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Gary Vaynerchuk's Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion is a short book at 142 pages, but a book I think you’ll enjoy. I read it over the course of three 60 minute Nordic Track Ski sessions. I would best categorize this book as infectious. Vaynerchuk uses his own experience with Wine Library TV and other ventures to inspire you to keep doing what you love and believe in, while using Social Media to eventually prove that you were right all along. 4 out of 5 Nordic Track Ski...

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary from Eric Raymond is the Bible on Open Source development. I read two other books on Open Source over the last few months and can’t believe I let this book sit on my shelf while I read the others.  I gained a lot from this book. Eric Raymond has been writing open source software since the 70’s and is a principle figure in shaping and chronicling the Open Source Movement. You can see him in Revolution...

Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is deceivingly simplistic. You read, “be helpful, connect people, be transparent, blah, blah.” Social Marketing concepts you already know and may perhaps practice, yet they are presented here in such a way that you realize you can do it better, much better. Chris Brogan has proven the effectiveness of his claims after all. The book was a solidly constructed hardback, a much nicer experience than many...

Tuned In: Uncover the Extraordinary Opportunities That Lead to Business Breakthroughs. The title pretty much does my job of describing the book to you. A light-weight Nordic Track read with good marketing advice. 2.5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. _______________ p.9 An idea that people immediately understand has value to them even if they have never heard of your company or its products and services. The tuned in company constantly listens to, observes and understands the problems that buyers...

The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google was written by Nicholas Carr, the author of Does IT Matter? Switch is much like a “Does IT Matter” Part II, where Carr proposes that computing is becoming a utility much like electricity, something all around us we no longer have to think about. But unlike electricity, the computer grid may have ominous side affects. This book is like Ray Kurzweil on depressants. Not pretty. Yet Carr makes a lot of observations about a dark side of ubiquitous...

I’m giving Jeff Howe’s 2008 work Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business 3-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. This doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable read, but that perhaps other books on the subject, like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody or Seth Godin’s Tribes provided—for me, anyway—more useful information about crowdsourcing than Crowdsourcing. Or it simply could have been because I read them first, otherwise this would have gotten 5-out-of-5 stars, too. ___________________...

The Unfinished Revolution: How to Make Technology Work for Us--Instead of the Other Way Around is the second Michael Dertouzos book I read, the first being What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives. Michael Dertouzos was the Director of the M.I.T. Laboratory for Computer Science from 1974 until his death in 2001. Unfinished Revolution was published in 2001. As you'll read in the excerpts, Dertouzos is trying to guide us into thinking about computers as serving human...

I’ve read several of David Meerman Scott’s books and have enjoyed each of them. Scott also authors an interesting Twitter stream at @dmscott. The complete title of his 2007 release is The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly. Lots of good information on the role of content in marketing your product or service. Excerpts from the first 100 pages below. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. __________________...

Everyone reading this post is familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success to some degree. Few books received more press over the last 12 months than Outliers. I’m glad for that attention, because after several months of exposure I broke down and ordered the book. I wasn’t expecting much, but was pretty much blown away. Insightful conclusions with supporting facts and experiences on what sets exceptionally successful individuals apart, as well as which factors we individually may...

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath was one of those top-selling non-fiction books that seemed to be everywhere for a while. After skimming through it at the local Barnes and Noble I knew I’d enjoy it. The book focuses on how to create ideas that stick. A quick and fun read. 3-out-of-5 Nordic Track Ski Stars. __________________ p.4 The operator said, “Sir, don’t panic, but one of your kidney’s has been harvested.” Some ideas are inherently interesting, and some...

With a title of Flip: How to Turn Everything You Know on Its Head--and Succeed Beyond Your Wildest Imaginings you may think this book from Fast Company writer Peter Sheahan is mostly hype. It isn’t. Instead it provides many considerations in keeping your business fresh and continually flipping your mindset to maintain a successful career. Here’s Sheahan’s description of “Flip” on page one. “A shift in mindset and thinking, often a counter-intuitive approach, that reflects the hard reality of the...

I’m a bit behind on my Nordic Track Book Club reviews and pulled The Myths of Innovation from my stack of Nordic Track books to get back into the groove. I enjoyed walking through it again. 3.5-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. It didn’t get 4-stars or higher only because it was @160 pages and I’m going through an anti-skinny book phase. Still, lots of insights on the definition of innovation and its execution. Recommended. ------------------------- p.8 Big thoughts are fun to romanticize, but it’s many...

Future Perfect by Stan Davis is an insightful work originally published in 1996 describing a more productive way to look at time, product development, and the role of information in the product lifecycle. 4-out-of-5 Nordic Track Stars. ---------------------- p.12 Informationalized business means that the economic value that comes from creating, processing, communicating and selling information grows significantly faster than the value added by traditional goods and services. Informationalized businesses...