Be more effective

This was my first read of The One Minute series.<br /><br />I have also read some other books about time management, and I have to agree with the author that this book is somewhat different.<br /><br />All the other books tell you how to make the same things but faster - in less time. But, if you are already doing wrong things, the increase of speed will only make you do more wrong things.<br /><br />Basically, you can easily increase your efficiency, but if your effectiveness remains low, time problems will not go way. For me this was the main message of this book. <br /><br />The book tells a story, so is a very easy read, and very enjoyable one to!

A Great Resource

This is a fantastic resource for anyone just starting to get to grips with e-pr. Full of ideas of how to make the best use of the internet to drive your public relations campaign.<br /><br />However, it is very Americanised and, unless it is updated yearly, it is unlikely to keep up with the fast pace of the net.<br />

Unlimited resources for those interested in NLP

Sue Knight's book NLP at Work is a practical guide to those who want to play with NLP and a great resource for those who want to get serious. Read it from cover to cover, or just open it and try out the simple instructions. A masterpiece that is highly Recommended<br />

Great book because of the way its layed out ...

Thought this was a great book. The way it takes you through a week by week step makes it very easy to understand and he gives you some very useful contacts. I reckon with the majority of people who read this they will feel much more comfortable and at ease in starting a business.

Focus on your strengths

I strongly believe in focusing on your strengths, not your weaknesses. Any time you spend on improving your weaknesses is wasted, because you're not spending time doing what you do best, and you can get your weakness to improve from a 5 to a 7, but it won't become a 9 ever. <br /><br />Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman focus on the same. As a manager you should focus people on their strengths to get the most out of them. It means changing the way you hire them, the way you train them, the way you reward them and the way you team them up. <br /><br />For me and many of my participants (I'm a management trainer), this book is a great relief. No more competence management, which tells you which gaps you still need to close to become all-round perfect. An exhausting message to hear, by the way, because you will NEVER get a natural eye for detail or be a great out of the box thinker... unless that was your given talent. <br /><br />The art, so say the writers, is to create a safety net for a person's weakness, so it stops being a problem. Such as teaming them up with someone who has complementary skills, or rearranging their task to never get them to come in touch with their weakness. A leader, in short, must do anything possible to allow his or her people to focus fully on their strengths. <br /><br />I find this book hugely inspirational, not just for leaders, but also for employees. It relieves you from the pressure of having to be all-round perfect. It makes a powerful step towards personal branding. <br />

Making websites work. E-Commerce book of the year 2005?

Why do website conversion rates remain at a gloomy 2-5 per cent?

"Call for Action" focuses on how we can improve the conversion rates. Not from a technical or academic or conceptual standpoint. Instead it takes a rare PRACTICAL and down-to-earth approach on how to improve conversion rates to improve sales and thus profits.

What is CONVERSION? Virtually all websites have a persuasive purpose; to get someone to subscribe, to register, to inquire or to buy something. And if all we get is 2-5 per cent conversion, we ought to review our website. Do we offer a product or service that could meet the needs of more than 2-5 per cent of the market? Can visitors find that, solution on the website? Do they understand our offer's value? Was it made at the right time? Are we sure they're coming back?

NAVIGATION is the biggest challenge websites face, the authors argue. The issues are: What to do with the traffic once it lands on the website? How to get visitors to take the first action and click deeper? And once there, how to induce visitors to click to the next step, and the next, and the next?

The fundamental idea is that a PERSUASIVE ARCHITECTURE links a visitor's buying experience to our company's sales process. It bridges the buy/sell process in a measurable way. If you can influence visitor behaviour and empathize with visitor motivations, you can influence results to provide a better experience and more frequent, effective conversions.

The book is filled with illustrative screen dumps of websites (before and after a change). This is a great benefit of such a how-to field book on e-commerce improvements. In my opinion, most e-commerce sites can recover the book's cost price in a few days just by following one or two of the practical suggestions in the many diverse case studies.

The primary focus of this book is e-Commerce. The key messages on conversion, however, are important to anyone running a large website.

This is a rare book. I've been involved in e-commerce since 1997 and read many interesting books on this topic. But I've never found such a practical approach to optimising e-commerce web sites as this one.

The brothers Eisenberg call themselves"wizards of web". I agree and hope my existing and future competitors don't read and act on this book. These secret formulas to improve online results are very effective, indeed.

If you're looking for a conceptual e-commerce theory, please look somewhere else. This is about the nuts and bolts about making money with an e-commerce web site. If you don't have or don`t plan to have such a website; forget about this book. Then it's a waste of time.

I also recommend Jakob Nielsen's books on web usability and Steve Krug's easy-to-read"Don't make me think".

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

Inspiration for Lean

It is now nearly three years since I first read this book and it's message is as valid today as it was then.

In an easy to read style it sets out the steps taken by different people as they first faced a looming crisis and then journeyed down the road to Lean and reaped the success that was achieved by their hard work.

For any manager or improvement agent it is an excellent introduction as it tells the stories of several companies from different industries and dispells some of the myths of Lean.
For me it has been an inspiration as I now work educating and helping companies implement Lean as described in this book.

One thing is certainly true, survival is optional, and as this book shows with Porsche, a big name and fantastic quality are no defence if you can't keep your costs down. Lean methods saved them and it can do the same for your company, you need to be convinced? Read Lean Thinking, I still dip into it on a regular basis!

Priceless guidance on a too common problem

I have read enough management books to I hope know the good from the bad - the fact that this book is the first one that after having read it I immediately started to read all over again, makes it for me a unique offering. This is due to:<br /><br />1. The subject is one which applies in so many work situations that its potentially wide application cannot be denied. The comments made by other reviewers as to recognising the many different types of personalities involved and the five individual issues from their own experiences demonstrates the consistency of the problems being identifiable under many different factual scenarios. <br /><br />2. The book is written in a very easily assimilated style and precise chapters per point plus the use of a fictional parable style story makes it come alive in a way that rarely happens in most management books.<br /><br />3. The analysis of the five issues having been gone through is then in a summary end piece restated not only as to their individual relevance but also how they inter-relate and practical methods of addressing each is provided - this hands on solution solving makes the book a very powerful basis for personal decision making using the tools provided.<br /><br />In part the impact of the book on myself may reflect that I read it as I was starting to grapple with one of the most difficult teams I have had to ever lead in over twenty years of management roles. That this book provided me with a number of options to consider and apply in making progress reflects the true value of the lessons it shares.

Figure out why you buy before you buy

This is emphatically not a work of strategy and and not a book about strategic analysis. I can't see how this would be practical or useful in a real"hands-on" business environment, although i can see how the more shallow CEOs may pick up on its buzzwords. Strictly speaking, this is a work of applied classical economics and as such has rigour and intellectual clarity, though some presuppositions seem a bit dodgy and some of the results aren't extended far enough. Recommended for business studies/MBA students.

Strategy book of the 1980s - still a key reference guide

Michael Porter is the founding father for strategies in a competitive context. This pioneering book represents some of his best thoughts on business and corporate strategy.

Chapter 1 is a summary of his first landmark book -"Competitive Strategy". So if you just want to buy one of his bestsellers, then buy"Competitive Advantage".

The book's most important contribution is the concept of the VALUE CHAIN. Today, you won't find an MBA who doesn't know this idea. This book gives you all the details on the value chain. And it even tells you exactly how the value chain is translated into his two generic strategies: Cost Leadership and Differentiation. Most strategy books devote a separate chapter to this idea. If you want to get a more than a superficial understanding of the value chain, you simply have to read Porter's book.

This book also gets to the core of how synergies are created and when diversification might work. Curiously, Porter chooses the term interrelationships for synergies (you know, a term for a nice idea that rarely occurred in practice...).

Being a business development manager, I have strategic thinking as part of my key areas. This book is still a reference guide for me. Obviously though, Porter's views cannot stand-alone.

If you're looking for critical views on Porter's ideas, then consider buying Hamel & Prahalad's"Competing for the Future" (1994) or Kim & Mauborgne's"Blue Ocean Strategy" (2005).

Beware: You have to read Porter's Harvard Business review article"What is Strategy" from 1996, if you want his own response to the critics.

Warning: You cannot work seriously with strategy without having understood Michael Porter's core concepts. And the superficial introduction by most - even advanced - strategy books won't make you competent enough to apply his ideas skilfully. Let me give you two examples:

COST STRUCTURE:
Most MBAs have learned about the value chain and cost structure analysis. But in real life I've seen very few who combine these two concepts proficiently. The real beauty in benchmarking cost structures is when you skilfully apply it to the value chain. This book tells you exactly how to do this. In practice, I've seen this approach applied very few times (except advanced strategy consultants). It may be because people often use Porter's concepts too casually...

COST DRIVERS:
Most strategy books are on drivers of differentiation - the preferred strategy choice by management gurus. And Porter does indeed help you on this issue. More importantly, this book is one of the few to tell you about the cost drivers. How many books have you read on Cost Leadership? Porter elaborates on 10 cost drivers, such as economies of scale, learning, linkages, synergies, pattern of capacity utilization, integration, timing, policies, and location.

STRATEGY IS ABOUT BEING DIFFERENT. Start out personally by reading the real thing ... it's a bargain.

Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business

Great and usefull book for sales professionals

This book is the first I would advise to anyone involved in sales. It is very comprehensive and detailled and deals with the general overview rather than treating seperate issues. Only bad point I find is that it is a bit too textual. Some clear summaries and graphs could make its reading a bit less heavy, but then again, these are formal issues. This is all well compensated by the comprehensive content.Hence 5 stars well deserved.

Make an Amazing business today.

Godin isn't doing anything revolutionary in his books. This is good. He isn't trying to be clever. This is good. He is however, trying to get you to get your business to work. He goes about this by taking the most obvious, elementary ideas and expressing them simply and with plenty of information to back up what he is saying. He uses diagrams, stories, case studies and whatever else comes along to illustrate these points again and again. In this book there is one basic idea. That businesses are ten a penny, like cows in a field. How do you make your business stand out from all the other cows? Have a purple cow! Make your business unique and amazing. It seems, simple, it is simple, but hardly anyone is doing it. If people spent more time implementing Godin's brilliant ideas, and less time worrying about having something revolutionary to do or say, there would be a lot more fantastic, successful businesses out there.

Pass the Prince2 exams

I rate this book highly because it enabled me to pass the Prince2 Foundation exam. It is comprehensive and authoritative reference manual which can be refered to in the open-book, 'Practitioner' exam. It is a cost-effective confidence-booster to instructer-led training, as long as one has some exposure to Project Management in the work-place.

Nancy Kline's Time to think review by David Megginson, past chair of EMCC

This book is a stunner. The information that Nancy gives on listening, really listening, is remarkable and transformative. For me the methodology of addressing limiting assumptions is A methodology rather than THE methodology for personal change, but none the worse for that. Nancy's account of her dealing with cancer is one of the most moving accounts that I have read of understated courage and determination. An inspiration.

Superb book

Loved the simple and easy to read style. Don't be put off by this as the message therein has a powerful impact. In many ways with busy lives, this is the sort of book to read- life changes that are straight to the point with a minimum of words. Another book that I came across with the same style is Close Your Mouth. I really think it is the way forward in book writing. More authors should realise that we don't want to plough through thousands of boring words to get a few gems of information. Just give us the gems, that is all we want. This book provides just that!!

Penguins Learn to Stick Their Heads in the Ice Beneath Them

<br />My favorite part of John Kotter's classic, Leading Change, is the cover image of a penguin leaping across a space between two blocks of ice while 10 other penguins look on from the side the penguin leaped from. Here is one case where you can tell the book by its cover.<br /><br />Obviously, that wonderful image penetrated deeply into the consciousness of Holger Rathgeber in designing this penguin-based version of how a leader might deal with the problem in Who Moved My Cheese? (changing conditions affect survival)? If you miss that connection to Who Moved My Cheese? there's a foreword by Spencer Johnson to make it clearer.<br /><br />The Emperor Penguins have lived on an iceberg in Antarctica for many years. They planned to always live there. But Fred had a different idea: The iceberg was melting in a way that meant the possibility of a catastrophic collapse in mid-Winter. The rest of the book explores how Fred's knowledge is translated into useful action for the 268 penguins that lived in the colony.<br /><br />The fable naturally draws on John Kotter's famous eight steps for leading change which I have paraphrased below into seven to make them easier to understand:<br /><br />1. Get peoples' attention.<br />2. Establish a change-leading team.<br />3. Agree on the results you want.<br />4. Allow needed changes.<br />5. Show regular progress.<br />6. Stay focused.<br />7. Build new habits that will serve you well after the change is done.<br /><br />Fables are difficult to write. I admire John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber for taking a crack at it.<br /><br />But if you pay attention to the facts, you'll find that their story doesn't quite make sense. Emperor Penguins live on the pack ice that forms seasonally. As the pack ice retreats, they simply move to the edge. Seldom would they stay on an iceberg. Why? Because the ice breaks up when the youngsters are old enough to swim to the main ice pack. If you read science articles, you'll also learn that what is more likely to threaten a penguin community is that their iceberg drifts into an area where the winter freeze isolates the colony too far from the open sea. The penguins have to walk to the sea rather than dive in to get food.<br /><br />Also, most icebergs are going to eventually release into warmer seas and melt that way rather than be split by freezing water as described in this book.<br /><br />If you look at the leadership, it's also very male dominated. The story would be more realistic if it included more male-female interaction.<br /><br />The problem of survival in the face of the environment seems more akin to what a town council might face in deciding to relocate away from a leaking dam that what a business organization might face.<br /><br />I could go on, but I'm sure you see the point: A better fable could have been written (even if it had to involve penguins).<br /><br />I also compared the book to Leading Change and The Heart of Change. Unless you are only able to learn by reading fables, both of those books are much better on this subject.<br /><br />My suggestion is that you let the iceberg melt and read about how people lead instead in Dr. Kotter's other excellent books.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />

Excellent book for Assessment Centre practice

An excellent book for assessment centre practice, full of useful advice and ideas including a wide variety of potential tests. Would recommend.

Highly Recommended!

If you are a new manager, aspire to a managerial position or recently promoted an employee to a managerial or supervisory position, we suggest this manual as required reading. In fact, every new manager should be given a copy of the book along with the promotion. Too often great employees are promoted without any concept of the new skill set required to succeed as a manager or supervisor. This handbook clearly identifies the new competencies needed and explains how to develop or acquire them. Author Morey Stettner also pinpoints many of the common mistakes new managers make - and tells you how to avoid them. Anyone studying business management in college also should read this book, since it provides good, practical"in the trenches" advice that's hard to find in textbooks.