Best Seller Podcast

Dr. Deepak Chopra, author of Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential, his 89thbook, felt compelled to write this book because we live in chaotic times and he wants to create a world that is more peaceful, more healthier, and joyful. This is his latest contribution to that effort. He defines ‘metahuman’ as the need for people to stop being robots by observing their behavior and themselves without judging themselves in order to access the highest intelligence leading to insight, intuition, inspiration, creativity, higher vision, and transcendence. Chopra says that the world is currently at a crossroads – we are either facing extinction or we can take the next evolutionary leap from humans to metahumans. We have the tools to make it happen, and the choice is ours to make.

Even after his 89th book, Chopra’s life has continued to evolve in three major ways. He adds, “Slowly, I have become independent of good/bad opinions of the world. I am immune to both criticism and flattery. I have decided to have clarity of experience without being bound to the experience, and I have stopped looking for external validation or rewards.” Those, he says, have brought him “deep peace.” This book has 31 steps that encourage readers to progressively shift from doing, to thinking, to feeling, to being – in fact, to be “grounded in being,” not in imagining or thinking.

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Nelson Griswold, author of Breaking Through the Status Quo: How Innovative Companies are Changing the Benefits Game to Help Their Employees and Boost Their Bottom Line tackles a very timely topic: healthcare costs. Griswold argues that “healthcare has become the second or third largest P&L line item, for every company in America.” He states that the problem lies with insurance companies telling CEOs, CFOs and other decision-makers they have no control over the cost of insurance. This is the biggest mistake companies are making – they have adopted that mentality for so long but the tide is slowly turning with the rise of Next Gen Benefits Advisors. These advisors are the allies that companies need in order to help them gain anywhere between twenty and sixty percent back into their bottom lines and lower their costs of healthcare. Griswold says that a “benefits revolution” is going on right now and these Next Gen advisors are saying “no more.” This book is mainly for c-suite leaders who have been told by insurance companies they have no control over healthcare costs, something Griswold refers to as “healthcare’s big lie.”

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Branding involves creating a name, symbol, or design that consumers can easily identify a specific company or celebrity with. Bernt Ullmann, CBA, author of The Billion Dollar Branding Blueprint: 7 Steps to Building a Brand and Accelerating Your Wealth, explains the importance of having a memorable brand because, “In order to kind of evoke an emotion, in order to get a transaction, you need to connect with the consumer.” Ullmann has based his career as a CBA, which stands for Chief Brand (or Business) Accelerator, asserting his belief in the importance of having a brand.

Ullmann says he loves to create brands because it helps create something that’s lasting. He adds, “If you don’t have a brand, if you don’t have some type of distinguishing mark – something that sets you apart from your competitors, you are left to compete with only one thing, namely price.” Today’s society is more experiential than ever before, and while people still want to spend money on certain brands, they prefer to do so on experiences.

Ullmann’s book focuses on proven techniques and practical applications that took years of experience to cultivate and then put in writing as a step-by-step process. Ullmann says if he has the ‘opportunity to help someone and make their journey better or easier, that will be my true pleasure.’

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Dr. Gary McGrath, author of A CEO’s Journey: The 7 Steps of Intentional Leadership – Making Bosses Into Great Leaders wrote this book to help CEOs that are struggling with being good bosses and might be in need of someone to coach them through some of the rough patches of being a c-suite leader. He says that it is very easy for CEOs to feel like they are in a vacuum with few resources to help them be better leaders.

The book dives into the fundamental parts of leadership and what is required to be an effective leader this day and age. Herein are the seven steps of leadership, broken down into three sections – steps 1-3 involve self-development, step 4 is the crossover between self and the team, and steps 5-7 involve team development. These steps allow those in leadership positions know where their leadership capabilities are. McGrath argues that leadership is based on someone’s authentic ability to tell people what they stand for – their own mission statement of sorts. He adds, “If you’re not clear about that, people aren’t going to follow you.”

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David Newman, author of Do It! Marketing: 77 Instant-Action Ideas to Boost Sales, Maximize Profits and Crush Your Competition, writes a book where “nothing is assumed” and where anyone – whether a beginner or a seasoned professional, can “flip open the table of contents” and get whatever they need or want. Newman says the book is about sales-driven marketing with seventy-seven specific strategies that ring up the cash register. He says, “It’s not marketing for the sake of marketing. It’s marketing that drives sales.”

One of the mantras of the book, Newman says, is to offer value and invite engagement through thought leadership management, which he defines as holding clients’ interests above your own. He adds that marketers shouldn’t focus on pitching and peddling but in helping and serving instead, as the age of mass marketing is over. All efforts to reach customers need to be laser-focused, personalized, and intentional with the goal of building relationships. Newman states, “There’s no such thing as a generic solution to a specific problem.”

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Eddie Turner, Jr., author of 140 Simple Messages to Guide Emerging Leaders, wrote a book that is applicable to everyone – those early in their careers as well as those well into their career. The ‘one hundred and forty’ refers to the number of characters that Twitter allowed early on, as he realized that everyone reads a tweet, but not everyone reads a scholarly book. His goal is to give readers the “cliff notes” that will guide emerging leaders on the road to success. Turner says that everyone has a different perception of what an emerging leader is. Some of the people he talked to think of millennials as emerging leaders, while others believe a company’s high performer is also one. However, he argues, there are others who don’t fit either category, such as young people, those re-entering the workforce or those who are changing careers.

Turner is a believer that leadership begins in our youth and that “readers become leaders.” Leaders who read always stay abreast of the most current knowledge in their industry; whereas other leaders prefer to remain within their own inner leadings. Turner also points out that “you don’t need a title to be a leader” as leadership and influence are not one in the same. Leadership, he says, “is an art and a science that must be practiced.” It’s not something we fully ever master.

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Nina Sunday, author of Workplace Wisdom for 9 to Thrive: Proven Tactics and Hacks To Get Ahead in Today’s Workplace talks about future-proofing one’s employability by improving our human skills. A “tsunami of automation” is already upon us and that brings opportunities, dangers, and pitfalls. Sunday says that in order to prevent AI and automation to fully take over, we need to up our human skills, which include collaboration, creating interpersonal relationships, and demonstrating empathy. She says, “If you can up your human skills, you’ll be the last one to lose your job.”

Sunday’s book is aimed at young professionals entering the workforce as it is often unwritten ground rules and assumptions that create confusion and miscommunication among team members. Therefore, it is imperative that younger employees understand the niceties of professionalism, giving them all of the necessary tools to be poised and confident. One other “workplace wisdom” Sunday offers is making sure employees become interdisciplinary, not specialists. The more skills they acquire, the better opportunities they have for career advancement.

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Author Dwight Holcomb wrote the book, The Lean CMO, with the purpose of teaching CMOs how to capture the right audience that will pursue your message because they see what you’re offering them as it’s tailored to their specific needs. He states that this is the “new model” of doing business as opposed to the “old” way where CMOs put too much emphasis on metrics with no real return as a result of their ad spend. He refers to that as “finding the ideal customer profile.”

Holcomb says that a common mistake marketers make is the need they feel to be everything for every client, when instead, they should hyperfocus on certain things they do right. He adds that CEOs and other executive leaders don’t always have the bandwidth to execute on all the items they need to do, but more often than not, the ideas are there. There’s just no bandwidth to implement them. He stresses that executives use a team of functional specialists to perform a number of tasks – whether it’s public relations, content writing, or social media, allowing them to focus on high-level strategy. This is what he calls, “the lean CMO blueprint.”

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Andrew Tarvin, author of Humor That Works: The Missing Skill for Success and Happiness at Work, talks about how people need to learn how to incorporate humor into their professional lives in order to be more productive and achieve better results. Tarvin wanted to write a book that was actionable, that people could read and immediately start implementing humor into their workplace. He says that people “learn skills to be effective at our jobs, but never learn the skills to actually enjoy our jobs.” The most important thing Tarvin feels is understanding your humor M.A.P. – Medium, Audience and Purpose. Tarvin stresses that in the workplace it’s less about being a comedian, it’s about being effective. Humor enhances positivity and, with 83 percent of Americans feeling stressed out at work, the book is about how to use humor to execute faster, communicate better and connect – or lead – further. After all, “It’s less about doing what you love than loving what you do.”

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Larry Vaughn, author of Business Cards and Shoe Leather: How Dyslexia Help Me Found One of the World’s Premier Business Cooperatives, wrote a personal book about being dyslexic and thriving as an author, speaker, and businessman in spite of struggling with the disorder from a very young age. Vaughn started out selling print and because of his dyslexia, resorted to perfecting the art of storytelling. In order to be a good salesman, he says, all you need is “business cards and shoe leather. If you have good business cards and a good pair of shoes, you just hit the street and start selling.” With this book, Vaughn decided to share his own personal struggles to encourage other professionals with the same disability to take this perceived weakness and turn it into a strength. He adds, “Once you realize that, good things will come.”

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