100-year flood
Tax Planning Strategies 2010-2011
CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business; $39.99
Between the unknown fate of the Bush tax cuts and the flood of new tax regs, we can't remember a time when taxpayers and tax preparers faced so many critical issues with so little certainty. While the latest edition of CCH's Tax Planning Strategies can't force Congress to clean up its act and straighten out the mess it created, it can help taxpayers and planners make the best of a bad situation, with plain-English guidance and clear advice on a wide range of tax strategies and planning options.
Yes! No! Maybe!
Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization
Harvard Business Review Press; $29.95
If you've ever waited on a line while some idiot dithered endlessly over grande versus venti, you know that decision-making is definitely a skill. What Decide & Deliver makes clear is that it's not just a skill lacking in individuals - organizations can lack decision-making skills, too, often with far more serious consequences. With plenty of real-life examples of high-profile companies with both good and bad decision-making processes, the book shows all the many ways that a company can go wrong, how to assess your own organization in terms of its decisive prowess, how to identify critical decisions, and how to build structures that both streamline the organization's decision-making, and empower individuals to decide better. Decide to read it today.
Take your seat
Work Your Strengths: A Scientific Process to Identify Your Skills and Match Them to the Best Career for You
Amacom; $21.95
By now, everyone's familiar with Jim Collins' injunction to get the right people on the bus in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, but most people expect those decisions to be made about them, not by them. Work Your Strengths offers a process to find out for yourself which bus you should be on, and which seat you should take. The book lays out a set of 12 skills to evaluate yourself on, and then shows how to match them to the right industry, and even the right department within a company. (In case you were wondering, organization is the key skill for accountants.) It also shows managers how to use the skills to assign employee seating.
Can't live with 'em ...
The New Experts: Win Today's Newly Empowered Customers at Their 4 Decisive Moments
Greenleaf Book Group Press; $18.95
As annoying as clients and prospects are, they're only getting worse. Between the Internet and the instant access they get to it through all those fancy wireless gadgets they're carrying, they feel like they know more than ever - more, maybe, than you. The New Experts shows how to grab and hold these obnoxious, capricious know-it-alls, from catching their attention and keeping it, to turning them into advocates for your services. While it has definite applications for retail businesses, it's also relevant for professionals.
