Sign-In | Cart The Career Test Store

My Favorite Books on
Business and Management

By
Founder
www.CareerPlanner.com

 


Building on Bedrock:  What Sam Walton, Walt Disney, and Other Great Self-Made Entrepreneurs Can Teach Us About Building Valuable Companies
By Derek Lidow

 

Amazon's Description...
Here's an astounding fact: Over half the working population will try their hand at being an entrepreneur during their working career. We all dream to some extent about achieving some combination of the fortune, fame, and control over our lives we associate with successful entrepreneurs. Those are admirable aspirations in a society that counts on entrepreneurs to innovate, create new jobs, and to grow our economy. Our work-driven culture encourages us to take the entrepreneurial bait, but how can you know whether being an entrepreneur will end as a dream come true or a nightmare from which you cannot awake? Building on Bedrock will help answer that question. This book will focus on when you should take the leap and whether entrepreneurship is even the right thing for you?as a founder, co-founder, or investor. Based upon research, but told through the stories of American businessman and entrepreneur Sam Walton and others, Building on Bedrock discusses the who, what, when, where, how, how much, and why of successful entrepreneurs. Was it luck, talent, passion, charm, a rich uncle, or something else that was the key to this person's success? Which might be the key to your success? What you learn will surprise you.
(Book-20)

iGen:  Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us
By Jean M. Tweng, PhD

 

Amazon's Description...
A highly readable and entertaining first look at how today’s members of iGen—the children, teens, and young adults born in the mid-1990s and later—are vastly different from their Millennial predecessors, and from any other generation, from the renowned psychologist and author of Generation Me.

With generational divides wider than ever, parents, educators, and employers have an urgent need to understand today’s rising generation of teens and young adults. Born in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s and later, iGen is the first generation to spend their entire adolescence in the age of the smartphone. With social media and texting replacing other activities, iGen spends less time with their friends in person—perhaps why they are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness.

But technology is not the only thing that makes iGen distinct from every generation before them; they are also different in how they spend their time, how they behave, and in their attitudes toward religion, sexuality, and politics. They socialize in completely new ways, reject once sacred social taboos, and want different things from their lives and careers. More than previous generations, they are obsessed with safety, focused on tolerance, and have no patience for inequality. iGen is also growing up more slowly than previous generations: eighteen-year-olds look and act like fifteen-year-olds used to.

As this new group of young people grows into adulthood, we all need to understand them: Friends and family need to look out for them; businesses must figure out how to recruit them and sell to them; colleges and universities must know how to educate and guide them. And members of iGen also need to understand themselves as they communicate with their elders and explain their views to their older peers. Because where iGen goes, so goes our nation—and the world.
(Book-18)

Generation Me - Revised and Updated:  Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
By Jean M. Twenge, PhD

 

Michael's Comments...
Many people are fascinated with the Millennial generation and want to know why they turned out so different. Author Jean Twenge, PhD takes a different approach that most others who cover this topic. She used facts and data gleaned from multi generational surveys and personal interviews.

Twenge is a professor at San Diego University, where she has had access to Millennials and where she has hundreds of grad students she can put to work doing her research.

In her book which she revised in 2006, she dispells many common myths about Millennials by using her research. But then she also goes on to explain why Millennials are like they are.

I won't spoil it here - go read her book yourself and you will be impressed.
..........................
Amazon's Description...
In this provocative and newly revised book, headline-making psychologist Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls “Generation Me” are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also disengaged, narcissistic, distrustful, and anxious.

Born in the ’80s, and ’90s and called “The Entitlement Generation” or Millennials, they are reshaping schools, colleges, and businesses all over the country. The children of the Baby Boomers are not only feeling the effects of the recession and the changing job market—they are affecting change the world over. Now, in this new edition of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge incorporates the latest research, data, and statistics, as well as new stories and cultural references, to show how “Gen Me-ers” have shifted the American character, redefining what it means to be an individual in today’s society.

Dr. Twenge uses data from 11 million respondents to reveal shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior and religious practice, and controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes, disappointments, and challenges of Generation Me. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, and funny, Generation Me gives Boomers and GenX’ers new and fascinating insights into their offspring, and helps those in their teens, twenties, and thirties find their road to happiness.
(Book-17)

The Alliance:  Managing Talent in the Networked Age
By Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha | Chris Yeh

 

Michael's Comments...
Written by Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Cofounder of PayPal with Elon Musk.

The age of lifetime employment (except in government jobs) has been over since the 1970's, yet most companies behave as if its still valid, until its time to lay you off. Hiring managers let you assume if you do a good job you can stay with the company for 20 - 30 years until retirement age.

Hoffman has figured out a better way for employers and employees to partner with each other, and this way avoids the lie of life time employment.
..........................
Amazon's Description...
A New York Times Bestseller

Introducing the new, realistic loyalty pact between employer and employee.

The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent.

The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or as free agents. Think of them instead as allies.

As a manager you want your employees to help transform the company for the future. And your employees want the company to help transform their careers for the long term. But this win-win scenario will happen only if both sides trust each other enough to commit to mutual investment and mutual benefit. Sadly, trust in the business world is hovering at an all-time low.

We can rebuild that lost trust with straight talk that recognizes the realities of the modern economy. So, paradoxically, the alliance begins with managers acknowledging that great employees might leave the company, and with employees being honest about their own career aspirations.

By putting this new alliance at the heart of your talent management strategy, you’ll not only bring back trust, you’ll be able to recruit and retain the entrepreneurial individuals you need to adapt to a fast-changing world...
(Book-10)