By Jim Altfeld

The Owner's Manual is an owner's guide for carrying out your otherwise intimidating duties as your company's chief strategist, visionary officer and leader. This is not a manual about change. This is a manual about discovery - discerning your company's realities, living with change based upon those realities and taking advantage of both change that has been handed to you and change you've created. Jim Altfeld has spent more than 30 years in business to business management, marketing, advertising and sales. During much of that time, he has involved himself in the strategic analysis of how to get small and medium-sized businesses up to speed and keep them there.

By Napoleon Hill

Here are money-making secets that can change your life. Inspired by Andrew Carnegie's magic formula for success, this book will teach you the secrets that will bring you a fortune. It will show you not only what to do but how to do it. Once you learn and apply the simple, basic techniques revealed here, you will have mastered the secret of true and lasting success. And you may have whatever you want in life. Napoleon Hill's philosophy teaches you what you were never taught. Specifically: How to Recognize, Relate, Assimilate and Apply principles whereby you can achieve any goal whatsoever that doesn't violate Universal Law - the Law of God and the rights of your fellowman.

By Marcus Buckingham & Curt Coffman

The authors have culled their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup during the past 25 years. Quoting leaders such as basketball coach Phil Jackson, Buckingham and Coffman outline "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: Finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and selecting staff for talent--not just knowledge and skills. First, Break All the Rules offers specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job. For instance, the authors show ways to structure a trial period for a new worker and how to create a pay plan that rewards people for their expertise instead of how fast they climb the company ladder. "The point is to focus people toward performance," they write. "The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for this." Written in plain English and well organized, this book tells you exactly how to improve as a supervisor.

By Cindy Ventrice

"Please, not another t-shirt!" is the common cry among employees. Make Their Day! shows what employers and employees each expect from recognition and why most efforts miss their mark. Author and management consultant Cindy Ventrice demonstrates that to be effective, recognition must be built directly into the work and workplace, directed at specifics, and tied to performance. Written from the employees' viewpoint, this book explains why good working relationships form the core of effective workplace recognition. The author then offers specific, low-cost recognition programs that have been effective in improving morale and productivity at leading companies like FedEx Freight and Wells Fargo Bank.

By Meryl Runion

In this follow up book to Power Phrases (see below), communication guru Meryl Runion explains why effective communication is more than just a business tool. It is also the key to happier, healthier relationships, and greater personal fulfillment and business success. In How to Use Power Phrases to Say What You Mean, Mean What You Say, & Get What You Want she introduces readers to the concept of power phrases--short, focused expressions that let people be direct and to the point without seeming brusque or nasty. In clear, down-to-earth language, illustrated with numerous vignettes and real-world examples

By Loretta A. Malandro

Being a business professional is all about managing, motivating, and leading, or, in other words, getting people to do what you want. And, far and away, the most important tool for accomplishing this objective is language. Written by an internationally recognized expert on business communications, this book offers managers deep insights into the power of language and how to wield it effectively in any organization. Loretta Malandro arms readers with more than 200 power words and phrases designed to help readers become better managers, leaders, and coaches. She also reveals communication secrets such as emotional triggers, victim versus ownership language, escape phrases, as well as language for "softening the edges," reframing, accountability, and recovering from communication gaffes.

By Leonard L. Berry

Improving service quality has finally become a top priority of management today, yet according to service quality expert Leonard Berry only a handful of companies have managed to determine exactly what to improve and how to improve it. From two years of research, Berry has constructed a dynamic new framework for improving service. This framework provides a roadmap for implementation found nowhere else in the service quality literature. Linking service excellence to value creation, Berry provides solid financial reasons for the necessity of great service. Here, at last, is the book for which managers in every service industry have waited: Leonard Berry's "operating manual" for turning plans for great service into action.

By Petra Marquart

The Power of Service: Keeping Customers for Life is a comprehensive approach to customer service that ulitmately holds each individual responsible for his or her behavior. It addresses the complex issues that affect people's willingness to perform well and their dedication to their work. It shows how people are affected by their leaders, the power they are given to perform, how they are rewarded and recognized, and the systems, procedures and policies within which they work. This book addresses those issues and offers solutions and suggestions as to how organizations can create environments in which people thrive and inspire people to provide world-class service.

By Tim Hindle

It's true that negotiating skills are learned over a lifetime, but this itty-bitty handbook aims to distill a lifetime's worth of deal-making lessons into 72 snazzily laid-out pages. Neatly divided into the three phases of a negotiation--preparation, conducting, and closing--it covers all aspects of the bargaining process, including identifying your own objectives and assessing the opposition's, choosing a strategy and creating the right atmosphere, and moving to a close, handling a breakdown in progress, and even using a mediator if you have to. On every page, boxed tips, checklists, flow charts, and mini case studies walk you through the entire process.

By Roger Dawson

Each of us is in the business of persuading someone to take some sort of action or to think differently about something. Persuasion is done every day in business environments, in the home, in shopping experiences, and many other encounters between people. We're not talking about negotiation; we're talking about persuasion. Roger Dawson is an internationally recognized expert in persuasion, negotiation, and helping people get what they want in life. There's a reason his books have been translated into ten languages and his audio program on negotiation is ranked as the largest-selling album in the history of business cassette publishing. This is a man to be listened to, to be read. His effectiveness is illustrated by examples from his own life.

By Meryl Runion

Have you ever needed to express yourself but did not because you could not find the right words? Have you ever walked away from a situation and thought of the perfect thing to say AFTER it was too late? Have you ever given a long explanation and wondered-is there a faster, more effective way to communicate? PowerPhrases is the answer to those problems and questions. Knowing what to say results in increased confidence, enhanced self-esteem, refinement and professionalism and the ability to slide out of sticky situations with grace and ease.

By Amy Delpo, Lisa Guerin, Janet Portman

An employer's nightmare? Problem employees, of course. But in today's world, many business owners, supervisors and managers often want to work effectively with difficult employees rather than fire them -- and Dealing With Problem Employees shows them how. This book combines the practical and legal information employers need. Whether employers need to handle situations as they crop up, or want to implement policies and procedures to make the workplace problem-free, they'll find everything they need in this one-of-a-kind book. Provides sample policies, forms, checklists and statutes for every state. NOTE: This book does not cover hiring or layoffs. For more information on these topics, see The Employer's Legal Handbook, published by Nolo.

By Stephen Covey

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change was a groundbreaker when it was first published in 1990, and it continues to be a business bestseller with more than 10 million copies sold. Stephen Covey, an internationally respected leadership authority, realizes that true success encompasses a balance of personal and professional effectiveness, so this book is a manual for performing better in both arenas. This isn't a quick-tips-start-tomorrow kind of book. The concepts are sometimes intricate, and you'll want to study this book, not skim it. When you finish, you'll probably have Post-it notes or hand-written annotations in every chapter, and you'll feel like you've taken a powerful seminar by Covey.

By Jim Collins

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, "Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?" In Good to Great, Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11 and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. The book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books you will be reading and rereading for years to come.

By Carl Sewell and Paul B. Brown

In this completely revised and updated edition of the customer service classic (more than 600,000 copies sold), Carl Sewell enhances his time-tested advice with fresh ideas and new examples and explains how the groundbreaking “Ten Commandments of Customer Service” apply to today’s world.

Drawing on his incredible success in transforming his Dallas Cadillac dealership into the second largest in America, Carl Sewell revealed the secret of getting customers to return again and again in the original Customers for Life. A lively, down-to-earth narrative, it set the standard for customer service excellence and became a perennial bestseller. Building on that solid foundation, this expanded edition features five completely new chapters, as well as significant additions to the original material, based on the lessons Sewell has learned over the last ten years.

By Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Written in the parable style of The One Minute Manager, Raving Fans uses a brilliantly simple and charming story to teach how to define a vision, learn what a customer really wants, institute effective systems, and make Raving Fan Service a constant feature--not just another program of the month.

America is in the midst of a service crisis that has left a wake of disillusioned customers from coast to coast. Raving Fans includes startling new tips and innovative techniques that can help anyone create a revolution in any workplace--and turn their customers into raving, spending fans.

By Charles A. Coonradt and Lee Benson

This book assumes one thing - people like to win! People inherently want to succeed, but they often don't try or bother because they don't know how to win nor do think it matters if they do win, so they just go through the motions, never reaching their true potential. And the way most management operates today, they're pretty right. What this book points out is that in order to excel, people need to know HOW to win and to know IF they're winning or not. The simple way to enable that is to keep score.

By Charles A. Coonradt, Jack Lyons, and Richard Williams

How to enjoy work as much as play. Learn to improve productivity and achieve organizational goals. This book will provide you with useful ideas and will spark your own creativity as you seek greater success in your organization and in your personal life.