Previous Offers
Everyone seems to have an opinion about the best selling Nothing to Lose, Everything to Gain, an autobiographical business book by Ryan Blair (with Don Yaeger) which recounts Blair's personal success story of How I Went from Gang Member to Multimillionaire Entrepreneur. It was by far the most ... Read more
"So how then, exactly, do you take a chance and invest in your own possibilities?"There has been an influx of books in the past few years that have tried to answer this question. The advice has ranged from low-risk (keep your day job; get a hobby and start small) to high-risk (quit your job and sell ... Read more
This was the opening paragraph of our Jack Covert Selects review of Screw Business As Usual: "By the time you get to page four of Richard Branson’s Screw Business as Usual, you will have already been treated to stories of Kate Winslett saving his mother from his burning home on Necker Island—literally ... Read more
The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of ItMost people regard willpower as hard-core issue. You either have it or you don't. And if you don't, well then, you should try your darnedest to acquire some. After all, willpower is about having steely ... Read more
An oft-quoted study in 2002 reports some good news: People who make resolutions at the dawn of a new year have nearly a 50% chance of keeping them past 6 months. Now maybe that doesn't sound much like good news. After all, in a glass-half-empty way, you also have a 50% chance of failure. And that, I ... Read more
This week on inBubbleWrap, we are featuring The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. I can't even pretend to be objective about the book, since I've spent much of the last five years working on the book, it's promotion, and it's various iterations. Needless to say, I think every business reader needs ... Read more
Selling yourself. That short phrase carries with it a lot of baggage. It comes off as self-serving, naturally. But also a little aggressive. A little desperate.(Maybe even a little illegal?)But to marketing guru Harry Beckwith and his co-author Christine Clifford selling yourself is about putting your ... Read more
I apologize for the unannounced hiatus around these parts, but the inBubbleWrap homestead, 800-CEO-READ, has been hopping with many deadlines. The good news is that we've got a lot of exciting projects to announce before the new year: the release of the paperback version--with new and updated ... Read more
How. Such a small but powerful word. You only have to watch the evening news or to read headlines on the Internet to agree with Dov Seidman, who, in his 2007 book, How, dubbed this time in history as "the Age of Behavior," meaning that more and more, behavior matters. From OccupyWallStreet to BuyLocal, ... Read more
If you were to open up David Kord Murray's Plan B to the Table of Contents and run your finger down the list of chapter inclusions, you'd scan such colorful teasers as these:iTunes as a Can OpenerThe Fat Man and Little BoyTen Thousand Empty StoresErnest HemingwayBeginner's SexIntriguing, to say the ... Read more
A new book by executive coaches Jill Flynn, Kathryn Heath, and Mary Davis Holt, Break Your Own Rules, will be an incredible help to those women who want to take their progress into their own hands. Flynn, Heath and Holt aren't interested in playing Quixote and charging the familiar windmill that is ... Read more
I like this guy Peter Bregman. That's the first thing I think of when trying to synthesize my thoughts about his book, 18 Minutes, into a post. It's the first thing I tell a coworker who asks me about the book. No, it doesn't seem like the provocative place to start, but maybe it is the most important, ... Read more
It's Not About You: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business.In any business parable, readers can usually expect to meet a seeker and guru. Alex Rogo and Jonah in Goldratt & Cox's The Goal, and Steve Farber himself and Edg in Farber's The Radical Leap are two of the most memorable pairs. ... Read more
While readying The 100 Best for it's updated paperback release this fall, we spent some extra time with the books we featured more briefly in our Takeaway chapter of the book, expanding the reviews to include more detail. It was especially fun for us to revisit Thinkertoys not only because some of the ... Read more
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on Matthew Kelly's new book, Off Balance: Getting Beyond the Work-Life Balance Myth to Personal and Professional Satisfaction, and this week I'm thrilled to have 20 copies to give away on inBubbleWrap! Why am I so thrilled? Because it is a great book. But also ... Read more
We write about and sell lots of books about leadership, creativity. running a business, quitting the corporate grind and striking out on your own. All of those books gravitate to the decision-makers, the strategists, the creators. But there really aren't a lot of books out there that are about, quite ... Read more
Unfortunately, the shipment of books I had scheduled to giveaway on InBubbleWrap this week didn't arrive. Fortunately, that gives me the opportunity to offer one of the ever-popular grab bag prizes. After all, we do have a lot of books around here and we need to get these books into the hands of readers! ... Read more
The most common metaphor for alignment within a company, it seems, refers to everyone needing to pull on the same oars. Authors Saj-Nicole Joni and Damon Beyer, in their book, The Right Fight, define this nautically-tinged tenet with a bit more specificity than I just did: "To accomplish anything, the ... Read more
by Greg CrabtreeWe (and many other smart people) tout Michael Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited as one of the very best books for small business owners. In our review of that book for The 100 Best Business Books of All Time, we wrote:Gerber believes that a common cause of small-business failure lies within ... Read more
I spent much of the weekend at home with a sick kid and an underachieving air conditioner watching a lot of sports events. The Ironman. The World Cup. The British Open. A regular season Brewers baseball game. During this marathon of TV watching, I wrote the following comment on my Facebook page: Sports. ... Read more
A general rule of thumb is to never send a reader away from your website during a post, but in this case, I think it is imperative that you click here and watch a quick minute-long trailer for the documentary, The Mountain Within. Don't worry; I'll wait...***You're back? Great. Fantastic, right? But ... Read more
There is something "likeable" about this book from the get-go. It's bright yellow color; it's big thumbs up. It's a smack-in-the-face ray of sunshine on the corner of my desk every day. And isn't that what we want our social media to be? A quick inspiration from our Twitter feed, a bite-sized update ... Read more
"Small interactions are the best-kept secret of leadership," writes Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell Soup Company, in his book, TouchPoints, written with Mette Norgaard. TouchPoints are those moments when a leader interacts with an employee, team member, or peer, and makes those moments matter...instead ... Read more
A couple weeks ago, I was walking through our warehouse and caught a glimpse of a book with a bright lime green cover and delicate origami bird taking flight from a pile of crumbled pieces of paper that one of my co-workers was customizing and packaging up for shipment. That day, I walked right past ... Read more
I just got back from a short vacation in New York/New Jersey where, on Friday afternoon, I decided to take a leap (pun intended) and go to trapeze school. I'm generally pretty risk-averse, and have a healthy fear of heights (I am not sure I have actually ever climbed to the top of a 6-foot house ladder), ... Read more
There is a pull-quote in the first chapter of Jeremie Kubicek's, Leadership is Dead, that plainly states the moral call of this book: "After decades of greed by corporate tycoons, financial moguls, and political egos, this generation is searching for authentic, selfless leadership that holds a mission ... Read more
Become an Idea HunterAndy Boynton and Bill Fischer will teach you how to hunt ideas using four principles that are easily remembered with the acronym I-D-E-A, which the authors explain more concisely than I ever could.Principle 1: "Do I want to be interested, or merely interesting? All of us naturally ... Read more
I am the elephant. The two customer service folks sitting to my right are giraffes. Perhaps you are a wildebeest, a lion, crocodile, cheetah, or mongoose. Perhaps you've never thought of yourself as any kind of animal, but Stefan Swanepoel, author of Surviving Your Serengeti, would encourage you ... Read more
Thanks to our multi-talented accounting master, Shawn Quinn, for reviewing Malled by Caitlin Kelly for inBubbleWrap this week!***In what seems a lifetime ago I worked in retail managing a store that was part of a national chain. I know that retail is hard work. It’s physically demanding and ... Read more
We first became enamored with Charles Fishman's writing when Jack read a copy of his 2007 article in FastCompany, titled "Message in a Bottle" and passed it around the office. And we became raving fans of his bestselling book, The Wal-Mart Effect (which we recommended in our "lost chapter" of The 100 ... Read more