BookBuzz staff essentially read on behalf of CEOs and executives who don't have time to do it themselves. This gives BookBuzz readers a feel for business trends. They say those trends for 2015 have been organisational design, customers experience and mindfulness.
BookBuzz have also assembled an overview of the best six books of 2015:
Author Liz Wiseman attempts to address the following questions:
- Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete?
- Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me?
- How can I keep up?
The answer: "Stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie." Though the answer is nothing new, Wiseman turns a corner when she asks: "Are the experience-based HR policies that have been so pervasive in past decades fit for the future of our workplaces?
In Association with
She then turns to advice on how to hire, suggesting that learning agility take priority over experience. She identifies the four traits of a perpetual rookie as being curiosity, humility, playfulness and deliberation.
2. X: The experience when business meets design
Brian Solis' work focuses on customer experience, emphasising its value (85% of consumers say they would pay up to 25% more for superior customer service).
Solis claims that superior customer service leads to word of mouth recommendations of your business, meaning it might be better to invest in customer experience than in marketing and advertising. He also says technology alone can't do the trick — it must be married with other skills, such as those from liberal arts and humanities.
He also speaks of designing for a medium as different from designing for an experience, saying it's better to think beyond both those categories, as media evolves too quickly.
L. David Marquet asks his reader to consider upending the workplace tier system. He says the energy put into trying to avoid error should be redistributed to achieving excellence, subtitling the work "A true story of turning followers into leaders."
He writes: "Instead of one captain giving orders to 134men, we would have 135 independent, energetic, emotionally committed and engaged men thinking about what we needed to do and ways to do it right. This process turned them into active leaders as opposed to passive followers."
Steven Kotler attempts to "decode the science of ultimate human performance," which he attributes to finding the flow, in which we're so focused on the task at hand that everything else falls away.
Kotler argues that anything you do, you do better in flow, and BookBuzz dubs the work an 'advertisement for flow'.
He branches out to speak about incorporating flow into group work, goals and overall business.
Author William Deresiewicz muses on "the miseducation of the American elite," attempting to dissect all that is wrong with the U.S. elite education system. He then links this with how it affects business presently and how it will continue to affect it in the future.
The author criticises both students and the adults who raised them. These kids, who have been meticulously prepared for schooling, seem at a loss when it came to thinking critically and creatively and finding a sense of purpose.
And if this system is charged with producing a leadership class, what will future leaders look like?
BookBuzz links these American issues with parallel situations in Ireland.
Rob Roy authors about strategy, for which BookBuzz finds movement is more important than direction. Culture is too slow, the BookBuzz review claims, which places increasing importance on organisational design for businesses.
Roy turns to the Navy SEALS as a prime example as what can be done when it comes to focusing on mindset rather than resources. Roy, who spent two decades as a SEAL, now has a company that puts CEOs through SEAL training to teach leadership skills.
This training, Roy argues, promotes self-awareness, inner strength, teamwork and leadership. His literary work details how this is so.
