Chuck Wall’s book Customer CEO: How to Profit from the Power of Your Customers (Bibliomotion, 2013) is all about listening to the customer, with plenty of examples from established companies. While the tips may seem obvious (of course it makes sense to listen!), the chapters, examples, and advice make it easier to focus on each aspect of listening to customers so that you can shape your business around them.

Click on the image to view or download a larger version of my visual book summary/review.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution – I’d love it if you link back to this site and tell me about it. =) ) It should print out fine on letter-sized paper, too.

For more information or a free chapter, see Customer CEO Consulting (their blog has lots of examples).

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book for review.

Check out my other visual book reviews!

Want to make your social media marketing more visual? The Visual Marketing Revolution: 26 Rules to Help Social Media Marketers Connect the Dots by Stephanie Diamond (Que Publishing, 2013) gives you an overview of rules, tools, content, and tactics to help you plan and improve your marketing.

Click on the image to view or download a larger version.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution – I’d love it if you link back to this site and tell me about it. =) )  It should print out fine on letter-sized paper, too.

Intrigued by the ideas? You can check your local library to see if they have a copy, or buy your own copy below.

Disclosure: I received a Kindle copy of this book for review, and I’ll get a small commission if you buy anything from Amazon using the links above.

Other sources of information: books.google.com, visualmarketingrevolution.com

I’ve been working on making my own sites more visual, so I’m looking forward to applying the ideas from this book. If you do as well, please share your stories!

Check out my other visual book reviews

How can you bring together different ideas in order to innovate? Red Thread Thinking (2013) shares guidelines for coming up with new ideas and recombining old concepts for profitable innovation, with plenty of stories of real-life products and services. It also includes some chapters on how to package the innovation for greater appeal (including simplicity, engagement, and design thinking), and how to train your brain and your intuition in order to make better decisions. Whether you’re an idea person in a big company or a solo entrepreneur in a microbusiness, you’ll probably find good questions and examples to jog your creative thinking. If you’re tired of brainstorming sessions going nowhere or resulting in small, incremental improvements, try out what this book says about relaxing and generating ideas on your own before bringing them to a small group for expansion and refinement. (That said, incremental improvements can also be a good thing!)

After reading this book, I plan to experiment with the obscure feature method and the generic parts method. They might be great ways to sharpen my observational skills and see opportunities for everyday creativity.

You can click on the image below for a larger version.

Feel free to share this visual book review! (Creative Commons Attribution Licence)

Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library.)

The Culture Blueprint is an upcoming book that draws on lessons from Zappo’s corporate culture. It offers a mix of high-level advice as well as practical tips on how to influence your company’s culture and help your company be more effective. I liked the chapter on implementation, which includes a sample conversation showing how someone negotiated an experiment’s scope until the person got the resources and commitment needed. The tips are geared more towards medium- to large-sized companies, but even small business owners can benefit from the focus on values and stories.

Hope you find this visual summary useful! Click on the image to view a larger version, and feel free to share it with others. © 2013 Sacha Chua (Creative Commons Attribution Licence) – https://sachachua.com

Disclosure: I received a copy for review. If you have or know of an interesting, well-written book you’d like me to review, I accept requests.

Lots of people sell, even if they don’t know it yet. Selling – convincing someone – is a normal activity. In his 2012 book To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink shares a few practical tips on how to sell more effectively through attunement, buoyancy, and clarity. Good read with research-backed tips and illustrative case studies.

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Feel free to share this under the Creative Commons Attribution License! Links are appreciated. =)

Amazon affiliate link: I earn a tiny fraction if you buy something from Amazon’s site after clicking on the link, even if it has nothing to do with the book. =)

If you have a library near you, you can check it out there too. (I totally love the Toronto Public Library!)

It can be difficult to get work done in an environment filled with interruptions. Cool Time: A Hands-on Plan for Managing Work and Balancing Time (2005) offers many schedule-based tips on how to plan your day so that you have time to deal with interruptions as well as to focus on your real work. I like the emphasis it puts on managing people’s expectations and “conditioning” them to work with you better.

Here’s a sketchnote that summarizes the key points from the book. Click on the image to see a larger version.

Cool Time is a good book for people who work in an office and use calendar systems a lot (or would like to make better use of their calendars). Even if you work on your own, you might find it useful to adopt the “I-beam review” involving 15 minutes of planning before you start your day and 15 minutes after for processing. If your life is even more interrupt-driven, David Allen’s bestselling Getting Things Done (2012) book is an excellent read focusing more on managing your to-dos.

Check out my other sketchnotes and visual book notes for more business- and technology-related visual summaries!

Setting a price for products and services seems like a black art. The Art of Pricing covers strategies that you can use to come up with differentiated prices, versioned products, or segment-based approaches.

Click on the image for a larger version of the sketchnote.

The Art of Pricing has some tips for entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out the right price for their first product or service (see the value decoder on p99). It has more tips for business owners who have established a few profitable offerings and are trying to figure out how to tweak the levers for more profit or expanded markets.

Feel free to share this! You can credit it as (c) 2012 Sacha Chua under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada licence.