Business Book Summaries

Customers trust companies that take the time to really listen to them. This is a crucial component in connecting with customers.

While the idea of listening seems basic, it is difficult to approach customers openly and without preconceived notions and ideas. Here are the following strategies for truly listening:

• Concentrate.

• Be free from anxiety.

• Use imagination.

• Empathize with customers.

• Understand from experience.

• Share love of the product and customers.

In addition to listening to customers, companies must also listen to the market. Many companies employ outside consultants who use metrics or quantitative methods to do their market listening.

This strategy creates a middleman, with biases and personal experiences filtering the data. The company receiving the information does not know what is lost in the translation.

Companies are encouraged to embrace the concept of "esho funi" when beginning a dialogue with customers. "Esho funi" is a Buddhist term that means to be at one with one's environment.

Ideally, a company should be at one with its customers and the marketplace, at the center of that community. This concept reinforces the idea of active listening, or listening for the sake of learning and growing.

Listening and learning most often happen on the edges or fringes of an organization, where the company interacts with the customer. Most strategy, however, comes from the center of an organization.

It is important that the listening and learning be absorbed into the core and not divorced from it. Let's use of the term "duende," which the poet Francis Lorca describes as the place where the audience and the performer are in the same moment.

"Duende" describes the ideal synchronicity between the customer and the company.

This article is based on the book "Flipped." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Metrics, or sets of data points, bring order to the investment process, just as data presented by dashboard instruments brings order to the process of driving. Finding and understanding the right data points leads to understanding the market and investing wisely.

Different metrics vary in helpfulness for different investment decisions, all of which are essentially a study of risk/return tradeoffs. Strict adherence to the top-down decision process leaves little room for emotionally-driven decisions.

Metrics are often considered in groups that serve as market benchmarks, or indexes; that is, in groups of investments that share common characteristics. The Dow Jones Industrial Average considers industry giants and measures their performance across all market sectors.

Other indexes provide benchmarks for other asset classes. How an investment performs relative to an appropriate benchmark is vital information.

The reliability of data will vary; obviously, more reliable data should be weighted more heavily. U.S. government data is considered more reliable than data from an emerging nation in political turmoil.

Reliable data is regularly verified and seasonally adjusted. The Goldman Sachs Commodity Index has proved unreliable over time because it has no inbuilt mechanism for adjustment.

The Dow-Jones-AIG Commodity index is reliable thanks to its practice of annual readjustment, which allows it to reflect market activity with consistent accuracy. Other risks include bias.

As a product of inevitably biased human beings, no index can be completely impartial. Sometimes indexes have a built-in bias, such as weeding out stocks delisted from an exchange, while sometimes indexes reflect wishful thinking.

Another risk is unrealistic time frames. As a rule, investments need 12 to 18 months before they can reasonably be expected to show profits; fretting over short-term changes is foolish.

Daily market swings are likelier to be emotion-driven and are therefore unreliable. The choice of metrics trusted for consistent usefulness and reliability is a labor-intensive process. Moreover, the trustworthiness of any metric may change, so investors need to assess their metrics regularly.

This article is based on the book 'Reading Minds and Markets.' The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

The majority of meaningful recognition is free. Many organizations focus on tangible rewards when in fact, employees see plaques, certificates, bonuses, incentives and perks as vehicles for recognition.

People are looking for an acknowledgement of their individual achievements, and genuine worth to the organization as a whole. Tangible items can be part of the recognition process, but managers and organizations should focus on the meaning behind an award or bonus to utilize recognition effectively.

Recognition works well when employees are acknowledged by their superiors. Supervisors and managers should make a point to know the following information about each employee:

* Name

* Length of time with the company

* Role on the team

* Special strengths

* Current project and why it is important

There are four elements to creating recognition. Each effective act of recognition contains at least one of these elements, but is most often a combination of more than one:

1. Praise. Employees desire to be told they contribute something important. To be successful, praise must be offered in an intelligible and precise manner, be commensurate to the accomplishment, and be extended in a timely fashion.

2. Thanks. Genuine gratitude is a significant form of recognition that works. People respond to sincere appreciation and by offering thanks, a manager improves both team morale and productivity. It is important to note specifically why an employee is being thanked and gauge which employees would desire to be thanked publicly and which would prefer gratitude be expressed in private.

3. Opportunity. An organization, employer, or manager should be aware of opportunities for their employees to contribute ideas and acquire new skills. This is a powerful form of recognition as it demonstrates individual significance, creates company loyalty, and allows workplace aspirations to be achieved.

4. Respect. Respect is a key element in recognition that works. Managers should make a personal connection with employees by listening to them, allowing for personal crisis, and considering their individual needs when making decisions.

This article is based on the book 'Make Their Day!' The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

It is Thanksgiving week and once again, you might be thinking of ways on how to be productive during this time. It might be doing projects you have been meaning to jump-start or brush up on skills that may enhance your career.

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Poor time management hinders workers from reaching their full potential. However, working harder or longer may not be effective.

Instead, for efficient time management, people should:

* Start a project right away: Making a start will reveal additional information about a project, generate excitement, and allay performance anxiety.

* Manage "to do" lists: Many "to do" lists are unnecessary, and managing them keeps people from feeling overwhelmed by tasks that are not yet in progress.

* Create "to do" list alternatives: By staying in touch with the people and projects that are most important, an individual can prioritize efficiently and get started. Keeping a daily calendar can help make the most effective use of the workday.

* Utilize deadlines to create three- and four-dimensional pathways back to the start: Distance and time constitute the third and fourth dimensions, through which a person can predict a project's completion before it is started. Then, by backtracking through the necessary steps to the start, a person can plan more efficiently and get started with the anticipation of meeting goals.

* Request feedback early in the project to forestall perfectionism: Perfectionism can unnecessarily delay a project's completion. By obtaining feedback early on, a perfectionist can avoid excessive self-criticism and be guided by realistic criteria.

Such strategies as dropping one last-minute task, taking a short walk at the end of the workday, and taking deep breaths after finishing one task and before starting the next can boost energy. Also, by taking some planned time off each week for recreation and relaxation, people can be more productive during work time.

This article is based on the book "The Now Habit at Work." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Businesses that compete in markets strive to win. Essentially, winning means earning and growing profits.

When a company wins during one period of business operations, it has more profits to reinvest to help it win in the next period. At the same time, the company's competitors are also trying to win in their markets with the same customers.

All companies want to develop winning strategies and approaches to earning profits. There are six counterparts to the reasons why companies fail, which demonstrate how companies win:

A winning company helps its customers make more money by doing business with it.

A winning company injects quantitative, outside-in customer information into its decision making and analyzes the data to help it determine if its customers are making money by doing business with it.

A winning company develops and executes customer plans that deliver value. The company ensures that after it has decided to invest to create value, its organization and resources are aligned and focused to deliver value for its customers.

A winning company predicts growth, one customer at a time, with a process of measurement and continuous improvement.

A winning company builds capability and shapes it culture as it continually improves to become more customer-centric, customer-driven, and customer-informed.

A winning company deploys a systematic set of methods and technology to gather customer data and use it during planning and decision making processes. The authors provide a system called the Customer Value Creation (CVC) Management System that incorporates their concepts and methods.

Winning with customers is not just about increasing revenue. The drivers of customer value also encompass the reduction of activities and investments that do not create value, eliminating waste and costs and improving profits.

This article is based on the book "Winning with Customers." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Is the art of war important to the state? The art of war cannot be neglected; it is a road either to safety or to ruin.

The art of war is governed by five factors:

• The moral law that causes people to be in complete accord with their ruler and undismayed by danger.
• Natural phenomenon like weather, time of day, and seasons.
• Types of terrain.
• The virtues of military leaders.
• The proper methods and disciplines used to manage troops, supplies, roads, and expenditures.

Generals who do not attend to these factors will fail. Forecasts of victory and defeat can be made by comparing military condition of sovereigns; who is imbued with the "moral law" (i. e., who is in harmony with his or her subjects); who has advantages of weather and terrain; who enforces discipline more rigorously; who has a stronger and better trained army; and who is more consistent in rewarding and punishing members of his or her army.

All warfare is based on deception. When forces are able to attack, they should seem unable.

When forces are near to the enemy, the enemy should think they are far away. Armies should pretend to be disorganized to bait the enemy, and then crush them.

If enemy forces have superior strength, they should be avoided. By baiting the weaker characteristics of an enemy, a general can gain the upper hand.

When an enemy's forces are united, a general should strive to separate them, give them no rest, and attack them when they are unprepared. Generals who win battles make considerable secret plans beforehand that ultimately lead to victory. Generals that do little preplanning will fail in battle.

This article is based on the book "The Art of War." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

The amount of confidence people have has a huge influence on their economic activity. When they are confident, they go out into the world and make purchases.

They are more likely to make decisions spontaneously and feel that they will instinctively be successful in their ventures. Confidence requires trust in the system, and trust in a positive outcome.

As long as individuals remain trusting, they will not recognize the impulsiveness of some of their decision making. Once trust in their own success falters, however, the poor decisions they may have made are revealed and the new impulse is to sell and withdraw.

Unconfident individuals are more cautious about the economic decisions they make and are more likely to hold onto their money and refrain from making new investments. Unconfident banks are less likely to approve new lines of credit because they do not trust that they will be paid back.

Traditional economic theory dictates that when making economic decisions, individuals consider all of the options available to them, weigh the pros and cons and possible outcomes of these options, and make a decision. In reality, however, many economic decisions are made without deep foresight and the weighing of pros and cons.

Instead, they are made because of the confidence the individual, company, or nation feels about the economy at the time of their decision.

One of the most popular economic theories is Keynes' multiplier theory. The idea is that when the government creates a stimulus and puts it into the hands of the people, they will go out and spend part of it.

The money spent becomes the money of other people, who will go out and spend it. Their money spent goes out to even more people.

These people spend the money, and the cycle continues. The theory states that the amount of money put into the economy through the rounds of spending will be much greater than the initial amount the government invested.

Conversely, this has also been used to help explain the Great Depression, where a small dip in expenditure could end up creating hugely magnified negative effects. Many computer simulation models have been created in accordance with this theory and are used to make economic estimates and create policies.

Confidence should be accounted for within these models because slight changes in confidence in the first round of an economic event can further another round of deeper changes in confidence, which can spiral into a huge lack of confidence or complete overconfidence. By taking confidence into account, these models can more accurately predict the ups and downs of the economy and the effect that a slight dip or raise will have on the global marketplace.

This article is based on the book "Animal Spirits." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.

Social networking allows individuals to share their stories with a large number of people at a time. When people begin to share the story of their lives with one another, they build a foundation of trust between the sharer and the listener, and from that trust grows empathy.

Empathy occurs when individuals identify with the emotional experience that someone else is having; essentially, it occurs when a person "puts themselves in someone else's shoes." When someone shares his or her insights and personal experiences, others have the opportunity to find out who that person really is.

This exposure to new thoughts and ideas is contributing to consciousness-raising within the digital age, where people are able to see things from different viewpoints and perspectives due to the glimpses they have into the personal lives of a large number of different individuals. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the first social networks started to spring up, namely MySpace and Facebook.

Social networking took off from there and has continued to expand, making it one of the most effective public communication methods in the world. Because of the large number of people that can be reached with a single message and the speed with which they can receive it, social networking is an excellent method for organizing towards a common cause and for spreading important information.

However, creating contacts within social networks does not mean sending out one message to thousands of people, hoping that it will reach an individual who is actually interested. Instead, it is about focusing on a smaller group of individuals who are passionate about the subject that a group or individual has to offer, giving them that information, and allowing them to spread the information throughout their own social networks.

An organization or individual should make sure its contact list contains some "connectors." Connectors are people who have a talent for making and maintaining friendships.

They tend to be very charismatic and outgoing, and they are involved in many different niche activities, thus resulting in their large and diverse group of contacts. These connectors are good at relaying information to two different types of relationships that exist within the social networking world.

The first type is a "weak tie," who is someone with which an individual has had light and infrequent interaction. The second type of social networking relationship is a "strong tie"--someone who has a significant relationship with an individual, such as a family member or close friend.

Connectors are particularly skilled at enlarging their pool of weak ties, thus increasing the amount of people who read and follow their updates, which is why it is so important for social networkers to utilize connectors when trying to spread information. Authenticity is another important aspect of online social networking.

People can spot phoniness right away, both online and offline, so it is very beneficial to individuals and corporations just to be themselves. Those participating in online social networks should be authentic and share who they really are; doing so helps encourage the development of real relationships that can spill into the outside world, whether it is within their workplace or personal life.

Individuals should also be willing to share painful and difficult moments. Doing so will rally support behind the cause they are discussing and will also deepen the bond between the sharer and the follower.

An incident at a Philadelphia country club provides a good example of how the sharing of experiences can lead to social change. In the summer of 2009, a private country club in Philadelphia banned a group of African-American children from swimming in its pool, even though the children's camp had paid for the swimming rights.

The word spread through social networks like wildfire. To raise awareness of their concern, individuals began posting stories about prejudice that they had encountered within their own lives.

When their followers started reading about the instances of racism and prejudice that their own friends had faced, they became much more impassioned about and outraged by the issue. Because of the connections they had made online, many individuals who had never experienced racism or prejudice first-hand gained a deeper understanding of what it actually felt like, and they were motivated to take action against it.

This article is based on the book "Share This!" The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.