multipliers. How the best leaders make everyone smarter. Liz Wiseman with Greg McKeown.2010 ISBN 9780061964398.  If you are being asked to achieve more with the team you have, this is the book for you. After a long tenure at Oracle, Wiseman has written one of the most useful management development books I have ever had the pleasure to read.  She really nails this concept of multiplier vs diminisher leaders.  I have worked for both, but in tech I see more diminishers than any other type. Hard driven must be the smartest guy in the room people who crush initiative or drive it away. This is indeed a guide to success as a CEO, coach, teacher, leader. Easy but thoughtful read.

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The Experience Effect. Engage your customers with a consistent and memorable brand experience. Jim Joseph. 2010. ISBN 9780814415542. This is a very practical book.  It contains terrific real examples of recognizable brands as well as lots of useful tools for the marketers tool belt. You will glean things that you can use for your entire career, some everyday and some whenever. Marketing’s role is to create a clear and consistent brand experience from the MOT and ever more.  Rocket Builders certainly agree with his point of view. To paraphrase, any sales person and marketer should do what clients do in their day to experience what their life is like, to wrap their heads around the real persona they deal with.  Although his experience is B2C  I gleaned lots out of this book for our B2B practise.  perhaps I would have enjoyed a different structure to the book as well as a few more bullets and lists, but the style is conversational, not theoretical by any means.  A recommendation to the marketers among you. Check out JimJoseph.com

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Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned from Google. Aaron Goldman. 2011. ISBN 9780071742894. Yes this is an important book for all marketers ( Which according to Porter is 1/2 of every business). Each reader will take away their important bits.  I enjoyed his discussion of Googel Website Optimizer and how to do those controlled runs.  Another resource is GoodURLBadURL.com , its hilarious!

The book is quite full of excellent resources, many created by the author.  He is not loath to point out the utility of comScore, AdGooroo, Compete.com, and Hitwise.  Overall is the constant discussions of what Google does, is doing and will do, which is as fascinating as anything else.  At Rocket Builders we have used Gambescia’s four boxes of branding in order to clarify an USP. It certainly works well.  Goldman has a very tough USP test oin that he asks you to put yours into one Tweet.  Now that can be really a mind chewer.  It is the hardest work to make things clear and simple.  Goldman is also an advocate of building marketing frameworks first before you get sucked into endless wordsmithing. Thats certainly true. Well written, organized and clear – great for a coast to coast plane ride.

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How to Sell a Service. Guidelines for effective selling in a service business. Malcolm H B McDonald & John W Leppard. 1988. ISBN 0434912883.  Malcolm McDonald is a giant in English sales and marketing, with over 30 books out that I know about.  Much of  this prolific output is now out of print. This is one of those, but you can still get it from AbeBooks etc. It is a treasure as he writes in a laconic direct style that gets you stuck into the useful parts. I stress useful, as this is a practitioners book, not an academic tome.Yes some of the sections are dated – but they are quite minor.. His early chapters on selling service are as current as they come. The hidden value parts are the end of chapter questions (with answers at the end of the book). They are not just pen and paper but he has included several excellent activities that a progressive sales manager would want to use in sales meetings with his troops, as well as for his own use.  If you sell services this is a great book for you.

The New Launch Plan. 152 tips, tactics and trends from the most memorable new products. Joan Schneider & Julie Hall.2010. ISBN 0615326781.  This book is chock full of very good information. It is a bible for best practices for product launches.  The authors ran annual surveys n the most memorable product launches . Results are listed on http://mmnpl.wordpress.com/.  For our practice in B2B in the high tech world the bulk of the examples were in the retail sector, but there was a great discussion about Tweetdeck. Any marketer worth their PR ribbons must read this book.  I found the chapters on success and metrics to be of great value.  Some useful quotes:

• The First Moment of Truth has moved from the retail shelves to the Internet/Facebook and blogs.
• Supply shock is creating a product that is required by customers, not a choice (ie flu vaccine)
• If you create key messages without a framework you wil be mired in wordsmithing before you know it.
• Media members are short staffed, covering multiple beats – it behooves you to help them as much as possible
• Social media is another form of online customer service – do it well or do not do it

Well written and easy to get through. Good one for a 3 hr plane ride.

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The Hyper-Social Organization. Eclipse your competition by leveraging social media. Francois Gossieaux & Ed Moran. 2010. ISBN 9780071714020. Based on a Tribalization of Business Study (http://www.tribalizationofbusiness.com/category/tribalization/) , the authors have the data and experience to prove out their point. I just wish they had got to the meat a lot sooner. I took lots of notes all the way through but the real value starts at Chapter 14. Some juicy quotes I picked up:

Companies usually have a mix of two communities, defenders of the faith and seekers of the truth. You certainly do not look for innovation from defenders.

Peter Drucker, ” Because the purpose of a company is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two – and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.  Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business. ( Sound like any place you worked? “

A hypersocial enterprise will require – new salespeople. new sales metrics, better integration of all customer touching areas (and their data), seeing fewer one to one sales  but more one to tribe sales, salespeople with new skills,

Bill Joy says that their are always more smart people outside your company than within it. (So the tribes can conttibute a a big part of product dev and innovation)   Dev can not ignore the reaching out of marketing to the tribes.

Breakthrough products will not come out of committee. Henry Ford always said if he gave people what they wanted he woudl have produced a faster horse.

HR must change and in a big way with HyperSocial.

Owners of big communities/tribes will monetize through becoming “brokers” e.g. facebook.

A valuable but not an easy read. Could have used an aggressive editor, but leaders need to read this stuff. I am better for reading it. Great examples.

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Engage! The complete guide for brands and businesses to build, cultivate and measure success in the new web.  Brian Solis . 2010. ISBN 9780470619704.  If you struggle in a company that has dinosaurs for marketing heads, who just do not get the impact of social media, this is your new bible.  Solis starts with a very comprehensive lay of the land, filled with big name company successes. From that he provides a foundational approach to why this works. But his big addition to this field is how he takes a deep dive into traditional marketing “theology” and shows through example and metaphor how social media does and must fit into every marketing departments POV and plans.  Along the way you will learn so much more than you ever suspected was working with social media. (E.g. even his title is designed to garner lots of SEO and tagging points)  Ever the pragmatist, Solis points out all the short cuts and programs available to those with the big budgets, but he never loses sight of the reason for business- to make a customer.

Thanks to Troy Agrignon who “donated” the download to force me to add it into the Kindel. New for me, a total digital read. Can not decide if I like it a whole lot. I read, not browse books and attempt to make them part of who I am. Seeing I have a terrible memory, I flip back and forth in a book to reread sections to refresh the ideas. That’s tough digitally, plus I have a litany of methods to increase my comprehension of a book. which are hard to do on a digital machine. But you have to love the form factor, so I will need to develop speed reading methods for the digital world.

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Change your Brain Change your Body. Daniel Amen, M.D. 2010. ISBN 9780307463579. Dr Amen is often seen on PBS talking about the impact of your brain on the rest of you.  As I reflect on the various conflict type sports I played and my sons played, it gave me several things to think about, since head injuries can be caused in many ways in sport, and they are not all concussions.  Much of the self help business is built around “self talk” and Dr Amen shows how thoughts and self talk are reflected in brain scans.  The book is an easy read and I found myself quite enthralled with his science. At one point. I completely missed my train stop being so deep into this book.  if you have tried everything to lose weight, quit smoking, exercise more, eat better then this just may be the book that provides you with the correct incentives.

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