Dan Ariely speaking at TED (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. How we lie to everyone – especially ourselves. Dan Ariely.2012. ISBN 9780062183590.  Another terrific book. His studies about what and why people do what they do are really good.  This one is has strong examples that we will all recognize. For any of us, dishonesty is a slippery slope that starts with the smallest of things ( and this behaviour appears to cross all cultures) .  The forces that increase dishonesty are:

• Our ability to rationalize
• Conflicts of interest (increase own income)
• Creativity ( types that is)
• One immoral act (slips the slope)
• Being depleted (of resistance) – good lessons for dieters
• Others benefiting from our dishonesty ( love company)
• Watching others behave dishonestly (well he did it)
• Culture that gives examples of dishonesty

To reduce dishonesty skip the ethics class and try to nip it at the time and each place :

• Pledges work
• Signatures
• Moral reminders
• Supervision.

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I just finished How to Make Your Blog the Centerpiece of Your Business by Wakeman, Denise on Kindle for Android! http://www.amazon.com/kindleforandroid/ This is a quick ebook that does not waste your time.  If you intend to use social media to promote your business than a blog is central to that. I appreciated her list of  ways to attract readers to your blog.

Contextual Pricing. The death of list price and the new market reality. Rob Docters, John G. Hansen, Cecilia Nguyen & Michael Barzelay. 2012. ISBN 9780071772464.  New, exciting , easy to read and useful. This is a resource for anyone working with pricing in any industry.  I have been working with value pricing for a year now and was wondering about a hybrid response to pricing.  This book has given me a big chunk of the answer.  If you are finding that  cost based or competition based pricing does not give you the tools to get out from under discounting, than value pricing  is  one step.  Now coupled with contextual pricing you can take some great big steps.  Value pricing shows your sales guys how to explain to customers how all your products values/attributes/benefits add up to more than the price asked. Contextual pricing helps you gain understanding of buyer context.  This  allows marketing/sales to develop pricing scenarios for common market situations (rush, size, market power, geography, competition, trade show). These become part of a salesperson’s toolkit, reducing complexity while speeding responsiveness. And I love it , increasing prices while increasing speed, shortening cycles, reducing sales costs!  A must buy for sales and marketing leaders. You will thank me ( the case studies are worth the book) – but it will take some work to get this going.

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Pricing Strategies.A marketing approach. Robert M. Schindler. 2012. ISBN 9781412964746.  Written as a business school textbook, this is a very useful reference book for all. The dive is deep but the author takes good care of you as he guides you through quite a comprehensive look at all aspects of pricing. I was taken with his simple description that in a negotiated price situation, value is determined by how well your product satisfies all your customers needs.  A salesman is best situated to assess, extract  and match those needs to the product offering such that the overall value provided exceeds the price asked.  You will appreciate Schindler’ s framework for differentiation of customer needs. They range from objective ,aesthetic/hedonic, social, reliability, and product convenience needs.  The book makes good use of current case studies where he names names and describes the results

• Guest Post: Pricing Skills Today & Tomorrow (rocketbuilders.blogspot.com)