Koo Review

Posts

Showing posts with the label Book Review

Influence People

Today we continue exploring Dale Carnegie's book How to Win Friends and Influence People. The first part of this two series post was on How to make friends which you can check out by clicking the link below: How to make friends The other portion of this text is about influencing people. If you'd like to read all the points that Dale Carnegie suggests, wikipedia does a nice job of laying it out in an easy to read format in the link below. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People While Mr. Carnegie lists out twelve key points to winning people over to your way of thinking, I'd like hone in on a few of his points that in my opinion are the most important. I think because these points feel so counterintuitive that it becomes difficult to understand how these points could be valid. Nonetheless, I would like to share my thoughts with you on these few ideas and pair them with a brief anecdotal. Then you can be the judge and d...

How to make friends

How to make friends and influence by Dale Carnegie is one of the most influential books of all time. Much like the title suggests, it is a self-help book that provides a mindset and strategies to make friends and influence people. As an exploration of this text, we are going to do a two-part series on Carnegie's book, with today's post focusing on making friends. I found out about this book when I was reading an interview on Barbara Cocoran. The founder of the Cocoran Group and current panelist/investor on Shark Tank. In the interview she mentioned that the last book she had read was the aforementioned text. She stated that this book was her guide to interacting with people and with making sales. I must admit that even in my own life I have incorporated parts of this book into my interactions. In addition, as a person who has gone through leadership training programs, I am shocked at how much of his teachings are incorporated into the modern e...

Special Friday Post - My Yahoo Portfolio Experience - Part 1

If you have read the Koo Review before then you know that we are avid readers. I have especially been interested in finance and investing as of late, as well as some marketing. One of the key items I've learned from reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham were strategies on how to invest in the stock market. I created a Yahoo Portfolio account to track five companies that I found on the 52 week low list that I would have picked back on July 14th to invest in. I purchased 100 shares of each company (to keep things simple). My focus was: 1) Large cap companies. 2) A history of steady dividend payments. 3) Consistent positive net income for the past three years. 4) An established brand 5) The company sold or produced something that I understood So as you see below this is how our portfolio did after three weeks. So while it was not all great, you can see that the total gain was $558 as of August 4, 2017 at 10:45 a.m. ...

Review on the Purple Cow - Transforming your business by being remarkable by Seth Godin

The Purple Cow by Seth Godin is a book on marketing, and focuses on the modern day environment. Godin believes that the traditional methods of advertising are broken and ineffective. He defines traditional advertising as companies that follow the P's of marketing: Pricing, Promotion, Positioning, Packaging, Pass-Along, Permission, and Publicity. Godin believes that the key to successful advertising is by creating a remarkable product. The metaphor that he uses for a remarkable product is a purple cow. The idea is that a purple cow is unheard of, and therefore it is a remarkable thing. Godin believes that modern day marketing tactics should focus on just one P, the purple cow. Godin then provides cases in which remarkable products launched companies to the forefront of their industries. An example is Google. It is a website that has a slot where you can type in text and two buttons. One of the buttons is completely arbitrary. ...

Management Styles - How to turn the ship around

Turn the Ship Around! By David Marquet is a book on leadership and management style in working within a turnaround project. David Marquet is a retired naval captain and was captain to the nuclear submarine, the Santa Fe. In the Navy, there is a clear hierarchy of power. The formation of the organization is like a pyramid, and it is designed as a leader-follower model of leadership. The leader-follower model is where the senior officer will give orders and the junior personnel would follow. The expectation is obedience to authority, and punitive measures for those who step out of line. In some situations, this style of leadership works. In situations where this does work, the efficacy of the leadership model goes out the window when the leader leaves. This is because the commander has been the driving force behind the organization, and is keeping all his subordinates on task. Before Mr. Marquet became a captain, he was a...

Sleep training in weeks one through six

As short as a few weeks ago, my wife gave birth to our son. He has been a treasure and a blessing. As new parents, we learned quickly that it is difficult to decipher what his cries mean. Most of the time I assumed he was hungry, needed a change, or wanted to be held. I was unaware that newborns could be bored, overstimulated, and/or overtired. In addition, it seems that with every few days his noises change slightly. Lately his pitch is slightly higher, the volume has gotten louder, the length of his cries has increased, and his cries seem to have changed meaning. A mistake that I have been consistently making is putting a bottle in his mouth every time he cried. I think this is a mistake most parents make because it seems to settle their kids down. So, the logic becomes if it settles him down, then it must be what he wants. The obvious problem with that thinking is that it makes you believe that all he ne...