Suggested Reading
The 5 Levels of Leadership
By John C. Maxwell
Rise to a higher and more effective level leadership and master the ability to inspire and build a team around you.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
By Stephen R. Covey
One of the best-selling books of all time. A must read.
Attracting Perfect Customers
By Stacey Hall
Learn how to attract only customers who value your service, pay you what you are worth and send you referrals on a regular basis.
Building Customer Loyalty from the Inside Out
By Debra J. Schmidt
Having heard Deb speak on two occasions, I can attest that she is the industry leader in building customer loyalty.
Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
By John Warrillow
Learn what it takes to create a solid business that can thrive long into the future without the personal involvement of the owner.
First Things First
By Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, Rebecca R. Merrill
This book can help you understand why so often our first things aren’t first.
Fish!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results
By Stephen C. Lundin
Over 5 Million Copies Sold! An easy, fun read that will help you bring energy, passion and a positive attitude to your workplace.
Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring to Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead
By James A. Belasco
This bestseller presents a management program that encourages employee leadership.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
By Jim Collins
The author set out to determine how good companies, mediocre companies and even bad companies achieve enduring greatness. His finding shed light on virtually every area of management practice.
How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
By John C. Maxwell
A Wall Street Journal bestseller. Eleven keys to more effective thinking that will lead you to personal success.
How to Win Friends & Influence People
By Dale Carnegie
For more than 60 years this book has helped people achieve success in their business and personal lives. A true classic.
Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
By Keith Ferrazzi
Understand the power of relationships and learn how successful people truly connect with others not just network.
The One Minute Manager
By Kenneth Blanchard, Ph.D
An easy read story that reveals three very practical secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands. It has been a business best seller for years.
Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach To Customer Service
By Ken Blanchard
Just having satisfied customers isn’t good enough anymore. Written in a parable style, this simple story will introduce you to the concept of Raving Fan service.
Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
By Robert T. Kiyosaki
The #1 personal finance book of all time explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.
Six Steps to Small Business Success
By Five PASBA Members
Written and inspired by members of the “Professional Association of Small Business Accountants (PASBA), this book will help any small business owner remember to dream big, think realistically, and plan carefully, ultimately achieving more than ever imagined.
Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition
By Harvey B. Mackay
Written by a businessman who’s seen it all and done it all, this book has sold almost 2 million copies.
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
By Richard Koch
The book shows how we can achieve much more with less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts.
The Carrot Principle: How the Best Managers Use Recognition to Engage Their People, Retain Talent, and Accelerate Performance
By Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton
The book shows definitively that the central characteristic of the most successful managers is that they provide their employees with frequent and effective recognition.
The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
By Michael E. Gerber
The essential primer for all small businesses dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and paves the way to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.
The Referral of a Lifetime: The Networking System That Produces Bottom-Line Results Every Day
By Tim Templeton
Another book from the Ken Blanchard Series its author uses a fable to explain how understanding one’s personality type can enable you to showcase strengths and improve weaknesses to achieve success in business and in life.
Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
By Spencer Johnson, M.D.
The author helps take the fear and anxiety our of managing the future and shows people a simple way to successfully deal with the changing times.
Get What's Yours
by Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Philip Moeller and Paul Solman
Learn the secrets to maximizing your Social Security benefits and earn up to thousands of dollars more each year with expert advice that you can’t get anywhere else.
Book of the Month
Good To Great
Jim Collins
The Challenge:
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study:
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards:
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons:
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.
The Findings:
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings? More...
