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So I have not posted in a long time and need to get back in the habit.  Anyway I just finished listening to the book “The speed of trust” by Stephen M R Covey.  It was a short 75 minutes long.  It was a great book talking about how business runs faster and your own success happens faster if there are high levels of trust in your life.  I have worked at companies that don’t have high levels of trust between executives and workers and it really slows things down.  He talks about how you can measure and improve your trust with others.  I think that so often people let too many things “slide” in the work environment and this hurts your trust levels with others.  Anyway it is a great book and worth the read.

As some of you know I attended Woodbadge training with the Boy Scouts last June.  The main focus of this is to come out of the training with a set of goals (tickets) that you work on over the next 6-12 months.  One of my goals was to read more and I set a goal to read 12 books.  Some business, some religious/inspirational, and some just for fun.  I completed this goal months ago but here is the list of some of the books I read over the last year.

• Legacy of Honor -  a book about famous Eagle scouts and how it helped them.  A great book that all scout leaders and scouts should read.
• Permission Marketing – An old standard from Seth Godin that I had never got around to reading.  Great book.
• Edge of Physics – Pretty good book about what is happening today in physics.  Some crazy stuff.  It got a bit long and I had a hard time finishing it.
• Viral loop – Great book on social networking and what virality is.  I wish it had focused more on social business than on promoting yourself.
• The tipping point -  Again I was a bit late to read this but it is an excellent book and I highly suggest it to anyone.
• The lightning thief (several of my young men and my daughter were reading this)  I loved the book and hated all the changes the made to the movie.  Read the book and skip the movie.
• How to survive the end of the world as we know it – I have been on a survival/preparedness kick the last few months.  This is a great book but gets into the nuts and bolts (or should I say bullets) a bit too much.
• The Mormon way of doing business – This is the best book I have read this year.  Every Mormon in business should read this and I am encouraging any young man who is preparing to go on a mission to read it.  My son loved it.  A must read!
• The road – Fictional end of the world story (now a movie).  My brother-in-law Jeff suggested it to me.  It was not helpful in actually preparing to survive any real problems and was a bit gory.
• Getting things done – Another book I have always wanted to read.  Great book everyone should read.
• The lost symbol – I am just a fan of this series.  It is a fun read.
• Super freakonomics – I love everything about this book.  Everyone should read it.  Also subsribe to their podcast it is great as well.
• 33 million people in the room – Another social networking book.  Again it focuses on promoting yourself and not a business
• Series of 3 star wars books – Fate of the Jedi.  I love my Star Wars!  Not the best I have read but it was pretty good.
• Square foot gardening.  I planted my garden this way this year.  Here is a photo of it about a month ago.  It is looking great.  A great way to garden if you need it to be easy (like me).
• Several canning books – Canned a batch of jam already using home made pectin that I made from apples.  I plan on doing a bunch of canning this year.  Including some meats.
• You on a diet (lost 25 pounds between february and may).  Great book.
• Patriots – An “end of the world” book written by a survivalist.  Of course they had an amazing setup with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment and supplies and live off them for 5 years.  Kind of a paranoid view of a worst case scenario but worth a read if you like this stuff.
  
• One second after - An excellent “end of the world” survival book about a small town after an EMP kills anything with electronic circuits in the US.  I enjoyed this book very much and it did have useful info to improve your preparedness.

Let me know if you you have any questions about any of these books or want to borrow them.  Some I read and some I listened to with my Audible subscription.  I am currently listening to the book “The Passage”.

Anyone that knows me knows that I LOVE my iPhone. I use it for everything and have 7 screens of applications installed. Many are free and quite a few are applications I paid for. But this last weekend I wanted to try the Kindle on the iPhone from Amazon. After all the app is FREE so I had to try it.

First off I do NOT have a Kindle and have never had the chance to try one. I have read several short ebooks on my computer and found it to not work very well for me. Part of it is that I sit in front of my laptop all day (and often late into the night) for work. The idea of reading a book there as well during my free time just does not appeal to me. Also I find the screen to bright and it strains my eyes. I can stare at the screen for 10-12 hours but even I have my limits .

The Kindle app for the iphone intrigued me for several reasons. One is the portability. The idea of always having something in my pocket to read is great. I already have plenty to read on my iphone. I do about half of my time on Facebook from my iphone. Also I read many blogs (like the lifehacker blog from their app) and news (like the USA today and Digg). Plus all my email accounts! But sometimes I want to curl up with a good book. Usually about technology, marketing, church stuff, or sci-fi / fantasy.

The second thing that I thought I would like is the actual presentation on the screen. The lines are short because of the size of the iphone screen. I have not officially taken any speed reading courses (not since 6^th grade at Delta Middle School) but I do know that you should try to read 4-6 words at once and the iphone screen size seemed perfect for this. (My next quest is for a good speed reading course).

So on Friday night in bed I downloaded the kindle application. It took about 15 seconds. I thought it would come with some type of free content or book but it did not. But it had a link to Amazon.com to get a book. I did not want to buy an actual kindle book to test this out but I did find several free books. I navigated the Amazon easily on my Safari browser and “purchased” the free book on the iphone. By the time I could fire up the Kindle app my new book was already there. A fantasy book called the “Assassin’s Apprentice” by Robin Hobbs. I barely read the description of the book before downloading it just because I was conducting a test.

I am now on chapter 20 of the book and on page 5339. Obviously the pages are much smaller . The experience of reading this book on the iphone has exceeded my expectations. I find it very easy to read. There is no vertical scrolling of any page. Just flip the page to the left or right like a real book. Be it a book that is 3”x4” and has 9000 pages! I have spent about 5 hours over the weekend on the book and found that it has not strained my eyes at all. I read in the car, waiting for a movie to start in the theater, waiting for my food at sizzler, and in my back yard. Plus I think the for factor of the pages has helped me to increase my reading speed.

An added bonus has been that I have really enjoyed the book! It is great and has really sucked me in. I like her story and the world she has created for this series of books. Yes it is a great marketing ploy by Amazon to give away the first book in several series to hook you into reading the rest. It will probably work for me. I love the long series of escapism literature.

Overall I give the kindle for iphone app and overall experience of 5 out of 5. It makes me wonder if I would like a Kindle. I probably would but will never fork out the cash to buy one. Why should I when I have my iphone!

How to win business and influence friends.  I recently finished the book “Love is the killer app” by Tim Sanders.  This is on Paul Allen’s must read list and I have wanted to read it for a long time.  I actually finished all but the last few chapters about 3 months ago.  But I finally pulled it out again and finished it up.  I can see why it is one of Paul’s favorites.  I want to summarize his ideas and provide a few of my own.

He breaks the book into a few major sections: Knowledge, network, and compassion.  The step in sharing you love in the business world you have to have a foundation of a TON of business knowledge.  There is no better place to gain this knowledge than to read a ton of business books.  He has a whole system for this including reading with a pencil and writing down every one of your ideas in the margins of the book.  Then after each chapter you write a short summary in the blank pages at the back of the book.  Stuff to refresh your memory later on if you need to look something up.  He has 4 steps to really learn the information in a book aggregation, encoding, processing, and application.  I can say that the next book I read I will do as Tim suggests.  It just makes sense.

Next he says you have to build your network.  Not just of business contacts but of real friends.  These are the people you will help with all the knowledge you gain.  He also believes in sharing contacts and hooking people up with other people in your network.  Paul is a great example of this.  He has a very large network and uses it to get business done.  Not just for himself but for others as well.  This book was written in 2002 just as LinkedIn and other social sites and tools were just taking off.  I am sure he would suggest using these new tools today.

Last is to use compassion in the business palace.  This is such a 180 from how most people see business working.  Share, teach, and love others and eventually they will do the same back. I think that this may be true.  But what is true for sure is that if you love others in business it will make life so much better!  Feel better about yourself and gain a reputation of a knowledgeable, kind business person.  That is the place to be.

The only problem with reading this book is I can’t help but think of all the times I did not share when I could have, or did not care when I should have.  This book has changed the way I see business and will work in business the rest of my life. I completely suggest reading this great book!

Just a few thoughts from me.  First of all I think that these principles are already used in volunteer organizations (like the LDS church).  Everyone wants everyone else to succeed, and everyone shares their knowledge and skills.  It only makes sense this would work in business.  Also with the recent surge in social networks and applications it is easier than ever to build your network and keep in contact with large amounts of people.  Tools like blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed all fit into this philosophy very well.  This book today should be called “Love is the killer social network” because that is what it is (or could be).

I will close this post with Tim’s last paragraph in the book “Why do we have to wait for these moments? Why is it only during peak experiences that we offer the love? Why does it take a championship season to show emotion? Why not reach inside ourselves and, whenever and, whenever we have an appropriate urge, tap in to that love and express it. It can make a wonderful world of difference to you and to
everyone around you.”

Next books on the list “Influence, the psychology of persuasion” and “Actionable Web Analytics”.  When I am done I would be happy to share the knowledge

I just finished reading the book “All Marketers Are Liars” by Seth Godin. I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it. I am a bit embarrassed to say this, but this is the first Seth Godin gook I have read. My sister-in-law, Jill Piacitelli, gave it to me for Christmas. Jill is a big fan of his. She was invited to his big conference because he liked the non-profit she heads up. She is the national director of Alternative Breaks. I guess that for each of his conferences he invites one non-profit to attend for free.

Here is the description from Amazon on the book:
“Every marketer tells a story. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche Cayenne is vastly superior to a $36,000 VW Touareg, which is virtually the same car. We believe that $225 Pumas will make our feet feel better-and look cooler-than $20 no-names . . . and believing it makes it true.

Successful marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story. A story we want to believe.

This is a book about doing what consumers demand-painting vivid pictures that they choose to believe. Every organization-from nonprofits to car companies, from political campaigns to wineglass blowers-must understand that the rules have changed (again). In an economy where the richest have an infinite number of choices (and no time to make them), every organization is a marketer and all marketing is about telling stories.

Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner or the iPod.

But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers and Marlboro.

This is a powerful book for anyone who wants to create things people truly want as opposed to commodities that people merely need.”

I really like how the book explains that when people are marketed to they put your message in their own “World View”. And to market effectively you have to target their world view to make it effective. It is a simple idea but really makes sense. He lists many examples to prove his points and to back up his claims. Many marketing books do not do this. The end of the book was a bit “slow”. But over all, this is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

Jill also gave me his book “The big moo”. I would also like to read “Permission Marketing”. I know that this book is a business standard and I need to get my hands on a copy.