In this list I’ve collected my favourite books which helped me a lot at work, and with self-development and inspiration:
1.Jay Sullivan “Simply said: Communicating better at work and beyond”
This book explains how to interest people to do business with you and how to engage people with your idea or product. This book is extremely practical with clear and simple explanations and tools for writing effective business proposals, and instructions on how to make presentations which attract and stimulate business partners to buy your product/service or collaborate with you. And the most important skill you’ll learn from this book is how to learn to draw the attention of your clients, partners, executives or anyone else, to you. Understanding this you will allow you to easily and effectively interact with your audience and clients without difficulty.
2. Erin Meyer “The Culture Map: Decoding how people think, lead, and get things done across cultures”
Are you from the East and your boss from the West or vice versa and when you are trying to communicate with them do you have difficulties or misunderstandings? Or maybe your clients are from the East and you need to sell them your product or idea or work with them but don’t know how? In this book you will find out how to interact with people from different cultures with whom you need to work or whom you need to hire for your company. This book is a “panacea” for Executives and Employees who want to understand the mindset and outlook of people from different cultures.
3. W.Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne “Blue Ocean Strategy: How to create uncontested market space and make competition irrelevant”
In this book you will learn about marketing strategies and effective tools that will impact your business development and insight into how processes can work. There are many real examples of Big companies and the competitors they eventually left behind, even though at the beginning they were more powerful. I think this book is useful for Executives and for Assistants. And this book also inspires us to chase our goals.
4. Howard Behar “It’s not about the coffee: Leadership principles from life at Starbucks”.
I think they need to make a movie about this company. This book implements ideas from the previous three books, in a practical way. When you follow the most important rule: the “care” and “attention” of your clients, staff, and company culture you can build success and loyalty to your brand from your clients, which means a lot for any business.
5. Yuval Noah Harari “Sapiens: A brief history of humankind”.
This book explains why we are the way we are today. This is not a boring and dry text about our evolution, (inspired of historical facts about our evolution), instead it includes spectacular and interesting facts about humankind from the start of time. You will find out a lot of new and previously unknown information about our culture, habits and even behaviour. This book has got so many positive recommendations from famous people and the media and after reading it you will definitely understand why.
6. Malcolm Gladwell “Outliers: The story of Success”.
Why do some people become successful despite going to the same school or being in the class as us? In this book you will find out the secret to real success, which we don’t usually use in real life because we’re not aware that it can get us exactly what we want and need. What I can say is that I used this technique when working towards my “dream” and I can definitely say, it works. This book is ideal for people who don’t believe in themselves and think that they can’t do what they really want to do or what they dream about because they are not talented or smart. And also this book is a great present for students or teenagers.
