K.Coaching’s Recommended Reading List

Roadmap to Success has just been released! In this new book, I join with Stephen Covey, Ken Blanchard and other top leadership experts to share critical insights and strategies for achieving business and personal success.

My section focuses on ShipBuilding — the practice of intentionally building and maintaining strong “ships” — relationships and partnerships — to:

• Increase sales
• Enhance customer loyalty
• Improve employee productivity

…and attract amazing opportunities while enjoying a happier, more fulfilling life.

Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology’s fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.

At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant “themes” with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.

Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance.

So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes — such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic — you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.

With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.

The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology
• Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

In the riveting style of The Tipping Point, Stephen M. R. Covey uncovers the overlooked and underestimated power of trust in a gripping look into what he calls “the one thing that changes everything.” Groundbreaking and paradigm-shifting, The Speed of Trust demonstrates that trust is a hard-edged, economic driver—a learnable and measurable skill that makes organizations more profitable, people more promotable, and relationships more energizing.

The former CEO of Covey Leadership Center (founded by his father, Dr. Stephen R. Covey), Covey draws on his experience leading a $100 million enterprise to explain how trust can help you create unparalleled success and sustainable prosperity in every dimension of life.

He reveals the 13 Behaviors common to high-trust leaders and persuasively demonstrates actionable insights that will enable you to increase and inspire trust in all of your important relationships. The Speed of Trust presents a road map to establish trust on every level, build character and competence, enhance credibility, and create leadership that inspires confidence.

In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business — from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed — and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not.

Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.

In today’s competitive business world, bragging is a necessity — not a choice! Remaining quiet about yourself or, worse, downplaying your successes leads to being underappreciated, or even allowing others to take credit for your achievements. When done with grace and style, bragging promotes your best asset — you!

Now a top business coach teaches you to artfully communicate your talents and accomplishments without feeling or sounding like a walking billboard. You’ll gain the motivation and skills that lead to gem assignments, raises, promotions, and stronger professional relationships. And you’ll enjoy tooting your own horn in a way that is sincere, feels comfortable, and doesn’t turn off those you’re trying to impress. Filled with self-promotion dilemmas and solutions for both your professional and personal life, and written for everyone from telecommuters to those who are between jobs, BRAG! shows you how to put your best foot forward — while keeping it out of your mouth!