October was a wonderful reading month. I hit my goal plus one. I am now working on finishing a stack of book reviews. Fortunately, I had time to buckle down and get quite a number of them drafted. Expect to see them posted over the next week. November looks like a great month for reading. Because I have some days off during the month, I expect to not only advance my reading goals but also catch up on the book reviews. It looks like all the books for November have a business leaning. This is what I am planning to read.
My November reading list is focused primarily on marketing and goal setting.
Here is what is on my reading list for November 2019:
Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer-Sell Like a Superstar by John Jantsch
I have read a couple of John Jantsch’s books to include The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself and Duct Tape Marketing Revised and Updated: The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide. I also got to see him speak at Social Media Marketing World. I am a fan of his message.
Via Amazon:
Many of the areas that salespeople struggle with these days have long been the domain of marketers, according to bestselling author John Jantsch. The traditional business model dictates that marketers own the message while sellers own the relationships. But now, Jantsch flips the usual sales approach on its head.
It’s no longer enough to view a salesperson’s job as closing. Today’s superstars must attract, teach, convert, serve, and measure while developing a personal brand that stands for trust and expertise.
In Duct Tape Selling, Jantsch shows how to tackle a changing sales environment, whether you’re an individual or charged with leading a sales team. You will learn to think like a marketer as you:
- Create an expert platform
- Become an authority in your field
- Mine networks to create critical relationships within your company and among your clients
- Build and utilize your Sales Hourglass
- Finish the sale and stay connected
- Make referrals an automatic part of your process
Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion Potential Customers in 10 Minutes by Perry Marshall, Keith Krance, and Thomas Meloche
A couple of months ago, I read Marshall’s books Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes as well as 80/20 Sales and Marketing. I loved both of them. I am looking for
Via Amazon:
Facebook makes it easy for businesses like yours to share photos, videos, and posts to reach, engage, and sell to more than 1 billion active users. Advertising expert Perry Marshall is joined by co-authors Keith Krance and Thomas Meloche as he walks you through Facebook Advertising and its nuances to help you pinpoint your ideal audience and gain a ten-fold return on your investment.
Now in its third edition, Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising takes you further than Facebook itself by exploring what happens before customers click on your ads and what needs to happen after―10 seconds later, 10 minutes later, and in the following days and weeks.
You’ll discover how to:
- Maximize your ad ROI with newsfeeds, videos, and branded content
- Create custom audiences from your contact lists, video views, and page engagement
- Use the Facebook Campaign Blueprint proven to generate your first 100 conversions
- Boost your Facebook ads using the Audience Network and Instagram
- Follow the three-step formula for successful video ads
- Maximize campaigns and increase conversions on all traffic to your website
- Track and retarget engaged users by leveraging the Power of the Pixel
- Make every page on your website 5-10 percent more effective overnight
Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs by John Doerr
When I learned about Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) I became a huge fan. I recently learned about this book and I knew I had to read it. It is from the same guy who introduced OKRs to Google. As I write this, I am halfway through it. I have already picked up a number of ideas to improve how I am implementing them in my work.
Via Amazon:
In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he’d just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They’d have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered.
Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove (“the greatest manager of his or any era”) drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove’s brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.
In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone’s goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.
The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization’s most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.
In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.
Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character by Admiral James Stavridis USN
I listened to Admiral Stavridis speak on a late-night news show and he mentioned his book. Based on his description, I knew I had to read it.
Via Amazon:
In his acclaimed book Sea Power, James Stavridis reckoned with the history and geopolitics of the world’s great bodies of water. Now in Sailing True North, he offers a much more intimate, human accounting: the lessons of leadership and character contained in the lives and careers of history’s most significant naval commanders. Admiral Stavridis brings a lifetime of reflection to bear on the subjects of his study–on naval history, on the vocation of the admiral with its special tests and challenges, and on the sweep of global geopolitics. Above all, this is a book that will help you navigate your own life’s voyage: the voyage of leadership of course, but more important, the voyage of character. Sadly, evil men can be effective leaders sailing toward bad ends; ultimately, leadership without character is like a ship underway without a rudder. Sailing True North helps us find the right course to chart.
Simply as epic lives, the tales of these ten admirals offer up a collection of the greatest imaginable sea stories. Moreover, spanning 2,500 years from ancient Greece to the twenty-first century, Sailing True North is a book that offers a history of the world through the prism of our greatest naval leaders. None of the admirals in this volume were perfect, and some were deeply flawed. But from Themistocles, Drake, and Nelson to Nimitz, Rickover, and Hopper, important themes emerge, not least that there is an art to knowing when to listen to your shipmates and when to turn a blind eye; that serving your reputation is a poor substitute for serving your character; and that taking time to read and reflect is not a luxury, it’s a necessity.
By putting us on personal terms with historic leaders in the maritime sphere he knows so well, James Stavridis has in Sailing True North offered a compass that can help us navigate the story of our own lives, wherever that voyage takes us.
That’s it for this month — I want to hear what good books YOU’VE read lately! Please share in the comments below.
If you missed previous months in 2019, you can still check them out:
January | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September
My Reviews for This Reading List
- Book Review: Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs
- Book Review: Sailing True North: Ten Admirals and the Voyage of Character
- Book Review: Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising: How to Access 1 Billion Potential Customers in 10 Minutes
- Book Review: Duct Tape Selling: Think Like a Marketer-Sell Like a Superstar
Keep on reading!
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