Monday, March 28, 2011

A few things

So I just found out that I get to train a new sales person at work on Wednesday. Perfect timing.

I will be racing to put something decent together for this new guy so that I can start testing out my methods and presentation in a real life sales situation.

I also just bought a few of books online:

How to Master the Art of Selling by Tom Hopkins
The Psychology of Selling by Brian Tracy

These were recommended to me by Prof Litchford. I will read them as soon as I get them.

I am also going to try and convince my boss to pay for me to attend a Chet Holmes sales training seminar so that I can see how the top sales training guy in the world does his presentations.

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

Good news

I have some new developments that I am excited about.

I have asked Professor David Litchford to be my adviser and he has agreed. After speaking with him, I discovered his vast experience in sales training. He seems to be the perfect one to help me with my sales training program.

He also recommended that I take his Advanced Public Speaking course in the summer. He told me that in this course students will get rigorous one on one feedback on their presentations. He said that I could use this course to work on and perfect my presentation. I am very excited about this opportunity to work more closely with my expert adviser.

I have also decided to narrow down my thesis to just the sales training program. I believe this will help me focus and I will have many more resources in this area to draw from.

Note to Scott and Mark: Sometimes I post more than one time each week. So please do not miss the other work I do.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Effective Sales Training Program

This last week I have been working hard on developing a training program on selling. This program is something I would like to be able to use to train people in the companies that I start. Last summer I started my own sales/marketing firm and wanted to develop this but never got around to it. Now I would like to include it as part of my capstone as a motivational speaker.

Selling is an essential life skill in business. It is the money maker; it is how deals are made, and it is how business is done. I have worked in sales, started and run my own sales company, studied the literature, and have spent time working and talking with some really good sales people that have taught me almost everything I know.

I am going to put a video together to train people on essential sales principles. I have asked my mentor Nick Romano (an expert sales professional) and other sales professionals to participate in the video. They have agreed, and with their help, I am going to teach how to effectively sale anything.

I have based my training program on 3 fundamental skills:
  1. Establish the appropriate relationship
  2. Educate/Build Value
  3. Identify the Closing behavior (close the sale)
Each skill is based on principles of human behavior, psychology, relationships, and economics. In my video presentation I will show examples of how to use these skills in real life situations in multiple arenas of selling. I will also include hand out worksheets to allow people following the presentation to practice these skills.

My presentation will not only draw from my own successful sales experiences, and those of my mentors, but also from the academic and popular literature in sales to provide credibility and power to these principles.

I will begin the presentation by building the value of effective sales training. I will show how simple steps and skills can lead to big sales results. Then I will show an overview of the program and the three steps.

In each step I will use one or two experts from the sales profession to help teach that principle. I will also show acted examples of those principles to show how to use it in real life. At the end of each principle. I will create a spot on the video for people to take time to practice that skill with a partner.

Below I have included some of the basic material I will cover that I have drawn from my experiences, Interviews with sales professionals, and the popular and and academic literature.


Closing the Sale

This step is by far the most important and most difficult part of any sale. It is the part where you get them to buy. Where you get them to do what it is you want them to do.
To Effectively close the sales:

1. Identify the CLOSING Behavior

An effective sale and close will influence to a specific behavior. In the classic book on leadership and change, Influencer by Vital Smarts, the authors research how master influencers make effective change come about using multiple sources of influence. They highlight effective leaders such as Muhamed Yunus with the Grameen Foundation and Mimi Silbert with Delancey Street enterprises and how they influenced large groups of people to do incredible things. The book shows how the strategies of these master influencers to create such change by focusing on a specific behavior to influence. These behaviors, which they call Vital Behaviors, are the key and specific behaviors they are trying to influence to create maximum influence.
Examples of vital behaviors include
In sales the vital behavior happens when you close the sale. One of the biggest problems people have with closing sales is not selling people to do that specific behavior. What I mean by this is if you are selling something, what specifically you want them to do to buy. What specific behavior do you want from them? Do you want them to sign a contract? Do you want them to take an item and purchase it at the register? Do you need a credit card number? Do you want them to only say yes? Do you want them to jump up and down and do a little dance for you?
I started a sales firm once selling curbside recycling services. I learned quickly the importance of Identifying Closing Behaviors quickly. I would emphasize the importance of closing sales in my trainings but my sales people kept trying to get people to ‘sign up for recycling’. I identified this problem one time training a sales person when a frustrated customer said, “What do you want me to do? Do I sign up with you? Do I call my city utility office? Do you have a website? What?” All we needed from people to ‘sign up for recycling’ was to fill out and sign a simple form. My sales people had the forms but kept trying to get people to sign up for recycling and not sign the forms. They would do an excellent job and educating the value of recycling to people and do everything perfect but could not clarify to each customer what it is they wanted from them specifically.
I then focused my sales scripts to simply and quickly get to the closing: “All we need is for you to fill out this simple form, and we can get you started recycling.” My sales reps were to hand the clipboard and pen anticipating acceptance from the customer. Sales performance improved dramatically.
How does this apply to other sales?
Identify the specific Closing Behavior first; it is the main objective of the sale, and everything else in your sales strategy should build up to that objective. This is primarily why I have chosen ‘Close the sale’ as the first step in an effective sale.

2. Make it easy for them to say yes/ Make it hard for them to say no:

a. Physically
b. Psychologically
My mother works as a cashier at ShopKo. She recently came to me for advice on how to sell extended warranties on electronic devices sold in the store. She told me how corporate was pushing these warranties and how nobody wanted them and she didn’t feel like it was her place to try and push these onto people.
I asked her to go through her sales presentation with me. As a cashier you have only a moment to make the sale. She said she would quickly explain the benefits and price and then ask if they wanted her to add on the extended warranty. She hadn’t had much success with this approach.
I went through with her the principle of closing sales and found out that the closing behavior for selling these extended warranties is consent. All the customer has to do is consent that they buy the extended warranty. They don’t have to sign anything extra, fill out any new form, just say yes.
This is where principle 2 of close the sale comes in. Make it easy for them to say yes and make it hard for them to say no. You are going to do this verbally, physically, and psychologically. Let’s talk about how to do this verbally and psychologically. I thought about how to make it easy for someone to say yes and hard to say no to the extended warranty. Originally my mom would ask, “Would you like me to add on the extended warranty to your product?” Now taking the time to add one something sounds hard regardless of price. You have to wait longer, you have to make the cashier more work, you have to pay more money for something you might never need or use, it is just too hard to say yes and easy to say no. An effective sales person will switch this.
I told my mom to try it out this way. Instead of asking the customer to add on the extended warranty, she was to say, “If it’s alright I’m going to go ahead and add the extended warranty.” This way instead of making it easy to say no, it was hard to say no. The customer would then have to stop the cashier from doing something they had already started and awkwardly communicate the desire to a confused cashier to not get the extended warranty. In this situation it is socially much easier to say yes, and hard to say no. Physically I told my mother to also, after she said, “If it’s alright, I’m going to go ahead and add the extended warranty,” she was to turn away from the customer and begin the transaction.
Selling in person has this advantage. You can use strong body language and gestures to aid you in closing sales and making it easy to say yes and hard to say no. This definitely is a high pressure sells technique but you must learn that all good salespeople are high pressure sales people. It isn’t about manipulation of strong-arming someone; it is about doing business and being concise. There is no shame in a good business person trying to do business.
When I ran my sales firm selling recycling services I used body language to make it easy to say yes and hard to say no on the doorsteps of peoples’ houses. After my sales reps gave the closing line, “All we need you to do is fill out this quick form and we can get you started recycling,” the reps were to hand the clipboard and pen to the homeowner in anticipation of them taking it and signing the form. It worked miracles when it was done.
Not everyone has the courage to close hard and show anticipation of the sale toward customers. They have a fear that waits, not allowing any expectations to go up in case they don’t get the sale. There is something powerful about communicating an expected sale. When you can successfully communicate, “it is obvious that you are going to choose to buy this so let me take care of the details for you quickly and easily,” you are almost guaranteed to close the sale every time.



3. Show immediate value

After you communicate the closing behavior, you should then communicate the immediate value associated with that behavior. "All we need you to do is sign this form and we can get you started saving the environment."

"If it's alright, let's go ahead and move forward so we can start working hard for your company."

4. Do it early, do if often

This principle is self-explanatory. When you are closing the sale, do it early in the sales presentation to communicate to your customer clearly what you want from them, and do it more than once. (Statistics?) What's great about this skill is that it can first save you a lot of time if they say yes the first time, but it will also help any objections or concerns about your product come out early in the presentation. You will better be able get a feel about your customer's feelings about your product.


PRACTICE

With a partner, go through each of the situations below. For each situation (1) Identify a closing behavior (2) Discuss how to make it easy to yes and (3) Identify the immediate value and (4) Take turns practicing closing the sale in a role play.

1. You are a clerk in a retail store trying to sell the new big screen television set that is on sale to someone 'just looking'. The workers in the back have to bring one to the front when someone buys one.

2. You are negotiating a large marketing contract with a big company. The executive you are negotiating with seems interested but you cannot yet tell if he is in or not.


Establish the Appropriate Relationship

Based on two main factors:
1. Your customer

References
McFarland, R., Challagalla, G., & Shervani, T. (2006). Influence Tactics for Effective Adaptive Selling. Journal of Marketing, 70(4), 103-117. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

“Buyers are more complex than orginally presumed. You cannot neatly put buyers into categories. An effective salesperson will adapt their influencing techniques to match the buyer’s specific needs and personality.”
  • Be on their side
  • Talk about anything about the sale at first to build rapport
  • Fill their needs: Find out their specific needs. “Whats important to you (in a tv)?”
    • AMPP: Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase, Prime
Do not ever start a conversation with, “Can I help you?” You will almost always get a no. Find other questions to ask to get started. “Have you shopped here before.”

2. Your product

Educate/Build Value

The market place exists to create and exchange value. Nothing should be sold or will be sold for very long that isn’t really valuable to someone. In the market place you are not just selling things to people. The word selling has gotten a bad reputation somehow connoting manipulation and ripping people off. But you should never sell something where you have to do that. It isn’t good business and it isn’t ethical. In the real business world you are exchanging value.
However, there is so much value out there and we don’t all see value in the same way. So the only way that we can learn to recognize new value is to discover it on our own, or have someone else teach us the value of something. This is what a sale is. It is educating value to customers. If you don’t see value in what you are trying to sell then how can you teach its value to someone else without lying to them? You either need to find something else to do or have someone teach you more about value. Entrepreneurs are trying to create new value, and they do create new value, this is how we have made so much advance in the world over the past few centuries is because of entrepreneurs creating value.
Sell only things that are valuable. Learn how to recognize value where it exists. You cannot communicate and build value if you do not see it yourself. It is much easier to get someone to see something you are seeing than to get someone to see something you do not see. You need to clearly understand why it should be obvious why someone should purchase a specific product. You must be totally convinced yourself. To do this you need to be educated about the product as much as you can. People buy things for different reasons, and you need to see how this product is valuable to many different types of people with many different types of needs and wants.

When it is possible, I try to sell to specific types of people who I know will obviously need or want the product. When I am convinced that someone will clearly want it, then all I have to do is teach them what I know so that they will buy. If I am selling to someone who at first does not convince me that they do obviously need the product, I try to take time to learn more about the product and the situation so that I can see why something is so obviously valuable. This is why I prefer to sell to businesses instead of resident households, besides there is more money, I can do more research on the specific company because of their own marketing/PR efforts, rather than a person at their home whom I will know little about before speaking to them besides the color and type of front door they have.
You also need to trust that people can make good decisions about value if they are only taught to see what you see.

People buy things that they perceive to be valuable. This is why they purchase; they are purchasing the value. They are not purchasing the product, they are purchasing the value of the product. When you buy a microwave, you aren’t buying a weird looking box with buttons, you are buying the convenience of heating your food quickly, this is why you are buying a microwave. When you buy life insurance, you are not buying paperwork and another monthly bill, you are buying the security that comes for loved ones in the event of your death. In Michael Gerber’s book The E-Myth Revisited, Gerber emphasized that you are selling more than just the product, you are selling the feeling. When you go to McDonald’s you are not buying a very high quality hamburger or any high quality food for that matter, you are purchasing the McDonald’s experience which is Ronald McDonald, the play place, the quick, friendly, and consistent service with a , “Welcome to McDonald’s!” in ___ locations around the world.

Other
Sell the feelings, not the product; sell the value, not the item
Make them feel special
Overcoming objections
High pressure sales
Do business, not manipulation
Get them saying yes

Your best customers are you best customers

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Annotated Bibliography

Here is my annotated bibliography. I have many more sources that I plan to use (which I have listed from the books in a previous post) but I will annotate them once I have used some material from them.


Bibliography

The Holy Bible Authorized King James Version. (1979). Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Adler, M. J., & Van Doren, C. (1972). How To Read A Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Ashcraft, M. H., & Radvansky, G. A. (2010). Cognition 5th Edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education Inc.

Franklin, B. (1996). The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Mineola: Dover Publications, Inc.

Gallwey, T. E. (1974). The Inner Game of Tennis: Revised Edition. New York: Random House.

Gordon, T. (1970). Parent Effectiveness Training. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Graham, B., & Dodd, D. (1934). Security Analysis: The Classic 1940 Second Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Jackson, B. H. (2003). On Becoming a Professional:Lessons from Professionals on Becoming a Human Performance Consultant.

Kiyosaki, R. T., & Lechter, S. L. (1997). Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-- That The Poor And Middle Class Do Not! New York: Warner Books.

Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin Group Inc.

McConnell, C. R., Brue, S. L., & Flynn, S. M. (2009). Microeconomics: Principles, Problems, and Policies Eighteenth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Mormon. (1981 [1830]). The Book of Mormon Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Patterson, K., Grenny, J., Maxfield, D., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2008). Influencer: The Power to Change Anything. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Peck, M. S. (1978). The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional value and Spiritual Growth. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline. New York: Doubleday.

Weinberg, G. M. (1975). An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Sample material: Ideas

Here is about 10-12 minutes of written material that I am going to record. It is not very good in terms of grammar; I wrote it out as I would say it so it needs a lot of editing as a written piece. There are sentences that are repeated. This is not an error. Again this is how I would say the material out loud. A repeated sentence is said with more emphasis and more slowly. But I would like some feedback for anyone who has time to go over it.

An idea: the most resilient parasite

We live in a world of complexity and information overload. There is just not enough time for us to process the vast amounts of information the world expects us to process. All this information coming in from the outside leaves us very little time to think about and process information and ideas that come from the inside, from ourselves.

This power to generate ideas, make inferences, and be creative is the key difference that separates us and keeps us above computers in the evolutionary chain. It is what makes human special. Computers can store and process massive amounts of information with incredible power and speed. Human brains do not consciously do so well. Yet in the information age, to keep up to speed, we are required to learn and process so much information. Let’s not forget what makes a human brain so powerful and so unique. It is not our ability to process A LOT of information, it is about ability to process information in really creative ways.

Henry Ford was criticized for not being very educated, for not having enough of that outside knowledge. He replied saying that he didn’t need to be educated. He said that he hired other people to learn that stuff for him so he would have more time to do more important tasks such as thinking. Thinking and creating is what we do well.

That’s what I would like to talk about today: Take more time to think to generate and develop your own ideas. There is incredible power in this discipline and I will show you how and why.

You don’t need to be a genius to come up with good ideas. I have a theory that I would like to share with you: Human beings were designed to have good ideas. Human beings were designed to have good ideas. I know at times it seems that exactly the opposite is true, and I will admit that most of any one person’s ideas are probably bad ideas. I have had loads of bad ideas I could tell you about, but I still believe that it is in our fundamental nature and design to produce good ideas even if they aren’t as frequent as the bad ones. YOU were designed to create brilliant and powerful ideas!

“So how come I haven’t recognized any of these ideas?” you ask. Well if you are like most people, who don’t give much awareness and attention to their own thoughts and ideas, you just let ideas come and go as they naturally do. You probably don’t take the time to think about, test, and act upon these ideas to see if they are good. You probably don’t have the patience or trust to give yourself a chance. It is a terrible mistake. You were designed for so much more.

So… when you have an idea, when it hits you and you feel inspired, when it makes you smile, when it stirs you and gets you excited, hold onto it. HOLD ONTO IT with all your might. Let it swell within you until it brings forth fruit and you can say, “It was a good seed; It was a good idea.”

“What is the most resilient parasite? (Remember the movie Inception?) Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient... highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed - fully understood - that sticks; right in there somewhere.”

Ideas are powerful. Hold onto them.

Do not let them go because they will disappear if you do. Most people never find out which of their ideas grow into really good plants, which ideas are the most valuable, which ideas make millions, because they let them go. We have lots of bad ideas but we should at least take the time to find out which ones are bad and which ones are good.

All the time I hear fantastic ideas from people. They go something like this:

“I think I should quit my job and do this.”

“I think I’d be really good at that.”

“I’d like to start doing this or that.”

“If only someone did this or that..”

I say, “HEY! I think that is an excellent idea. You should do it.”

How many people listen to me? Not very many. I’m telling you I hear such good ideas from people all the time it hurts me when they let them go. Hold onto your ideas.

One of the best ways to hold onto an idea is to write down these ideas on paper. Make a habit of this. Any spark that goes on between those cute ears of yours, write it down. If you are in a place or situation you can’t write down an idea, hold onto it! Hold onto it until you can write it down because that idea might just be the one that changes your life. And it only takes one idea written down and acted upon that can make enormous changes for you.

An idea came to me one night as I was getting off the bus on my way home from college. It was cold and snowy, and dark so I wasn’t about to write it down right then; I was just going to go home. But I had to pee really bad. There was a Taco Time right there at the bus stop, so instead of walking ten minutes uncomfortably to use my bathroom at home I just walked into the Taco Time to use their facilities. After doing my business in the men’s restroom, this idea came to me again and I thought I should write it down. So I did. Right there in the men’s restroom at Taco Time I pulled out a pen and notebook and wrote down the idea.

I am so glad that I did. It was one of the most important ideas I have ever had.

Honestly I probably could have made it home without using the restroom, but the idea might not have made it home.

The idea might not have made it home. It’s funny because I ended up writing that incredible idea because I needed to use the restroom. I would have just walked home otherwise. So here is my advice: If you can’t wait to get home to use the restroom, don’t wait to get home to write down an idea. (Profound yeah? J )

Write down your ideas. We don’t do it enough. If you have an idea for a business, write it down. If you have an idea to improve your life or someone else’s, write it down. If you have an idea for a book, write it down! That one should seem obvious, if you are going to write a book about some incredible ideas, I would think at some point you would have to start actually writing those ideas.

We’ve all heard of writer’s block. You know, when a writer can’t write because he’s run out of ideas? Well a worse type of writer’s block occurs when a writer won’t write and he is FULL of ideas. We need to get over our writer’s block and write down our ideas.

You should also make a habit of writing down ideas you get from other people. You will learn a lot doing this; there are a lot of good ideas out there. But it is much more important that you write down the ideas that come out of your own head. Why? Well you are probably more likely to do those ideas if they are your own. More likely to turn one of them into a plant that produces fruit. You could hear the same idea a hundred times from other people and you’ll never do it. But once it comes from you, it is inspiration.

Cobb: What do you want?
Saito: Inception. Is it possible?
Arthur: Of course not.
Saito: If you can steal an idea, why can't you plant one there instead?
Arthur: Okay, this is me, planting an idea in your mind. I say: don't think about elephants. What are you thinking about?
Saito: Elephants?
Arthur: Right, but it's not your idea. The dreamer can always remember the genesis of the idea. True inspiration is impossible to fake.

Once you come up with the idea, once it is yours it can grow and work magic. If you want to influence people don’t try to give them ideas, try and help them discover ideas. Inception plot. That’s a Dale Carnegie classic how to win friends and influence people.

While you are listening to me, if an idea comes to your head. Forget! what I am saying and take a moment to dwell onyour idea. Your ideas, for you are much more important than my ideas for you. In fact the most important ideas you’ll ever have are the ones that come out of your own head. This is the idea that changed my life and just so happens to be the idea that I wrote down in that Taco Time restroom. The most important ideas you’ll ever have are the ones that come out of your own head. I will share with you some ideas, but you need to get your own! Do you understand the power and potential of what I am saying? Or even more important, do you understand the power and potential of what you are thinking? Even right now? This room is swarming and bursting with really really good ideas. And they’re not coming from me.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the great thinkers in history men in history that came up with really good ideas: Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Hegel, Marx, Dante, Aquinas, da Vinci, Galileo, and Einstein. These men have gone down in history as the great thinkers. Might I suggest that they are considered the great thinkers because they I don’t know, took a little more time to think? It’s possible. The point is that they took the time to think their own ideas, write them down, develop them, improve them, and write them again until they became the great thinkers. They were brilliant because of their OWN ideas, not because they necessarily new OTHER peoples’ ideas. In fact Mortimer Adler, Editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica said that the great thinkers probably read less books in their lives that what is required for us to read in college. They just took more time to read better than we do. Took more time to think and create their own ideas. Interesting. Why then do we try to get as much outside information in our heads as possible? We should, if we want to be great thinkers, develop our own ideas.

Take more time to think and generate your own ideas.

I’m not saying that you should NOT study other peoples’ ideas and other books. You should make study and reading a very important part of your life. I am only suggesting that you take more time to think about your OWN ideas. Because unless we can catch and hold onto a few good ideas from our own head then we will have sure wasted our time, wasted a good brain that was designed for creation, designed for more. Until we capture our own good ideas then we will never discover our true potential.

The idea was the product of other ideas.

If it is a good idea, it will swell within you.

And you got to test the idea. People are afraid that their idea that they think is good will not turn out to be so good. That will probably happen… a lot. But you have to be emotionally stable to accept it and not take it personal. You have got to have the courage to keep trying your ideas even though many and possibly most of them will fail.

I had a professor once to agree to go over a paper of mine as a favor only if I promised him that I wouldn’t be offended if he torpedoed it. He said that people sometimes have “fundamental misunderstandings” and he was a very logic based professor so fundamental misunderstandings did not slide with him. I told him okay. However before I gave him the paper I was worried that he would find fundamental misunderstandings in my paper and reasoning and I was afraid to give him my paper. Now this seems odd to me. Wouldn’t I like to know if I had a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere in my head? Shouldn’t I try to make sure I have the fundamentals understood correctly? Why is it people are afraid to face their imperfections and learn from them? Why can’t people face their fundamental misunderstandings of the world?

Have courage to face and fundamental misunderstanding that you have, and then have courage to keep developing those incredible ideas.

Motivational Speaking Timeline and Objectives

Here are timelines and objectives for my capstone project:

Capstone 1 Objectives:
  • Have written materials for all 6 hours(4 Hours Audio, 2 video) of training program including: screen plays, speeches, handouts, and marketing plan.
  • Record practices on film and audio, with a journal on how I will improve.
  • Get feedback from peers who are willing to assess my performance

Capstone 2 Objectives:
  • Perfect Performances and Edits of written materials
  • Film 2 Hours of material
  • Record 4 hours of audio material
  • Publish handout materials to be used
  • Put together project portfolio with written materials, drafts, feedback, and improvement journal.

Capstone 1: Timeline:

Week of March 7:
  • Hour 1 (Audio) written and recorded in first draft and posted on blogger
  • Get detailed feedback from 2-3 sources
  • Journal of improvements recorded and edits made for hour one
Week of March 14:
  • Screen play for 30 min video 1
  • Hour 1 (Audio) Re-recorded with Improvements
  • Improvement Journal
Week of March 21:
  • Hour 2 (Audio) written and recorded in first draft and posted on blogger
  • Get detailed feedback from 2-3 sources
  • Journal of improvements recorded and edits made for hour 2
Week of March 28:
  • Screen play for 30 min video 2
  • Hour 2 (Audio) Re-recorded with Improvements
  • Improvement Journal
Week of April 4:
  • Hour 3 (Audio) written and recorded in first draft and posted on blogger
  • Get detailed feedback from 2-3 sources
  • Journal of improvements recorded and edits made for hour 3

Week of April 11:
  • Screen play for 30 min video 3
  • Hour 2 (Audio) Re-recorded with Improvements
  • Improvement Journal
Week of April 19:
  • Hour 4 (Audio) written and recorded in first draft and posted on blogger
  • Get detailed feedback from 2-3 sources
  • Journal of improvements recorded and edits made for hour 4






Grant Weaver’s Recommended Leadership Reading List

Here is a list of books that I am pulling from. I have added a few more that I have been reading recently. I have also kept all the textbooks from the courses listed below but did not have want to take the time to reference them in detail:

Microeconomics

Macroeconomics

Principles of Personal Excellence

Managerial Economics

History of Economic Thought

Organizational Behavior

Leadership Process

Human Resource Management

Principles of Management


1. 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

2. Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute

3. Influencer by Vital Smarts

4. The 8th Habit by Stephen Covey

5. The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden

6. Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferazzi

7. Built to Last by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras

8. Good to Great by Jim Collins

9. Crucial Confrontations by Vital Smarts

10. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When the Stakes are High by Vital Smarts

11. The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino

12. As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

13. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin

14. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

15. Getting Things Done by David Allen

16. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

17. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl

18. Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams

19. The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie

20. In Pursuit of Excellence by Terry Orlick

21. The Power of Full Engagement by Dr. James E. Loehr & Tony Schwartz.

22. The Myth of Leadership: Creating Leaderless Organizations by Jeffrey Nielsen

23. The Tao of Leadership by John Heider

24. The Road Less Travelled by M. Scott Peck

25. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

26. The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn

27. The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

28. The Lessons of History by Will Durant

29. The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman

30. The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

31. Parent Effectiveness Training by Thomas Gordon

32. The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

33. First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman

34. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham

35. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

36. The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

37. The Cultural Dimensions of International Business

38. The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

39. How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer Adler

40. Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not by Robert Kiyosaki

41. The Power of Intention by Wayne Dyer

42. What Matters Most: The Power of Living Your Values by Hyrum W Smith

43. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

44. The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman

45. Difficult Conversations

46. The Greatest Secret in the World by Og Mandino

47. The Greatest Miracle in the World by Og Mandino

48. The Leadership Challenge

49. Outsmart Your Brain

50. Connecting: With Self and Others

51. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell

52. The Effective Executive by Peter F Drucker

53. The Art of War by Sun Tzu

54. The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J Stanley

55. The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt

HaHardball Selling by Robert Shook