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Success, Business Strategy, Innovation, Management, & More [CEO Bookshelf]

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You’ve heard you are what you eat, well we believe that you are what you read. Teach a CEO presents lessons from our CEO Bookshelf on how you can improve and grow your venture. We have taken gems or nuggets from our library and provide them for CEO’s, startups, entrepreneurs and business owners. Get your copy of these books and more at CEO Books.

Success – 7 Nuggets

  1. To be clear, capacity building is not about doing more. It's about doing more fo the right things. (Elevate)
  2. A leader's goal should be to inspire and elevate expectations so that team members can simultaneously improve in all areas of their lives, including leadership, time management, prioritization, decision-making, self-awareness, and self-confidence. These abilities have a domino effect. When you improve in one area, you begin to improve in all, and one of the most important outcomes in capacity building is the exponential effect it has on others, including friends, family and those whom you lead. (Elevate)
  3. Without that alignment, you may be running really hard in the wrong direction or obtain the appearance of success that feels inauthentic or unfulfilling. (Elevate)
  4. I can't stress enough that being reactive is rarely a recipe for success. (Elevate)
  5. Sleeping, eating well, and exercise are all basic needs that should be uncompromising proorities in our lives. (Elevate)
  6. No one should be living up to less than their full potential. (Elevate)
  7. …great leaders don't create followers. They create more leaders. (Elevate)

Young Entrepreneurship – 5 Nuggets

  1. All you have to do is remember the following: Mo's BOWS of Business. Whatever challenge you're facing today–in school, life, or business–you can improve your position by checking in with the following BOWS: Believe in yourself, Opportunities–find ways to give back, Work hard, Support from family and friends. (Mo's Bows)
  2. In any start-up business, you want to focus first on making your MVP, your minimum viable product, the simplest form of what you are trying to offer to the public. (Mo's Bows)
  3. Entrepreneurs are everywhere! You don't have to be designing an app in a secret hideout to be considered an entrepreneur. The skills of an entrepreneur are valuable to anybody at any level of business–whether you're just getting started or already work for someone else. (Mo's Bows)
  4. The key takeaway point here is that while opportunists cant' always count on opportunities, entrepreneurs can count on themselves to create their own opportunities or the future–opportunities that will lead to a successful business. (Mo's Bows)
  5. The important thing about being an entrepreneur is to just let yourself be you. Dream big. Be big. Learn how to work out the details. Remember: the difference between you and any other person is all in the details. (Mo's Bows)

Management – 8 Nuggets

  1. The remaining 85% of working adults in the world tell Gallup they are either not engaged at work–just going through the motions–or worse, they hate their jobs, managers and companies. Among many other things, they report that their jobs have no meaning, which is the new millennium, translates to: Their lives have no meaning. (It’s the Manager)
  2. Culture has a direct, measurable impact on performance. (It’s the Manager)
  3. The most important thing you can do to maintain a strong employment brand a workplace culture that lives up to that brand. Reputation travels much more quickly now than in the past. And organizational transparency will become even more magnified with Generation Z entering the workforce. All they have known from birth is digital communication. If there's a discrepancy between how your organization presents itself to the world and how it really is, prospective employees will find out about it online and from their friend. And the word will spread. (It’s the Manager)
  4. If leaders were to prioritize one action, Gallup recommends that they equip their managers to become coaches. (It’s the Manager)
  5. High-development cultures: are CEO and board initiated, educate managers on new ways of managing, practice companywide communication and hold managers accountable. (It’s the Manager)
  6. The five traits of great managers (1) Motivation–inspiring teams to get exceptional work done (2) Workstyle–setting goals and arranging resources fo the team to excel (3) Initiation–influencing other to act; pushing through adversity and resistance (4) Collaboration–building committed teams with deep bonds (5) Through process–taking analytical approach to strategy and decision-making. (It’s the Manager)
  7. Optimists claim that the gig economy represents a movement toward increased entrepreneurship and worker empowerment… This may benefit the economy over the long term as new technology opens up untapped pools of productivity. On the other hand, this trend could signal a deterioration in the social contract between employees and employers as some organization hire more contingent workers t cut labor costs and overhead. (It’s the Manager)
  8. If you give every team member in your company a great manager–a great coach–one who cares about their development and growth, you have successfully engineered an organization with unlimited potential. It's the manager. (It’s the Manager)

Emotional Intelligence – 4 Nuggets

  1. Your emotional intelligence isn't just about recognizing and exercising your own emotional life and strengths: it's also about perceiving and connecting with your environment and the emotional lives of those around you. (The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Non-Obvious Guides))
  2. Emotional intelligence requires courage. It takes guts to movee beyond yourself and try to shape your office's current environment. Leaders fail to adapt when they fail to bring together all the pieces: heart, brain and courage. (The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Non-Obvious Guides))
  3. Agility is having the confidence to look to the uncertain future and remain willing to anticipate risks, take risks, execute quickly, and course-correct as needed. (The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Non-Obvious Guides))
  4. So cultivating a growth mindset means we have to learn to manage our emotional tendencies of control, blame, avoidance, and other derailers. (The Non-Obvious Guide to Emotional Intelligence (Non-Obvious Guides))
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Persuasion – 6 Nuggets

  1. Persuasion isn't just about language and message; it is equally about strategy. (Persuasion)
  2. Persuasion isn't convincing someone that you are something you're not. Persuasion is about find an authentic story that will change beliefs or behaviors. So don't promise innovation if you're just meeting a need…. If there's a perception gap between how you see yourself and how the person you are trying to persuade sees you, you will have a problem. (Persuasion)
  3. The center of persuasion is showing something a little bit unexpected. (Persuasion)
  4. You can't serve your audience until you fully understand who they are and how they want to be served, and the brands that have mastered persuasion–like Nike, Apple, and Starbucks–are the ones that understand that service mind-set. (Persuasion)
  5. Persuading haters takes intense curiosity, it takes discipline, and sometimes it takes creating some distance because that is hard to hear. (Persuasion)
  6. In the post-fact, the tribal, identity-driven world we live in, persuasion is rate. Engaging with people with different opinions is becoming rarer still. So when you do connect in a meaningful way, it will have an impact. It will be refreshing. And it will work. Take the time to get out of your comfort zone and you just might change some minds–and maybe even the world–in the process. (Persuasion)

Stress & Pressure – 5 Nuggets

  1. We all have one common factor and one wild card factor. Life stress is what we have in common; however, some of us have more than others, depending on circumstances (either in our control or not, as the Asian tsunami illustrates). The wild card factor, what I call the “human factor,” relates to our ability (either learned or intrinsic) to not only cope with life stress but also to gain mastery over it. (Performance under Pressure)
  2. Focusing on what's important–keeping your eye on the prize–is one of the best tools for navigating stress successfully and easily. (Performance under Pressure)
  3. Show me a person's level of commitment to preparation, and I will show you that person's capacity to succeed in whatever he or she sets out to do in the midst of stress. (Performance under Pressure)
  4. …you must be actively committed, every day, to master your stress. (Performance under Pressure)
  5. In an overriding sense, this book is about balance, which is a beautiful principle. Think of a ballet dancer poised on the tip of his or her toe, body thrust forward, and arms spread like an eagle's wings. Balance is the key to performing under pressure and cracking our personal stress code. By balancing stress with recovery–and achieving balance by regularly aligning our mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects–we can experience stress as a positive force that propels us to new heights. (Performance under Pressure)
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General Business – 11 Nuggets

  1. There is a responsibility for businesses to step up and use their reach, assets, and influence for good. But this is more than a responsibility; it's also simply good business. As the world continues to shift, it is becoming increasingly clear that you can no longer do well without doing good. (The GuruBook) 
  2. The best way to become a billionaire is to help a billion people. (The GuruBook) 
  3. Make sure you have a bold and visionary ambition. People generally won't risk their life (or time) on something is not meaningful. Very few people will take that step into emptiness to make 1%–better toilet paper. (The GuruBook) 
  4. Most startups fail because it's hard. There are so many things that have to go right, so there's a lot of luck. (The GuruBook)
  5. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company names. (The GuruBook)
  6. Innovation is still the single best chance we have to create things to solve the many wicked problems of our planet…. Innovation should be ambitious. (The GuruBook)
  7. For entrepreneurs, failure is not defeat. Rather, failure becomes an opportunity to learn from missteps and move forward. (Building Blocks)
  8. In many ways, making a good merger is like making a good hire. The fit must be right professionally and culturally or it won't work. (Building Blocks)
  9. To move forward, and grow the way one wants to grow, firms need to take the time to develop a vision and a strategy that lays out a roadmap for the future. There isn't room for a lot of secrets. Everyone has access to the same information. The difference lies in execution. (Building Blocks)
  10. Sometimes, when starting a business, you tend to only think about your vision. That is only a beginning… it doesn't get the business started. The true first step is writing–on paper–the top three to five things that will move the vision from idea to reality. (Building Blocks)
  11. In the world of business, continuously improving your firm may mean deviating from the traditional view of what a firm is. (Building Blocks)

Books on The CEO Bookshelf

Descriptions are from Amazon.com. Check out this edition at CEO Books.

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