Tag Archives: books

Three New Summaries to Advance Your Career

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The desire for continuous self-improvement is part of every executive’s professional DNA. The amount of time you spend shaping and improving your organization should never completely eclipse your efforts to improve yourself. Soundview is now featuring three new Soundview Executive Book Summaries that will help you improve three critical parts of your development: communication, change and boundary breakthroughs.

by Shari Harley

by Shari Harley

How to Say Anything to Anyone by Shari Harley: In How to Say Anything to Anyone, you’ll learn how to ask for what you want at work, improve all types of working relationships, reduce the gossip and drama in your office, tell people when you’re frustrated in a way that resonates, take action on your ideas and feelings, and get honest feedback on your performance. Author Shari Harley shares real-life stories of people who have struggled to get what they want at work. With her clear and specific roadmap in hand, Harley enables you to create the career and business relationships you really want.

 

by John C. Norcross, Ph.D.

by John C. Norcross, Ph.D.

Changeology by John C. Norcross, Ph.D.: Change is hard. But not if you know the 5-step formula that works whether you’re trying to stop smoking or start recycling. Dr. John C. Norcross, an internationally recognized expert, has studied how people make transformative, permanent changes in their lives. Now his cutting-edge, scientific approach to personal improvement is being made available in this indispensable guide. Unlike 95 percent of self-help books, the Changeology plan has a documented track record of success. In his book, Dr. Norcross gives you the tools you need to change what you want within a mere 90 days.

 

by Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason

by Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason

Boundary Spanning Leadership by Chris Ernst and Donna Chrobot-Mason. We live in a world of vast collaborative potential. Yet all too often, powerful boundaries create barriers that can splinter groups. And this can lead to uninspiring results. To transform borders into frontiers in today’s global, multi-stakeholder organizations, you need Boundary Spanning Leadership. Powered by a decade of global research and practice by the top-ranked Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), this book takes you from rural towns in the United States to Hong Kong’s skyline and from a modernizing South Africa to the bustling streets of India, showing you how to build bridges across boundaries.

All three summaries are now available for download in multiple digital formats.

Can Conflict Cause Creativity?

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Conflict is often viewed as one of the biggest roadblocks to achieving a shared goal. There are many instances in which it can bog down or completely derail a project from reaching completion. However, consultant Lina M. Echeverria, author of Idea Agent: Leadership that Liberates Creativity and Accelerates Innovation, argues that there is a hidden benefit to conflict: it can help your team achieve creative breakthroughs.

In a recent Soundview Author Insight interview, Echeverria addressed the concerns leaders have about conflict:

Conflict is one of the things that scares most leaders because it doesn’t feel good.  We have always been conditioned from early childhood not to fight.  Be good.  Be nice.  And it is not about encouraging fighting; it is about encouraging dialogue.  It is about encouraging the ability to disagree, to give other viewpoints and engage in a dialogue.  But as I say, it really feels in the pit of your stomach like, “Ugh, I don’t want to be here.”  So, what it takes first is a lot of courage once you have come to the realization that that conflict is an essential part of the creative process.

It is an essential part because people that are creative, that have a really good idea that others have not seen, are driven by this vision.  And this vision can be very, very powerful and they’re not going to stop because of any barriers until they achieve the mission.

So, when those viewpoints come from a different angle, you could have a lot of passion, each [person] pulling in a different direction or let’s say, pushing towards the center and trying to make [his or her idea] happen.  So, what is needed is to bring them to the team.  Have them understand that theirs is not the only way and that they need to learn to respect others while at the same time, helping them understand how their behavior can impact the dynamics of the team and can push others down.

Soundview subscribers can login to their online library to hear the complete interview with Echeverria. The Soundview Executive Book Summary of Idea Agent is available for download now.

Book Review: You Can’t Lie to Me

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by Janine Driver

by Janine Driver

Whether executives want to admit it or not, during the course of the average week someone, be it a client, vendor, employee or peer, is attempting to lie to them. People faced with this situation use a variety of methods to attempt to determine whether they’re getting the facts. Few of these methods actually result in separating fact from fiction. Author, keynote speaker and world-renowned body language expert Janine Driver offers a better way to pull the truth out of others in her book You Can’t Lie to Me: The Revolutionary Program to Supercharge Your Inner Lie Detector and Get to the Truth. This book is now available in multiple digital formats as a Soundview Executive Book Summary.

Driver stakes a claim for her expertise by offering “The BS Barometer,” a combination of tools that help readers understand the nature of detecting deception. One surprising point is the critical importance of the emotional investment of the person attempting to discover deceit. Driver writes that emotional investment is “the biggest predictor of your success. You must have as much skin in the game as the liar does. Why you want to know is just as important as what you want to know.” Recognizing what could be gained or lost by allowing a lie to persist will power executives to stop it in its tracks.

You Can’t Lie to Me provides a five-step program for advanced lie detection. Each step is given a name that will register with fans of true crime novels or police procedural media: Gathering Intel, The Wiretap, The Stakeout, The Full Body Surveillance, and The Interrogation. With unique insights on body language, verbal cues and facial expressions, Driver creates a communication method that, if thoroughly read and carefully practiced, can give executives a secret advantage in their daily interactions.

New Summaries on Deception, Innovation and Explanation

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Some of the most difficult parts of an executive’s job can result from ordinary situations. A simple conversation with an employee can reveal a problem that will affect the entire organization. A mishandled pitch in a meeting dooms an idea for a game-changing product to fail. Soundview has three new summaries that provide executives with the skills to turn those pivotal moments into extraordinary opportunities.

by Janine Driver

by Janine Driver

You Can’t Lie to Me by Janine Driver. What if you could increase your salary by 15 percent and kick problems and worries to the curb simply by learning how to detect a lie the moment it starts? What if you had an easy-to-use test that tipped you off the instant someone held something back from you? No machine built to date has proven more effective than a well-trained human lie detector, says world-renowned body language expert Janine Driver, a former federal law enforcement investigator who has trained agents at the ATF, CIA, and FBI. In You Can’t Lie To Me, Driver teaches you how to protect yourself from liars and manipulators.

by Lina M. Echeverria

by Lina M. Echeverria

Idea Agent by Lina M. Echeverria. There is perhaps no leadership challenge more daunting than managing creativity — and more urgent than delivering breakthrough innovation. How do you harness some of the most passionate, intelligent people in your organization without stifling them? How do you simultaneously unleash their energy and channel it into something tangible? In Idea Agent, Lina M. Echeverría offers seven proven principles through which new ideas come to fruition.

 

by Lee LeFever

by Lee LeFever

The Art of Explanation by Lee LeFever. You’ve done the hard work. Your product or service works beautifully — but something is missing. People just don’t see the big idea — and it’s keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem. The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems. In this summary, author Lee LeFever provides a guide to helping audiences fall in love with your ideas, products or services through better explanations in any medium.

 

All of the above summaries are now available in multiple digital formats.

Book Review: Predictably Irrational

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by Dan Ariely

by Dan Ariely

During the course of a day, executives spend a portion of time thinking about the “what” involved in various actions: What does the executive need to do? What did employees do? What are customers doing? Rarely does anyone take the time to analyze the “why” of what we do. Fortunately, Duke University professor and author Dan Ariely provides readers with one of the most thought-provoking examinations of the “why” behind decision making in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. The Soundview Executive Book Summary of this book is now available for download.

While Ariely’s book is not specifically written for a business audience, the benefits to an executive reader are tremendous. It is easy to read through the various social science experiments and see the applications to marketing, sales and customer service. What becomes clear to executives who read Predictably Irrational is that Ariely’s book offers additional suggestions for areas such as performance and workplace culture.

For example, Ariely suggests that a better method to prevent procrastination is to allow people to voice their preferred path of action to accomplish a goal. This prevents the individual from feeling crushed by a mandate from above while creating the self-imposed restrictions that can help give structure to finishing a task. Ariely admits that this approach may lack the effectiveness of more dictatorial ways of enforcing responsibility, but a more cooperative approach to goals can, as Ariely writes, “help push us in the right direction.” In a bonus bit of business wisdom, he suggests that people can be more successful at meeting deadlines if given training and experience in setting their own timetable.

Predictably Irrational is an entertaining read with insights that can be interpreted and applied to an executive’s own company. Choosing to read Ariely’s book is a decision that can be firmly labeled “rational.”

To learn more about the positive and negative effects of irrational behavior, check out the Soundview Executive Book Summary of Ariely’s follow-up book The Upside of Irrationality.