As you may know, flyte turned 10 years old today. This past weekend I had the "brilliant" idea of creating a top 10 list every day this month in honor of this milestone. That may have been over-ambitious.
Today’s Top 10 are the ten business audiobooks I’ve downloaded from Audible.com that have had the biggest impact on the way I think about running my business.
- Permission Marketing by Seth Godin. Still my favorite Godin book. It completely changed the way I look at marketing for the better. It’s all about ethical ways to market your products and services, which happens to also be more effective to boot.
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. I know what you’re thinking…that old thing? Well, it’s not as old as the bible, but people still read that for inspiration, right? Bottom line is that if you’ve never read this book you owe it to yourself to pick it up NOW! If you only learn one new thing from this book it may change your life forever.
- Visionary Business by Marc Allen. I’m not sure why I grabbed this title but I’m glad I did. It’s a business fable (groan!) that tells the story of an angel investor helping an entrepreneur run his business in an ethical, sustainable manner. I listened to it just about the time I joined the board of Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility. I took specific ideas from this book in working with others and integrated them immediately into my business.
- Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. This is a great book on why some ideas are remembered and others die in obscurity. It got me recording notes throughout and helped me address some of the shortcomings in our procedures.
- Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m not sure that this book changed the way I run my business, but it definitely got me thinking along different lines. Like The Tipping Point and Freakonomics, it just gets your brain working in new ways. It’s like mental yoga.
- Copy This! by Paul Orfalea and Ann Marsh. I downloaded this one and didn’t listen to it for months. It’s the autobiography of Orfalea, the guy who started Kinko’s despite suffering from dyslexia. It is an amazing story of overcoming obstacles and success by thinking differently.
- All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. This book will show you the importance of telling stories that help sell your product or service.
- Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing by Harry Beckwith.This books is a must read for anybody in the service industry. The only frustrating part was the section on naming your company; turns out I did everything wrong.
- How to Become a Marketing Superstar: Unexpected Rules that Ring the Cash Register by Jeffrey J. Fox. Lots of good contrarian opinions to marketing, which is almost always the right approach. When they zig, you zag.
- Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens. Yes, I downloaded this book because of the title. However, I liked Stevens approach to marketing and his real life examples of marketing opportunities.
Wow. Did I really think I was going to knock out 31 top 10 lists? Sheesh. Maybe I can get ten done this month.
