So many useful business books and so little time – was the thought that occurred to me as I was teaching this week. Here are my top tips for students in extracting the useful knowledge in these books with minimum cost and maximum ease.
(Publishers should avert their eyes at this point)
Google- “title of book PDF”. For the really successful business books, someone has often made a summary of the key ideas and saved it as a PDF. So if you are working on a challenger brand you will want to get Adam Morgan’s ideas, Google “Eating the Big fish PDF” and and you get this
Or if you want one of the the foundation texts of marketing effectiveness try googling “how brands grow PDF” – and you get this
Google “title of book PP.” And the chances are you will end up on slideshare where someone has made a PowerPoint of the Key ideas. Take, for example, Daniel Kahnemann’s great book “Thinking Fast and Slow” which is a must read for all people in communications but , let’s be honest, hard work to get through. Well there are two PowerPoints covering the key ideas on slideshare
Slideshare and Amazon are useful search engines in their own right so it can be useful to go straight too them and have a browse
30 minute summaries. You have to pay for these but they can be worth the money if you want to know a bit more. Go to Amazon and search “title of book 30 minute summary” . There is a good one of Kahnemann’s book
Youtube it – Youtube is also a search engine in its own right.Writers of the really good books (and even the not so good) go in the speaking circuit and their talks often get videoed and shared. For example the most powerful brands of our day sit as apps on our smartphones- they are in the business of habit forming. Nir Eyal in his book “Hooked” has insightful explanations as to how they do this. Here he is doing a TED talk