Five New Business Books - April 14th 2008

Here at Cultivate Greatness, I receive tons of business books for review, sometimes more than I can possibly read… but, I want to make sure that you guys get the same benefit of knowing which business books are in the pipeline, that you may want to pick up.

Since August 2007, I have received well over 200 books, and so, each week, I would like to go over a quick review of each new business book that I have and share the business book resource with you. There are some great books here! Roll over the images to get more information about each business book!

2011- Trendspotting for the Next Decade by Richard Laermer.

In this fast and furious time machine of a book, Richard Laermer shows you how to use-and in some cases abuse-the trends of the next decade (or two) that really matter. As an author with a functional crystal ball, a veteran marketing innovator, and media master, Laermer foresees a fabulous future-if you start planning for it today.

2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade is packed with eye-popping predictions (and realities) on how you’ll live, work, play, buy, sell, talk, text, laugh, and more. You’ll discover how miniscule attention spans will increase a need for velocity…how to work while you’re sleeping…how to wash off mediocrity…and why today’s communication devices will become obsolete. With 2011you’ll learn how to participate in change instead of trailing it.

Life Entrepreneurs - by Christopher Gergen & Gregg Vanourek

A new generation of “life entrepreneurs” is emerging: people who apply their vision, talents, creativity, and energy not only to their work but to their entire lives, changing the world for themselves and those around them.

In this book, successful entrepreneurs Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek draw on numerous interviews with fifty-five leading entrepreneurs worldwide as well as the wisdom of multiple thought leaders to provide vivid examples, moving vignettes, concrete frameworks, and practical strategies for revving up our work and play through entrepreneurial leadership. This book starts by providing strategies for integrating life, work, and purpose and ends by capturing the implications of the current entrepreneurial boom for our workplaces, learning institutions, communities, and families.

Jacked UP by Bill Lane- The inside story of how Jack Welch talked GE into becoming the world’s greatest company.

Bill Lane was Jack Welch’s speechwriter for 20 years. In the first book by a GE insider, Lane shows that the real secret to Welch’s immense success as a leader was Welch’s ability as a master communicator. Welch launched a communications revolution that took GE from a ponderous supertanker of a company, to what Welch called a high speed “cigarette boat” capable of radical moves and rapid learning from the best institutions in the world.

You’ll learn Jack’s simple, often brutally enforced guidelines for “making a great pitch”, and how Welch practiced them himself in his memorable appearances before employees, financial analysts and customers-and his zero-tolerance of BS. You’ll witness laugh-out-loud-funny cameo appearances from boldface names like Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher, Don Imus, Jack’s ex-wife Jane Welch, Conan O’Brian, and “Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog”. And you’ll understand exactly how every leader can master the art of communication, to teach and inspire, shock and provoke, all at the same time.

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Become a Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Complete Guide and 40+ Resources

by Skellie @ AnyWired

If you are — or would like to be — an entrepreneur, yet you’d be happy to earn enough to live the life you want rather than becoming filthy rich, lifestyle entrepreneurship might be a good fit for you.

Lifestyle entrepreneurs will generally base their ventures around time minimalism, or something they love, even if there are more profitable (but more time-consuming, or less interesting) options available.

The goal of a lifestyle entrepreneur is not to amass a huge fortune, but instead, to achieve certain definable goals and, beyond that point, to ensure business does not interfere too much with the enjoyment of those goals.

In this article, I’ll be outlining the primary steps to becoming a lifestyle entrepreneur, followed by 40+ educational and practical resources you can use to get started.

The 3 types of lifestyle entrepreneur

Time minimalists. This method is all about taking much of the time commitments out of owning a business and earning an income. This is usually achieved through elimination, outsourcing, the 80/20 principle, simplicity and automation, or through focusing on ’set it and forget it’ products, like eBooks or drop-shipped products.

Example: Doug Price, who created ProSoundEffects.com. His PPC advertised site sells audio libraries at several hundred dollars a pop and earns over $10,000 a month with under two-hours of maintenance work each week. The business allows Doug to spend plenty of time pursuing his two primary passions: music and travel.

Nomadic entrepreneurs. While the nomadic lifestyle entrepreneur isn’t necessarily working less than anyone else, the nomad’s number 1 aim is freedom of location: an anywhere work style. Work should enable travel, not confine it to one weekend each year.

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Two Rules for Business Start-ups

by Brian Tracy

Entrepreneurship is the art of finding profitable solutions to problems. Every successful entrepreneur, every successful businessperson has been a person who has been able to identify a problem and come up with a solution to it before somebody else did. Here are the five rules for entrepreneurship.

Find A Need And Fill It
First, find a need and fill it. Ross Perot, when he was working for IBM, saw that his customers who were buying IBM computers, needed help in processing their data. He went to IBM with this idea and they said they weren’t interested, so he started his own business. He eventually sold it out for $2.8 billion dollars. He found a need and he filled it.

Find A Problem And Solve It
The second rule is to find a problem and solve it. A secretary working for a small company began mixing flour with nail varnish in order to white out the mistakes she was making in her typing. Pretty soon, her friends in the same office asked if she could make some for them. So she began mixing it on her kitchen table. Then, people in other offices started asking for it, and she eventually quit her business and worked full time creating what is today called Liquid Paper. A few years ago, she sold her company to Gillette Corporation for 47 million dollars.

Customers for Life
The highest paid salespeople and the most profitable companies have the best reputation for customer service. You learn a series of low-cost, no-cost ways to get customers to buy from you, buy again, and tell their friends. A satisfied customer is 10x easier to sell to than a new customer. A referral from a satisfied customer is 15x easier to sell to than a cold call.
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16 Rules I Try to Live By

by GoDaddy.com Founder, Bob Parsons

Of all the articles I’ve written for my Blog, this was the most popular. I’ve received many comments from readers saying they felt that part of, or all of, this article has either helped them with either something they were dealing with, or something they wanted to accomplish. Perhaps you will also find it interesting and/or helpful as well.

Late in 2004, I was asked by BizAz Magazine (a local Phoenix magazine) to speak at one of its “Business Beneath The Surface” breakfast meetings. As part of the event, participants have the option of submitting questions to the speakers, which are then answered during the breakfast.

One of the questions directed toward me was, “What advice do you have for someone who is just starting a business?”

I liked Clint Eastwood’s rules.
Also at that time, I happened to pick up a copy of Men’s Journal. Clint Eastwood was on the cover and an article featured 10 items called “Clint’s rules.” I found his rules to be interesting. They were things like, “You are what you drive,” “avoid extreme makeovers,” and things like that. As Clint Eastwood is a pretty easy guy to respect, I thought the whole rule thing was pretty cool. And the more I thought about it, I realized that over the years I had accumulated a number of principles (or rules) that I tried very hard to adhere to — and these rules (in many ways) have become the foundation for whatever successes I’ve had.

So, a few weeks before the meeting, I sat down and started typing — in no particular order — the rules I try to live by. At the breakfast meeting, I read my rules at the end of my presentation. The response was amazing. I was swamped with requests for copies of the rules. An edited list was published in the Arizona Republic newspaper a few days later. I was even called and interviewed by a local radio station about the list.

Since then, some of the rules have been edited, some consolidated, and a few new ones added. Despite those changes, the list of rules I presented that morning are pretty much what appears at the end of this post.

As I write this, I am now 54 years old, and during my life thus far I suspect that I’ve encountered more significant life events than most people ever dream about. Here’s some information about me:

I grew up in a lower middle class family in Baltimore’s inner city. We were always broke. I’ve earned everything I ever received. Very little was ever given to me.

I’ve been working as long as I can remember. Whether it was delivering or selling newspapers, pumping gas, working in construction or in a factory, I’ve always been making my own money.

And, of course, not all life events are happy ones.
I was stood up to be executed during a robbery of a gas station where I was working when I was 16. To my amazement, my would-be executioner could not muster the nerve to pull the trigger. This saved both of us. I lived, and while he went to jail, he did not go there forever. Even though there were other witnesses to the gas station robbery and assault, and other crimes he and a partner committed, I was the only one who testified against them. They both received major jail sentences.

I was with a United States Marine Corps rifle company in Viet Nam for a short while in 1969. As a combat rifleman, I learned several key life lessons that resulted in some of the rules I try to live by. I learned first hand how significant a role “luck” or karma can play in our lives. The rifle company I was assigned to, Delta Company of the 1st Batallion, 26th Marines, operated in the rice paddys of Quang Nam province. We operated on the squad level (7 to 10 of us, depending on casualties), and most every night we left our command post and went several kilometers out into the rice paddys and set up in ambush. While there are many who saw significantly more combat action than me, I did see my share. After 5 or 6 weeks, I was wounded and medevaced to Japan. I returned to Viet Nam several times after that, but came back as a courier of classified documents. Although I requested (at least twice) to return to my old rifle company, the transfer was never approved.

After the Marine Corps, I used the G.I. Bill to attend college, and graduated from the University of Baltimore with a degree in accounting. I attended college mostly at night. After college, I took and passed the CPA exam. I worked only a few years as an accountant. The lion’s share of my career has been spent as an entrepreneur.

I’ve been very lucky when it comes to business.
I started a successful business division for a company called LeaseAmerica. During the four years I was involved with this business, it grew to 84 employees and wrote over $150 million dollars in small office equipment leases. Its success helped redefine how business in that industry is now conducted.

Not long after I started the division for LeaseAmerica, I started a software company in the basement of my house. I started it with the little bit of money I had, and named it Parsons Technology. I owned this business for 10 years, grew it to about 1,000 employees and just shy of $100 million a year in sales. Eventually, we sold Parsons Technology to a company named Intuit. Because my then-wife and I were the only investors, and the company had no debt, we received the entire purchase price.

Shortly after selling Parsons Technology, my wife and I decided to go our separate ways and did the customary “divide everything by two.” I then moved to Arizona and retired for a year. This was a requirement of my deal with Intuit.

Retirement was not for me.
Retirement wasn’t for me, so after the mandatory year passed, and using the money I had from the sale of Parsons Technology, I started a new business. This business eventually became The Go Daddy Group. I started this business from scratch, did it without acquisitions, and developed our own products. In the process, I came spooky close to losing everything I had, and actually made the decision to “lose it all” rather than close Go Daddy. Today, Go Daddy is the world leader in new domain name registrations, and has been cash flow positive since October 2001 (not bad for a dot com). As of this writing, I continue to be the only investor in Go Daddy.

Throughout all of these life events, I came to accumulate a number of rules that I look to in various situations. Some of them I learned the hard way. Others I learned from the study of history. I know they work because I have applied them in both my business and personal life.

And one more thing.
I’ve read many times that original ideas are rare indeed. This is particularly true when it comes to the rules herein. I can’t imagine that any of my rules represent new ideas.

My contribution is that I’ve assembled these ideas, put them to work in my life, and can attest — that more often than not — they hold true.

While I put my 16 rules together in response to a business question, I’ve been told by others that they can be applied to almost any pursuit.

Here are the 16 rules I try to live by:
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