Matt

Flips traditional leadership training in its head

Reviewed: 10-13-17

Excellent book for creating change in your career or role. Ibarra's primary lesson is that changing your behaviour will be far more impactful in helping you change your thinking, than trying to change your behaviour based on thinking differently. Our actions are more often driven by our experiences, not our knowledge, so the best way to grow is to get new experiences, not by reading books (besides this one I guess).

The book has some great examples, stories and some actionable steps to help you on this new journey.

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Highly efficient and impactful

Reviewed: 09-26-17

I took an exceptional number of simple and actionable ideas out of this book to improve processes within my team. I'd very much like to implement the full system described in the book, and will try to implement it in stages at my company.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone on a leadership team within an organization, or anyone that leads a team of people.

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Exceptional collection of persuasion techniques

Reviewed: 02-28-17

This book is filled with dozens of fascinating, and occasionally shocking, techniques used by compliance practitioners (sales people, marketers, social leaders, scam artists, etc) to increase the likelihood of us agreeing to their requests.

Through interesting stories, each confirmed and explained through thoughtful experiments, Cialdini has created a book that is equally as educational as entertaining.

This is the type of book that can be read multiple times, as each pass will surface new information relevant to your current situation.

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Essential lessons

Reviewed: 02-25-16

Cheaper 1 is based on one of the most valuable and important lessons that can be taught to people in the workforce today. Getting past busy is one of the most critical factors in achieving success in the modern world.

The rest of the book is interesting and occasionally useful, but the core lesson and value of the book, in my opinion, is contained in chapter 1.

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Exceptional book with many story lines and lessons

Reviewed: 02-09-16

This book is about:
- an eager person chasing a dream to make a movie with computers
- a lost soul looking for a new purpose after fulfilling their (until that point) lifelong dream
- a story of the making of one of the greatest companies ever made
- a leader's passionate ideas and struggles to create an enduring culture of creativity (twice!)
- a master class in leadership and management
- an intriguing glimpse into life at both Pixar and Disney

As I was finishing this book, I was thinking that it was an enjoyable read that had provided some interesting things to ponder throughout the book. But then, in the final pages, Ed sums up a few of the takeaways, and it dawned on me just how much it had covered. Because the story lines were so interesting, I hadn't realized it had addressed so many important lessons. As I reflected on the book after reading it, I realized just how impressive it actually was.

I would highly recommend this book to any business leader, anyone interested in working with people, anyone interested in creating or building businesses (particularly startups), anyone interested in Pixar and Disney, and anyone looking for an inspiring story. That's an impressive list of people that this book does a great job of satisfying!

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Excellent for anyone growing a customer base

Reviewed: 04-08-15

This book dives into 18 different traction channels, each with detailed descriptions, useful tips, common pitfalls to avoid and great examples. It's almost guaranteed to spark at least a few useful ideas in several channels to help you find new ways to find customers.

The narration of the book was also very lively and easy to listen to.

This is going on my must read list for new entrepreneurs.

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1 person found this helpful

Fantastic insights into online media manipulation

Reviewed: 03-20-15

You will get two things out of this book:
1) understand the corruption and insanity of online media, and how it ends up influencing real world events.
2) learn to harness the corruption and use it to your own advantage (if you're so inclined).

I believe the online world would be a better place if everyone read this book. Understanding the manipulations and misaligned incentives of online media is the first step to improving it. I'm sick of seeing the garbage headlines and outlandish content of the majority of articles today, and I hope we see a day where integrity is an attribute of online journalism.

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Great intro to Corporate Boards

Reviewed: 01-30-15

Excellent info about forming, working with and getting the most out of a board of directors. This book is very useful for entrepreneurs as well as future or current board members.

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Thought provoking

Reviewed: 01-21-15

A great book for spurring ideas for new technologies and thinking about how the future may look.

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Inspiring, enlightening and highly entertaining

Reviewed: 09-24-14

If you're interested in software or start-up tech, this is an incredible read. The book is packed with invaluable insights, interesting problems to contemplate, and inspiring stories.

It is very well written, with a smooth flow of events through one summer session at YC. I honestly can't recall a single boring moment through the entire book. I wish there was a book for every YC session.

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