Posted by: AtlasMD

December 10, 2014

Recommended Reading: The SPEED of Trust

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. We’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: The SPEED of Trust.

Stephen M.R. Covey shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients and, employees—is essential to a successful organization.

With nearly 750,000 copies in print, this instant classic shows that establishing trust is “the one thing that changes everything” (Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths) in both business and life.

Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees, and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time–killing, bureaucratic check–and–balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

BUY THE SPEED OF TRUST >

Posted by: AtlasMD

November 26, 2014

Recommended Reading: The Power of Habit

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. We’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: The Power of Habit.

In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.

Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.

At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.

Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.

BUY THE POWER OF HABIT >

Posted by: AtlasMD

November 17, 2014

Recommended Reading: The Checklist Manifesto

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. We’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: The Checklist Manifesto.

In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.

The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a compelling argument that we can do better, using the simplest of methods: the checklist. In riveting stories, he reveals what checklists can do, what they can’t, and how they could bring about striking improvements in a variety of fields, from medicine and disaster recovery to professions and businesses of all kinds. And the insights are making a difference. Already, a simple surgical checklist from the World Health Organization designed by following the ideas described here has been adopted in more than twenty countries as a standard for care and has been heralded as “the biggest clinical invention in thirty years” (The Independent).

BUY THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO >

Posted by: AtlasMD

October 23, 2014

Recommended Reading: The Tipping Point

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. We’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: The Tipping Point.

The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

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Posted by: AtlasMD

October 2, 2014

Recommended Reading: Atlas Shrugged

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. Well, we’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. 

In our opinion, Atlas Shrugged should have a home on every bookshelf ever made.

With adoring fans, rabid critics and very few in between, why does Atlas Shrugged evoke such impassioned responses? Because it grapples with the fundamental problems of human existence — and presents radically new answers.

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s last novel, is a dramatization of her unique vision of existence and of man’s highest potential. Twelve years in the writing, it is her masterwork.

Is the pursuit of profit a noble enterprise or the root of all evil? Is sexual passion an exalted spiritual virtue or a dirty, animalistic vice? Is reason an absolute or is faith an alternative source of truth? Is self-esteem possible or are we consigned to a life of self-doubt and guilt? In what kind of society can an individual prosper, and in what kind of society is he doomed to the opposite fate?

Rand’s worldview emerges in the compelling plot turns of a mystery story, centered on the question “Who is John Galt?”

READ MORE ABOUT ATLAS SHRUGGED >

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Posted by: AtlasMD

September 16, 2014

Recommended Reading: Charles Koch’s “The Science of Success.”

We often get asked for recommended reading lists. Well, we’re delivering! These weekly posts feature one book we highly recommend to learn more about business, philosophy, and different perspectives to help you run your business. Do you have a recommendation that’s not on the list yet? Mention it in the comments!

This Week’s Recommendation: Charles Koch’s “The Science of Success.”

“Successful companies create value by providing products or services their customers value more highly than available alternatives. They do this while consuming fewer resources, leaving more resources available to satisfy other needs in society. Value creation involves making people’s lives better. It is contributing to prosperity in society.”

What is behind the success of Koch companies? It is Charles Koch’s unique and transformative business philosophy, Market-Based Management®.

Developed by Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive officer of Koch Industries, Inc., MBM® is defined as a philosophy that enables organizations to succeed long term by applying the principles that allow free societies to prosper.

As MBM became the foundation upon which Koch companies grew, the challenge of sharing it internally and externally led to the creation of “The Science of Success.” To learn more, click here.

In the book, Mr. Koch presents the evolution of Koch Industries and the “Science of Human Action” upon which MBM is based. He also provides a systematic view of MBM at work within Koch companies by outlining five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.