Our ExecEd team is gearing up for our next book club and we need your help! There are so many great business books out there that we can’t decide what to read next.
We want to select two titles to read out of the following book selections. Please share your thoughts on the best pick for our April book club! We’ll be promoting this on social media to get as much feedback as possible.
Here’s the list, with links to Amazon and descriptions that we grabbed from those pages:
- The Brand Flip: Why customers now run companies and how to profit from it, by Marty Neumeier. It “shows you how to make the leap from a company-driven past to the consumer-driven future. You’ll learn how to flip your brand from offering products to offering meaning, from value protection to value creation, from cost-based pricing to relationship pricing, from market segments to brand tribes, and from customer satisfaction to customer empowerment.”
- The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, by Jim McKelvey. “Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn’t accept American Express cards…. McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones…. But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product…. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet?… He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack.”
- Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments, by Stefan H. Thomke. “When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don’t work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments…. That’s what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.”
- To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, by Daniel H. Pink. “Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others…, explains why extraverts don’t make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an “off-ramp” for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds. Along the way, Pink describes the six successors to the elevator pitch, the three rules for understanding another’s perspective, the five frames that can make your message clearer and more persuasive, and much more.”
- Designing for Modern Learning: Beyond ADDIE and SAM, by Lisa M.D. Owens, Crystal Kadakia. “Learning is no longer an activity or luxury that only occurs at specific stages in your life or career. With the digital revolution, learning has become immediate, real-time, and relevant whether you’re young, old, in the workforce, in school, or at home. As a learning and development professional, you’ve likely confronted the digital learning revolution armed with instructional design models from the pre-digital world. But today’s digital universe has a new model to address its wealth of new technologies and a new philosophy of learning experience design: learning cluster design.”
- The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback, by Dan Olsen. This is “a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement.”
- Design for How People Learn, by Julie Dirksen. Readers “discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you’re sharing. Updated to cover new insights and research into how we learn and remember, this new edition includes new techniques for using social media for learning as well as two brand new chapters on designing for habit and best practices for evaluating learning, such as how and when to use tests.”
- The Accidental Instructional Designer: Learning Design for the Digital Age, by Cammy Bean. “Cammy Bean presents a fresh, modern take on instructional design for e-learning. Filled with her personal insights and tips, The Accidental Instructional Designer covers nearly every aspect of the e-learning design process, including understanding instructional design, creating scenarios, building interactivity, designing visuals, and working with SMEs. You’ll learn all about the CBT Lady and how to avoid her instructional design mistakes. Along the way, you’ll hear from a few other accidental instructional designers, get ideas for your own projects, and find resources and references to take your own practice to the next level.”
- The Art and Science of Training, by Elaine Biech. “There are more similarities than differences between how artists and scientists work. Both ask countless questions. Both search in earnest for answers. Both are dedicated to reaching the best results. Not so different from today’s trainers, are they? Elaine Biech, one of the most highly regarded names in talent development, has set out to identify the perfect blend of content mastery and audience insight. The result is this highly informative book.”
- Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation, by James D. Kirkpatrick. “Don Kirkpatrick’s groundbreaking Four Levels of Training Evaluation is the most widely used training evaluation model in the world. Ask any group of trainers whether they rely on the model’s four levels Reaction, Learning, Behavior, and Results in their practice, and you’ll get an enthusiastic affirmation. But how many variations of Kirkpatrick are in use today? And what number of misassumptions and faulty practices have crept in over 60 years? The reality is: Quite a few.”
- The Business of Belonging: How to Make Community your Competitive Advantage, by David Spinks. “The rise of the internet has brought with it an inexorable, almost shockingly persistent drive toward community. From the first social networks to the GameStop trading revolution, engaged communities have shown the ability to transform industries. Businesses need to harness that power. As business community expert David Spinks shows, the successful brands of tomorrow will be those that create authentic connection, giving customers a sense of real belonging and unlocking unprecedented scale as a result.”
- Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs that Don’t Even Exist Yet, by Michelle R. Weise. “Written by the former chief innovation officer of Strada Education Network’s Institute for the Future of Work, this book offers readers a fascinating glimpse into a near-future where careers last 100 years, and education lasts a lifetime. The book makes the case that learners of the future are going to repeatedly seek out educational opportunities throughout the course of their working lives ― which will no longer have a beginning, middle, and end.”
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