By MBO Partners
Professional development is all about making the right connections, but it’s important to achieve the right balance. Garnering the right attention to who you know while honing your craft and what you know is essential to properly packaging your expertise and services.
Last fall, we shared Six Business Books Independent Consultants Must Read. This post continues to be one of our most visited resources on our blog, so we wanted to give an updated version for 2016.
We highly recommend adding these 10 books (and authors) to your “must read” (and follow) lists before the fall season gets in full swing.
1. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
While many may not agree with everything the author preaches, this book offers good insight into the mind of a Silicon Valley mogul. – Filip Sufitchi, Software Engineer
2. Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling
As I rise up the career ladder, it becomes more and more apparent that soft skills like emotional intelligence are as important, if not more so, than the hard skills we all worked so hard to develop. This book flips the concept of management and leadership on its head by allowing the reader to understand that interpersonal relationships in the workforce may just be our most powerful “to develop” area of our entire careers. – McLean Robbins, Director, Content Strategy
3. Emotional Intelligence 2.0
If you’re working for yourself, you have to wear multiple hats, which means interacting with many different types of people in many different capacities. You can’t just push off the sales work or the client relationship work off to someone else while you do all of the solo delivery work. If an independent contractor has trouble building and maintaining good relationships, or just wants to get even better at it, this book will help develop those skills. – Cyndi Zaino, Director, Digital Marketing and Customer Experience
4. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
I strongly recommend this book, as it is incredibly valuable in showing the virtues of hard work and what one can accomplish when they stick to their moral values, even in a world where cheating and underhanded deals are the norm. – Dayna Mabry, Senior Project Specialist
5. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
As an independent, you value your client relationships, and the last thing you’d want to do is damage that relationship because your sub-contractors haven’t met client expectations or plain just haven’t done things the way you would have. Helping your sub-contractors understand how to deliver unexpected and unbelievable service to your clients is critical for an independent when they un-expectantly need to scale but deliver to the same standards. – Cyndi Zaino, Director, Digital Marketing and Customer Experience
6. Think and Grow Rich
This choice may be obvious to some, but the book is a classic, nonetheless. The book, originally published in 1937, tells the story of an interview with Andrew Carnegie, in which Carnegie hints at a “master power” he used to achieve his entrepreneurial success. – John Piazza, Senior VP, Solutions Delivery
Click here to read more https://www.mbopartners.com/blog/how-manage-small-business/10-business-books-every-independent-consultant-should-read-right-now/