32 Business Tips & Lessons from the Entrepreneur’s Bookshelf

You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken nuggets from our library and provide them for entrepreneurs and business owners.

Influence

1. When it comes to influence, every interaction matters. (Influence Redefined)
2. Powerful people act they make decisions and they go with them. (Work It!)
3. If you don't have peoples attention, you can't influence them. (Influence Redefined)
4. You have to earn the right for people to listen to you. (Influence Redefined)
5. Influence is all about your communication. Communication is the very foundation of influence, but he subject of communication is often missing from discussions about influence. (Influence Redefined)
6. Self-awareness is the first step to greater influence.  (Influence Redefined)
7. Influential communicators eliminate excuses, discipline themselves to hone their skills every day and reach out to others for support. (Influence Redefined)
8. If you do nothing else that I suggest in this book, video record yourself speaking. (Influence Redefined)

Self-Awareness

1. Our prediction, base on the data, is that this upheaval in the number and types of available jobs and required skills will turn our lives and our children's lives upside down. (Humilty is the New Smart)
2. Life's challenges demand your response, and that response defines your character and determines your destiny. Difficulty is an essential part of our story. It calls us to overcome, persevere, and share our story to inspire others. (Five Bold Choices)
3. We believe that there are 4 fundamental behaviors that will help us overcome our nature and nurture limitations: Quieting Ego, Managing Self (one's thinking and emotions), Reflective Listening, and Otherness (emotionally connecting and relating to others). (Humilty is the New Smart)
4. Simply put, lack of clarity is the number one reason why people quit a job or some major endeavor. It's easy to quit when you have no compelling vision of success and lots of busyness with no direction. (Five Bold Choices)
5. Simply slowing down and deciding wither to choose to act quickly or instead take our time and engage deliberately in a situation is a first step in managing ourselves. (Humilty is the New Smart)

History of Entrepreneurship

1. Throughout history the entrepreneur's ceaseless quest to discover and/or develop new markets has been pursued through a variety of means, all of which have an enormous impact on society. Among others these methods have included overland and overseas trade, radical innovation of both products and processes, social engineering, territorial conquest, and most recently, interplanetary travel in the form of space tourism for the ultarich. (A Brief History of Entrepreneurship)
2. So in the process of learning about the history of entrepreneurship and its role in shaping our world, one also gains a deeper understanding of each of its vital components. (A Brief History of Entrepreneurship)
3. Like Apple and Google in our day, Columbus's entrepreneurial “discover of the New World opened up a fresh vista of opportunities for the entrepreneurs of his day (at least, from an exclusively European perspective). (A Brief History of Entrepreneurship)

Promotion

1. Success is almost always the result of two things–positive thinking, the belief that you can and will achieve your goals, and passion, the energy, enthusiasm, and drive you need to get to the finish line. If either is in short supply, reaching your goals will be a whole lot harder, if not impossible. (Work It!)
2. We've all heard the saying “It's who you know that counts.” Well here's another take on it ‘It's not only who you know that counts…it's also who knows you.” So become a positive and highly visible presence in your workplace, your business, your industry, and your community, and you're almost sure to travel far in your career. (Work It!)

Leadership

1. Ingagement is a process where you involve people to make decisions. (Ingaging Leadership)
2. Ingagement isn't a single action that you take just once. It is an ongoing, dynamic business practice that has the power to transform your organization, your people, you, and ultimately, your success. (Ingaging Leadership)
3. Confident leaders have the humility to slow down and put things in proper perspective. They seek the truth and prepare for what lies ahead. (Five Bold Choices)
4. Truly strong leaders are always asking questions and learning. They are not arrogant or autocratic. (Ingaging Leadership)
5. Appreciation is both a gift and a discipline. But if it's not exercised every day, you risk losing it. (Five Bold Choices)
6. Attitude is the most important trait among your people. Attitude is a game-changer. If you populate our organization with people who are positive, they will life others and lead them to excel. On the other side of the equation, negative people can drain the energy out of everyone around them. (Ingaging Leadership)

General

1. Bu here's the unvarnished truth, from a seasoned entrepreneur: When you own your own business, you have to work much harder and longer than anyone else. Forget the “work wherever you want” idea. (Work It!)
2. Although this book is about understanding different types of difficult behavior, it is important ot recognize how much of creating a healthy environment lies with each of us. When someone's behavior bothers us, we have to ask ourselves, Why is this behavior affecting me in this way? Why am I bothered by it, and is there something about me that I can look at to understand another person's behavior? (The Schmuck in My Office)
3. Our society is moving toward a faster pace of living working and interacting, fed in part by mobile technologies that give us the illusion of being able to keep up with an ever-increasing number of streams of thought and activities throughout the day. While there are both advantages and disadvantages to being on this path, we must remember that we are constrained by the limits of the human brain. (Distracted)
4. It is important to be aware of dysfunction and to do something, and, if that doesn't work, to be persistent and try something else. (The Schmuck in My Office)
5. In order to get somewhere, you must choose a direction. (Work It!)
6. The focused attention of others is hard to come by. Understanding the things that the human brain bet responds to (such as cohesive narrative and novelty) helps to create and organize messages more effectively. (Distracted)
7. Technology is changing the way we meet and get to know other people but mostly in positive ways. Close relationships tend to include a broad range of communication channels (both online and offline), thus making the impact of any one choice carry less weight overall and providing opportunities to express ourselves in more ways. (Distracted)
8. The very same behaviors that are a problem to the workplace can be easily observed in children: disrespectful language, name calling throwing objects, refusing to complete tasks, interupting meetings, and bullying, to name a few. (The Schmuck in My Office)

Books from the Bookshelf

Quotes are taken directly from the books we received. Descriptions are from Amazon.com and links take you directly to the Amazon page.

Influence Redefined – In her thought-provoking Influence Redefined, Stacey Hanke introduces her powerful Influence Model, a step-by-step method for improving communication and producing the ideal type of influence—one that moves people to action long after an interaction is over. She dispels the most common influence myths and instructs leaders on how to stop sabotaging themselves in order to leave a positive, lasting impression.

A Brief History of Entrepreneurship: The Pioneers, Profiteers, and Racketeers Who Shaped Our World (Columbia Business School Publishing) – Through engaging vignettes, A Brief History of Entrepreneurship charts how the pursuit of profit by private individuals has been a prime mover in revolutionizing civilization. Entrepreneurs often butt up against processes, technologies, social conventions, and even laws. So, they circumvent, innovate, and violate to obtain what they want. This creative destruction has brought about overland and overseas trade, colonization, and a host of revolutionary technologies—from caffeinated beverages to the personal computer—that have transformed society.

Work It! – Happiness, success and fulfillment. Isn't it what we're all asking for? And when you're new to the work world, or beginning a new career path, that's most certainly the dream-and Work it! shows you how to achieve it. Work it! seeks to help young professionals everywhere take charge of their careers, and find meaningful employment in their ideal line of work. Work it! shows you how to overcome obstacles that may be holding you back from success and fulfillment; how to maintain positivity and passion in everyday life; how to find (and keep) a meaningful, satisfying job: how to seek growth within an organization and find new, challenging opportunities; how to fit in at work and become a respected member of the team; how to practice assertiveness in all aspects of communication; how to get noticed for promotion; how to move up the ladder into management positions; how (and when) to gracefully move on if a position isn't working out the way you had hoped; and how to have a fun and fulfilling life along the way. In a nutshell, Work it! is a must-read for anyone looking to achieve career success. Author Denise Dudley, co-founder and former CEO of SkillPath Seminars, the world's largest public training company, learned the secrets of business success early in her career, rising quickly to become Clinical Director of California's most prestigious corporation of psychiatric hospitals by age 30, and is now recognized as one of the top-rated professional speakers in the country on personal self-improvement. In her highly acclaimed new book, she draws from her myriad experiences and firsthand knowledge to provide the ultimate career guidebook for young professionals-delivered in Denise's no-nonsense storytelling style.

Distracted: Staying Connected without Losing Focus: What are the benefits and negative consequences of our increased connectivity at school, at work, and at home? Is being constantly distracted now a worldwide problem? This book examines how new technologies and social pressures have changed the way we use our attention, and the extent to which they drive us to distraction, by interpreting hundreds of scientific studies from the literatures in cognitive and social psychology, sociology, communication, management, and decision making.

Ingaging Leadership: 21 Steps to Elevate Your Business: In Ingaging Leadership, business leader Evan Hackel lays out the positive philosophy of Ingagement that he has created and used to help hundreds of organizations achieve excellence and organizational success. “Ingagement is a leadership philosophy for those who believe that it is not enough to tell people what to do, but to involve their minds, creativity and even their emotions,” Hackel writes. “When you align people and create an organization where everyone works together in partnership, that organization becomes vastly more successful.” Companies and leaders that have worked with Evan Hackel to put the philosophy of Ingagment into practice report the following benefits . . . An increased flow of innovative new ideas from employees at every level An enhanced ability to spend more time on the activities that build profits and success Increased employee motivation, loyalty, and commitment to company values Improved leadership, built on keen listening skills and other Ingagment activities, that gets the right things done and increases profits, customer satisfaction and ultimate success”

The Schmuck in My Office: How to Deal Effectively with Difficult People at Work – Everyone has a “schmuck” in their office—a difficult, disruptive person who upsets the workplace, confuses coworkers, and causes concern. It’s hard to understand why schmucks act the way they do, but one thing is certain—they seem to come in all shapes and sizes. . . – Narcissus—the condescending attention-seeker who carelessly steps on everyone’s toes. – The Flytrap—the bringer of chaos whose emotional instability causes an office maelstrom. – The Bean Counter—the orderly perfectionist who never gives up control, even when it’s full-steam-ahead to disaster. – The Robot—the unreadable stone wall who just can’t connect. In The Schmuck in My Office, Dr. Jody Foster explains the entire spectrum of people we may think of as schmucks, how they can decrease productivity, destroy teams, and generally make everyone else unhappy. Along with nailing down the various types, she looks at personality traits and explains how dysfunctional interactions among coworkers can lead to workplace fiascos. She helps readers understand schmucks as people, figure out how to work with them, and ultimately solve workplace problems. She also makes readers consider the most difficult thing of all: despite where your finger may be pointing, sometimes you are the “schmuck”! Let Dr. Foster teach you how to make your workplace a happier and more productive one.

Humilty is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age – So when it comes to smart machines, we can't beat 'em and we can't join 'em. To win, we have to play a different game. Hess and Ludwig offer us that game plan. The key is to change our definition of what it means to be smart. We need to excel at critical, creative, and innovative thinking and emotionally engaging with others—things machines can't do well. Hess and Ludwig call it being NewSmart. In this extraordinarily timely book, they offer detailed guidance for developing five NewSmart attitudes and four critical behaviors that will help us adapt to the new reality. The crucial mindset underlying NewSmart is humility—not self-effacement but an accurate self-appraisal: acknowledging you can't have all the answers, remaining open to new ideas, and committing yourself to lifelong learning. Drawing on extensive multidisciplinary research, Hess and Ludwig emphasize that the key to success in this new era is not to be more like the robots but to build on the best of what makes us human and to excel at doing what technology can't do well.

Five Bold Choices: Rise Above Your Circumstances & Redefine Your Life: Five Bold Choices helps you break free from the barriers that prevent you from realizing your untapped potential. What if the things you fear and avoid are portals to your success and significance as a leader at work and at home? No one seeks trials, but they can put us on a pathway toward realizing our true purpose and potential. In this book, Jay Coughlan and best-selling author Larry Julian map out five bold choices that can get you unstuck and enjoying the journey God intended for your life. This book will not only inspire you to triumph over your most challenging issues, it will provide a practical plan to persevere and realize the true potential that lies within you.