More than 11,000 business books are published every year—an overwhelming choice for busy professionals. Therefore, in partnership with getAbstract, Training brings you July’s top three business books recommended to our readers.
“Powerhouse. Insider Accounts into the World’s Top High-Performance Organizations” by Brian MacNeice and James Bowen (Kogan Page Publishers, 2016, 280 pages, ISBN: 9780749478315; $13.56)
How do great organizations sustain superior performance year after year? Performance experts Brian MacNeice and James Bowen spent five years traveling the globe to interview executives at the world’s top organizations. The authors explain the 12 “Powerhouse Principles” they identified as markers that distinguish excellent organizations and discuss how they apply the “four key pillars of high performance.” Their research codifies peak performance. getAbstract recommends this informative manual on how top companies sustain success to executives, entrepreneurs, and business students who want to know how to maximize an organization’s performance.
Rating (out of 10): 8
Applicability: 8
Innovation: 8
Style: 7
“Strategic Learning. How to Be Smarter Than Your Competition and Turn Key Insights into Competitive Advantage” by Willie Pietersen (Wiley, 2010, 260 pages, ISBN: 9780470540695; $21.15)
Strategy guru Willie Pietersen’s book lays out a path to a compelling goal: Use learning to create an adaptable organization that can continually adjust to today’s VUCA—“volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous”—business world. He outlines four steps for conducting your learning efforts strategically: “Learn” what you need to know, “focus” on priorities, “align” learning with your corporate goals, and “execute” with experimentation and flexibility. getAbstract recommends Pietersen’s manual as an essential guide to two critical organizational topics: learning and strategy.
Rating (out of 10): 8
Applicability: 9
Innovation: 7
Style: 8
“Reclaiming Conversation. The Power of Talk in a Digital Age” by Sherry Turkle (Penguin Press, 2015, 448 pages, ISBN: 9781594205552; $16.54)
Sherry Turkle—one of the foremost experts on the impact of technology on culture and psychology—argues persuasively that technology should augment your life, not control it. Conversation and human connection, she maintains, have degraded to near-unrecoverable levels. No one makes eye contact or can read anyone else’s emotions. As you read, count how often you look at your phone and how many pages you can absorb without distraction. See if you can focus for six minutes. Turkle may convince you to deprioritize social media, e-mail, and texting so you can reclaim conversation and focus at home and at work. getAbstract recommends her thoughtful overview to anyone in the workforce, especially parents and teachers.
Rating (out of 10): 9
Applicability: 9
Innovation: 9
Style: 8
For five-page summaries of these and more than 15,000 other titles, visit http://www.getabstract.com/affiliate/trainingmagazine
