TOP 10: Business Books We are Reading at P&N

If you'd like to know how to change your underachieving firm, At The Crossroads: The Remarkable CPA Firm That Nearly Crashed, Then Soared may hold the key to a bright new future. This innovative book is told in story form, drawing the reader behind the scenes of a dysfunctional team that applies Crosley’s Practice Growth Model to overcome the defects to produce a highly functional team.

At the Crossroads - Gale Crosley 1

Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Built to Last – Jim C ol lins 2

The time was the 1980s. The place was Wall Street. The game was called Liar’s Poker. Liar’s Poker is the culmination of those heady, frenzied years—a behind-the-scenes look at a unique and turbulent time in American business. From the frat-boy camaraderie of the forty-first-floor trading room to the killer instinct that made ambitious young men gamble everything on a high-stakes game of bluffing and deception, here is Michael Lewis’s knowing and hilarious insider’s account of an unprecedented era of greed, gluttony, and outrageous fortune.

Liars Poker – Michael Lewis 3

Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, ad philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.

Behind the C loud – Marc Benioff 4

Jenkins provides a riveting introduction to the world where every story gets told and every brand gets sold across multiple media platforms. He explains the cultural shift that is occurring as consumers fight for control across disparate channels, changing the way we do business, elect our leaders, and educate our children.

C onvergence Culture – Henry Jenkins 5

Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Competit ive Advantage has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable.

C ompetitive Advantage – Michael Porter 6

There are relatively few new ideas in business, if any at all. The lesson is clear: Believe passionately in what you do, and never knowingly compromise your standards and values. Act like a true professional, aiming for true excellence, and the money will follow. Act like a prostitute, with an attitude of “I’ll do it for the money, but don’t expect me to care,’’ and you’ll lose the premium that excellence earns. True professionalism wins!

True Professionalism – David Maister 7

Value pricing is becoming more common among attorneys and CPAs across the country. Everyone's talking about it, but very little has been written on how to implement this innovative, lucrative option. This resource is designed to provide CPAs, attorneys, and other professionals with the information needed to evaluate the economics of alternative billing methods.

Implementing Value Pricing – Ron Baker 8

The Challenge: How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

Good to Great – Jim C ol lins 9

The book that shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job. Putting an execution culture in place is hard, but losing it is easy. In July 2001 Larry Bossidy was asked by the board of directors of Honeywell International (it had merged with AlliedSignal) to return and get the company back on track. He’s been putting the ideas he writes about in Execution to work in real time.

Execution – Bossidy & Charan 10