Invest In Yourself With These 9 Great Leadership Books

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide for Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You or Your Team is at is says on the tin. A practical way of finding your “why” either as a duo or as a team.

There is no reason why you shouldn’t create your own “why” for your team even if your business does not have one. A nested “why” they call it.

I highly recommend you reading the Simon Sinek books “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action” and “The Infinite Game: How Great Businesses Achieve Long-Lasting Success” first, before your attempt to run your own “why” workshops. 

So what? Understanding you “why” and being able to write in a way that appeals to the limbic part of the brain is useful today for writing in sales and marketing. 

As Randy points out, people don’t to your website to buy. They come to your website to research, in real-world situations a great website only converts 5% of traffic, in fact it’s probably more like 0.05%. So how can you increase your conversion rate? Not with gimmicks and hacks but some common sense design and use of psychology. 

I know nothing about websites, website design and SEO, that’s untrue. I know nothing about websites, website design and SEO from a technical point of view but I do know about websites, website design and SEO from a buyer and a business leader prospective. I’m CEO of a fast growing start-up.

Randy has created a great book, for once here we have simple, common sense explanations on website and website design and how you can get Google “juice” which is about getting your products or services onto page one of Google. This book is a great read for the web designer, but it also a great read for the marketer or the business leader (like me) who needs to explain to a web designer how we want our website to look. We are all in the business of “sales” and “branding” from the technical to the leader and this book does a great job of explaining web design in simple, non technical terms. Worth a read. 

I’ve read three of Michelle Carvill’s books and they are all good.

This one takes 28 social media myths and dissects each one. While Michelle is a social media writer so you would expect a bias. But in fact she is balanced and backs each myth up with research and argues the point, for and against. 

It’s a book you can pick up and read if you don’t know anything about social media, as she explains context with each myth discussion. 

If I would make two criticisms; firstly some of the research is “old”. In the world of social media research from 2016 does not really have much bearing on the fast moving world of digital. My second concern was the lack of examples, it would have been nice to follow up each chapter with a case study.

It would be nice to think that maybe, just maybe, people who don’t “get” social media will give it a read and see what they are missing out on. 

Please be aware that Michelle shares the same publisher as me and I was sent a copy to review. 

Working in business I’ve often heard people talk about using significant resources or budget is a requirement.

For example to launch a company or product. 

These people tend to come from a background of “throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick”.

What if you don’t have a lot of budget? Time? Or resources? Or what if you want to persevere the capability you have?

In “Tipping Point” Malcolm Gladwell explains the secret to enable you to hack the tipping point, going viral, launch point.

The secret? You need connectors, mavens and salespeople from that you can create and execute a word of mouth campaign. 

If you work in the field of leadership, sales and marketing then this book is worth a read. 

Polar Bear Pirates is a fun book about business. It describes many of “blockers” you find in business, the people, the attitudes and negativity. It provides solutions and ways and means to overcome these issues as you advance on your quest to reach “fat city”. While this book is fun, it has a serious message, if you are in business, it’s worth a read. 

Forgotten Women - The Leaders is a truly inspirational book. It takes female leaders, the rebels, the warriors, the rulers, the activists and the reformers and tells a short story about each one. The story gives you the background and context, “warts and all”. Each story is lovingly illustrated by female illustrators, all of who are referenced in the back of the book. 

Well done to Zing Tsjeng for researching the stories, also for bringing them to life. These women won’t be forgotten, but will provide inspiration for future generations. 

Zing has written a series of these books which are worth checking out.

In her book “Rising Strong”, Brene Brown, looks at failure, shame and regret. How can we get out “from under a rock” and how can we react to it without anger and all of the other feelings and reactions that our parents, our friends and our enemies have tried to push on us as behaviours.

We all fail and we all fall from time-to-time and this is about us getting back up and not lashing out, however it might make us feel better.

She also talks about how, so often we have a “story” in our heads that plays out and how this often ends in “tears”, either our own or somebody else’s. We are better than that, and dealing with the anger, the vulnerability the shame and regret is OK. We are all human and we all feel these things. A great book if you want to live a better life, without some preachy, do-gooder telling you, what to do. Brene is real and explains her own situations as examples.

I was recommended this book by Sir Clive Woodward, who was the England Rugby Manager when England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003. He knows a lot about preparation and checklists. The Checklist Manifesto is all about checklists.

If you have ever flown, you will pleased that checklists exist as they keep you safe (there includes an interview with the Head of Checklists at Boeing). If you have ever been operated on, you will be pleased that checklists exist as they reduce the number of complications and save lives.

You will also learn that there are different types of checklists. Why are checklists so important? There are activities where you cannot let the human brain remember, as it won’t. The brain needs to be focused on the things it needs to focus on, rather than mundane things. In fact checklists make the world go around, from winning the Rugby world cup to keeping people safe. Worth a read.

Full disclosure: Just be aware that I was part of a program that Neal Schaffer produced at Rutgers Business School.

Knowing Neal, I purchased a copy of “The Age of Influence” as soon as it appeared on Amazon. Neal has been in the Influencer Marketing space as long as I can remember and being an Influencer himself he can speak from both the brand side and the influencer side. In this book, he does both.

So what is the book like? Neal gives a great background too Influencer Marketing basics. From what it means from both the Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B) point of view. He describes how social media has changed society and changed the world of business. He then goes on to describe, how you can create your own influencer marketing campaign. From working out which influencers to target, how to contact them, how to work with them and how you should measure (there is a list of tool) the influencer program.

For me, the important point that Neal gets across is that through the whole process the influencer (if they are any good) will be in charge. If you think that an “advert” will be created and put through an influencers network, that isn’t influencer marketing, that’s advertising. 

He finished up with explaining how you can become an influencer. 

If you are in marketing, thinking about influencer marketing, or any to be an influencer it’s well worth a read. 

It wouldn't be an article about books without mentioning my two books. Both are highly practical, they are not about my journey, they are designed to be used by the reader in their day to day work.

Social Selling describes the modern buyer and the way, as sellers and marketers we need to react to that. It takes the reader through the way that the market has changed to provide a structure that you can use in your day to day life.

Smarketing is about how you can merge sales and marketing, or at least bring the two departments together.

Having seen a number of articles about, should we or should we not merge sales and marketing, we decided to write the book that will support you run such a project.

We are not allowed to mention the company the use case is based on. It's not therefore a hypothetical example, but based on real science. We take you through the reasons for sales and marketing should work together, to a plan on what, practically you need to do. We also share with you the common "gotchas" so you can plan for them in advance. we also share with you common measures.

Both Social Selling and Smarketing, as are all of the books above available on Amazon world-wide. Yoo can contact me here and DLA Ignite here