Zig Ziggler has been selling longer than I have been alive. He really is at the prophet level. This book is a true coaching program on the raw salesmen attitude. He goes beyond basics and dives in to the inner game of a salesmen. He teachers good values in sales people and even quotes Jesus. Sales is really an art and what Zig says if you can help enough people get what they want in life you can have everything you want in life. You have to really believe in your product and that your product of service will really benefit your prospect. Zig doesn’t sugar coat the profession but teaches you the philosophy behind sales. How sales has helped the world prosper and even acknowledges that bad sales people make it harder for good sales people to do their job. 

Zig has the most interesting and honest approach to sales. He demonstrates you don’t have to be a crook to be a good salesmen but rather you need to understand your product and and you need to understand the need of your prospect and get them emotional involved. Asking questions to build up your prospects own interest in the product. This way it’s their idea to buy you are just informing them how they can benefit from your product. Zig is the kind of guy who opens up his paper and sees a company he wants to do business with then starts a plan to contact that company and do business with them. Can you imagine the influence you would have if you could just pick a company you wanted to do business with and sell them your product or service. Good selling requires work, faith and persistence. It requires you have your game together as well as treating your prospect with respect and courtesy. A great read for anyone involved with sales.  

Negotiating is a lost art. People often go from casual conversation to law suites where only lawyers make money. Being a negotiator means you have to look at things from both sides fairly and evenly. With out those values you will not be a good negotiator. If you are too sucked in to winning even at the demise of your opponent then your negotiation will break down. That may be okay depending on what your BATNA is. Your best alternative to a negotiated agreement. You would offer the other party something you would want to be offered. I know that sounds radical the whole do unto others bit before you pick up the phone to call your attorney pick up this book from the old school way of thinking. Take things less personally and negotiate a better business deals, negotiate your way out of trouble or debts. Save thousands on wasted attorney fees. I once hired a lawyer to write eBay who had banned us for our affiliation to one of our clients who had gotten in trouble with too many complaints. The lawyer wrote letter after letter eBay never responded with anything that was helpful. For privacy reasons they could not tell me what exactly I was banned only it was related to our customer.

Our customer had to resolve their issue before we could be unbanned. However executive assistant to Rob Cobb would not tell them either exactly why they were banned. After failing to negotiate with the attorney I tried negotiating directly. Kristen Hale she was relentless in ignoring us and being as vague as possible. It was in February and I was at my wits end. I tried to think of a way to get the situation handled. I sent Kristen Hale flowers for valentines day with the card reading “please unban us we didn’t violate any polices..”. Low and behold it worked. I had filed complaints with every organization BBB, Consumer Affairs, State Justice department and achieved nothing. The act of sending a woman flowers and asking nicely actually worked. You can’t always send flowers in a negotiation. However Ms. Hale acknowledged we were getting a raw deal but that was just eBays policy. eBay has a C rating with the BBB and 1\100 order is fraud they must over police the system to stay under the radar. Even state senators have written eBay about the fraud issues. Now Meg Whitman is running for state governor in CA. If she had eBay treat it’s consumers so bad and created so much fraud I can’t wait to see what she does to California. In closing the negotiation might seem like you are compromising yourself but my attorney fees and time cost 1000’s but the flowers costs 40 dollars. I would argue we’re all doing the best we can for where we are at. Talk to people and look at things from their side. Be a true Negotiator. Oh and Kristen Hale executive assistant to the president of eBay said I was the more persistent eBay user she had ever come across. Persistence pays off but a good negotiation is priceless.                  

Stephen Covey has a really great program for developing the attitude and discipline and people skills needed to be a good manager. He has advised sitting presidents of businesses and countries. This book is kind of a review of the 7 habits and other qualities you can work on to achieve. This program on audio is presented to a live audience. The dynamics are good and it’s a nice review. When you hear him talk about situations and why things break down for people you think “this guy gets is”. I have debated with executives on the values introduce by Covey on how to manage resources. How to treat employees and how to get things done. Many mangers think in terms of carrot and sick from the industrial age. However we’re in the information worker age where that simply doesn’t work any more. Companies failing to understand the value of their workers as opposed to just the work will eventually fail. The cold processes of companies that don’t allow their employees to think or act on their own will eventually not be able to compete with companies that embrace the information age.and the information worker 

I’ve listened and read to every book Tolle has published. Tolle offers up what he calls sign posts to truth and liberty. In his own life he experienced deep depression and anxiety. As he approached suicidal thoughts something snapped in his Mind that there was a distinction between who he was and the self he was not happy with. That came to him when he thought “I am going to kill my self”. The distinction happed for him in the “I” and the “my self”. Realizing the power of now means simply to put your attention in to the current moment as opposed to scattering yourself over a multitude of things which dilutes your power to get thing handled. In this follow-up program Tolle cracks jokes about how the Mind goes in to despair over the smallest and insignificant things.

Listening to Tolle on audio especially has a calming affect even if you have no idea what he is talking about. He quotes all religions and teachers large and small. He doesn’t promote religion but rather an acceptance of what is. To accept the present moment doesn’t mean you give up on yourself. Rather no change will ever come from a place of resistance so he teachers surrender. When you surrender to it in your Mind you then you release the resistance and then the solution can appear to you. If you think about it how many times has a solution come to you when you took a break, shower or even smoked a cigarette. It’s the discord in your” beingness” that causes things to break down in the most subtle ways. If you think I’ll be happy when this happens the discord of that keeps you from it. If you can surrender to it then what you want will work it’s way to you and you will be a willing partner in that.        

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Wow this was an interesting book on the dysfunctions in your team that can really hurt your performance and ruin your life. This book came up when I worked for X-CORP which is fictitious name of the company I worked for. Our department was highly dysfunctional we should have had our own reality TV show. It was so bad but on the flip side we were treated really well to kill each other. I was young and wanted to push the company in to modern technology. Some people there loved the idea and others hated it and fought change till the bitter end where I found my own death by meetings. The environment was ridiculous but I am a die hard believer people can change, situations can change and I was encouraged by the CTO and the President of the company. Who wouldn’t go for it! For me it was new I had never even heard of such thing to resist something new because it was different. How long could it take to convince everyone it was the right idea. It’s not like we were trying to implement topless Fridays.

This was one time I was dead wrong. We spent 3 years in meetings where Death by Meeting also came up. I calculated in payroll we spent thousands of dollars in meetings on decisions that should have been no brainers in just one month. The Death by meeting does offer a pretty good meeting structures. It will save you more time so you can be more dysfunctional as a team. After 3 years later our boss picked up the Dysfunction book for people in our department and it was floating around the company. It was interesting and brought up good points but there are a usually reasons people are dysfunctional. I think our situation was an extreme situation and it was summed up beautifully by a colleague of mine there. She said the issue is that members in the team had fundamental differences in values. It’s probably not fair that the author could solve such a core dilemma.

I brought in someone I considered a mentor to the company to do some consulting and to see if he could assist them with these issues between team members which included me. You know the big guns he was an author for Microsoft and really knew the material. He charged them his fee to the review our team and approach but even he could not make sense of it. He pulled me aside and warned me on the elevator ride down. He told me Calvin get out of here these people are not going to change. Come work for me he said and you don’t have to worry about this stuff. I was young and overly loyal oh how I wish I had  left! What was I thinking! On the way back up from the elevator one of the opposing developers pulled me aside and told me jokingly “what are you trying to do make us do real work around here?”. I got him back for that by changing his Solitaire card game short cut to open SQL Enterprise Manager which is where he should have been spending his time. Later this guy would just stop showing up for work at all after he got a bad review years after I left. He simply vaporized and no one heard from him again. I always wondered if he left because Solitaire wouldn’t work. After 5  years I can say no worries and I have no dysfunction in my team anymore. Did the book work I guess it depends on how you look at it. Do yourself a favor if your boss buys you one of these books it’s time to MOVE ON!

If you read this book a 1000 a years ago it falls in that prophecy feel to it the sense of authority. It is very relevant because it talks about the internet and the affect on human nature. It’s kind of meant to be a internet scripture to get you thinking about internet technologies and how they related to marketing and the future of how everything works. It predicts the end of certain practices and major shifts of power. My sign would not say “The end is near!” but rather it’s just getting started. The internet very much represents the One Mind idea that we are all connected. In our world we attempt to recreate how our inner most workings are also setup. It’s probably unlikely the internet will always be the only technology used to connect people.

Imagine a hard drive that can store everything that the internet has but everyone has one. It stays synchronized with all the data on the internet with no cables, no wires or wireless. Rather it uses entanglement to tap in to the universe’s vast network already in place. You think the Matrix was just a movie. Well most of it was but the idea of the Great Matrix is web that connects the entire Universe. Computers will never take over the world they can barely take care of themselves. For now we entangle with each other using slow technology of fiber cables draped at the bottom of every ocean in the world. This is a great book to get you thinking it probably won’t revolutionize your marketing online or anything like that but it will change the way you see the internet and idea of interconnectedness of people. Even if those people are in Nigeria and want you to know that you have already one 1,000,000 Euros.    

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When they say for dummies they really mean it this time. This book was help in that it helped me affirm I am not that far behind on managing my time. It also lead me in to a more interesting conversation about time management. I am not sure who this book would be good for. If you were a house wife for 20 years and suddenly had to jump in to a busy work schedule definitely a good read.  

Allegedly Bill Gates wrote this book and it was one of the first books I got in to when I realized I wanted to be a business owner. It’s interesting how Bill manages documents at Microsoft. There are only 8 paper forms at Microsoft mainly because they are government forms. I think for a high tech person this book would not be as useful. I think this book is out reach to the many companies and managers that do have a lot of paper forms and processes. It was published in 1999 right before we though the world was coming to an end with Y2K. I listened to this book on audible.com I think it would have been more interesting if Bill had read it himself. If you are already high tech then this book probably will sound dated because you probably do deal on paper anyone either. It does provide a useful reference when talking with customers if you deal in the high tech world.