A Gift Guide for the Executive in your Life

With the Holidays inching around the corner, we’ve all got gift giving on our minds. For that executive in your life that has his fair share of ties and coffee mugs, I suggest you get them some new reading material. Here are three books I would suggest:

The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

Bill Walsh wasn’t only a remarkable football coach. He was a game changer, and his story of leadership is significant in that it guides you through a journey of disruption in a way that a leader in any industry can apply. He discusses resistance and how to develop a system of engaging with others in a way that they will open up and accept a new way of doing things.

This is right in line with what I want you to embrace in Reset thinking: just because it’s a good idea doesn’t mean that it won’t take some shaping, hammering, and persistence.

The Business of Belief by Tom Asacker

The reason why this book is so important because it goes into the aspects of how people are stuck in their belief systems and why you need to respect the depth, dimension and context of that resistance. Whether you’re talking to a team, your customers, or trying to shape an account, understand all of the aspects that determine belief and just how powerful they are. It can be tremendously positive or it can be tremendously negative. It’s something to be respected.

So when in coaching and challenging an old way of doing things, you have to remember: you’re not up against a firm—you’re up against a belief. And that’s huge.

To Sell is Human by Daniel Pink

This quick read is about how we all, as consumers, tend to look at sales people as pigs. Now, now—before you get offended—think of the last person that struck you off guard and was forceful in their attempt to have you buy their product, service or idea. I’m sure you weren’t thinking highly of them. In a firm, they have this notion of well, here’s the sellers, and there’s everyone else who makes the money. And that’s where the unhinging process begins.

But in reality, the seller is all of you. Regardless of your title in the company, we all spend our days trying to encourage other people to act: be it our children to be kind, our friends to listen, or a stakeholder to invest. In this life, we’re all in sales.