In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh – the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer – explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success. Even better, he shows how creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.
Synopsis: “Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation – into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture – but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.”
In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired – and so profitable.
“Jack Welch knows how to win. During his 40-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits.
Welch’s optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set is riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack’s distinctive no-b.s. voice, Winning is a great read and a great business book. It offers deep insights, original thinking, and nuts-and-bolts advice that are bound to change the way people think about work.” -Audible
For decades Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as “the dean of this country’s business and management philosophers” (Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management – the executive.
The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done”. This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.” -Audible
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“The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind, one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.
“Getting an MBA is an expensive choice – one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether….
The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges.
“Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better, and look cooler, than $20 no-names…and believing it makes it true.
Synopsis: “A tribe is any group of people, large or small, who are connected to one another, a leader, and an idea.
If you think leadership is for other people, think again – leaders come in surprising packages. Consider Joel Spolsky and his international tribe of scary-smart software engineers. Or Gary Vaynerhuck, a wine expert with a devoted following of enthusiasts. Chris Sharma leads a tribe of rock climbers up impossible cliff faces, while Mich Mathews, a VP at Microsoft, runs her internal tribe of marketers from her cube in Seattle. All they have in common is the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.
Tribes will make you think (really think) about the opportunities in leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, or readers….It’s not easy, but it’s easier than you think.” -Audible
Opening thoughts:
I read Seth Godin’s other book Linchpin last month, which was my first time reading one of his works. I thought the book was phenomenal so I decided to pick up another book of his for this month. I remember hearing about this book in particular from other mentors of mine, so I finally chose to read it for this month.
Marlo Yonocruz 
