10 Must Read Books for a Business Consultant
Our list of highly recommended books to help you succeed as a consultant.
Conquer the Chaos
Summary:
You started your business for the freedom and adventure of being your own boss, but now you feel buried by your business. So many entrepreneurs experience this, and some have given up the hope of ever finding the money, time, and control they thought business ownership would bring them. But take heart! You can meet the challenges, reclaim your life, and grow your business at the same time. Conquer the Chaos shows you how.
A one-stop turnaround plan, Conquer the Chaos lays out a complete path to make your business run smoothly and provide you with the freedom you desire. This realistic, in-the-trenches guide offers six strategies that, when combined, give you a step-by-step approach for reaching entrepreneurial success.
Described with stories and examples anyone running a small business today will recognize, the strategies offered by Conquer the Chaos allow you to:
Balance work, family, and emotional and physical health
Grow your business without being consumed by it
Cultivate a realistic and disciplined optimism
Finally get organized so your business can grow
Fix the follow-up breakdowns that hamper your business growth
Liberate yourself from busywork through automation
Chaos is an inherent part of running a small business. How you decide to deal with that chaos - whether to accept it, fight it, or conquer it - is up to you. By business owners, for business owners, Conquer the Chaos enables you to reevaluate your approach, revitalize your operations, and realize the freedom and success your hard work deserves.
Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion - Gary Vaynerchuk
Summary:
Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand.
By the end of this book, listeners will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver's manual for modern business.
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3. E-Myth Mastery - Michael E. Gerber
Summary:
Michael E. Gerber, the world's leading small business guru and best-selling author of the phenomenally successful The E-Myth Revisited, presents the next big step in entrepreneurial management and leadership with E-Myth Mastery. This audiobook presents a practical, real-world program that can be implemented in real-time in your business.
Gerber shows that most businesses fail because of a crisis of vision that creates an inevitable cloud of misdirected activity. Presenting practical exercises to help small business owners recover their vision and passion, he clears a path for getting back to the basic disciplines for business success. The E-Myth credo, Don't work IN your business, work ON it, is spelled out here in the seven essential disciplines followed by every leader of a world-class enterprise. Each discipline provides the leadership keys for unlocking success in the critical areas of business development: Leadership, Marketing, Finance, Money, Management, Client Fulfillment, Lead Conversion, and Lead Generation.
E-Myth Mastery is the ultimate business development program that will help you recover your passion and turn your company into a world-class operation, a turn-key machine for the money and satisfaction that only a successful entrepreneur can enjoy. Get started today!
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4. Focus - Al Ries
Summary:
If your company has lost the focus it once had, here are clear solutions for moving your organization back to its key service and discarding everything else. Ries, coauthor of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, gives clear examples from a variety of industries and demonstrates how crucial focus can be. Focus, he offers, is the key component to the successes of on-track companies such as Coca-Cola, Volvo, Sun Microsystems, and Little Caesars. He defines a new standard of corporate competitiveness for companies both big and small and passes on his extensive marketing experience and cutting-edge managerial advice. Get focused: your future depends on it.
5. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Summary:
You can go after the job you want—and get it!
You can take the job you have—and improve it!
You can take any situation—and make it work for you!
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time, How to Win Friends & Influence People will teach you:
-Six ways to make people like you
-Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking
-Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment
And much more! Achieve your maximum potential—a must-read for the twenty-first century with more than 15 million copies sold!
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6. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion - Robert B Cialdini
Summary:
In this highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller, Dr. Robert B. Cialdini—the seminal expert in the field of influence and persuasion—explains the psychology of why people say yes and how to apply these principles ethically in business and everyday situations.
You’ll learn the six universal principles of influence and how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and, just as importantly, how to defend yourself against dishonest influence attempts:
Reciprocation: The internal pull to repay what another person has provided us.
Commitment and Consistency: Once we make a choice or take a stand, we work to behave consistently with that commitment in order to justify our decisions.
Social Proof: When we are unsure, we look to similar others to provide us with the correct actions to take. And the more, people undertaking that action, the more we consider that action correct.
Liking: The propensity to agree with people we like and, just as important, the propensity for others to agree with us, if we like them.
Authority: We are more likely to say “yes” to others who are authorities, who carry greater knowledge, experience or expertise.
Scarcity: We want more of what is less available or dwindling in availability.
Understanding and applying the six principles ethically is cost-free and deceptively easy. Backed by Dr. Cialdini’s 35 years of evidence-based, peer-reviewed scientific research—as well as by a three-year field study on what moves people to change behavior—Influence is a comprehensive guide to using these principles effectively to amplify your ability to change the behavior of others.
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7. Outwitting the Devil - Napoleon Hill
Summary:
Following the success of his 1937 landmark bestseller, Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill wrote Outwitting the Devil, an exposé on the methods the Devil uses to ensnare and control the minds of human beings. Exploring the innermost depths of the psychology of motivation to understand why so many individuals, including himself, cannot find the initiative and courage they need to consistently implement the philosophy of individual achievement, Hill went so far as to interview the Devil himself. The resulting confession from the Devil made this book so controversial as to remain unpublished for over 70 years. Now it is your turn to break the Devil s code and free yourself from the hidden methods of control that lead to ruin.
In this reproduction of the complete text of Hill s original manuscript is laid out the exact nature of the power by which the Devil disarms human beings with fear, procrastination, anger, and jealousy so that they do not reach their full potential. This is the same power that paralyzed millions of individuals with fear and despondency during the Great Depression and continues to hold people back from their dreams. Complacency and mediocrity are not the root issue; they are symptoms of deeper ills that we are conditioned by society to accept. But you must open your mind to acquire knowledge and consider facts that might not harmonize with your personal beliefs in order to access a greater truth that will, as Hill said in his original preface, bring harmony out of chaos in this age of frustration and fear.
If you have been the victim of lost courage, weakened enthusiasm, and lack of self-discipline if you are demoralized and plagued by fear, anxiety, overwhelm, or apathy the seven principles to freedom detailed in this book herald your redemption. You will finally become independent of the causes of failure and misery, break the bonds of destructive habits, and unlock the secret of a natural law as significant as the law of gravity so that you can outwit the devil once and for all.
8. Purple Cow - Seth Godin
Summary:
You're either a Purple Cow or you're not. You're either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice. What do Apple, Starbucks, Dyson and Pret a Manger have in common? How do they achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and-true brands to gasp their last? The old checklist of P's used by marketers - Pricing, Promotion, Publicity - aren't working anymore. The golden age of advertising is over. It's time to add a new P - the Purple Cow."Purple Cow" describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat-out unbelievable. In his new bestseller, Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable. It's a manifesto for anyone who wants to help create products and services that are worth marketing in the first place.
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9. The E-Myth Revisited - Michael E. Gerber
Summary:
E-Myth \ 'e-,'mith\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work
Voted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.
An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.
Gerber 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 or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.
The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.
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10. The Goal - A Process of Ongoing Improvement - Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
Summary:
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry - even to your bosses - but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant - or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days - Jonah - to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex's fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.
One of Eli Goldratt s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement.
Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment. Twenty-five years after writing The Goal, Dr. Goldratt wrote Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. In this article he provided the underlying rules of operations. This article appears at the end of this book.