PROTRAINING Must Read Mondays…
If you’ve been interacting with us recently, you’ll notice that every Monday we recommend a new book. Not only do we recommend it, we also give our audience, yes you, the chance to win it every Thursday with our Thursday Trivia selection. We then pick a winner at random and you get the book delivered straight from Amazon.
We are handpicking the very best books that have been tried and tested. They offer great value and can show you different perspectives, ways of thinking and give you inspiration.
Here’s a list of our favourites. Be sure to check out our social media channels on Monday and Thursdays for a chance to win the next one.
Jacob Morgan: The Future Leader: 9 Skills and Mindsets to Succeed in the Next Decade
Are you a future-ready leader? Based on exclusive interviews with over 140 of the world’s top CEOs and a survey of nearly 14,000 people.
Do you have the right mindsets and skills to be able to lead effectively in the next ten years and beyond? Most individuals and organizations don’t even know what leadership will look like in the future. Until now.
Jacob interviewed over 140 CEOs from companies like Unilever, Mastercard, Best Buy, Oracle, Verizon, Kaiser, KPMG, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Yum! Brands, Saint-Gobain, Dominos, Philip Morris International, and over a hundred others. Jacob also partnered with Linkedin to survey almost 14,000 of their members around the globe to see how CEO insights align with employee perspectives
Denise Lee Yohn: FUSION – How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies
Denise Lee Yohn examines some of the world’s greatest organizations and reverse-engineers their greatness – specifically how they’ve integrated what’s on the inside (culture) with what’s on the outside (brand) for remarkable results.
Through detailed case studies, interviews with industry leaders, findings from respected academic research and drawing on her own experience working with extraordinary brands across a broad range of sectors, Denise shows how great companies achieve the brand-culture fusion that creates extraordinary results and growth. FUSION is for those with responsibility and oversight for the core operations of their business (C-Suite and line managers) who also set the tone and direction for their companies. The book includes access to Denise’s proprietary online assessment for determining how close to or how far from brand/culture integration a company is and a blueprint for achieving brand-culture fusion.
Thomas Erikson: Surrounded by idiots, the four types of human behavior and how to effectively communicate with each in business (and in life).
Do you ever think you’re the only one making any sense? Or tried to reason with your partner with disastrous results? Do long, rambling answers drive you crazy? Or does your colleague’s abrasive manner rub you the wrong way?
You are not alone. After a disastrous meeting with a highly successful entrepreneur, who was genuinely convinced he was ‘surrounded by idiots’, communication expert and bestselling author, Thomas Erikson dedicated himself to understanding how people function and why we often struggle to connect with certain types of people.
Erikson will help you understand yourself better, hone communication and social skills, handle conflict with confidence, improve dynamics with your boss and team, and get the best out of the people you deal with and manage. He also shares simple tricks on body language, improving written communication, advice on when to back away or when to push on, and when to speak up or shut up. Packed with ‘aha!’ and ‘oh no!’ moments, Surrounded by Idiots will help you understand and communicate with those around you, even people you currently think are beyond all comprehension.
Erica Dhawan: Digital Body Language – How to build trust & connection, no matter the distance.
Email replies that show up a week later. Video chats full of “oops sorry no you go” and “can you hear me?!” Ambiguous text-messages. Weird punctuation you can’t make heads or tails of. Is it any wonder communication takes us so much time and effort to figure out? How did we lose our innate capacity to understand each other?
Humans rely on body language to connect and build trust, but with most of our communication happening from behind a screen, traditional body language signals are no longer visible — or are they? In Digital Body Language, Erica Dhawan, a go-to thought leader on collaboration and a passionate communication junkie, combines cutting edge research with engaging storytelling to decode the new signals and cues that have replaced traditional body language across genders, generations, and culture. In real life, we lean in, uncross our arms, smile, nod and make eye contact to show we listen and care. Online, reading carefully is the new listening. Writing clearly is the new empathy. And a phone or video call is worth a thousand emails.
Digital Body Language will turn your daily misunderstandings into a set of collectively understood laws that foster connection, no matter the distance. Dhawan investigates a wide array of exchanges–from large conferences and video meetings to daily emails, texts, IMs, and conference calls–and offers insights and solutions to build trust and clarity to anyone in our ever changing world.
Charlie Dawson & Sean Meehan: The Customer Copernicus – How to be customer-led.
Some companies are great for customers – not only do they care but they change whole markets to work better for the customers they serve. Think of Amazon, easyJet and Sky. They make things easier and improve what really matters – obvious, surely? They have also enjoyed huge business success, growing and making plenty of money.
The Customer Copernicus answers the question that follows – if it’s obvious and attractive why is it so rare? And then it answers a second question, because Tesco, O2 and Wells Fargo were like this once. Why, having mastered it, would you ever stop? Because all three did, and two ended up in court.
The Customer Copernicus explains how to become and how to stay customer-led. Essential reading for leaders and teams who want their organisations to stay competitive by developing a more purposeful and innovative culture.
Charles Duhigg: The Power of Habit – Why we do, What we do in life and business.
In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.
Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.
Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
Barack Obama: A Promised Land
Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency—a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
Obama takes readers on a compelling journey from his earliest political aspirations to the pivotal Iowa caucus victory that demonstrated the power of grassroots activism to the watershed night of November 4, 2008, when he was elected 44th president of the United States, becoming the first African American to hold the nation’s highest office.
A Promised Land is extraordinarily intimate and introspective—the story of one man’s bet with history, the faith of a community organizer tested on the world stage. Obama is candid about the balancing act of running for office as a Black American, bearing the expectations of a generation buoyed by messages of “hope and change,” and meeting the moral challenges of high-stakes decision-making. He is frank about the forces that opposed him at home and abroad, open about how living in the White House affected his wife and daughters, and unafraid to reveal self-doubt and disappointment. Yet he never wavers from his belief that inside the great, ongoing American experiment, progress is always possible.
This beautifully written and powerful book captures Barack Obama’s conviction that democracy is not a gift from on high but something founded on empathy and common understanding and built together, day by day.
Bill Gates – How To Avoid A Climate Disaster
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. With the help of experts in the fields of physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, political science, and finance, he has focused on what must be done in order to stop the planet’s slide toward certain environmental disaster. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal.
He gives us a clear-eyed description of the challenges we face. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas in which technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. Finally, he lays out a concrete, practical plan for achieving the goal of zero emissions-suggesting not only policies that governments should adopt, but what we as individuals can do to keep our government, our employers, and ourselves accountable in this crucial enterprise.
As Bill Gates makes clear, achieving zero emissions will not be simple or easy to do, but if we follow the plan he sets out here, it is a goal firmly within our reach.