Tag Archives: Business book summary

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: Idea Agent

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by Lina M. Echeverria

by Lina M. Echeverria

The cover of innovation leadership consultant and author Lina M. Echeverría’s book Idea Agent: Leadership That Liberates Creativity and Accelerates Innovation perfectly captures the problematic way many organizations view creativity: lightning in a jar. Fortunately for executives, Echeverría removes much of the mystery and offers a better alternative to allow creativity to bloom. Idea Agent is now available in multiple digital formats as a Soundview Executive Book Summary.

Echeverría provides readers with a framework to create a culture of creativity and innovation. She calls the elements the “Seven Passions of Innovation.” The seven passions include everything from gathering diverse teams of intelligent employees to shaping a culture that provides the necessary amount of time for creativity to occur. As Echeverría writes, the seven passions, “come together to make up a living system whose energy radiates from a leader at the core, to its heart center.”

The advice Echeverría provides leaders does a good deal to harness the more difficult parts of innovation. There is an obvious connection between talented individuals, a supportive workplace and successful innovation. Idea Agent delineates the gaps between these pieces and creates a more complete picture. It also provides the business ramifications of creativity in a way that other volumes struggle to attempt. A core tenet of Echeverría’s philosophy is the deep connection between company success and a leader’s commitment to the careers of his or her employees. When a leader pushes to set equally high goals for employees and him- or herself, the results can be game-changing.

Idea Agent is an intriguing journey into the soul of innovation and leaders will find it a worthwhile guide for building better teams.

Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent

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Are you selling vanilla ice cream? Most likely you aren’t literally selling it, but do you sell a product that’s basically like your competitor’s – a plain, basic commodity?

Book summaries are our vanilla ice cream. Although we have distinguished our summaries from those of our competitors by the selection of titles, quality of writing, and thoroughness of the summary, some people still consider all book summaries alike. This is why we’ve gone further to separate ourselves from the competition.

We have brought together talented staff to help us provide subscribers greater access to the authors and their work through hosting weekly webinars with book authors, interviews with the authors to gain clearer insight into their lives and ideas, and launched our Executive Insights series to also provide video interviews with executives who are putting these new ideas into practice. In addition, we provide a customized library for each subscriber to search and use this content, while providing access through apps as well.

This is the basic concept behind Steve Van Remortel’s book Stop Selling Vanilla ice Cream. In order to differentiate yourself from the competition, you need the right talent and strategy to make it happen. Van Remortel goes so far as to say that “there is no difficulty any viable enterprise can confront that that cannot be surmounted by improving its strategy and optimizing its talent.”

He provides five fundamentals to help define an organization’s route from where they are today all the way to greater prosperity and effectiveness.

  1. Differentiation – deliver a competence that creates a clear differentiation for your organization.
  2. Tangible Value – don’t just say you’re the best – prove it.
  3. Talent Management – implement a talent management system that enables your organization to identify, select, develop and retain talent.
  4. Tactical Department Plans – develop and execute action plans that work “on” the business in each department of your organization.
  5. Plan Execution – institute a plan execution program to insure an organizational culture of discipline that focuses on accountability.

If you’re tired of selling vanilla ice cream and would like to work out a differentiation plan, please join us on April 23rd to hear Steve’s Stop Selling Vanilla Ice Cream process in detail and to ask your questions throughout the presentation. Register now for Differentiating Your Company Through Strategy and Talent.

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.