Reading a business book can be a great way to expand your B2B knowledge and skill set. So, grab a coffee, don your reading glasses, and let our industry professionals talk you through the top picks to add to your Autumn bookshelf.
Title: Thanks for the Feedback
Authors: Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen
Publisher: Penguin
Reviewer: Charlie King, senior PR account executive, Kelso Consulting
This is not the easiest book to read. Mainly because it encourages serious self-reflection, while making you question the way you have taken feedback in the past.
This book is not just for HR departments. It is for any marketer receiving a performance appraisal and who wants to improve. Career progression is important for any industry. So developing the tools to grow professionally can be found in these pages.
We will always get unwanted or unnecessary feedback, at the wrong time or just in the wrong way. This can have a bigger negative impact moving forward than planned. So it is important to have the various types of feedback explained and when they apply to our lives. It will go a long way when you to learn how to flip any kind of feedback to your advantage.
One of the book’s key strengths is examining the types of triggers that prevent us from using feedback constructively. They include relationship triggers, identity triggers and truth triggers. This is useful when Douglas Stone and Shela Heen delve into the realms of how people can interpret feedback differently. This goes beyond the person’s personality and their role in the company, but looks more at why people understand information and data in different ways and how you yourself can address this.
I think every marketer who wants to improve, both professionally and personally, should read this book. It is clear from the first chapter Stone and Heen have done their research. This book will eventually become dated due to the constant developments in neuroscience, nonetheless, every marketing director should get their team to read this and watch the long-term benefits.
Star rating: 5/5
Title: Measuring Customer Experience
Author: Phil Klaus
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Reviewer: Claire Shiels, media relations, Claire Shiels Marketing
Providing a consistent, excellent customer experience has, for commercially aware organisations, become somewhat of a holy grail in recent years. Competition is fierce and the importance of this concept is undeniable in terms of profitability. However, a principal accepted method of measuring customer experience (termed as ‘CX’ within the text) does not yet exist, leading to considerable difficulties for marketers trying to achieve buy-in at a strategic level.
The problem argues Phil Klaus, is that CX goes far beyond customer satisfaction and service quality in that it begins even before the point of purchase and reaches far beyond the point of sale, into usage over a period of time. The author’s detailed research reveals that many managers are unclear as to how to accurately measure their CX management programme or even in some cases, understand why it is required.
Identifying three types of CX practices: ‘Preservers’, ‘Transformers’ and ‘Vanguards’, Klaus explains that while Preservers consider CX simply in terms of service quality and customer dissatisfaction; Transformers recognise the necessity of embedding a CX programme but struggle to do so effectively, Vanguards invest in the development and measurement of an appropriate strategic model of CX management, reorganising the business to ensure its effective implementation.
Measuring Customer Experience strives to offer an alternative solution to this conundrum, based on sensing, seizing and transforming – a way for Preservers to progress towards adopting a Vanguard approach to CX programmes and ultimately, achieving greater profitability.
Marketers and managers looking for step by step tips on how to design and embed an effective CX programme may be disappointed in the academic-style content of the text. However, this book goes further than many other similar titles in challenging traditional perceptions and offering a potential solution for benchmarking existing CX strategies.
Star rating: 3/5
Title: The Art of Business Communication
Author: Graham Shaw
Publisher: Pearson
Reviewer: Laura Hall, acquisition marketing manager, British Gas Business
Graham Shaw’s The Art of Business Communication is a completely different approach to improving the way you communicate messages and, ultimately, make them more impactful.
The general theme is that you can dramatically improve how you communicate – in a variety of different business situations – by illustrating your point using simple drawings.
Having the artistic talent of a brick, I was pleased that Shaw explained each example using step-by-step instructions that even I managed to follow with surprising success. It is very much a hands on, practical book throughout, and encourages the reader to try to incorporate drawings into everyday work discussions, presentations and meetings. I hadn’t read a book that was quite like Shaw’s before and it was successful in making me rethink how I communicate my ideas in a marketing environment.
I found drawing the small characters surprisingly easy with Shaw’s instructions, albeit repeating at a later date without the book was a different story. However, the key theme of using doodles to describe ideas definitely did resonate with me. Using simpler doodles such as a curved tick, a thumbs up sign or a light bulb is more realistic at work and does bring general business discussions to life.
The book would be of particular use to those in marketing and sales who are regularly presenting new ideas or concepts, even if just to an internal audience. Messages and ideas can be easier to follow, better digested and are made more memorable using the doodles Shaw suggests, and certainly light years away from anything presented using PowerPoint.
Star rating: 4/5
Title: The Value Trail
Author: Marc Sanso
Publisher: Ashgate
Reviewer: Chris Forrester, managing director, Primesight
The Value Trail is a solid read. I tend to judge the strength of a book on how many pages I’ve folded and how often I’ve written around the text. I read this with my iPad on my knee throughout and ended with a long list of actions, accompanied by scribbles on the pages, many of which have already found their way into discussions on how to move our business forward.
You won’t be too surprised that value sits at the book’s center. At its heart it identifies a new model, ‘Three Dimensions of Value’, which delivers success within a business: value from a customer perspective (appreciation), how it is boosted (concentration) and removed (predation).
It also covers areas well-trodden by many business books, such as corporate goals. But its new approach should encourage readers to take a fresh view of business covering customers, suppliers and the elements adding value to your business.
The book is a little dry and sometimes difficult to digest. That said, it’s also the sort of guide you can relate back to your own ‘world’ and so I found myself re-reading sections as my mind wandered to my own business ideas, circumstances and requirements.
Sanso uses a healthy dose of examples of successful companies to serve as evidence to the theory. Approaches split out by competitive models are helpful, but like many authors he falls into the trap of only applying examples from globally recognised companies. Although a reader will be able to understand the competitive model that suits their own circumstances, using more appropriate, real-life examples would help. Apple features a lot and although it is a company that we all recognise as the symbol of business success, it is aspiration in the extreme in terms of everyday relevance.
The book is written with senior management/c-suite in mind, although I can imagine students may well pick it up. The reader needs to be in a position where they can bring learnings back to the business and affect change if they are to seriously benefit. Students, rather than hungry young execs, will benefit from the book as a hypothetical read. Plus at £65, nearly 50p a page, it’s at the expensive end, but worth the price.
Star rating: 4/5
Title: Big Social Mobile
Author: David Giannetto
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Reviewer: Liz Barnsdale, managing director, Ais London
Having spent many an hour in conversations with my clients, all grappling in varying degrees with how they adopt and manage big data, social media and mobile technology in their businesses, I was very keen to read what David Giannetto had to say on the subject.
In a nutshell he weaves a tale of no-nonsense, common sense. The basic premise of his book is as follows: if you’re a business who places big data, social media and mobile technology in their own separate ivory towers, leaves them to the specialists and allows them to measure their own success, then you’re missing a pretty big trick. If however you integrate these ‘new’ practices with each other and into your existing business strategy, and tie the measures of success directly to your bottom line, then you’ll reap the rewards.
If you’re fresh off the boat and the weighty topics of big data, social media and mobile are new to you then Big Social Mobile will provide a reassuringly straightforward step-by-step guide as to how to approach and make sense of them in the context of your business. It also has some useful case studies that successfully illustrate Giannetto’s advice.
But if you’re like me, someone who has been a practitioner of these subjects for several years now, you might wish there was an abridged version. After a while Giannetto’s preaching to the converted can feel somewhat repetitive. And in fairness it doesn’t feel as though practitioners are Gianetto’s audience.
Did I feel as though I’d learned anything new from reading Big Social Mobile? No. But I do believe I’ve found the book to recommend to any new client who is only just venturing into these topics? Yes. Because if I can get them on board with Giannetto’s core premise, as explained above, then I’m confident we’ll achieve something.
Star rating: 3/5
Title: Connect
Authors: Lars Birkholm Petersen, Ron Person, Christopher Nash
Publisher: Wiley
Reviewer: Luke Hayter, VP, Europe, Magnetic
Connect is written by three executives who work at Sitecore, a global company based in California which provides customer experience management.
This book offers a comprehensive look at the marketing techniques of today, and how brands can utilise data to enrich customer experience. It does lean heavily, however, on Sitecore’s own customer experience maturity model and ConnectTheExperience.com: a bespoke hub for the book.
I’m not averse to these types of books, which can offer a useful lens on a service or point of view; but I would love to learn more from the experiences of the authors. More personal accounts would, I think, have added some colour to the often rather dry prose.
The detailed case studies are, unfortunately, from brands I’d never heard of, but illustrative in their own way. There is one chart which does reference the ‘strategic themes’ of brands like Apple, IBM, Walmart, Microsoft and P&G, but it’s a one-off and concludes by pointing the readers to a page on its online hub.
On the whole, I found it a basic step-by-step book on utilising customer data (an area which I would imagine has been extensively researched by marketers of all stripes) – with an element of bias towards Sitecore’s own service.
Star Rating: 3/5
Title: Trendology
Author: Chris Kerns
Publishing: Palgrave Macmillan
Reviewer: Robert Tas, CMO, Pegasystems
It was with great excitement that I started reading Trendology: Building an Advantage through Data-Driven Real-Time Marketing, by Chris Kerns. Finally – a book about real-time marketing in today’s omni-channel world. Unfortunately, the book did not deliver as much as I had hoped.
To be fair, the book is useful as an introduction to social media tactics, and provides interesting examples of the ways in which brands are dipping their toes into the digital and social media waters. But I kept hoping for more. The book is basically a Twitter primer, using case studies to make its point around tent-pole marketing tactics. It lacks the substance that most marketers need to deal with in today’s customer-centric digital world, and its narrow focus fails to address a number of challenges that today’s marketer needs to consider:
1. Multiple social media platforms
Kerns focuses on Twitter and doesn’t discuss other platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat, to name just a few that marketers must include in their strategies.
2. Real-time marketing
The book ties real-time marketing to tent pole marketing tactics, mostly as applied to consumer brands, and fails to take into account the multitude of other channels where marketers are doing real-time marketing. Think web, retail branches, customer service, etc. We don’t have the luxury of doing silo marketing – in fact it goes against best practices.
3. Audience quality
For all the emphasis Kerns places on audience engagement and growth, there’s little acknowledgement of the importance of the quality of the audience one is reaching. Marketers shouldn’t be measured by the number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes but rather on whether they are reaching the right target customer – which is what ultimately matters. The book offers some amusing gimmicks to drive some metrics but lacks insight into how to grow the right audience.
4. Social as part of an integrated strategy
For all the emphasis on social media, I was frustrated by the lack of ties back to holistic marketing strategies and brand building.
Perhaps the title of the book set my expectations too high, but as I read I kept hoping for more. Real-time marketing is a hot topic right now for good reason, and one my peers and I are very much interested in. A comprehensive book on real-time marketing still needs to be written.
Star rating: 3/5
Title: The Art of the 2.0
Author: Guy Kawasaki
Reviewer: Sean Mallon, CEO, Bizdaq
Publisher: Portfolio Penguins
As somebody who generally avoids press hungry web gurus, especially those that don’t write their own tweets, I was slightly cynical as to the potential of Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start. However as a B2B Fintech start-up, I felt I might be able to get at least a few useful nuggets of advice from the authors years of working for Apple and more recent investments in more than ten tech start-ups. I’m glad I looked past my perceptions, as Kawasaki has served up a concise, thoughtful and easily readable book that provides excellent advice to any executive.
The Art of Start 2.0 is the updated version of Guy Kawasaki’s start-up bible. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, business owner or executive, the book offers practical advice on hiring, innovation and branding. It’s split into four distinct areas that cover the business concept, getting started on the journey, building a successful business, and finally how to carry yourself when you’ve ‘made it.’
Right from the first pages, there is advice that the reader can instantly implement within their company. Specifically the concept of three to four word mantras is simple, yet effective. As a start-up we often have to compete for staff with better resourced, established companies, so being able to communicate the mission of the company in a succinct style to interviewees is crucial. Mantras have definitely helped and I would suggest that this could help any business.
In other areas, the book covers building a team, the art of partnering and pitching (Kawasaki has been pitched to hundreds of times). The 13 chapters of the book are short and easily digestible and most have exercises to complete in order to engage the brain and put the theory into action. There are even 20 illustrated pages at the back of the book before the afterword where Kawasaki illustrates ‘what entrepreneurs do.’ Spoiler: they’re not driven by money but building, hiring and love. Let’s just say I’m glad he saved that to the end.
Star rating: 5/5
