Michael E. Gerber I believe most people in small business know author Michael E. Gerber.  Michael has written a new book entitled, “The Most Successful Small Business in the World: The Ten Principles“.  Michael is a fascinating and dynamic man, not to mention a prolific writer.

In his 70’s Michael still travels the world speaking his message with great passion and zest for life.  In my interview we explore one of his new ventures entitled “Origination‘”.  I would highly recommend that you click on the link and watch his compelling video.  I am not someone to watch a 20 minute video on the Internet, but this video was quite compelling and intrigued me enough to learn more about what Michael is up too.

Michael reveals in “The Most Successful Small Business in the World: The Ten Principles” is a must read for any person in business.  Gerber’s ten principles will help you to break out of the vicious cycle before it starts in your new business. He’ll help you to embrace the energy of exploration with a road map for taking your vision beyond the obvious.  Only then can you build a company that provides continuous fulfillment and personal growth, and can expand the income, services and positive contribution to your employees and community.

Gerber’s ten principles will help you to: 1) identify your company’s essential “system”–its highly differentiated way of doing business that will be the cornerstone of your success.  2) Build a business of great imagination;a self-reliant “reach” that will create economic certainty in any climate. 3) Create a center of growth and learning for your employees, that will in turn develop you business beyond any standard that formerly existed. 4) Instill a higher purpose that can move yourself, your business, and your customers to greater levels of fulfillment and growth.

If you are looking for a truly different business book with wisdom, guidance and simple formulas for success—then you have landed on the right book.  Please visit Micheal’s website by clicking here for more video, audio, radio shows and more.

The website is beautiful and loaded with great free content. Enjoy this lively interview with a true master at small business,  Michael E. Gerber.

Robin Sharma What a wonderful interview with a fascinating man and prolific author.  Robin Sharma has just released his new book entitled, “The Leader Who Had No Title”.

This is a fable in which Robin eloquently weaves into the storyline the advice of a character by the name of Tommy Flinn to our main character Blake Davis about important lessons in life and leadership.  Robin’s message of “The Leader Who Had No Title” is very timely considering the major challenges our world is facing, and many examples we can pluck out of the news about leaders who have fallen from their so called thrones due to indiscretions or lack of integrity.

Robins main message revolves around the fact that everyone is a leader, we all have roles of leadership at work, home and or community.   We need not play down our roles as leaders but embrace the good that we do as a result of our leadership roles.  Robin tells that that we have just entered what he calls, “The Decade of Leadership”.  Leadership has become democratized, we don’t have to be executives to be leaders.

Robin articulates what he refers to as nine smart moves you can make today to start changing the game and create exceptional results:

1)    Remember You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader

2)    Shift form Victimhood to Leadership

3)    Innovate or Stagnate

4)    Become a Value Creator Versus a Clock Watcher

5)    Put People First

6)    Remember that Tough Times Build Strong Leaders

7)    Go to Your Limits

8)    Leader Yourself First

9)    Give Back a Legacy.

I highly recommend this great fable with a wonderful message about how we are all leaders, and we are now living in a age where we all need to step up and become leaders in our own right.  This book is loaded with wonderful advice and practical actions we can take to become the best leaders we are capable of.

Please go to Robin’s website which has loads of video and reference material by clicking here.  Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Robin’s new book by clicking on any of the links in this blog entry.

Enjoy this wonderful interview.

Cameron C. TaylorI thoroughly enjoyed my interview with Cameron Taylor the author of, “8 Attributes of Great Achievers”.  Cameron has studied the lives of hundreds of great achievers, and he found that each have possessed or currently possess certain attributes that are foundational to their great achievement.

 

In this podcast with Cameron we discuss the eight attributes of these great men such as Franklin, Churchill, Gandhi and many others.

 

 

Cameron has identified the attributes to be:

  1. Responsibility
  2. Creator
  3. Independent
  4. Humble
  5. Honest
  6. Optimistic
  7. Vision
  8. Persistence

This book has been written to help you develop the character attributes that lead to great achievement.  The author notes that in Jim Collins book,”Good to Great”, that they discovered that the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge or work experience.

This being the case, it is more important to work on your character development and less on your skills.  There is a saying that echos the importance of character, and it is,
” Hire for attitude and train for skills”. You can always train someone, but you can not always find someone with the character and attitude you would like to have for the position.

The great thing about this book is that it is a quick read, and it is a real reminder of what is important in life.  He also has written several other books, and I recommend that you visit his website to learn more about Cameron and his other publications.  You can click here to be directed to his website.  Enjoy our interview!

Glenn Llopis I had the personal pleasure of attending the Innovation and Humanities Summit in Orange, CA hosted by Glenn Llopis the author of Earning Serendipity.   I can personally vouch for the fact that this author is a man on a mission.  The program assembled some of the most incredible thought leaders of our time, and author Glenn Llopis is to be included in this esteemed crowd.

In my interview with Glenn we discuss his new book entitled, “Earning Serendipity“, which is about how you can claim your control over your prosperity.  As Glenn states, progression along the path is the result of a rare combination of skills that you can develop and apply in your career, business and life.

The four skills that we discuss are:

  • Seeing with circular vision: Which is the ability to broaden your observation beyond what you seek and beyond the obvious details before you, and enlarge your field of opportunities.
  • Sowing Entrepreneurial Seeds: When good vision is met with consistent, hand-dirtying execution every day, the result is a stable, growing fortune;focus on proper timing and proper depth.
  • Growing Seeds of Greatest Potential: This is when we learn how to recognize the most promising opportunities and give them the right amount of attention; don’t let the best opportunities wilt and don’t waste energy on opportunities with limited potential.
  • Sharing the Harvest: When you focus on meeting others’ needs to improve personal good fortune; make generosity part of your purpose, an integral part of the DNA of your career or company.

If you would like to learn more about Glenn and this great personal growth and mastery book, “Earning Serendipity“, than I recommend that you visit his website by clicking here.

Glenn’s website is rich with resources and videos to help the reader learn more.  You can also take his Workplace Serendipity Quiz the results of which will determine your propensity for creating and sustaining good fortune in your life.

Michael LinenbergerIf you are feeling overworked and stressed out these days, then join the crowd.  Most white collar workers are attempting to figure out how to manage the besiege of email, voice mail, text messaging, and just keep up.  For the most part we are not doing a very good job of it.

If you want to learn more about mastering your work day, then I encourage you to listen to my interview with Michael Linenberger the author of a new book entitled, “Master Your Workday Now!”.  Michael has developed proven strategies to control the chaos and create outcomes, and connect your work to who you really are.

In my interview with Michael we discuss the proven strategies such as his simple Now Task List.  This wonderful idea does more than just prioritize your to-dos, it provides a system for breaking them down into three simple sections: Critical Now, Opportunity Now and Over the Horizon.

Michael’s  system of getting your Workday mastered revolves around a simple pyramid which at the foundation is control, then moves to create and at the top of the pyramid is connect. He wants people to get control of the workday by managing their urgency zones. Once this is mastered you create your outcomes by using Now Goals and Goal Activation.  Then you move on to connecting your work with who you really are.

His program is easy to understand and he connects all of techniques to Microsoft Outlook if you are using this desktop manager.  As many of you are aware with the massive amounts of data that we are responsible for managing, it is almost impossible to do it without some type of software system.

But, just in case you are not using a computer to manage your contacts, information, etc.,  Michael’s system will work without Outlook or any other desktop manager for that matter.

I highly recommend “Master Your Workday Now!”. If you want to take back control of your day, and all of the to-do’s that are keeping you from really focusing on the most important aspects of your life then read Michael’s book and practice his mastery techniques.

You can get more information at Michael’s website by clicking here.

Tracey Jones

I was recently introduced to Tracey Jones the daughter of Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.  Charlie recently passed away, and Tracey has taken over the publishing business which is now called Tremendous Life Books.  It was a pleasure doing this podcast with Tracey and learning what it was like to be the daughter of such an icon in the speaking and motivation business.

If you have never read a Charlie “Tremendous” Jones book, I can highly recommend one of his greats, ” Life is Tremendous”.   In my interview with Tracey we speak about the simple yet valuable lessons that Charlie was always teaching as he would speak and meet with his audiences.  His passion for life was contagious, and he always had a way of helping one see life from a positive and different perspective.  As Charlie says in the front of his book ” Life is Tremendous! It really is.  You can be happy, involved, relevant, productive, healthy and secure in the midst of this high pressure, commercialized, automated, pill-prone society.  It’s not easy nor automatic, but it’s possible through the development of certain personal qualities which make up the traits of leadership.  And you can be a leader, because leaders are made, not born.

Tracy and I speak about the Seven Laws of Leadership that Charlie so passionately spoke about for so many years. The Seven Saws of Leadership are: 1) Learning to get Excited About Your Work 2) Use or Lose 3) Production or Perfection 4) Give or Get 5) Exposure or Experience 6) Flexible Planning 7) Motivated to Motivating.

Please enjoy my interview with Tracey as we explore her father’s work, and how the passion for what he started has transferred a generation to Tracey as she carries on the Jones legacy through Tremendous Life Books.

If you would like to learn more about the book titles that Tremendous Life Books has published please click here to access the Tremendous Life Book website.  I know you will enjoy this interview with Tracey Jones.

Elizabeth WageleMy interview with Elizabeth Wagele the author of, “The Career Within You“, focuses on a tool called the Enneagram designed to assist the you in finding the correct career path .

Elizabeth states that more than ever people are considering new careers-but deciding on a new career path can be daunting.  How does one determine what the correct path to fit their personality type?

This practical yet-fun career guide employs the Enneagram Personality Assessment System to help you find a career specifically tailored to your specific type by offering a quiz designed to identify your type, and thus, the best career path for you.

If you are not aware of the Enneagram Personality Assessment Tool, it segments individuals into the following types: perfectionist, helper, achiever, romantic, observer, questioner, adventurer, asserter and peace seeker.

The book provides a easy to take quiz that will assist you in identifying your career type.  Once you have completed this quiz you can reference your specific personality type to learn more about career matches that fit for you.

So if you are on a new career path, and are interested in learning about a fascinating and accurate tool to assist you in determining what might just be the correct career path for you, then read ” The Career Within You“.  This book is for anyone who is questioning their existing career and looking to find more meaningful work, or the new college graduate who is seeking his or her first job.  I know you will find the information to be quite useful as well as easy to follow and read.   Elizabeth also has a website that has many resources for the reader.

If you are interested in learning more or taking the free career within you quiz then click here .  Enjoy my interview with Elizabeth Wagele, and I hope you understand more about your personality after listening to this very knowledgeable author on the subject of the Enneagram Personality Assessment System.

Jeff KleinI had the wonderful opportunity of meeting Jeff Klein at the recent Innovation and Humanities Conference in Orange, CA.  It was an inspiring to hear him speak,  and I was very impressed by his message and passionate delivery.  I subsequently have had several deep dialogues with Jeff and feel honored to know a man who’s mission is to help shift how we think about our work.

Jeff starts the preface of his book with a wonderful quote from Kahlil Gibran, “Work is love made visible”, and there could be nothing more true.   “Working for Good” has been written to support any conscious entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, leaders, and change agents at work who truly want to make a difference while making a living.

Jeff refers to as the essential skills of working for good as 1) awareness 2) embodiment 3) connection 4) collaboration 5) integration.  The combination of these five skills forms an integrated Working for Good system.

While each skill is connected and informs the other, there is a progression of development and application from awareness to embodiment, connection, collaboration and integration.  Awareness asks questions that seek to penetrate, to get behind facades and into the depth.  What’s going on here?

Connection begins with cultivation awareness–connecting with ourselves and working with our minds and hearts–and emerges as we carry awareness into embodiment, into action with our bodies.

Collaboration leads to integration and completes the full circle of the Working for Good system.  Integration is the dynamic process of combining various elements into a new whole that has its own presence and integrity.

Jeff Klein is truly a thought leader with a unique message, attempting people to understand that they have the abilities to apply new skills and passion to do good, and make a big difference through the work that they choose to do, no matter what the work.   As Jeff says,  “Awareness is the first step to becoming a more conscious leader, and with this first step we can all create work with a purpose focused in doing good in and for the world”.

I encourage everyone to not only read Jeff’s new book, “Working for Good“,  but to practice the exercises at the end of each chapter.  Jeff’s website is awesome and loaded with content, videos and downloads.  I highly recommend that you download the  26 principles of working for good.

Do yourself a favor and listen to this great podcast with truly a wonderful thought leader, then go to his website by clicking here and watch a couple of his video’s.  Enjoy this podcast–and start your practice of Working for Good.