What I’m Reading the Week of Monday, October 22, 2012

by on October 23, 2012 in What I'm Reading...

Many small contractors while they revile homeowners invading their online forums with Do-It-Yourslef questions are perhaps the most blatant DIYers themselves and it fail to understand how it hurts them: 5 Reasons Why Do-it-Yourself Marketing Can Actually Hurt Your Business | Small Business Trends

I’m reading John Jantsch’s (of DuctTapeMarketing.com) The Commitment Engine: Making Work Worth It on my iPad via Kindle and just yesterday a paperback copy of The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself arrived that I got as part of a special offer. I’m about two thirds through The Commitment Engine and I review both of them when I’m done.

But today I also found myself reading and excellent blog article by  Jantsch on his DuctTapeMarketing.com web site: The Most Important Onine Marketing Tactics. 7 great points small and midsize contractors can’t ignore..

Apple announced the release of it long suspected iPad mini ($329 for ) earlier this week and I for one am very happy to find out that they made the mini smaller in size (a 7.9 inch display) while keeping the  screen resolution the same as the 1024-by-768 iPad 2. That means I don’t need to redesign another version of our 360 Difference Software Toolset  for yet another device! Hurrah! So some of the articles I read that I think are worth handing on are….

U.S. new home sales near 2.5-year high in September | HousingZone 

Increased pace adds to signs of broadening housing market recovery

By HZ Staff October 24, 2012
Though increasing home sales are giving a modest lift to house prices and to builders’ confidence to take on new projects, the housing market rebound lacks the vitality needed to become the main driver of an economic revival….(read the complete article…)

Powerful Presentations–Every Time! « Remodelers Advantage

“It’s useless to be a good craftsperson . . . unless you can also sell what you create.  Your customers cannot be expected to recognize a good idea unless it is presented to them by a good salesperson.”

This was a paraphrase of a quote by David Ogilvy, one of America’s advertising legends and the message really struck me.  Just think about it, you can develop the very best solution to a exceptionally complex problem, but if you can’t present that idea in a way that will convince your prospects, all of your work has been wasted. (read the complete article…)

The Ogilvy quote is great and so very apropos to so many of the contractors I speak with every day.

Spottend on the Ektron (a big Web Content Management System services company) blog  two worthwhile posts:

Managing Yourself: Extreme Productivity – Harvard Business Review

 Bob Pozen does a lot. He’s been a top executive at two mutual fund giants, Fidelity and MFS Investment Management. He’s also been an attorney, a government official, a law school professor, a business school professor, and a prolific author. And he has often been several of those things at once. Yet Pozen never comes across as overwhelmed, frazzled, or even all that busy. We know this because he’s a frequent contributor to HBR and hbr.org—with a reputation around our offices for writing faster than we can edit. Our experiences with him led us to wonder if he might have something interesting to say about personal productivity. So we asked him about it. The result was a series of blog posts for hbr.org (http://s.hbr.org/eDJ4g4), which Pozen has here distilled into six principles for a more productive work life.  (read  (and listen to) the complete article…)

A link to the book: Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results,Reduce Your Hours  (I’ll be picking up the Kindle edition) and the authors blog site: Bob Pozen on Extreme Productivity | Bob Pozen

While I am a lifelong Macintosh user since I do have so many consulting clients & 360 Difference  users on the Windows platform I’ve been anxiously looking forward to both Windows 8 and MS’s new Surface tablet too.  The big question for me as a developer  is not will FileMaker 12 run on Windows 8 (I am confident it will soon enough) but will it run on Windows 8 ARM?

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