After a very busy week I’ve been plowing through my aggregator and catching up on some reading. I was surprised to find this list of recommended business books at Manager Tools. I’ve posted earlier about the high quality of the Manager Tool podcasts (here, here and here). So I’m scanning the list and finding some titles I’ve read, and others that I’m adding to my list. If you are at all interested in improving your business and management skills, scan the blog and start on the podcasts. They have the most immediately useable stuff I’ve found so far.
[...] here, here and here for some examples). Manager Tools has also evolved a really neat blog and comment feature into their site. Mark Horstman (50% of the Manager Tools partnership) has posted this neat feature on reading. Mark is reading about 200 books a year despite a busy life as a consultant. He explains his formula for reaching that number. I really like the post although I’m not quite on board with his reluctance to use audio books. Mark feels that commuting time should be better spent on the phone building relationships. I certainly cannot disagree with that concept, but I regularly listen to book and podcasts on my iPod while working out, cooking, etc. Plus some commuting time is often outside of normal business hours. I’m usually on the road between 5-6am, then again after 6pm. I do make several calls during these time periods (often very productive ones to people’s voicemails that saves email and other time), but I also find it a good time to get some listening done with audio books. I’ve reached the point where I read limited numbers of fiction books, but listen to a few every month just to relax and get away. Mark does make a valid point that we read faster than we can listen to books. iPod users can overcome some of this by selecting the faster reading option on their iPod. This increases the reading time to 125%. Conversely, people with listening difficulties can reduce the time to 75%. Unfortunately, this only seems to work with audio books and not podcasts. [...]