"...keeping you great"

HEADLINES:

Best How-To Marketing Book I've Ever Read -- They did it, EOers Mike Lieberman and Eric Keiles have written the most concise, how-to, marketing book I've ever read entitled Reality Marketing Revolution: Transform Your Business into a Money Making Machine! Immediately go to page 39 and read Chapter 6 (four pages) and do their blue-circle, red-square test on your website, marketing materials, customer emails, proposals, etc. Then jump to Chapter 17 and check your website's home page against their suggested structure -- statement of pain, emotional photo (vs. the standard stock photos we all use), offer of free resources, etc. Office Practicum has a homepage that fits all their criteria. May all our websites be so crisp and compelling. Then read the rest of the book! There are dozens of practical, actionable, marketing tools in this simple and short book. Plus they provide a sequential marketing process you can follow in Chapter 22.

Best Parenting Article We've Read -- entitled "How Not to Talk to Your Kids." Po Bronson points out, in this New York Magazine piece, the grave mistake of praising your child for being smart. Instead, it's critical you praise them for hard effort. And that your praise be very, very specific. And Po backs up his ideas with solid research showing the damaging effects praising children for being smart has on their confidence to tackle challenging work. Thanks for Rick Sapio, CEO of Mutual Capital Alliance for pointing my wife and I to this important article.

"Out Read the Other Guy" -- this is Tom Peters' latest video message: the importance of out-reading your competition. Take just over 2 minutes (2:05) and get a dose of Tom to end your week. In my presentation to a group of MBA students and faculty from IESE last night, I noted that over my 27 years of educating executives of growth firms, the best predictors of success are a voracious thirst for learning and a bias for action -- i.e., learn fast, act fast. It's why Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, focuses on his routine of shutting off his Blackberry over the weekend and reading a book or two.

Seth Godin's November Reading List -- and yesterday Seth Godin, marketing guru, shared his latest reading list (mainly non-marketing books and some excellent sci-fi). Note the first book -- a sci-fi account of crowdsourcing, bottom-up innovation, and the new economy -- made Seth shed a tear. And I immediately ordered the The Art of the Idea by John Hunt, just released a month ago. In fact, Tom Peters rants and raves about this book along with Seth (who is milder!).

Beating Major Competitors (your thoughts?) -- the book entitled Eating the Big Fish, on how to take on major competitors, caught my attention. How can Gazelles take on Stanford, Harvard, Babson, and MIT in the area of executive education? Goldman's $500 million (announced yesterday) will be spent providing community college and university-based entrepreneurship education to small business owners when I know our simple and practical approaches would be more useful in many situations. Thoughts? Connections?

What Are Your Favorite Books/Authors? -- continuing with crowdsourcing (definition from Wikipedia), what books are you reading right now? I'm planning our webcast series for 2010 and would love to know which business thought leaders you would love to hear present LIVE for 90 minutes. John Hunt is now on my short list. BTW, Dr. Cialdini rocked earlier this week -- his principles of Influence are timeless and his 90-minute presentation is a MUST for all executives/leaders -- it's only available for three months in our archives per our contract with Dr. Cialdini -- he's practicing what he preaches -- scarcity!

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