Persuasion

This is very good.

Taken from the new book "Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive" by Noah Goldstein, Steve Martin & Robert Cialdini, it's an overview of all of the techniques they describe.

50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive
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Tribes

Seth Godin is an author and a leading voice on how to make your marketing more effective in the modern, digital, connected age. He's been described as 'the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age'

His latest book, Tribes, looks at how you go about building a movement that people will want to follow:

"...to bring together a tribe of like-minded people and do amazing things. There are tribes everywhere, all of them hungry for connection, meaning and change. And yet, too many people ignore the opportunity to lead, because they are "sheepwalking" their way through their lives and work, too afraid to question whether their compliance is doing them (or their company) any good... if you have a passion for what you want to do and the drive to make it happen, there is a tribe of fellow employees, or customers, or investors, or readers, just waiting for you to connect them with each other and lead them where they want to go."

By way of a freebie, Seth has collaborated on a list of 100 tactics you can use to help build your Tribe.

100 Ways to Build your Tribe

He's also produced a free e-book on the subject of Tribes, a sort of wisdom of the crowds piece with stories and ideas from members of his Ning group. The link is on his regularly updated Blog.

Tribes e-book
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Black Swans

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the excellent "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" (a must- read if you're at all interested in why banks and finance houses were institutionally incapable of stopping the financial melt down we're all experiencing) has written an article with some guidelines for avoiding similar situations.

Ten Principles of a Black Swan-Proof World (opens as a PDF)

I particularly like number 3, People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus; and number 4, don't let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant

For more of his observations visit Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The Talent Code

Business Guru Tom Peters interviews Dan Coyle on his new book "The Talent Code"

"It started when I was paging through the sports page and noticed that there were an unusual number of top tennis players from this tiny club in Moscow. I looked into this more. As it turned out, this club, which is at the same latitude as Churchill, Manitoba—meaning it's not exactly tropical—had one indoor court. In fact, more world top-20 players came from this tiny club with the one indoor court than came from the entire United States.

So it got me thinking, what else is like this? Of course we're all aware of these quasi magical hotbeds. There's the baseball players from the Dominican Republic, this tiny island, that make up about 11% of the major leagues now. There are the soccer players from Brazil. In the world of math, there's this one high school in Bulgaria that produces all these incredible champions. In pop music, there's a little music studio in Dallas that's produced a high number of American Idol finalists, Jessica Simpson, Demi Lovato, Ryan Cabrera. Incredible, really."

I'm particularly intrigued by his description of "Deep Practice" as a method of learning more effectively.

Dan Coyle interview

Outliers: The Story of Success

New book from Malcolm Gladwell, "Outliers: The Story of Success"

The blurb states:

"A brilliant new book from the bestselling author of The Tipping Point and Blink Why are people successful? For centuries, humankind has grappled with this question, searching for the secret to accomplishing great things. In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an invigorating intellectual journey to show us what makes an extreme overachiever. He reveals that we pay far too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where successful people are from: their culture, their family, and their generation. Gladwell examines how the careers of Bill Gates and the performance of world-class football players are alike; what top fighter pilots and The Beatles have in common; why so many top lawyers are Jewish; why Asians are good at maths; and why it is correct to say that the mathematician who solved Fermat's Theorem is not a genius. Just as he did in Blink, Gladwell overturns many of our conventional notions and creates an entirely new model for seeing the world. Brilliant and entertaining, this is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate."

I really enjoyed his earlier books, "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" and this ones promises to be equally as thought provoking.

Malcolm Gladwell also write regulalrly on his website Gladwell.com