Competition is increasing and more and more employees are feeling the heat. That is the message we get from last month's new additions to Book Track. Readers lapped up books on marketing and self-help.
Heading the listing is Joe Girard's How to Sell Anything to Anybody. Americans, given a choice, would wish away the over-zealous car salesmen from their lives. Girard gives a new dimension to the car salesman's much maligned image, giving him new and convincing tips to close a sale. In fact, much of the book talks about effective selling skills, drawing parallels with the car industry. So marketers from other industries, who buy the book to have an insight into effective selling skills, may just be a bit disappointed. The book would have made better reading if it provided perspectives across industries.
It must surely be possible to dwell on the virtues of time-management in less than 450 pages. First Things First by Stephen Covey could be a bit time-consuming for a person already short of time. Covey's suggestion, to chart your priorities and rate them as urgent and not-so-urgent, and further as important and not-so-important, appears a bit demanding. But if one does not give oneself enough time and prioritise, then the going could get tougher, he argues.
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All in all an interesting book with snapshots from everyday life which makes it easy for one to connect to the situations.
The next book is Zig Ziglar's Steps to the Top. His first book, See You at the Top, is rated among some of the better books on motivating one's inner self to greatness. With his second book, Ziglar continues the good work. In the preface, says Ziglar, "...if you will spend just a few minutes each day with positive thoughts, you will have the lift that you need to succeed."
With that intent, this book looks at such `steps' as leadership, hardship, toleration and ridicule. It weaves an inspiring collection of tales on each of these. With the aid of these short stories, Ziglar illustrates each step with instances of people who were down and out, and yet managed to pull themselves together. An inspiring collection, and an inspired way to start
the morning.
From the `How to' of success to those who actually succeeded: Compaq's Eckhard Pfeiffer, Adidas' Robert Louis-Dreyfus and Christian Tourres, US Surgical's Leon Hirsch, UPS' Oz Nelson, Chrysler's Robert Eaton and Bob Lutz, Honeywell's Michael Bonsignore, and Continental Airlines' Gordon Bethune.
Martin Puris' Comeback tells the story of these leaders who have successfully engineered the comeback of their firms. He shows how by keeping one's finger on the corporate pulse and continuously winning employees' trust - activities practiced by these leaders - can manifest themselves in different ways to rescue a declining operation from certain catastrophe.
As competition in the marketplace hots up, service is going to be the key differentiator. Carl Sewell advises managers on how they can transform employee attitude and turn them into service superstars in Customers For Life.
As loyalty quotients attain an all-time high in the market-place, products need to be packaged with a whole lot of services to be made more acceptable. This could just be the start of the domino effect through which your customers will keep coming back for more.