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About Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip and Dan Heath
The Heath brothers’ latest book is focused on better decision-making, introduced through a four-step process to ensure we make the right call. Written in an approachable and readable style, Decisive explores how people make decisions, from including a rock star’s decision making system that works to a CEO’s disastrous decision and what they learned from it. Research has revealed that most decisions are made through a variety of biases and irrationalities. From being too confident, to finding information to justify our rationale, our brains are constantly working against us to make the best decision possible. Simply understanding these flaws isn’t the solution; there needs to be a different way to go about it.
Decisive is the Heath brothers’ most powerful and meaningful book yet, offering new strategies and practical tools to make better choices. It’s key to be aware that making the right decision, at the right moment, can make all the difference.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Decisive is a valuable tool to making objective decisions that will lead to success. The Heaths do an excellent job of presenting a process that works for making decisions, while proving their system with a wide variety of examples. They begin by discussing how the normal decision-making process proceeds in 4 steps, each of which has a "villain" that can negatively impact it. Along the way, readers learn the answers to critical questions, such as: How can we stop the cycle of agonizing over our decisions? How can we ensure that we don’t overlook precious opportunities to change our course? The Heath brothers explain how to navigate the land mines laid by our irrational brains and improve our chances of good outcomes.
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Our favorite part:
The first part of this book discusses obstacles to good decision-making, and the second part of the book is focused on overcoming them. The book is easy to pick-up, and to understand their system to making better decisions. This is the perfect read for any business professional struggling to make decisions, or knows an important decision is going to be made in the future. The Heaths spend the conclusion of the book detailing a process to make better decisions, which they call the WRAP process: widen your options, reality test your assumptions, attain some distance, and prepare to be wrong. This simple system could be the key to avoiding disastrous decision-making.
About Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal
General Stanley McChrystal ran into a dilemma when he took command of the Joint Special Operations Task Force in 2004. McChrystal and his colleagues wanted to go against conventional ideas and remake the Task Force into something new: a network that combined transparent communication with decision-making authority that wasn’t just coming from one place. This book is not just focused on the military, but is instead a collection of insightful ideas told through entertaining stories ranging from the business industry to the emergency room. The challenges that McChrystal and his force task faced in Iraq are relevant to countless businesses, nonprofits, and organizations. The world is changing faster than ever, and the smartest response for those in charge is to give smaller groups the freedom to experiment while driving everyone to share what they learn across the entire organization.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
The principles of traditional leadership struggle to deal with today’s pace of change, free-flow of information, and the entrepreneurial spirit of the digital age. Team of Teams utilizes the new way of leading a team: providing a leadership framework to produce and adapt, such as a fast-moving start-up, for organizations of any size. The book provides a blueprint for how to cope with increasing complexity in the world of running a team.
Our favorite part:
This book is recommended for leaders and associates from any type of organization that need to break down the effects of the information flow to make better decisions. Today, many ways of leading are ineffective in an increasingly complex environment. But this is not just a book about the latest way to become a great leader, the book hits its stride when it focuses on becoming the kind of leader that can develop and run an entire workforce of other great leaders. McChrystal challenges leaders to create organizations that are agile, transparent, and united rather than hierarchical, and which empower their people to work together for a better solution. A team needs to be trained well, and allowed to trust their gut. They need to be able to use their best judgment based on their training and knowledge.
Cydcor encourages ongoing education and professional development. It’s one of our core values.
Once we’re out of school we often abandon it altogether. And that’s too bad. Because if you want to get noticed at work you need to keep cracking the books—or tablet, smartphone, or headphones—whichever device works for you.
We’ve made personal developmental whole lot easier for you this fall by providing a reading business-focused reading list. There are lots of interesting ideas here that will improve your approach to work and your experiences in life. We’re looking at the big picture and that includes the whole person.
If you don’t like to read alone consider creating a book club at work for those eager to work on their skills too. Invite your coworkers, team members, mentors, bosses, supervisor, manager, and assistants to join the club. Try to arrange a meeting in person before work for coffee and conversation—when everyone is bright eyed.
Now it’s time to start studying. Check out this list:
To Sell Is Human by Daniel Pink
Pink teaches skills that will improve your sales technique and empower you to get others to take action. Develop a better understanding of negotiation, persuasion, and how to pitch.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do In Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
Duhigg is a New York Times business reporter who investigates scientific research revealing why we have habits and how we can change them. He brings a deep understanding to the study of human nature and personal transformation. Read Cydcor's review of this title here.
The 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling by Jeffery Gitomer
Selling is easy but it takes hard work to be good at it. Gitomer values optimism in his approach to sales. He’ll teach you to craft a positive attitude that wins people over.
Life is What You Make It by Peter Buffet
Warren Buffett’s son, Peter, is an Emmy-winning songwriter and musician. He may have grown up around great wealth but it was never promised to him. He writes about his life journey and the core beliefs about choosing to do good in your work life and in your personal life.
Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier
The authors have some great insight in new strategies for approaching work with a better, faster, easier way to succeed: doing the work and avoid the distractions. It’s a great read for people with an entrepreneurial spirit who want to accomplish great things in their organizations, but also have dreamt of being able to do it on their own.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
You need a social media expert like Vaynerchuk to learn how to connect with today’s customers. Your social media message has to be engaging and correctly prepared for specific social media platforms. This book will teach you how tell a good story that wins customers.
Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
Explore the positive power of meditation and learn how to train your attention, develop self-awareness, and form new paths that lead toward wisdom and success. Chade-Meng Tan was one of Google’s first engineers. Not your typical meditation advocate.
The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker
Drucker teaches us that an executive has the ability to get the right things done. Learn the importance of innovation, entrepreneurship, and management for the thoughtful executive. It may have been written in the 1960s but its message still rings true.
Cydcor also has a website dedicated to the latest business book reviews. Check out cydcorreviews.com for more recommendations on business books for personal development.
About Conscious Business: How to Build Value through Values by Fred Kofman
Consciousness plays a large role in organizational business. Building a conscious business means finding your passion and expressing your essential values through work, according to author Fred Kofman. A conscious business also continually builds a viable way to pursue happiness for many of its employees. It calls for solid performances through its community and the dignity of each shareholder. Conscious Business is the definitive resource for achieving what really matters in the workplace and beyond.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
The most difficult parts about starting or running a business is the amount of overtime work needed, the stressful deadlines, and the thought of being overworked without a secure future. The real challenges that make or break an entrepreneur’s success require dealing with their own integrity, priorities, and conflicts with others people. Conscious Business analyzes those challenges and offers many different tools and strategies of how we can manage them and come out ahead having built a stronger foundation and a stronger company. This book is grounded in the harsh challenges of reality in business, such as understanding that failure is never an option and success is not always achieved. It’s a great starting point for business professionals to realize it takes a lot to make it on top, but it’s definitely not impossible.
Our favorite part:
Conscious Business contains many techniques to improve organizational greatness. The book’s chapters present techniques on building unconditional responsibility, succeeding with integrity, improving communication and speaking the truth, be accountable with commitments, and how to be the ultimate source of leadership. This book creates a tool set for organizational learning that can be applied to any day-to-day business culture. It’s a quick read with worthwhile knowledge to take away.
About The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
The power to change is always in the hands of the beholder. The Compound Effect is based on the fact that decisions can shape a person’s destiny. Even the smallest decisions can have an effect on the future. Written by Darren Hardy, publisher of Success Magazine, The Compound Effect analyzes the how to earn achievements in business, relationships, and more through decision-making. This easy-to-use, step-by-step guide can show readers how to increase successes, keep track of progress, and achieve their biggest goals.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Only the biggest decisions we’ve ever made come to mind when we look back at the choices that have shaped our lives. However, it’s not only big decisions but also small ones, even ones that we tend to not notice, that we make on a daily basis. This is the basis of The Compound Effect. It's very similar to making small financial decisions that ultimately add up to a large sum. If you’re serious about wanting to change for the better, smaller decisions need to be kept on track. The frustrating part is that many of these small, unnoticeable decisions may affect us negatively. The Compound Effect aims to help readers realize where their blinders are.
Our favorite part:
Consistency, hard work, and patience are all of utmost importance when it comes to decision-making. Making simple improvements every single day, even if it feels insignificant, can make a drastic impact. Hardy does an excellent job of pointing out how the reason WHY we do something is important. He describes the things that undermine our ability to change. Readers will be able to pick up this book and instantly begin implementing things that can have lasting and positive impacts on their life. This is a book has the potential to be re-read regularly—you’ll still find new tips to compound your success.
About StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
Most people like to focus on fixing their weaknesses instead of making the most out of their strengths. To help people uncover their talents, the research-based management-consulting group Gallup introduced the first version of its StrengthsFinder online assessment in 2001. StrengthsFinder helped millions find out where they truly stood out. Its sequel, StrengthsFinder 2.0, unveils a new and improved version of the popular assessment. Although it can be read once to learn a few new things, it’s a great guidebook to continually refer to for career growth. The book is full of strategies for applying a person’s strengths professionally and personally. StrengthsFinder 2.0 is an approach by scientists to provide readers with a tool to identify their strengths--or more precisely, their talents. Author Tom Rath leads readers into their journey of becoming the best they can be.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
If StrengthsFinder 2.0 will do anything for a reader, it’s pinpointing the things that a person does well and the skills they can continue to grow. The combination of dissecting these talents and the development of a plan of action works relatively well. An interesting point that Rath makes is that talent multiplied by investment will equal more strength. This means that investing in the things that we do well will make us better professionals. But finding out these strengths is not the end of the journey. It’s up to the reader to further develop other areas that may need improvement. This is an easy recommendation for any future leader who wants to use the things they know about themselves to discover what other qualities lie beneath.
Our favorite part:
When it comes to books that require you to take a test to determine the best way to read it, the test always needs to be worthwhile to take. The online test that StrengthsFinder 2.0 provides can open readers’ eyes and helps them start their improvement. The book will help you find your strengths and the best way you can apply them. Although the test is essential to reading the book, which may not appeal to some readers, it can still open up doors to understanding the way you work and give you ideas on ways to apply your strengths. It can help managers, business professionals, and future leaders tenfold.
Cydcor is the leading provider of outsources sales team worldwide. Learn more about Cydcor by visiting us on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/cydcor/)
About The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team isn’t your average book of business advice. Author Patrick Lencioni has crafted another excellent leadership fable to go along with his previous bestsellers, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. In this book, Lencioni focuses his intellectual storytelling on the fascinating and complex world of team building. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team follows Kathryn Petersen, CEO of start-up Decision Tech, and how she handles a difficult leadership crisis: uniting her team when it begins to threaten the integrity of the whole company. Lencioni's gripping corporate tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a captivating story with a simple message for all those who strive to be the best leader they can be.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Anyone who has had difficulty with leading and getting a group of co-workers to work together will find value in this book. The model that Lencioni lays out consists of five tiers that describe the five dysfunctions of a team. These include an absence of trust, a fear of conflict, a lack of commitment, an avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. These are all dealt with accordingly and can open a leader’s eyes to some good ways to start making a difference. Although this is a fictional account of a leadership situation, it’s still possible to see yourself and your team in this business fable. Lencioni leads readers through the right steps to take and how to move a team from dysfunction to smooth operation. The examples are eye opening and will be useful to compare to your team’s last meeting.
Our favorite part:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team offers practical advice as well as exercises that are easy to implement in any workplace team. Disagreements occur frequently while collaborating, but a leader needs to keep going no matter the problem to unite everyone. The story told in this book can help the reader visualize typical workplace dysfunctions while offering effective advice on how to overcome them.
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team seeks to identify and alleviate the problems that arise for many work teams. The success of a company depends greatly on how willing its leadership is to face issues head-on.
Written by Sophia Amoruso, founder of online women’s clothing retailer Nasty Gal, #GirlBoss lays out Amoruso’s rise to success and the struggles she’s gone through to make it to the top. It’s the classic underdog story that’s both inspirational and educational. Amoruso wrote #GirlBoss for entrepreneurs seeking a path to success that’s different from the norm, no matter how problematic that path may be. Eight years after selling vintage clothing on Ebay, Amoruso is the founder, CEO, and creative director of an online clothing company worth $100 million. Her story is both inspirational and motivating.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
The main point #GirlBoss discusses is that anyone can reach success, no matter how big their struggles may be. It provides an authentic voice on success, failure, and what it takes to find positivity in any situation. This book offers a philosophy for making your work both worthwhile and fun while keeping things fresh. Amoruso encourages readers to own the qualities that many people are ashamed of, such as bossiness, in order to become the masters of their own destiny--financially independent and radically ourselves. This is a book that provides a direct stream of honest advice that can’t be found anywhere else. Her unconventional approach to business and her creative experience will appeal to any aspiring entrepreneur.
Our favorite part:
As most entrepreneurs know, it can be difficult to find genuine advice on how to get going on an alternative path to success. Since Amoruso did this all on her own with no financial aid or education in the area of business, her story is inspiring. Everyone takes their own path to the top, but this is a story that can open your eyes to the idea that anything is possible. #GirlBoss provides many pointers on being a leader and boss, but the main thing to take away is to never stop, even when failure occurs, and to keep going no matter the problem you may run into on the path to success.
About Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry & Jean Greaves
Professionals are always on the lookout for new ways to be better co-workers, managers, and employees. Today’s world is fast-paced, and competition is fierce. The best and most effective tools allow others to manage, adapt, and get ahead of the pack.
One of these tools is emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence allows a person to recognize their own emotions and differentiate between feelings and behavior. Your EQ (emotional quotient) is the foundation for a large number of soft skills that include flexibility, time management, trust, anger management, and change tolerance. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 delivers a step-by-step program for increasing their emotional quotient and enabling a person to achieve their fullest potential.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 has a self-contained, step-by-step program to determine your current level of EQ, while also providing suggestions on how to improve it. You will learn what may be holding you back and which of the book's strategies can help increase your emotional intelligence the most. This is the kind of book you’re looking for if you need both diagnosis and treatment options. Bradberry and Greaves do an excellent job of helping readers discover their strengths and find strategies that work on their weaknesses. It also provides a quick online assessment that can help you see where you currently stand on emotional intelligence.
Our favorite part:
The step-by-step program for increasing emotional intelligence through four core skills can be quite valuable. These skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. The book’s single purpose is to increase emotional intelligence, and this is the perfect place to start. The chapter “The Big Picture” explains what EQ is and what it is not, while also giving tips to manage stress and increase your tolerance for change. Emotional Intelligence 2.0 gives abundant and practical insights to ensure readers can follow along and improve their emotional intelligence skills.
Cydcor Reviews is a website dedicated to recommending business-related books to professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs. Learn more about Cydcor by checking out our page on Flickr.
About Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal by Oren Klaff
Delivering an excellent pitch to potential sales clients doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Enter Pitch Anything author Oren Klaff, who knows a thing or two about making a sale. Over the past decade and more, Klaff has utilized his pitching method to raise more than $400 million. In Pitch Anything, Klaff describes his formula to help any business professional with any sale pitch.
According to Klaff, crafting and executing the perfect pitch isn’t art; it’s more centered on science. By applying the latest scientific findings and discussing real-life examples, Klaff describes how the brain makes decisions and responds to sales pitches. By learning how the method works and what you’ve been doing wrong, it’s much easier to understand how a successful pitch is done. Whether you're presenting to new investors, locking down some new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything has you covered when it comes to perfecting the pitch.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Learning the method of a successful pitch isn’t too difficult, but many people fail the first step: getting the attention of potential buyers or clients. Attention requires the combination of two things working together: desire and tension. Not only do you need the person to be interested in what you’re selling, but you also need them thinking that they would be lucky to have the product or service. Be sure to let the client know that you have the best service or product and that they would be missing out by not buying. You have to be passionate about what you are selling and get other people to be passionate about buying.
Pitch Anything has great insights on how the brain processes simple information and how to take advantage of this with clients. Klaff has done the required research to prove his points, while still bringing something new to the table.
Our favorite part:
The sales method that Klaff discuses in Pitch Anything is simple to understand and apply. The “STRONG” method of pitching can be put to use immediately by any business professional. The steps include setting the frame, telling the story, revealing the intrigue, offering the prize, nailing the hookpoint, and finally, getting a decision. Applying these tactics and strategies will help to engage and persuade the person you’re pitching to, and you'll find more agreement and support than you ever thought possible.
Cydcor is the market leader in outsourced sales. Learn more about Cydcor by visiting our profile on Flickr.
About Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
What most people typically do to be productive does not work as well as it used to. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the best ways for people to figure out a system that works for them. His advice has helped thousands of people across the country since the book was first published in 2002. Allen's method isn’t difficult to understand: productivity is strongly tied to how well we can relax. The key to freeing up more time for leisure and bettering ourselves is to have a clear mind, unleashing our creative potential. Allen has created an excellent guide on taking the right steps to getting back on track.
Why Cydcor Reviews recommends this to future leaders:
Although it will take some discipline and determination to make real changes to productivity, Getting Things Done is a great starting point. From core principles to proven tricks, this book can transform the way a person does their job from day-to-day. It shows the best ways to pick up the pace without exhausting yourself. The more meaningful points of the book deal with reassessing goals, staying focused in new environments, planning projects the correct way, overcoming anxiety when overwhelmed, and positively accepting what is currently going on. This is an excellent read for business professionals looking for more control of their daily life, and it lays the groundwork for being an excellent leader.
Our favorite part:
If there’s anything to take away from Getting Things Done, it’s that every task, promise, or assignment has a place and a time. With everything organized in its own space, you feel more in control and can replace the time spent on anxiety with effective and timely effort. This in turn can lead to more accomplishments and growth as pressure starts to fall. Allen gives down-to-earth advice for anyone who wants to truly be more constructive. This book may not be for everyone, but many leaders can walk away with learning a few new things. Applying these rules can lead to a much more stress-free day.