Recommended Reading

A great deal of information is available on the Internet. Much of it falls into the “How to do something” genre, which is perfect if you’re looking to solve a particular problem – mine included, see Free Ebook: How to Write a Sales Plan + Plan Template.

Then there are books that show us how the world works. They help us understand the behavior of individuals, organizations and consumers.

Here are a few of those books (all are affiliate links to Amazon.com).

Delivering Quality Service

by Valerie Zeithaml, A. Parasuraman and Leonard Berry

This is the go-to source for understanding how customers determine service quality. Although there has been significant research since this was first published in 1990, it’s still valid today. If you want to know how customers fundamentally judge service quality, read about it here.

Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers

by Seth Godin

Here’s the first recognition of the chase for customers’ attention in an information overloaded world. In 1999 Godin points out that the industrial post-war idea of interruption advertising no longer works, we just ignore ads rather than buy as our parents and grandparents might have.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More

by Chris Anderson

The Internet made numbers king and The Long Tail followed those numbers to stand a basic business sales tenet on its head: more is no longer better. In his book Anderson makes a case that focusing on, and selling to the smaller niche markets actually means there are more of them out there. Less is more because of the reality of the long tail.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization

by Peter Senge

While the subtitle addresses the learning organization, the epiphany for me was the introduction to systems thinking. It takes the “when a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil there’s a real estate boom in Iceland” idea and makes it rationally understandable – so that I get it. In some ways it makes the world a little more frightening to realize what we thought was in our control is in reality impacted my many other players. Still, this book is the 101 primer on systems thinking.