Day 21 Books

All right. Happy Monday. I wanted today to do a video on five books that I have found most useful in my life. Maybe these aren't the most impactful books, but these are five books that are across different areas of my life that I want to share with you. Book number one is Lou Adler's Performance Based Hiring. So this book was particularly influential in my recruiting practice. He has a concept called Performance Profiles that really solidified some of the concepts that I wanted to incorporate and was what I used to build my entire recruiting practice around. It's something I would recommend to anybody that's getting involved in recruiting or looking to transform the recruiting process. That's book number one. Book number two is the alliance, which was in part written by Reid Hoffman, who was the founder of LinkedIn. And in that book they talk about building a tour of duty where an employee takes on a project or an assignment or a role for a set period of time as a tour of duty. And it's agreed upon at the beginning what the employee is going to get out of it and what the employer is going to get out of that tour of duty so that both are getting benefits. And you're creating this alliance rather than a what we now have a typical employer employer relationship and what their mission is to try to fix kind of what they see as a broken model of work. I think that the Performance Based Hiring and the alliance are really great models for some of the topics we're talking about today in hr, especially around diversity and inclusion and equity. For me, thinking about ageism and age diversification, I think both of those books have some great, great topics and philosophies that are relevant in constructing HR and recruiting practices that focus on diversity and inclusion. All right, book three, Moving away from the HR realm and more into the personal development space. The book I would list would be how to Win Friends and Influence People. It is a classic work and I recommend anybody read it. It is worth your time. I actually feel like I read it way too late. I should have read it early. I should probably read it every year. But I do have a summary printed up that I found online that is really helpful. And I just printed it out and taped it next to my wall because I do feel the principles in that book are ones that no matter, every time I go back to them, I always feel called higher and always feel like I can take some personal responsibility and some leadership in situations when I review those principles. So that's book number three. Book number four is a parenting book. Parenting is hard on marriages. It's hard on kids. It's hard on yourself as a person. And the book that really helped me and us as a family the most was Love and Logic. So if you just go to loveandlogic.com, they've got a whole bunch of books and really it's kind of a philosophy. But when we discovered that, it really gave us something to anchor a lot of our parenting practices around, and we still use it today even though our kids are off into college and moving on. It is a very useful philosophy and one that can make parenting easier, more enjoyable, and hopefully have a positive effect on the kids. The last one, Book five, would be a book about communication because I think anything we can do to improve our communication will yield results and it's worth the investment. So book five is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. If you haven't heard about it, I actually write up one of my techniques in the guide I published that is using the model of nonviolent communication. So please download the free guide how to Improve Any Relationship and you'll see in there an example of using nonviolent communication, and you'll also get some other tips on how to use nvc. And that's it. Five books, hopefully useful resources in some aspect of your life. If you found this useful, let me know. Thanks. See you soon.