Prolific author Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? is a powerful wake-up call to everyone stuck in the status-quo our society has created.

The core of Linchpin revolves around how you can be indispensable and why this is so desperately needed. As an employee you don’t want to be easily replaced. As a business owner, you want your product or service to be essential to your customers.

Status Quo

Godin outlines how our modern day society is the product of the industrial revolution and an educational infrastructure that produces factory workers. Factory workers don’t just work on an assembly line, they are in almost every job you can imagine today, even “white collar” jobs. People are just cogs in a machine.

The old system where you did your time, worked for your company, and then were taken care of later in life are over. In order to survive in the new reality, you need to be indispensable.

Becoming Indispensable

How do you become indispensable? Godin argues that you need to be an artist. Create something meaningful and unique. Be someone that doesn’t follow the established rules. Connect the dots of ideas and concepts that others are missing. Work on something that matters rather than just for money.

Being indispensable is knowing what to work on next without having to be told what that is.

The first part of Linchpin focuses around the employee and how she is essentially trapped in a system that doesn’t have her best interest in mind. The rest of the book outlines how to break free of this system and evolve to someone that is indispensable as an employee, entrepreneur, business owner, or whatever you want to be.

Recommendation: Read this Book

Seth Godin’s Linchpin really resonated with me as it calls out what seems so wrong with our current society and educational system. For us and our kids to be truly successful and happy long-term, we can’t rely on the antiquated system of yesterday, we must become linchpins.

This book is inspiring and compelling in its calls to action. You will want to make changes to your life after reading this book.

You can buy Linchpin on Amazon.com

The founders of 37signals, a company that makes web-based applications for small businesses, have compiled their years of wisdom and lessons learned in their book Rework.

Authors Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson have very strong opinions about how businesses should be run. Their ideas run counter to the conventional wisdom and that is exactly why you need to pay attention.

37signals has previously put out two very good books, Defensive Design for the Web and Getting Real. These two previous works were more focused on building websites or web applications. However, Rework is broader in its appeal and relevance.

Rework is a collection of essays that are applicable to any business, business owner, and even those working as employees.

If you’re familiar with the 37signals blog or have seen either of the authors present at a conference, many of the concepts in the book will be familiar. However, Rework consolidates all these nuggets of wisdom in one place so you don’t have to dig through blog or video archives to extract the principles for your business.

In addition to the insightful and thought provoking essays, the book is full of great illustrations that help visually convey the powerful message each essay contains.

Some of my favorite essays in the book include:

Scratch your own itch – if you build a product or service for yourself, you’ll best know what it needs versus having to guess what your target market wants

Less mass – cut free from the long-term contracts, debt, and other commitments that reduce your ability to change and react quickly

Focus on what won’t change – don’t chase after the latest and greatest fade, stick to the customer care-abouts that don’t change over time

Sell your by-products – in the process of doing your job, you create something, even if it is knowledge that you can share with others

Good enough is fine – quit polishing your product endlessly before launching it to the public, the sooner it is out there the sooner you can sell it and learn from it

Don’t copy – copying your competition is a losing game, you are always playing catch-up

Put everyone on the front lines – when everyone at the company knows the needs, care-abouts, and frustrations of the customer, then you can best serve customers

Decisions are temporary – you can always change your mind later and that is fine

Recommendation: Read This Book

Rework will make you rethink a lot of what you assume is the standard way to do business and work. The essays are short, concise, and to the point. There is no fluff to bore you or distract you from finishing the book.

Read the book and see how you can take the principles you’ll learn and shake up how you work for the better.

You can buy Rework on Amazon.com

How will you know if your business and marketing efforts are really working? You’ll need to try different things and measure the results.

Testing is fundamental to improving your efficiency and business. Without trying new methods, formats, processes, or messages, you’ll never know if you can do better than you are today.

The book Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer by authors Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar focuses on how you can improve your website.

Website Optimizer?

While the book does have some step-by-step on how to use Google’s free tool, Website Optimizer, the majority of this book is focused on why it is important to test and what you should be testing.

Even if you decide to use Google’s tool, the principles in this book will help you refine your online efforts to better meet your customer and business needs.

Examples

Always Be Testing offers multiple examples of before and after websites and the results that came through testing different website elements.

If you’ve read the essential Call to Action book from the Eisenberg brothers, many of the concepts in this book will be familiar.

This book will help you better understand the mindset of online visitors to your website and how you can effectively persuade them to take the action you need.

What to Test

A large part of this book is dedicated to giving you ideas of what exactly you should test on your website. This includes exercises and questions you can go through in evaluating your own website. If you ever wondered what you should experiment with on your site, this book will give you plenty of ideas.

Recommendation: Use This Book

If you have a website and hope to get anything out of it, you need to read and apply the principles in this book. By continually testing your site, you can refine and optimize it to get the results you want.

This book will not only show you how to test your website but give you specific areas that you should evaluate. It is a great guide to improving your site and reaching your company’s goals.

You can buy the Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer on Amazon.com

If you aren’t familiar with Gary Vaynerchuck, his latest book Crush It! will introduce you to why he is such a sought-after speaker, consultant, and inspirational figure.

Gary’s enthusiasm is contagious and nothing short of inspiring.

Passion

Crush It! centers around pursuing your passion and how that can lead to financial success. Gary outlines his journey as an entrepreneur and discusses how you, too, can chase your personal interests and build your personal brand as a viable lifestyle.

Personal Brand

Granted, the slant of this book is to prepare you to do your own thing, leave your job, and live your passion. However, the author has very important points about building your personal brand. This brand can be transferred anywhere and used not just in your current job or company, but anywhere your expertise is relevant.

Gary outlines how he moved from running his family’s wine business to becoming an online star and entrepreneurial icon.

Tools

Crush It! steps you through some of the online tools you can use to build your personal brand and, in turn, your personal success. While this isn’t a step-by-step guide on how to use social media and online technologies, it does point you in the right direction on how to get started.

Hard Work

As the core of this book revolves around cashing in on your passion, it will help you identify what your passion even is. This isn’t a get-rich-quick book. To the contrary, Gary is very honest in how much hard work it took him to get where he is and how hard you’ll need to work to achieve your dreams.

Inspiration

If you have a day job, this book will inspire you to reach for greater heights. You can be an expert and go-to person for whatever you are passionate about. That may or may not be related to your job.

If you own your own business, this book will help you realize that you probably aren’t working hard enough to achieve the success and potential that is waiting for you.

At a minimum, Crush It! and Gary’s exuberance will inspire you to take action. After all, you have to take a first step sometime if you hope to get anywhere.

Recommendation: Listen to this Book!

Gary actually “wrote” this book by speaking it and then had a ghost writer put it together for print. By doing this, his voice and animated examples come to life in the written word.

I listened to the audiobook version of Crush It! and would recommend you do the same. Gary himself recorded the audio version and interjects “off script” commentary as he goes along.

Read or listen to Crush It! and you will be motivated and inspired.

You can find Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion on Amazon.com.

Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief Chris Anderson tackles the changing landscape of pricing in his book
Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

Having read Anderson’s original article in Wired magazine, I was skeptical that a full-length book would be able to elaborate on his claims.

I was pleasantly surprised that the book kept my attention and was actually entertaining and informative.

What is in Free?

Anderson covers the history of “free” and how it has evolved in commerce to what it is today. As I enjoy history, this was an interesting component of the book.

The main premise of the book is that the cost of digital goods is decreasing so rapidly that the incremental cost of one more customer is essentially zero. Thus you see that companies are able to offer their products and services online for free to millions of users.

Anderson explains how many web-based services survive while appearing to charge their customers nothing.

Free pulls back the curtain of the business models of many companies that leverage the zero dollar price point to their profit. You’ll learn how companies defy common paradigms and essentially turn pricing models upside down.

Free is Free

I was intrigued by how this book was marketed. Since it is called Free and talks about making lots of things “free” the book should be, well, free. Right?

Well, the book is free. Really.

At its initial launch, the book was offered in many formats for free. I listened to a free audio book version of Free read by the author.

While many of the free versions have disappeared after the initial hype, you can still listen to the free audio version on audible.com.

Recommendation: Read it

If you are selling any product or service, this book will help you think through your options on what to charge customers. Don’t be scared by giving something away for free, just be sure you know how you will monetize that transaction with the customer. This book will show you how.

Prefer a tangible, physical copy of the book? Order a copy of Free: The Future of a Radical Price on Amazon.com.

Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood is not a book about customer service or business. However, this book is full of insights into what makes a great leader and how, just like Marines in battle, your business will encounter a lot of surprises.

Joker One is the account of a Marine platoon that patrolled the Iraqi city of Ramadi in 2004. The story is told by the platoon’s leader, then Lieutenant Donnovan Campbell. It is a story of the brotherhood that forms in war and the love that these soldiers share.

Like the book 1776, Joker One contains stories that provide great parallels to how your business can succeed.

The frustrations, pain, suffering, surprises, successes, sacrifice, and leadership in Joker One are truly inspiring.

Turning these principles to business, they bring up many self-searching, evaluating questions:

• What kind of leadership do you have running your organization?
• How dedicated are your employees to your company and its goals despite the trials thereof?
• Do you plan meticulously only to have those plans fall apart when the realities of business hit?
• How do you measure success?
• Where do you draw the line between meeting a goal and the sacrifice it takes to do so?
• Your competition takes on many different forms and is around every corner. Do you know how to identify them?
• Can you rapidly adapt to a changing environment to meet both the needs of your employees and your customers?
• Do you train, keep learning, and continue growing to be ready for upcoming changes?

Should you read Joker One?

Buy the book – If you enjoy military history, Joker One is a touching and inspirational story that will both give you insights into the realities of this modern conflict and a great appreciation for the sacrifice these Marines made for others.

Like a parable, you will have to extract the principles and practices that will apply to your business.

Buy Joker One: A Marine Platoon’s Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood from Amazon.com.

The concepts and principles that Claude C. Hopkins teaches in his Scientific Advertising are so relevant and timeless that you’d think they were written this year. In fact, Hopkins penned his book at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only thing out of date in this book are the dollar amounts he mentions in his examples. Of course there was no Internet back in Hopkins’ day, so his advertising examples are based primarily on direct mailings.

Hopkins covers the vital importance of testing everything you do. What is working? What do customers prefer? You’ll never know until you test.

The author also reminds us that we need to track the results of our advertising and campaigns. Shotgun blast broad mass media isn’t effective. We need to target our specific customer by only serving our message up to them and writing the headline and ad such that it speaks to them alone.

His chapter on samples was very interesting to me. After I read his book, my eyes have been opened to all the companies around that are wasting money on ineffectual giveaways and promotions.

A lot of what Hopkins teaches may sound familiar. It should! His work is the basis for most modern advertising and marketing. If you take his book and apply the principles therein, you can save a lot of money by not having to buy the latest and greatest from marketing gurus.

Should You Read Scientific Advertising?

Buy the book – If you are involved in any way in crafting the copy writing of advertisements or anything that a customer will see, you need to read Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising. It will establish a firm foundation and mindset for effectively using your ads and even business practices to get the best return on investment possible.

Want a compelling read that will change the way you think about the customer experience? Try Subject to Change, compiled by a handful of authors at product experience strategy and design firm Adaptive Path.

Focus: Customer Experience

The world in which we do business is changing rapidly and to be successful, we must focus on the customer experience.

This means you can’t really bet on the longest feature list or efficiency advantages to beat out the competition:

The processes for measuring and controlling efficiency are well-known and well-documented, and so in today’s world they no longer provide a significant competitive advantage.

Since you won’t be able to do everything, you have to be selective in your strategy. This involves deciding what to do and what not to do.

Design is a Keystone

The authors proudly proclaim that “design must become an organizational competency.” Everyone is a designer, not just the official design team your company may have. “Design is an activity” that involves empathy with the customer, problem solving, and prototyping of options.

Empathy

To the customers, the experience they have is the only thing that matters.

After all your product does (or doesn’t do), the experience a person has with you and your product is what will leave the biggest impression. To make this as smooth as possible, you need to understand where a customer is coming from:

An appreciation of customer’s motivations, behaviors, and context leads to the development of a product, service, or system that can satisfy them.

Too often we may rely on reports or surveys to gain insight into customer intent. Nevertheless, we have to go “beyond statistics or extrapolation from [our] own behaviors” if we want to truly empathize with customers.

You can’t shoehorn people into generic “users” or “customers.” Your customers aren’t all the same, they are different and will do things you didn’t foresee and in ways you didn’t imagine. Truly understanding a customer can come from effective research.

Customer Research

Design research needs to inspire and indicate a clear direction.

Research for research’s sake isn’t worth the effort. The output must be understandable and actionable.

One of the authors, Todd Wilkens, stated that “the effectiveness of a research report is inversely proportional to the thickness of its binding.”

When implementing a new product or feature, ask yourself these questions:

What do people want to accomplish?
How does this activity fit into their lives?
How can I deliver on those desires?

Corporate Structure vs. Customer View

Your company is made up of silos of groups and divisions. However, to your customer, you are just “the company.” How can you make that customer experience uniform and make you actually look like your right hand knows what your left is doing?

The book refers to this as a “coordinated symphony that addresses the whole customer experience.” Nice imagery.

Contingency Design

Not everything you make will work perfectly.

The true success of experience design isn’t how well it works when everything is operating as planned, but how well it works when things start going wrong.

The more you add or build into your product, the more likely that it will “fall apart and confuse customers.” Avoid the dreaded feature creep. By keeping things simple, your customers will be more likely to succeed.

Create the Long Wow

You can achieve long-term customer loyalty by systematically impressing your customers.

One of the authors, Brandon Schauer, explains “The Long Wow” and how to achieve it in his essay and this presentation:

Keep Going

Succeeding amidst uncertainty requires continuous improvement.

You can’t sit still or even just get by with what worked in the past. Continuous improvement, and its associated change, will help you meet the needs of customers and deliver great products and services.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy the book – Subject to Change is a very quick read that helps shake up the paradigms to which you or your business may be accustomed. This will foster some healthy self-evaluation and discussion of your business.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is the best business book I’ve read in quite some time. Chip and Dan Heath teach you how to make the ideas you are trying to convey to others memorable and actionable. In other words, “sticky” so your listener can’t help but remember what you talked about.

This book is broken down into several sections, with each section elaborating on a different letter of their “sticky” formula: SUCCESs (Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, Stories). When you use the SUCCESs steps, people will remember your ideas, internalize them, and take steps towards what you want them to do.

Simple

You need to boil your ideas down to their basic, simple core. This often means avoiding the “curse of knowledge,” frequently mentioned by the authors, which is: when you know something, it is hard to remember that other people don’t also have that knowledge.

Simple messages are easy to remember, easy to convey to others, and easy to understand.

Unexpected

People are used to finding patterns in life. You have to break this cycle if you want your idea to be effectively communicated. Breaking patterns by sharing the unexpected grabs the listener’s attention. For example, newspaper headlines (starting with the end result and working backward).

Concrete

Tangible ideas are easy to remember. Abstract, vague, or jargon-filled ideas are difficult to remember and hard to internalize. Think of Aesop’s timeless fables like “The Tortoise and the Hare” or “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” These ideas are so solid, you can almost touch them and thus they are extremely easy to remember.

Credible

No one will believe your idea if you aren’t credible. If you are already an expert in the field, great. If not, you may need others to add the missing credibility.

Emotional

Does your idea engage the emotions of others? If you can help the listener view themselves enjoying the benefits of your idea, you’ll have them hooked.

Stories

Since the beginning of time, we’ve loved to hear stories. You can better convey your idea when it is the moral of a story. Keep your eyes open for compelling stories from which you can extract your own idea.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a copy – Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die is a great read that keeps you entertained and delivers actionable steps you can use to improve your communication, ideas, and messaging.

The Heath brothers essentially eat their own dog food by applying the SUCCESs steps as they present countless stories and examples throughout the book.

This book is a classic and worthy of your attention and a place on your reference shelf.

In The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs, authors Bill Price and David Jaffe seek to challenge the traditional view of customer service.

While the title is a bit daring, “no service” isn’t really the solution the authors are proposing. Through an eight step process, they outline how your company can refine its customer service by identifying and fixing problems and enabling customers via self-service.

Prevention

A majority of customer service problems can be resolved up-front by identifying the root cause of issues. These may be problems with packaging, customer expectations, instructions, etc. Your company can prevent problems from even happening by having a feedback loop, ensuring that those who hear from the customers send the information back to those that can fix the problem.

Self Service

The real “no service” option is that of quality self-service. With current technology, customers should be able to solve the majority of their problems via your website or even your phone system. If customers can find the answers they need online and can take corrective action, they will solve their own problems.

Listen and Act

Too many times the customer service department insulates the rest of a company from customer feedback. R&D, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, IT, and others need to hear what is wrong so they can actually fix it! Listen to your customers and act on that information. Otherwise, you’ll just keep getting the same inquiries and issues every day.

Joe’s Recommendation

Buy a Copy – The Best Service is No Service will change the way your company thinks about customer service.

They share numerous examples of both the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’ll see how other companies were successful (or not) in serving customers and can then apply those principles to your situation. This was a very thought provoking book.

Buy The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs on Amazon.com.