Book recommendations from Carmine Gallo 

10 Simple Secrets Of The World’s Greatest Business Communicators

Carmine Gallo

Improve your communication skills with this tip from Carmine Gallo. Know your audience. Ask yourself three questions: 1). What do they need to know? 2). Why should they care? 3). What action do I want them to take? Help your listeners achieve their dreams and you’ll win them over.

Think Like A Monk

Train your mind for peace and purpose every day

Jay Shetty

Jay Shetty’s “Think Like a Monk” is a new book on Carmine’s bookshelf. Shetty is a social media superstar who reaches millions of people with his insights and lessons on how to live a life of passion and purpose. In his new book, Shetty, a former monk, reveals many of the lessons he learned from ancient wisdom that apply to the modern world. The big lesson—and Carmine’s big takeaway from the book—is that we can control our thoughts by controlling what we feed our minds.

The Biggest Bluff

How I learned to pay attention, master myself, and win

Maria Konnikova

Carmine Gallo talked to Maria Konnikova, author of “The Biggest Bluff.” Maria had a Ph.D. in psychology and zero experience playing poker. Within two years of applying psychology to the field, she had won $300,000 in professional tournament winnings. Maria’s best tip is to control the words you use when things don’t go your way. “The words you use to frame the current situation build the seeds of resilience.”

Ask For More

Ten questions to negotiate anything

Alexandra Carter

Carmine Gallo talks to Columbia law school professor, Alexandra Carter, about her Wall Street Journal bestseller, Ask for More: Ten Questions to Negotiate Anything (Simon & Schuster, May, 2020). In this conversation, the two authors reveal the most important questions to ask yourself and your audience (or negotiating partner). Tap into human psychology to advance your career, build stronger relationships, and unlock new possibilities.

Leadership Strategy and Tactics

Jocko Willink

I’m proud to share a publisher with a former Navy SEAL and best selling author Jocko Willink. And we’re both published by St. Martin’s Press. Jocko’s new book is another best seller “Leadership Strategy and Tactics.” I consider it a field manual for leaders. I love the fact that he’s devoted an entire chapter in this book to communication skills. As a leader, your instructions and your guidance must be simple, clear, and concise. Jocko says, “in any leadership position, “it is critical to keep everyone on the team “as informed as possible.” When team members are uninformed, they’re lost. They’re ineffective and morale plummets. You’ll never be a great leader without great communication skills.

Leadership Strategy and Tactics

Jocko Willink

I’m proud to share a publisher with a former Navy SEAL and best selling author Jocko Willink. And we’re both published by St. Martin’s Press. Jocko’s new book is another best seller “Leadership Strategy and Tactics.” I consider it a field manual for leaders. I love the fact that he’s devoted an entire chapter in this book to communication skills. As a leader, your instructions and your guidance must be simple, clear, and concise. Jocko says, “in any leadership position, “it is critical to keep everyone on the team “as informed as possible.” When team members are uninformed, they’re lost. They’re ineffective and morale plummets. You’ll never be a great leader without great communication skills.

The Splendid and the Vile

A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Erik Larson

As we all hunker down to fight the Coronavirus together, you might be looking for a good book. On my bookshelf today is the new number one bestseller by Erik Larson called “The Splendid and the Vile.” It’s the true story of Winston Churchill and the British people who endured six months of brutal aerial bombing by the Nazis in World War II. Now, as you can see, I take a lot of notes because I’ll be speaking to Mr. Larson and I’m gonna tell him this is exactly the kind of book that we need to be reading today. It reminds people that they’ve been through worse, they fought bravely and they went on to thrive. It also reminds people that great leaders like Churchill can elevate morale even when the bombs are falling. Winston Churchill taught people the art of being fearless. He made people believe they could win, and they did.

Narrative Econimics

How Stories Go Viral & Drive Major Economic Events
Robert J. Shiller

The Nobel prize winning economist, Robert Shiller, correctly forecast the dot com crash and the Great Recession of 2007. The data didn’t convince him; the stories did. And that’s why he wrote Narrative Economics, How stories go viral and drive major economic events.

I talked to Shiller about this topic. Everything from the stock market crash of 1929 to bitcoin mania can be explained through the lens of narrative. The stories you hear from others drive your behavior—like whether or not to start a company or save or spend money or to invest in the stock market.

My big takeaway—be really skeptical about the stories you hear. They’re not always based on facts. They just make for a good story. If want to lead a successful life, you need to understand the narratives you buy into.

Face to Face

The Art of Human Connection
Brian Grazer

Unfortunately, too many of us are glued to our devices when we should be focused on the person we’re having a conversation with.

That’s a theme that runs through Brian Grazer’s new book, Face to Face: The art of human connection. Grazer is a Hollywood Producer. He co-founded Imagine Entertainment with Ron Howard. Together they made Splash, A Beautiful Mind, 8 Mile, Arrested Development, and many other movies and shows.

Grazer has been negotiating deals for 40 years and he says eye contact is the ignition point. It is the first step in creating a real connection and building trust. Grazer doesn’t come from Hollywood royalty. He earned his success and learned valuable lessons on the road to the top.

What It Takes

Lessons in pursuit of excellence
Stephen A. Schwarzman

Success leaves clues and that’s why when a self-made billionaire shares his secrets, you should pay attention. I paid attention to every page of Stephen Schwarzman’s new book, What it Takes. Schwarzman is the co-founder and CEO of Blackstone, a firm that invests in hundreds of companies around the world.

His personal mantra: GO BIG! Have lofty goals and pursue them relentlessly. “It’s as hard to start and run a small business as it is to start a big one. So choose one with the potential to be huge.” When he started Blackstone, Schwarzman wanted to raise $1 billion for his first fund. His co-founder said $50 million was more realistic. They raised $850 million. Go big. That’s what it takes.

Thomas Paine

and the clarion call for American Independence
Harlow Giles Unger

Words have power and that’s why I recommend Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence. Historian Harlow Giles Unger reveals how Paine’s writing ignited the American Revolution. In January of 1776, Paine’s Common Sense sold millions of copies and. He wrote compelling logic and simple words that everyone could understand. “Commoners picked up their muskets and did the unthinkable by rebelling against royal rule.” When his troops were discouraged, George Washington ordered everyone to read and to listen to Paine’s words as they were spoken aloud. John Adams said without the pen of Paine, the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain. Leaders, your words matter.

The Trillion Dollar Coach

The leadership playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle

Today I’m recommending The Trillion Dollar Coach. This is the leadership playbook of Bill Campbell, Silicon Valley’s most influential business coach. He’s advised Steve Jobs, the Google founders, and many others.

After Campbell passed away in 2016, Google began to teach his principles to emerging leaders. One of those principles is simple and impactful: Start meetings with trip reports. Ask people what they did on the weekend or to talk about a recent trip. By sharing stories, it improves relationships as people get to know each other on a personal level, and it gets everyone involved right from the start. Campbell believed that communication skills are critical to a company’s success, and that’s why he created a trillion dollars in value for America’s top tech companies!

Principles: Life and Work

Ray Dalio 

Dalio, a hedge fund billionaire, didn’t start out that way. He was an ordinary kid and “a worse-than-ordinary student.” Forty years after starting a hedge fund out of his New York City apartment, Dalio shares his success secrets in 560 pages. Although Dalio’s company, Bridgewater Associates, has received attention for its commitment to radical transparency, another “radical” observation caught my attention in Dalio’s book: Be radically open-minded.

We’re living in an age that is, quite possibly, the most disruptive era in civilization. Every individual, every company is experiencing the dramatic effect of technological advances. According to Dalio, open-minded people will be in a better position to see around the corner. Close-minded people don’t want their ideas challenged, says Dalio. By contrast, open-minded people “approach everything with a deep-seated fear that they may be wrong.” Good decisions aren’t necessarily the ones that stroke your ego. A good decision is what’s best for you and your company. “People who change their minds because they learned something are winners, whereas those who stubbornly refuse to learn are the losers,” writes Dalio.

Hit Refresh

The quest to rediscover Microsoft’s soul and imagine a better future for everyone

Satya Nadella 

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s book shares two common themes with Dalio’s. Both books are endorsed by Bill Gates and both encourage leaders to keep an open mind. Nadella credits the book Mindset by Carol Dweck for inspiring a change in this own growth as a leader. “It changed my life,” he writes. Nadella says that leaders should always be curious. According to Nadella, “the learn-it-all” will always do better than “the know-it-all.”

Finding My Virginity

The new autobiography

Richard Branson 

One of the highlights of my year was spending time with billionaire Richard Branson. In my favorite chapter from Finding My Virginity, Branson tells the story of Virgin Australia airlines, the business pitch that fit on a beer coaster. Branson’s advice for all entrepreneurs and leaders who want to improve their communication skill is the best tip I’ve ever heard: “If your pitch can’t fit on a beer mat, a napkin, or back of envelope, I’d rather listen to someone else’s pitch that can fit. Most good ideas can be expressed very quickly.”

Leonardo da Vinci

Walter Isaacson

 Walter Isaacson’s bestselling book about Leonardo da Vinci isn’t a ‘business’ book, but Isaacson’s insights into how Leonardo and his previous subject, Steve Jobs, approached the creative process contains valuable insights for all leaders. Isaacson says one of the factors behind Leonardo’s stunning creativity is that he lived in Florence at a time when people from different disciplines and diverse talents “intermingled.” Steve Jobs attempted to create a similar type of environment for ideas to flourish. According to Isaacson, “Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together diverse passions.”

The Power of Meaning

Crafting a life that matters

Emily Esfahani Smith

The author has written about culture, psychology and relationships for a wide variety of publications ranging from The Atlantic to The New York Times. Esfahani Smith structures the book around four pillars of meaning: Belonging, purpose, storytelling and transcendence. It’s not as “new age” as the title might suggest. There are actionable insights for leaders who want to motivate teams. She argues that the world is full of employees who get “bogged down in paperwork and other day-to-day tasks, and sometimes lose sight of their broader mission.” When people can reframe their tasks as opportunities to help others, their lives feel more significant.

I believe true leaders are those who connect the work that their teams do to a broader mission. In 2018, commit to showing your employees—in presentations, videos, and stories—how their daily tasks make the world a better place.

The Power of Moments

Why certain experiences have extraordinary impact

Chip and Dan Heath

There may be power in meaning, and there’s also power in moments. The Heath brothers who wrote, Made to Stick, wrote a book this year that complements many of the themes in my Forbes column. Specifically, how brands and leaders can stand out among the competition. Chip and Dan Heath make the compelling argument that we remember experiences as “flagship moments.” In other words, we don’t recall every slide of a presentation. We don’t remember every detail of a dining experience. We don’t remember every step of our stay at a hotel. We recall short, defining moments that are both memorable and meaningful.

When you think about creating experiences for your audience or customers, focus on building those moments that they’ll remember and share.

Hit Makers

The science of popularity in an age of distraction

Derek Thompson

Thompson’s book also focuses on moments that people remember. In Hit Makers, Thompson, a senior editor at The Atlantic, examines the psychology of why people like what they like. “Products change and fashions rise and fall. But the architecture of the human mind is ancient,” he writes. Thompson builds the argument that hit makers (in music, literature, art, marketing, brand building), create moments by marrying the old with the new. “Exposure breeds familiarity, familiarity breeds fluency, and fluency often breeds liking. But there is such a thing as too much familiarity…Instead, the most special experiences and products involve a bit of surprise, unpredictably, and disfluency.”

Here’s the takeaway for leader/communicators. If you’re going to pitch a new idea, don’t make it so radically novel that it’s unfamiliar to your audience. Instead, pitch an old idea with a “slightly new” twist. People love to be surprised.

The Leading Brain

Powerful science-based strategies for achieving peak performance

Frederike Fabritius and Hans W. Hagemann

The authors are German neuropsychologists who challenge leaders to think about how people feel after they’ve interacted with you. “Do they feel more important, more valued, or more appreciated? Or do they feel unimportant, inferior, or under appreciated?” It’s important, argue the authors, because from an evolutionary perspective we all want to feel accepted as part of a group. In many cases—especially for sales professionals—elite status is as important (in some studies, even more important) as the size of their commissions. The authors suggest that leaders treat members of their team as valued players. “Treat your colleagues with genuine respect, and make sure they know that you truly believed they are valued…people want to feel important.”

One Mission

How leaders build a team of teams

Chris Fussell

Fussell knows leadership. He’s a navy SEAL and worked as General Stanley McChrystal’s aide-de-camp. Fussell learned that “A leader cannot simply command people what to do and expect them to wholeheartedly follow.” Leaders guide teams and influence their decision-making. Since I study and write about business storytelling, I was intrigued by the book’s chapters on “Aligning narratives.” Fussell says that teams must have a unifying, empowering narrative, that rallies the team around one mission. He focuses on the role that social contagion plays in group psychology. In other words, a leader doesn’t need to get everyone to buy in to the corporate narrative. A leader only needs to inspire a small group of influencers with the enterprise to carry the idea forward.

Irresistible

The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked

Adam Alter

We sure love our smartphones. In the most recent studies that Alter cites, most people are spending between one and four hours on their phones every day—and many are spending far more time. Over our lifetimes, many of us will spend an average of 11 years checking email, texting, playing games, surfing the web, etc.. I don’t know about you, but I want to use my time wisely and productively. After speaking to Alter and reading the book, I didn’t swear off digital screens entirely, but I did decide to keep track of my digital activities. The book is worth reading cover to cover. Alter said he jumped at the opportunity to speak with me over the phone because the very act “peels me away from the screen.” The screens are so addictive, even the professor who wrote the book on it has to be careful. It’s a powerful reminder that leaders need to be aware of how they spend their time.

Captivate

The science of succeeding with people

Vanessa Van Edwards

People will decide in the first few seconds of meeting you whether or not they like you. That’s the theory that guides the book’s content. Van Edwards, a behavior researcher, says the power of a strong first impression is not in what we say, but how we say it. Van Edwards has a tip she calls the “Triple Threat” to making a good first impression: 1. Use your hands, 2. Look like a winner by taking up as much space on stage as physically possible and 3. Engage in eye contact. Based on my research on TED talks and persuasion, I can attest that the “Triple Threat” will help you stand out as a speaker.

If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look

On My Face?

My adventures in the art and science of relating and communicating

Alan Alda

Alan Alda is a seven-time Emmy Award winner for his classic television roles, but Alda’s interest in science runs deep. He hosted a PBS series and is a visiting professor at Stony Brook University’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. In the absence of effective communication, scientific ideas often go unfunded, says Alda. His tip to becoming a better communicator—study the craft.

“Just listening to good communicators doesn’t work. It takes training to learn how to do it. I’ve been listening to good pianists all my life and I still can’t play the piano.”

How to Think

A survival guide for a world at odds

Alan Jacobs  

Part of the inspiration for Jacobs’ book comes Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman, who spent his career studying the biases that cloud our thinking. Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is one of my favorite books of all time. Jacobs, a humanities professor, does a nice job of summarizing Kahneman’s research while adding his own unique insights.

Jacob’s main point is that relatively few people want to think. Thinking is hard. It takes up a lot of brain energy, and it makes us uncomfortable. It’s easier to go with the flow. According to Jacobs, we are social beings. That means we surround ourselves—in our physical and digital lives—with people who are like us. And since social bonding exerts such a strong influence on our lives, we take on the group’s language, stories, myths and metaphors. Here’s the key.  Leaders, by definition, can’t just go with the flow. They have to be sharper, better thinkers, fair-minded and capable of looking at the problem from various dimensions. Better thinking requires a strategy. One tip that Jacobs offers to break out of the echo chamber: “Seek out the best and fairest-minded people whose views you disagree with. Listen to them for a time without responding. Whatever they say, think it over.

Popular

The power of likability in a status-obsessed world

Mitch Prinstein

Popularity mattered to our ancestors thousands of years ago. It matters today. You can have a great idea and design a lovely slide presentation, but if you’re not likable, you won’t get funding, support, customers, etc. According to Dr. Mitch Prinstein, the Director of Clinical Psychology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, “Popularity dynamics affect our careers, our success in meeting goals, our personal and professional relationships, and ultimately our happiness.” The good news is that Prinstein believes anyone can be more likable, whether they are extroverted or the quiet, introverted type. Likable people have the ability to read the room—any room. Prinstein says that one secret to being more likable is to be interested in the other person. Ask questions.

Put simply, people will want to talk to you if they believe you want to talk to them. According to Prinstein, likable people don’t chase status. They show an interest in others and avoid “vying for more attention and power.”

The Influential Mind

What a brain reveals about our power to change others

Tali Sharot

According to Dr. Tali Sharot, a London-based associate professor of cognitive neuroscience, we all have the ability to change another person’s emotional state and, in many cases, their opinions. The key is that data will only take you so far. Emotion is “the conductor” to reach another person’s neural pathways and to get them excited about your idea. You have the ability to change a person’s emotional state. Sharot writes about a concept I recently touched on—emotional contagion. Sharot calls it, emotional transfer. It works like this: “Your coworkers, family, friends, and even strangers will rapidly pick up on your state by perceiving changes in your facial expression, tone of voice, posture, and language. And while they may not be aware of it, if you are happy, they are more likely to become happy; if you are stressed, they are more likely to become stressed.” Emotions are highly contagious, Sharot argues. “Use them thoughtfully.” For example, if you have a message to get across, “transmitting it in a positive light means that people will be more likely to listen and, therefore, more likely to be influenced.”

QB

My life behind the spiral

Steve Young

Hall-of-Fame quarterback Steve Young is a paragon of grit. His autobiography is a tale of hard work, overcoming crippling anxiety, rallying teams around a mission and staying true to one’s character. Young reminds us that success in almost any chosen task takes work. For example, when Young was the eighth-string quarterback in college he was determined to show his coaches that he had the right stuff to be a winning quarterback. “From the beginning of January to the end of February, I threw more than 10,000 spirals. Over and over again. And them some. My arm hurt. But I wanted to be a quarterback.” Practice paid off and by the end of his college career Steve Young had been named All-American and the College Football Player of the Year. 

No Fears, No Excuses

What you need to do to have a great career

Dr. Larry Smith

Passion was a theme in many of this year’s nonfiction books, and few scholars believe in passion as much as Larry Smith who delivered a widely viewed TED talk, Why You Will Fail To Have a Great Career. After teaching 23,000 students over his career, Smith discovered the one underlying trait of all exceptional students—and those who went on to pursue satisfying careers: “In literally thousands of conversations, every student who was exceptional had a passionate interest in the domain being discussed. I have not encountered a single student who had great skill who did not also have passion for the field of battle. Not one.”

Hillbilly Elegy

A memoir of a family and culture in crisis

J.D. Vance

The poor working class is the subject for many of Bruce Springsteen’s songs, and their stories are also behind Hillbilly Elegy’s stunning 20-week run on The New York Times bestseller list (as of this writing). In every election season there’s a breakout hit because the books explain some of the shifts happening among the American electorate. In 2016, J.D. Vance did just that. Using deeply personal stories, Vance paints a vivid picture of the working poor in America, people who “helped drive the politics of rebellion,” according to one book review.

Vance’s book would never have caught on if it had been a purely sociological analysis with mindnumbing statistics. It caught my attention because of its vivid storytelling. “Our homes are a chaotic mess,” Vance writes. “We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. . . . A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama. Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later.”

Vance’s storytelling brings to life a wide section of the country who feel powerless, angry and demoralized. Statistics help explain, but storytelling illuminates.

TED Talks

The official TED guide to public speaking

Chris Anderson

TED curator Chris Anderson offers one of the best explanations for why leaders or advocates in any field need to sharpen their communication skills: “As a leader public speaking is the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, sharing knowledge and insights, and promoting a shared dream.” That sentence says it all. The rest of Anderson’s book is an excellent guide to unlocking presentation skills to wow your audience.

Above all Anderson believes that public-speaking skills and “presentation literacy” are teachable, and should be taught in every organization and every school. I couldn’t agree more.

The Fuzzy and the Techie

Why liberal arts will rule the digital world

Scott Hartley

“Finding solutions to our greatest problems requires an understanding of human context as well as code; it requires both ethics and data, both deep thinking people and Deep Learning AI, both human and machine,” writes venture capitalist Scott Hartley. His book is a good reminder of what Steve Jobs taught us — the best products, solutions and communicators combine technology with liberal arts.

32 Yolks

From my mother’s table to working the line

Eric Ripert

What does passion look like? How do you know someone has it? What does it sound like? These are the questions I often ask myself to help readers understand what passion is and who has it. Eric Ripert, the chef and co-owner of the 3-star Michelin restaurant Le Bernardin in New York City, clearly has it.

When Ripert writes that every ingredient is sacred, he means it. He realized he had a passion for cooking as a child. “I was fascinated by the act of cooking—how sugar, butter, apples, and dough magically transformed into a richly burnished tarte tatin.” 

“Today when I cut an onion, I have fun,” he writes. “It’s like a musician warming up by playing a simple song or piano scales. I love the craft and the contact, the sensuality of it.” How do you evaluate if someone is truly passionate about a given task? Ask them how they feel while performing it…and remember how Ripert describes cutting an onion.