he or she can continue the process.
  2. Lock in good intentions: Making some type of statement–a pledge, a signed document, or automatic reaction–in the present, which increases the chances that people will follow through on good behavior in the future.
  3. Let it ride: Making the desired behavior the default and asking people to opt out of a behavior rather than opt in, thereby using inattention and inertia for good.
  4. Get in the flow: Placing a cue or call to action in a location where people have already devoted their attention.
  5. Reframe the choices: Altering what a cue triggers in people, which directs people’s attention toward some aspects of an issue and away from others.
  6. Piggyback it: Making a behavior typically subject to inertia and/or inattention the side effect of something that people seek out or find pleasurable.
  7. Simplify…wisely: Removing barriers to change or improving fluency (the relative ease with which the brain processes information). Simplification of either type is usually, though not always, a smart design choice.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Speaking PowerPoint

Posted in Book Summaries, Communication, tagged , , , on July 29, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Speaking PowerPointVisual communication is the new language of business. When a leader explains an idea clearly, persuasively, and simply, that idea can spread to others. Therefore, leaders who can master visual communication will drive their business strategies. In his book Speaking PowerPoint, Bruce R. Gabrielle outlines the Mindworks Presentation Method for visual communications. This method of creating PowerPoint presentations helps leaders use this tool to communicate more effectively. It focuses on three main strategies: (1) the story should be carefully planned out on a storyboard before the PowerPoint presentation is created; (2) visuals should be easily understood and each slide should promote a single message that ties into the overall argument; and (3) the design should feature color and decorative elements that draw attention to the message.

According to the author:

  • Every business is an idea marketplace in which managers jockey to get their ideas heard and implemented. Used well, PowerPoint can be the key to winning in today’s business environment.
  • When creating a boardroom-style PowerPoint presentation, the first step is to determine the main message of the deck. The best way to figure this out is to ask the question, “What does the audience want?”
  • A successful PowerPoint deck is like an iceberg, with 10 percent above water and the rest submerged below. The main message and three to four supporting points make up the above-water argument. The rest of the evidence and explanations should be kept underwater until necessary.
  • The title is the most important element of a slide. The best way to make the title memorable is to put it in the form of a sentence. Using a full sentence to clearly state an argument also makes it easy for the audience to understand the point of each slide.
  • The average person can only understand four ideas at one time. This Rule of Four is based on neuroscience and should dictate how much information should appear on each slide.
  • Research has shown that most people think in pictures. Adding pictures to a document makes it easier to understand, agree with, and remember.
  • Research has shown that people are more likely to agree with something if it is easy for them to process. Slides that are more visually pleasing are easily digestible and more memorable.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Digital to the Core

Posted in Book Summaries, Leadership and Management, Technology, tagged , , , on July 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Digital to the CoreDigital technology is upending entire industries within a very short time, and there is considerably more change to come. In Digital to the Core, Mark Raskino and Graham Waller of Gartner, Inc. demonstrate how leaders today must bring digital to the center of everything they do. The authors examine how digital business will cause greater disruptions and demand more significant business changes than the Internet technology of the past did. Taking digital to the core requires “remastery” of one’s industry, enterprise, and self, and it promises to be the only way leaders can help their organizations both survive and thrive.

Too few companies have acknowledged how radically digital and information technology will disrupt and transform their industries. At each level of business–industry, enterprise, and leader–the following three digital disruptive forces require change and adaptation:

  1. Resolution revolution: Precision in understanding data and in controlling objects, services, and outcomes is increasing exponentially. The ability of sensors, 3D printing, cloud computing, and remotely controlled objects to deliver greater detail and accuracy improves every year and creates a myriad of new business opportunities and challenges.
  2. Compound uncertainty: Digital change upends the mind-sets, organizational structures, and practices that business leaders were once successful with. Uncertainty is compounded by being spread across three key areas: technology, culture, and regulation. Success requires finding a triple tipping point where the three areas are ready to adapt or be revolutionized.
  3. Boundary blurring: The intersection of the physical and digital worlds blurs many boundaries. A company’s core product, its value proposition, its designated industry, its division of responsibility among departments, and more all become blurred by digital business. Digital is no longer a support function controlled by an IT department; it must permeate the whole enterprise.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Wall Street’s Just Not That Into You

Posted in Book Summaries, Finance, tagged , , , , on July 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

116502594Investing in the stock market has always been risky. Even the most conservative of investors have had their shares of ups and downs. In Wall Street’s Just Not That Into You, Roger C. Davis shares a less traditional way of investing in the stock market, one in which current market trends are given a more important role in deciding where to invest. This tactical investment strategy reduces losses that many of the long-term-hold strategists accept as a normal part of the market.

Stock market investing can seem like a nauseating roller coaster ride at times. While the ups and downs of the market are inevitable, the losses seen by most long-term-hold investors can be minimized when they take a more tactical approach. The basics of this tactical investment approach include:

  • Analysis of current market conditions. There are trends in the marketplace that can be observed and recorded and that can expose critical information. Investing alongside these trends rather than against is crucial.
  • Availability of favorable investment opportunities. The traditional rules of investing, where older people nearing retirement must stay away from riskier stocks and younger people must stay away from safer stocks, are no longer valid. What makes an investment favorable is much more complex than that the investor’s age.
  • Risk management. While no one can predict the future, certain indicators have historically preceded significant tops for both individual stocks and the market in general. Understanding these indicators goes a long way in reducing risk.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for Elon Musk

Posted in Book Summaries, Entrepreneurship, Technology, tagged , , , , , on July 1, 2016| 1 Comment »

Elon Musk

Thanks to pioneering firms like SpaceX and Tesla Motors, Elon Musk has become one of America’s leading businessmen. He is often compared to Steve Jobs in terms of his vision and drive. Many are curious how Musk attained his success and what is next for his companies. In Elon Musk, Ashlee Vance provides a biography of the business giant and offers insight into his work and personal life.

  • Childhood. Elon Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. At age 17, Musk left for Canada. He attended Queen’s University in Ontario and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania where he earned degrees in economics and physics.
  • First start-up. Musk and his brother, Kimbal, founded Global Link Information Network in 1995. The company created a searchable directory of businesses and integrated the information with maps. The company was rebranded as Zip2 and was eventually bought by Compaq Computer.
  • PayPal. After leaving Zip2, Musk founded the online bank X.com in November 1999. X.com merged with Confinity—a startup that offered the PayPal service. Musk was pushed out of the CEO role. He stayed on as an advisor and received $180 million after taxes when eBay purchased PayPal in 2002.
  • SpaceX. After the PayPal sale, Musk founded SpaceX. The company’s goal was to build its own rocket engines more cheaply than others by applying lean startup methods. In 2008, the company launched the first privately built rocket to reach orbit. In 2012, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule successfully docked with the International Space Station.
  • Tesla Motors. Tesla has successfully developed electric cars that consumers are eager to own. Tesla has released the Roadster, the Model S, and the Model X. It plans to release the more affordable Model 3 in 2017.
  • SolarCity. Musk is the chairman and largest shareholder in this company founded by his cousins. SolarCity installs and leases solar panels to consumers. By 2012, it was the largest solar panel installer in the United States.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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New Business Book Summary Available for The Power of Being Yourself

Posted in Book Summaries, Personal Development, tagged , , , on June 17, 2016| Leave a Comment »

The Power of Being Yourself.jpg

In The Power of Being Yourself, Joe Plumeri challenges people to be truly authentic in both their professional and personal lives and not shy away from emotion and passion. He gives readers eight universal principles to live by to achieve lasting success, fulfillment, and self-actualization.

Plumeri challenges people to be themselves in their professional and personal lives by using eight principles:

  1. Everyone has the same plumbing.When business is conducted across nations and cultures, it can be easy to overemphasize the differences between people. Differences are just distractions from aspects of humanity that unite people.
  2. Show the way to grandma’s house. Realizing visions requires bringing them to life by associating them with smells, sounds, and all the senses.
  3. Cut your own path. Respect and destiny are attained by courageously following a passion and working hard to be the best and most capable within that passion.
  4. Let sadness teach you. Loss can be a difficult but effective teacher. When people care for their employees, coworkers, family, and friends, they learn what is truly valuable in life.
  5. Look up, not down. Difficult times are a true test of people’s ability to rise above circumstances and stay positive. The willingness to look up and believe that anything is possible brings transformation.
  6. Play in traffic. Getting excited about the other principles will not matter much if people do not then go out and apply them and take action. “Play in traffic” means exposing oneself to opportunities for serendipity.
  7. Make your heart your teleprompter. The heart should be the primary compass in decision making. Tools like data, technology, market research, and consultants should remain tools; they should never be substitutes for what people’s hearts are saying.
  8. You gotta have a purpose!People need a reason to begin each day and to do their work beyond making money.

To learn more, please visit http://www.bizsum.com

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