eNicholas » Books

The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost Your Sales (Paperback)

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:38:04 +0000

Product Description

A powerful sales letter is the ultimate marketing tool for all types of business owners, sales reps, and advertising professionals. However, most sales letters end up getting tossed in the junk mail pile. The Ultimate Sales Letter, 3rd Edition shows you how to write letters that get read, generate leads, and make money. Coverage includes:

The twelve best headline formulas

Strategies for building a customer base

Sales letters for Web sites and online use
This guide teaches you a step-by-step system for writing sales letters any business can use–designed by the most successful and highly paid professional direct-response copywriter in the country.

About the Author

Dan S. Kennedy is president of Kennedy’s Inner Circle, and has been writing sales letters for over twenty for both large and small businesses. He is a popular speaker on marketing and sales issues. His popular newsletter, The No B.S. Marketing Letter, reaches thousands of people in the U.S.

Buy The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost Your Sales (Paperback)

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:16:21 +0000

Book Review

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. His anecdotes are as frequently from family situations as from business challenges.

Before you can adopt the seven habits, you’ll need to accomplish what Covey calls a “paradigm shift”–a change in perception and interpretation of how the world works. Covey takes you through this change, which affects how you perceive and act regarding productivity, time management, positive thinking, developing your “proactive muscles” (acting with initiative rather than reacting), and much more. This isn’t a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you’ll want to study this book, not skim it.

When you finish, you’ll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you’ll feel like you’ve taken a powerful seminar by Covey. –Joan Price

Review

John Pepper President, Procter and Gamble I’ve never known any teacher or mentor on improving personal effectiveness to generate such an overwhelmingly positive reaction….This book captures beautifully Stephen’s philosophy of principles. I think anyone reading it will quickly understand the enormous reaction I and others have had to Dr. Covey’s teachings. –

Buy The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Paperback)

Surf for Your Life – Mick Fanning

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:11:19 +0000

Product Description

Mick Fanning is young, but he’s had many experiences that most of us never will. How does it feel to lose a brother? Win a world title? Rip your hamstring muscle clean off the bone? Weave through a zippering Superbank barrel for 20 or 30 seconds or paddle over the ledge at places like Pipeline and Teahupo? Have scoliosis so bad you can’t get off the floor? Address the New South Wales state of origin team before a match, bowl to Matty Hayden, and have Dave Warner belt you for consecutive sixes?

Mick tells his life story candidly—in turns funny, sensitive, thoughtful, self-deprecating—while providing intimate insights into the personal lessons gained along the way—with practical tips on surfing technique, fitness, nutrition, board design, travel, competitive strategies, and mental clarity. Mick has overcome personal tragedy and career-threatening injury on his way to claiming the 2007 world surfing title. Universally acknowledged as the most focused and driven competitive surfer of his era, his approach to surfing, sports psychology, life, and relationships makes fascinating reading.

The essential principles of perseverance, hard work, and overcoming obstacles in pursuit of your dreams will inspire anyone.

About the Author

Tim Baker has contributed to GQ, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, is the author of Go Surf, and is the coauthor of Bustin’ Down the Door and Occy.

Buy Surf for Your Life (Paperback)

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (Hardcover)

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 08:07:25 +0000

Amazon.com Review

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?” In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11–including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo–and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn’t require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy.

At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. –Harry C. Edwards

From Publishers Weekly

In what Collins terms a prequel to the bestseller Built to Last he wrote with Jerry Porras, this worthwhile effort explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results. To find the keys to greatness, Collins’s 21-person research team (at his management research firm) read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. That Collins is able to distill the findings into a cogent, well-argued and instructive guide is a testament to his writing skills. After establishing a definition of a good-to-great transition that involves a 10-year fallow period followed by 15 years of increased profits, Collins’s crew combed through every company that has made the Fortune 500 (approximately 1,400) and found 11 that met their criteria, including Walgreens, Kimberly Clark and Circuit City.

At the heart of the findings about these companies’ stellar successes is what Collins calls the Hedgehog Concept, a product or service that leads a company to outshine all worldwide competitors, that drives a company’s economic engine and that a company is passionate about. While the companies that achieved greatness were all in different industries, each engaged in versions of Collins’s strategies. While some of the overall findings are counterintuitive (e.g., the most effective leaders are humble and strong-willed rather than outgoing), many of Collins’s perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense. This is not to suggest, however, that executives at all levels wouldn’t benefit from reading this book; after all, only 11 companies managed to figure out how to change their B grade to an A on their own.

Buy Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (Hardcover)

The Power of Full Engagement

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 06:40:11 +0000

The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (Paperback)

The authors, founders of and executives at LGE Performance Systems, an executive training program based on athletic coaching programs, offer a program aimed at stressed individuals who want to find more purpose in their work and ways to better handle their overburdened relationships.

Just as athletes train, play and then recover, people need to recognize their own energy levels. “Balancing stress and recovery is critical not just in competitive sports, but also in managing energy in all facets of our lives. Emotional depth and resilience depend on active engagement with others and with our own feelings.” Case studies demonstrate how some modest changes can have an immediate impact. Loehr (Mental Toughness Training for Sports) and Schwartz (Art of the Deal, writing with Donald Trump) also include a chart highlighting Action Steps, Targeted Muscle, Desired Outcome and Performance Barrier and apply these tenets to individual cases.

A chart analyzing the benefits and costs to taking certain action shows the impact negative behavior can have on both physical and mental well-being. However, the actual “training program” whereby readers can learn how to institute certain rituals to change their behavior is less well-defined. Managers and other employees who have attended HR seminars may find this plan easy to use, but self-employed people and others less familiar with “training” may be unable to recognize their behavior patterns and change them.

For 25 years, Loehr and Schwartz have conducted intensive training with professional athletes to help them perform at peak levels under intense competitive pressures. They are not involved in the physical training process, however. Their intervention focuses on effective management of our most precious resource, our energy. They have found to their surprise that the performance demands most people face in their everyday work environments are often tougher than those professional athletes face. Because athletes train constantly, they are more prepared, whereas most people are in the work game 8 to 12 hours a day with little or no training at all. Most of us are constantly trying to manage time; here, the authors have instead set out a prescription for managing energy on every level: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.

You are likely to find some of yourself in one of the many case studies they provide to illustrate their techniques. Some of what they say is reminiscent of Tony Robbins’ self-help material, but without all the hype it’s easier to digest. David Siegfried

Buy The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal (Paperback)