This holiday season, skip the fruit basket and give your clients a book that will change the way they see the world, both personally and professionally.
Here are six of my favorites:
1. A Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl
Life to me is all about perspective. Viktor Frankl’s life throughout the Holocaust is a great reality check for all of us.
One of my favorite stories told in the book: After the Holocaust, Frankl begins treating fellow prisoners. One of the patients lost his wife during the Holocaust. After years of treatment and depression, Frankl posed a series of questions to the patient:
- VF: Is what you are experiencing difficult?
- Patient: YES, the hardest thing I have ever gone through.
- VF: Does it hurt everyday?
- Patient: It’s unbearable.
- VF: Since it’s hard and unbearable, can you imagine if you died and she made it? She would be experiencing this pain and agony.
The patient got the reframing. And I think about this all the time.
2. QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, by John G. Miller
Pound for pound, there is NO better book that will awaken a person to understand the real concept of personal accountability. Having the chance to have interviewed John, it is no surprise that his book is not only well received, but has sold more than one million copies around the world.
John not only writes about personal accountability, he lives it. We have bought nearly 500 copies and handed them to our clients. It is a must read for anyone trying to instill leadership and accountability into an organization.
Check out the Growth Factor interview with John G. Miller here.
3. A Whole New Mind and 4. Drive, by Daniel Pink
For their time, there are not two better books to trend where the workplace is going and how to truly motivate people. What impresses me most about Pink’s books are his research and how we synthesize his frameworks.
A Whole New Mind sets up why Emotional Intelligence (eQ) is a bigger influencer of work success than IQ.
Drive takes it one step further by outlining the three drivers of employee engagement: Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Pinks’s new book, To Sell is Human, is great too.
Check out the Growth Factor interview with Dan Pink here.
5. Abundance, by Peter Diamandis
This book is going to ROCK your world. Proclaimed a futurist, this book outlines how we still think locally vs. globally and can’t even comprehend what we are capable in the near future. As one of the founders of Project X, Diamandis puts a ton of killer stats in here that should get us all thinking differently about the Internet, technology and innovation.
After reading it, the SHIFT team has been conducting a series of brainstorming sessions to think much bigger than we ever did before.
6. The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg
So many books are written about change management – but this one NAILS it. The simplicity of his framework – response, routine, reward and use of very notable examples – provides the reader with something he can implement both personally and professionally.
This is a great book to give your clients around News Years Eve for obvious reasons.
Joe Mechlinski is CEO of SHIFT, where he's helped hundreds of companies prosper through some of the worst economic times in history. Joe's debut book, Grow Regardless, an instant New York Times bestseller, defines strategic growth, change management, and organizational development.
