A summary of things you should know about People Tools for Business according to Alan Fox Introduction In this episode Alan Fox gives a deep dive of his book, PeopleRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about People Tools for Business according to Alan Fox
In this episode Alan Fox gives a deep dive of his book, People Tools for Business, where he shares 50 strategies for building success, creating wealth, and finding happiness.
In his book, Fox provides easy and practical tools, organized into 50 chapters, that each address a specific issue and gives a strategy you can use to overcome it. The goal of the book is to help you gain success in areas such as developing self-confidence, improving management skills, and how to respond to being fired.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who need a handy book of business shortcuts that are time-tested and help solve everyday business related problems.
I’m not so serious about it and I have short chapters. You do not have to start at chapter one and read all the way through.
You can read it from front to back or you can jump around from chapter to chapter.
The one chapter that is really the most important I call Stick it Out. In harsh economic times you need to stick it out. If your marriage isn’t working stick it out. You have got to stick it out and ultimately you will succeed by sticking it out.
I start with the importance of leaving your grumpy attitude at home and putting a smile on your face every day.
One of my favorite chapters in People Tools for Business is called The Magic Piano. I think if you look at the world as a magic piano you will have more fun and get deeper in to life. In terms of business I have a different take than almost anybody.
In my book I go over the dreaded annual review and how I believe it shouldn’t be something that we do at the end of the year but rather every single day or at least once a week. If we change our annual review to something we do daily or weekly perhaps it won’t be something that is dreaded and more useful for you and your employees.
I also go over hiring and firing in my book. I think that if you look at firing as an opportunity to get a position which is more suited to you and your talents I believe that you will do better. A number of people that I have personally fired are now doing much better in the new positions that they are now in.
I have a chapter about advertising your mistakes. When I make a mistake I advertise it to people and people seem to like me better because I admit I am human and secondly they own up to their own mistakes.
In another chapter I talk about the importance of delegating some of your work. Delegate all that you can and trust them to do a good job because when you show your trust they are more likely to do a better job.
These are some of the many ideas and business tools that I give in my book People Tools for Business.
“There will be days when the universe seems to conspire against you and when it does take a deep breath, give silent thanks that your misfortune wasn’t worse, and enjoy a good laugh.” – Alan Fox
I am 74 years old and I’ve had a long and very successful business career. At first I was a CPA with a national CPA firm, then an attorney with my own law practice for a number of years and finally I formed a commercial real estate company at ACF Property Management Inc.
I think that you can do what you want to do and have fun while doing it. People Tools For Business is about doing things a little differently in business and enjoying yourself at the same time.
The Book by Alan Watts
Buy People Tools for Business by Alan Fox on Amazon today
Visit PeopleToolsBook.com to check out Alan’s blog
For questions contact Alan by email here
Follow Alan Fox on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel | Smartcuts by Shane Snow
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Productivity Tools For Entrepreneurs To Make Life Easier
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>7 Productivity Tools For Entrepreneurs To Make Life Easier What is the one thing that every entrepreneur wishes for? Well, you may get different sets of wishes, but one thingRead More
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]]>7 Productivity Tools For Entrepreneurs To Make Life Easier
What is the one thing that every entrepreneur wishes for? Well, you may get different sets of wishes, but one thing that is for sure is entrepreneurs need more time. When you start a new business, you have to handle numerous and tedious responsibilities on a daily basis.
Every entrepreneur needs more time in the day so that it becomes easier to manage everything and stay on top. But is it possible? It is when you add automation and handy apps to your bag of entrepreneurial tricks.
Here’s a basic list of productivity tools for entrepreneurs that will make it possible to maximize your workday:
Yast: When your focus is on saving time, you need to have a tool like this for tracking time first. Be it tracking how many hours you spend on a particular task or how much work has been put into a project, this tool makes it easy and simple.
It’s free for personal use; and available at a reasonable cost for business use.
Evernote: You never know when a “lightbulb” moment comes. This tool makes it easy to store and track spontaneous thoughts, ideas, perceptions, etc. It also helps you create a proper environment to get things done on time.
Good news – it is available for free for Android, iOS, and Web versions.
Trello: Project management often becomes a nightmare for startups. This is where this tool comes to help. With it, you can create project boards, almost same as Pinterest, and add and manage individuals and resources on them, similar to Basecamp HQ.
Whatever the size of your team, you can use this tool for free.
Dropbox: Storing and sharing documents was never this easy! The beauty of this tool lies in its simplicity. And you can access it from anywhere, anytime, and from any device. You need not worry about damaging or deleting your files too, as it keeps them secure.
You can get loads of benefits from the free version; you can upgrade to Pro or Business too.
LastPass: Cyber criminals are becoming more of a threat to our businesses and to prevent ourselves from becoming prey we need strong, secure passwords for the ungodly amount of online accounts we have. The problem is having to remember them all. LastPass saves you from having to reset your stupid password everytime and stores them with one secure login.
You can get the benefits for free; but you need to upgrade for mobile integration (which I suggest).
Bitrix24: A central program that offers a host of CRM tools for easy management of data, this one also comes with a social intranet system. Whether you are tracking contacts, messaging, managing the sales funnel, planning activities, this tool can be of immense help.
You can use it for free for teams of up to 12 people; and upgrade if your team’s larger.
HipChat: When it comes to internal communications, this is perhaps the best tool to manage it. Create chat rooms, invite specific users, message and share files – you can do it all from this. It saves both time and money and helps organize things. It is far more reliable than the other IM apps out there.
The fee for using this chat tool is quite reasonable; so, it fits the expense budget rather well.
Getting more done in 24 hours may be a challenge for a new entrepreneur, but it does not need to be if you know how to do it right. All you need to do is find the right tools for extra help, and you’ll get more work done, and even have time to spare (yeah right!).
Work Smarter by Nick Loper | Listen to Nick give a deep dive here
How To Succeed in 12 Months by Serena Star-Leonard | Listen to Serena give a deep dive here
Smartcuts by Shane Snow | Listen to Shane give a deep dive here
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland | Listen to Jeff give a deep dive here
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Scrum according to Jeff Sutherland Introduction In this episode Jeff Sutherland shares his book, Scrum, where he brings you a thought-provoking bookRead More
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Scrum according to Jeff Sutherland
In this episode Jeff Sutherland shares his book, Scrum, where he brings you a thought-provoking book about the management process that is changing the way we live.
In his book, Sutherland lays out his widely used project management system called Scrum which is a simple framework for solving the most intricate work problems effectively. The goal of the book is to simplify your work life, increase productivity, and get more done in less time than before.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling with managing small teams, increasing performance, and making forward progress with large projects.
If you go to Amazon you will see that this book has moved up to the top of the list on time management. Scrum is about getting things done with teams and teams are much more powerful than the individual.
It’s specifically not designed as a reference book but designed to tell the stories about why Scrum works. Any way you read you will find a very interesting story focused on a critical issue for teams getting work done.
The key issue is that within every person and team is a spirit of greatness that lays untapped and to tap that trying to use a traditional management style will not work. You must become a different type of leader and scrum gives you an organizational structure to bring out from the team that greatness that is within.
The first chapter of the book is titled The Way the World Works is Broken. Research shows that most people hate work. The only thing that is worse than going to work is being sick in bed. The reason I believe is the fundamental driver of this problem is that people can’t get stuff done. The whole idea of teams self-organizing to get great results is key to Scrum. So this chapter explains why things are broken and how Scrum fixes them.
That leads us into the second chapter which explains the origins of Scrum.
In the third chapter we get more focused on the teams. A lot of managers don’t understand that the difference in the best performers and the worst performers as individuals is 1 to 10. But if you look at the difference between the best teams and the worst teams it’s 1 to 2,000. So the team effect is two orders of magnitude bigger than the individual effect. So as a manager if you take a team and try to increase productivity person by person it will take you a long time and maybe forever. If you implement Scrum with a cross functional team and you focus the team on the goal they can double their production in a few weeks. This chapter focuses on how you can get teams to do twice the work in half the time.
The fourth chapter is all about time. You need to measure production instead of hours and in this chapter we show you how to plan.
Chapter five explains what happens when you are focused on measuring hours. If you measure hours you get a lot of waist. People think they have to hang around at their desk and punch their clock by doing nothing. We show systematically in this chapter how to build a cross functional team that gets on a self-improvement cycle that is continually removing waist from the system and accelerating faster and faster.
From there we move in to planning and Scrum uses reality base planning. This chapter gives the entrepreneur the nuts and bolts on how to get this implemented in the company with a lot of stories and examples the planning and implementation.
In the seventh chapter we describe how to get employees so motivated and happy that they never leave your company, they get twice the work done in half the time, they have fun while doing it and they are making sure the company objectives are being met. The bottom line is that happiness drives revenue and we show lots of stories on why that works.
Scrum in the art of getting twice the work done in half the amount of time.
“The entire armed forces need to get agile.” – Unknown
I am a CEO of a company called Scrum Inc. I had a career as a fighter pilot which is part of what led to the book we are going to talk about. I spent 11 years in the air force and what I learned flying over North Vietnam is imbedded in my book. When I got back I completed an advance degree in medical school and was a professor of radiology, biometrics and preventative medicine. I was then hired away from the medical school in to a large banking company and when I looked at what they were doing in software I implemented what I learned from medical school and the military and that resulted in the creation of Scrum.
Several years ago I wrote a book called Software in 30 days and in there we focused mainly on IT and software development. There is still a debate on what works and doesn’t work and I wanted to amplify on that. I also wanted to talk about how Scrum is moving outside of software development and tell all the great stories that I couldn’t get into my software book.
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
Buy Scrum by Jeff Sutherland on Amazon today
Visit ScrumInc.com to learn more about Jeff, his company, and Scrum
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: How To Succeed in 12 Months by Serena Star-Leonard | Getting Things Done by David Allen | Smartcuts by Shane Snow
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal Introduction In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see successRead More
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]]>Things you should know about Hooked according to Nir Eyal
In this episode, Nir Eyal shares his book Hooked where he teaches you why very few products see success and what makes consumers engage with certain products out of habit.
In his book, Eyal gives you a four-step process for figuring out exactly what you should build into your product to make it better than the rest. The goal of Hooked is to have your products bring consumers back continuously without depending on costly advertising and messaging.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are having troubles creating or getting a product to stick and need actionable steps for building products people love.
I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
If you are working on the kind of product that requires repeat engagement then you need to have what I call the complete hook, a four step process to creating customer habits. However, even If you are building a one-time use service there is still a lot that you can learn from consumer psychology by understanding these deeper reasons that people do what they do and I believe you can get the outline of that by jumping in and out of the book. I really hope that the reader gets to the end because I believe that there is a lot here that can help people save a lot of time and energy in building their businesses.
The one principle I would want the reader to take out of the book is that your behavior is designed.
The book follows this model that I call The Hook which is basically a design pattern. It’s something that I found in my years of research that is in all sorts of habit forming products. So my research revealed this four step process which I detail throughout the chapters of the book.
The first step in The Hook is The Trigger phase. The trigger phase is something that cues the user to action; it’s what prompts the habit. These triggers come in two types, internal triggers and external triggers. External triggers are things in our environment that tells us what to do next. This is what most people think of when they think about cues to action. Internal triggers are these things that prompt the user to action and there information for what to do next is actually in the users head. So what people do when they are in a particular situation, routine or when they feel certain emotions this dictates what they do next. If your company can attach to these negative emotions, this is where habits are formed. It’s absolutely critical that if you want to build a habit forming product you have to figure out what that internal trigger is.
The next step of The Hook is The Action phase. The action phase is the simplest behavior that the user does in anticipation of a reward. If you can make a behavior easier to do you are more likely to get that behavior to occur.
Then the next chapter is about variable rewards. It turns out that at the heart of all sorts of habit forming products you will find a variable reward. I details three critical types of variable rewards found in all sorts of habit forming products both online and offline.
Finally, the last step of The Hook is The Investment phase. It’s the part of the hook that I find most companies neglect as well as where there is the most room for growth and opportunity. It turns out that this phase is absolutely critical in bringing users back and it’d defined as the step where the user does a bit of work to increase the likelihood of them returning. I detail how you can ask people to invest in the product so that they can come back in the future whereas the product gets better the more it gets used.
At the end of the book I give some case studies and I profile an app that’s one of the most successful apps in the world, the bible app and I detail how this app uses the principles of consumer psychology to keep people coming back to use it. I also talk about the morality of manipulation, that if you’re using consumer psychology to change people’s behavior, I offer up a guide for how to use this responsibly.
“Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will.” –Matt Mullenweg
I’ve started two tech companies and after my last company was acquired I dove into the more academic side of consumer psychology and habit formation which is what I’ve been working on for the past three years.
I was at my last company and was banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my customers weren’t doing the behaviors that I designed for them to do. I wanted to dive deeper into consumer psychology, into the things that people are not able to necessarily articulate and yet predictably drive their behavior. So I couldn’t find that book out there that told me what resources and tools I could use to figure out what I should build into my product.
Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham
Buy Hooked on Amazon today
Visit HookModel.com for bundles of content
Visit NirAndFar.com to read Nir’s personal blog
Follow Nir Eyal on Facebook and Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg | Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Smartcuts according to Shane Snow: Introduction In this episode Shane Snow shares his book Smartcuts where he shows you how hackers, innovators,Read More
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]]>In this episode Shane Snow shares his book Smartcuts where he shows you how hackers, innovators, and icons accelerate success.
In his book, Snow teaches you how you can do more than you are doing and do it faster than you think by thinking about things smarter. He also explains how you can find the business secrets to shorten your path to success in real life and divides the book into three main sections of how this happens based on hundreds of interviews with incredible people.
This book is perfect for the entrepreneur who has the motivation to be super successful but wants to accomplish ideas at a faster pace.
I focus on speed and not just success. I focus on the patterns that make for breakthroughs throughout history.
It moves quickly so I would recommend reading it front to back.
The one message that I want to get across is that any of us can do more than we are doing and do it faster than we think by thinking about things smarter.
I start the book with the story of how when I was in undergrad my roommate beat the world record for Super Mario Brothers by using the secret ways to shorten the game. I explain how we can find these secrets ways to shorten our own paths to success in real life. I divide the book into three main sections of how this happens based on hundreds of interviews with incredible people of our day and academic research of that I call myths of success. The three sections of Smartcuts are shortened, leverage and soar.
Shortening is about what phycologists call lateral thinking which is when you are given a problem and instead of attacking it head-on, you attack it sideways. Another myth of success is about mentorship. We are told it’s not what you know; it’s who you know that helps you accelerate your success. Research shows that half, if not most of the time, mentorship does not help the mentee at all. This chapter is particularly important for entrepreneurs who are starting from the ground floor who want to learn from master teachers but do it the right way. I talk about the myth of the fail fast, fail often that we hear about in the startup cycle. I explain how heart surgeons who fail don’t get better but the ones who watch their colleagues fail get better at a significate rate. I explain how you can make the idea of failure and feedback work for your business rather than it putting you back at square one.
The second section of the book I talk about leverage. Leverage is about how people who have done great things in their businesses work just as hard as everyone else but they work the smart way by finding ways to amplify their work. The way the world gets changed is not when you do less work but when you amplify your work so that you can do more to accomplish more. In these chapters I talk about how platforms and technologies can help accelerate your learning. I talk about how kids should learn calculators earlier than they learn times tables by hand because the one who do get better at the fundamentals of math faster. I explore the idea of first mover advantage, the myths around that and how the analogy of catching waves in a surfing competition maps to pattern recognition for business owners and how they can spot opportunities and markets. I also talk about something that is dear to my heart which is called super connectors. These are people, businesses and groups that can unlock the trust of large groups of people and help amplify your message when you are trying to market yourself or cause.
The third section of the book is called Soar and is about swinging big and playing at a professional level. I talk about how there is this common myth of waiting for luck to strike. In the final two chapters I talk about radical simplicity, how world class products, businesses, and thinkers manage to simplify what is going on in their markets and companies to focus on the things that will get them much more bang for their buck. And the final chapters is about 10x thinking which is about the concept whether to set realistic goals or should you set goals that you might not hit but shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll hit the stars. It turns out that the shooting the moon concept has a lot of merit to it.
In this book everything is about my curiosity, about how people did it and the counterintuitive ways that the best of the best accelerate their success.
“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” – Dr. Seuss
I grew up in Idaho and live in New York City now. I first studied computer science and became a web entrepreneur and then I moved over to journalism. I moved to New York to be a journalist with a dream of writing for Wired Magazine and writing about Tech got me to start my own tech startup.
I was fascinated by people and businesses that seemed to beat expectations. As an entrepreneur myself I was curious how they did it and was looking for the patterns.
The Autobiography of Ben Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
Buy Smartcuts by Shane Snow on Amazon today
Visit ShaneSnow.com to learn more about Shane and his book
Follow Shane Snow on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: People Tools for Business by Alan Fox | Work Smarter by Nick Loper | Getting Things Done by David Allen
Relevant advice and tips: 7 Productivity Tools For Entrepreneurs To Make Life Easier
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Smartcuts with Shane Snow appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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