Book Summaries

In SNAP Selling, Jill Konrath alerts us to the fact that we are on the edge of a new age in selling — it’s no longer a numbers game. Today, you actually will be more successful if you make fewer calls, meetings and presentations. Konrath offers four SNAP rules to win more sales, and she teaches us that sales is an outcome not a goal.

The multi-generations that will make up the workforce in 2020 will place new demands on employers who will be challenged to manage employees who have vastly different values, beliefs and expectations. The 2020 Workplace can be a useful guide to help you and your organization create tomorrow’s workplace of choice.

Bestselling author Marc Miller delivers a new, critical tool for connecting with decision makers to make more and bigger sales. He offers a new sales approach designed to help salespeople earn A Seat at the Table – the place reserved for those select people who set the direction and the budget of an enterprise.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never happened before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company’s survival.

A recession can do far more damage to your organization than any of your ten toughest competitors. Without question, this is the most important lesson that business executives have all too painfully learned in the carnage of the 2007-2009 economic crash. Internationally recognized as an authority on managing the business cycle for competitive advantage, Peter Navarro shows how your organization can be a winner over the course of its entire cycle – not just when economic times are good.

The biggest challenge for HR professionals today is to help their respective organizations succeed. HR professionals often focus internally on the function of HR rather than externally on what customers and investors need HR to deliver. If HR professionals are to truly serve as business partners, then their goals must be the goals of the business. Transforming HR professionals into business partners isn't the end in and of itself; it's the means to a strategic, business-oriented end.

In this summary of Brain Rules, molecular biologist John Medina shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach and the way we work. He introduces 12 Brain Rules which cover what scientists know for sure about how our brains work and also offers ideas for investigating how each rule might apply to our daily lives. This summary will show you how to better understand how your brain really works — and how to get the most out of it.

Many of the greatest accomplishments can be reached only by two people working together. Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary were the first to scale Mt. Everest; Karl Malone and John Stockton were the key to each other's success on the basketball court; Michael Eisner was never as effective at Disney without Frank Wells. Authors Rodd Wagner and Gale Muller teamed up to lead a five-year endeavor to crack the code on collaboration and to discover what elements are crucial for two people becoming

In jargon-free language, Andrews and Johnson explain how managers can get the most out of their IT investment. The authors focus on successfully managing IT projects, including controlling project scope.