There is no doubt that the real estate world is changing, but let’s face it, real estate has never been constant. One of the enduring truths of our industry is that things are always in a state of change. The most successful real estate professionals understand that succeeding in real estate requires mastering the process of change. More importantly our careers depend on both recognizing market shifts and then reinventing our services and our practices to capitalize on those shifting trends.

Gary Keller’s Shift captures this essence of the heart estate in an easy to understand manner and delivers the material in practical useful scripts that will help you gain market share. It has been a long time since I have read a book with such amazing insight into the operation of real estate markets and what we need to be doing to succeed in them.

Some of the great information that you will gain from reading Shift is:

• How to Develop the Right Mindset in Shifting Markets
• Seller Pricing Strategies to Always Be Priced Ahead of the Market
• How to Engage in Successful Internet Lead Conversion
• Mastery of the Market of the Moment
• How to Create Urgency to Overcome Buyer Reluctance

This book is stuffed full of the information we all should know. I believe the subtitle of the book probably conveys all you need to know “It’s NOT About the Market…It’s About What You Do!”

Find out what you should be doing and put Shift on your summer reading list.

The Heath brothers strike again! You may recognize them as the authors of the best selling “Made to Stick”. Their most recent work Switch is subtitled “How to Change Things When Change is Hard” and you will find lots of good practical information here. Their insights into what inspires people to change habits and actions is useful in any business and the information is interwoven with stories about single individuals and entire companies that brought about meaningful change. Building on the analogy of an elephant and its rider allows Dan & Chip Heath to demonstrate the barriers that often exist to change and communicate effective ways of overcoming the obstacles.

They illustrate the fact that all successful change follows a predictable pattern, even if we have failed to recognize it until them highlight the pattern and techniques that lead to effective change. So whether you are trying to implement new ideas for educational programs, get businesses to utilize social media more, lead a team that needs cohesion or are engaged in the promotion of social causes, you will find important insights and strategies in the book, Switch.

You can learn much more about Switch and the Heath Brothers from either their website or on their facebook fanpage.

Highly recommended reading for the age of change that we are all negotiating.

Chip Heath is a professor at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Dan heath is a senior fellow at Duke University’s Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship (CASE).

Course Creators wants to know what is your sentence. Will you share with Course Creators the sentence you created after reading  Dan Pink’s book, “Drive?”

One of the hallmarks that I have come to appreciate most about Dan’s writing is that every book might as well be subtitled, “Everything You Thought You Knew About This Topic is Wrong.” Drive is the surprising truth and what motivates us. Dan will challenge everything you thought you knew about motivating your clients, your employees and yourself. There are so many authors and writers who believe that the changes which are occurring in the business world are all due to economic conditions and or technology. Dan instead digs much deeper to  unveil the fundamental shifts that we are experiencing in society. The first chapter is entitled, The Rise and Fall of Motivation 2.0. and sets the stage for a recurrent theme throughout the book and that is that business must begin doing what science already knows.

We lack the business models and theoretical constructs to understand a lot of the changes that are occurring, but Dan will provide you with the foundation  for a whole new mindset regarding the way we try to motivate others. You’ll find out why….

Author Dan Pink Even Surprises Himself!

• Offering something for FREE actually increases its value
• Paying volunteers will destroy a project
• People really engage in activities and what sustains their interest
• Managers and supervisors must recraft their roles or perish

The most unusual part of Dan’s book are the last 100 pages which offer a practical Toolkit to reinvent your company, office or group. It is chock full of ideas, references and improvement strategies which will provide you with the tools you need to really “Drive”. We think that without Dan Pink’s insight you and your business will be missing a key piece for the future of success.

The book is available at Amazon.Com or you can visit Dan’s website.

You can listen to Dan at the TED Conference sharing his Drive insights.

Dan Pink is the author of A Whole New Mind, a long running New York Times bestseller that has been translated into 20 languages. He is a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review and Wired and lectures across the country. Dan invites you to email him at dhp@danpink.com

Any idea how much the world around us has changed?

Do you have any idea of the networks that are being built in social media?

Did you know that most of the major corporations have shifted money from traditional advertising to social media? Have you?

Do you know the last presidential election was won in social media?

This book will help you put everything in perspective. Understand what you need to know in order to be successful today and how the world of business has changed forever. Juliette Powell does a tremendous job of putting all of this into perspective in “33 Million People in the Room!”

We took the concepts of this book, applied them and ended up with a 3 hour class that will help you Get It! Use It and Become More Successful Because of IT!. The class is called “Catch the Social Wave”

If you have been wondering where your clients went, both this book and our class will tell you. You don’t have to wonder anymore. Find out where your clients went and how to get them back

Click on the image to the right and watch the video and you’ll decide that you can no longer wait to learn this information!

Did you know that the average consumer is bombarded with around 3,000 advertising messages every day. Do you wonder whether your advertising and marketing have become invisible? Are you struggling with how you get a consumer to stop long enough to hear what you are saying?

These are the issues that Joe Vitale will help you understand to create more effective marketing messages and advertising that actually results in customers. If you don’t already know Joe Vitale you should. He is a prolific author, recognized as Mr. Fire and was heavily involved in The Secret. In addition Joe is a magician,  a hypnotist and has been studying those arts for quite some time.

Buying Trances is about the way that people function in everyday life and what you must do to “break the trance” and get them to listen to your message. There are  great business and personal psychology principles here. In fact, the subtitle to Buying Trances is  “A New Psychology of Sales and Marketing”

We found a lot of stuff here that made us rethink the way we were marketing and the messages we were sending. It’s a great read and you will find stuff you really need to know to grow your business.

“Glimmer” has found its place as one of the most influential books I have ever read. I now believe that the subtitle “How design can transform your life, and maybe even the world” isn’t overreaching at all. Warren Berger will make you think about everything you do in a whole new light. Contained in the book is a whole new way of looking at the way we do things, from getting through the day, to selling products and services, to interacting with our clients. I wrote so many notes and margins on the sides and blank spaces in this book that it will take me a lifetime to implement and that’s sort of Berger’s point.

Business today needs massive shifts in the way we do things. This book will help you:

• Understand the importance of design and its underlying principles
• Design everything you do through the eyes of consumers and end users
• Refuel creativity and innovation
• Overcome barriers and create breakthroughs in your thinking
• Redesign you, your business and your life

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Stuffed full of amazing insights, ideas and concepts. We need this to get to the next level.

You can find outt even more about Warren Berger and his thinking by visiting his site.

There is also a Glimmer Site which applies all of this thinking to selling, advertising, the marketing of various products and services.

Glimmer will help you understand that we do not live in an age of information overload, we live in an age of data overload. Raw data is what we are swamped with. For that data to rise to the level of information – for it to be informative – it must be organized, simplified, clarified and well, in a word, designed.

I ran across this gem in an Indianapolis bookstore and finished it on the plane ride home (understand my ride home compliments of American Airlines included a detour through Little Rock Arkansas and an unplanned stranding in Dallas overnight) . Maestro is one of the best books on leadership I have ever read and chances are that for most of you it comes out of a profession in which many of you have not spent a lot of time.

The author of Maestro, Roger Nierenberg, is a world class conductor. He has had an extremely distinguished career leading prominent orchestras across America. He has participated in the Carnegie Hall Series of Great Orchestras and has recorded with the London Philharmonic. In his recent book Roger takes you inside the art and science of great conducting all the while making clear the analogies between what he has done and leadership in the business world.

As an example he takes a young conductor who accurately leads the orchestra through a technical piece of music by indicating note for note what the musicians should be playing. The impact comes when Niergenberg has the young student turn away from the orchestra and Nierenberg instructs the orchestra to play the piece without his assistance. They do and it is better. Then Nierenberg explains, the musicians, like top executives in a company, do not need you to show them what to do note for note and your micromanagement gets in the way of their creativity and performance. They do need you to set the rhythm, the pace and the emotion of the music. I think you get the point and I also think you will find Nierenberg’s treatment of the concepts fascinating.

Nierenberg has created a very unique leadership training program where he seats executives among the orchesttra and then interwoven with performance pieces takes them through leadership principles. The concept is know as The Music Paradigm and is one of the creative and ingenious teaching concepts I have seen in a long time.

If you have been involved with the Music Paradigm or have read the book I am interested in your comments and insights.

If you are one of those individuals who has developed a love affair with books then Allison Bartlett’s recent work, “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much” is for you. Bartlett takes you on a journey through the true story and antics of John Gilkey, thief of  books and obsessed neurotic. Bartlett’s trip into the world of collectible and rare books and the people who inhabit it is worth the journey.

More than the detective story built around the schemes and very successful attempts by Gilkey to steal these treasures, is Bartlett’s insight into the passion that books have inspired over the centuries. When we begin to understand that books are the propellant fuel behind the progress of mankind and our evolution of knowledge, we also begin to appreciate fully the past attempts of book burners, hoarders and even religious institutions to stifle and limit access to the books. For in our past the books were everything.

As detached, neurotic and eccentric as we may find Gilkey, we learn he is not the first to be obsessed by books. Seeing the books as a symbol of wealth and success may be the sanest part of Gilkey’s perceptions since we do indeed find the books and the bookcases as a backdrop in every movie, scene and story about what makes life good.

I think Bartlett is correct. There is something mesmerizing about holding a good book in your hands. Whether it pulls you back into your childhood, forward into your fantasies, there is probably a bit of Gilkey in all of us. We just have a clearer sense of right and wrong. You will enjoy this book as an adventure, as a piece of history and as in insight into the beauty of a good book.

I have always been a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. His previous works Blink and the Tipping Point provide some of the the most insightful and revolutionary ideas surrounding the business world during the past decade. Outliers challenges fundamental notions of success and the book is premised on the supposition that success is the product of circumstances and opportunity. The assertion is that these factors may have more to do with success than our traditional notions of hard work, intelligence, ambition and passion. Try as I might with an open mind I could never quite buy into the book’s most basic conclusions.

Gladwell credits “lucky breaks” “good fortune” “timing” “birthplace” and “cultural advantages” to the success of Bill Gates, the law firm of Skadden and Arps and Canadian hockey players. There is no doubt that many factors influence a person’s success and we would be naive to believe that anyone ever accomplished success on their own. But for every success story that Gladwell pairs up with these peripheral facts, there are thousands of others with the same factors who did not succeed. Did these things create opportunities? Certainly!

But here is the point that I believe Gladwell misses throughout the work. Successful people find and make opportunities and it is their passion and their untiring willingness to devote themselves wholly to their mission that sets them apart. What may appear as opportunities that were unfairly bestowed upon them I think would be better characterized as opportunities that they sought out. When Gladwell speaks of the internet giants who were “given” free computer time access and just happen to be fortunate, we fail to realize that these people would have doggedly pursued an outlet for their endeavors until they secured it in one way or another. That is what made them successful, not what looks like unfair advantage and opportunity.

I can’t think of any better example than Gladwell’s own family which he talks about in the last chapter. When he said that his great grandmother went out and was fortunate enough to be given the opportunities. I think the most important words are that she “went out!” That is the hallmark of success and opportunities come to those who with passion and undaunted vigilance seek them out.

There is plenty here to digest and to get you thinking, from the educational research done by Karl Alexander which explains the impact that summer vacations have on education to the Hofstedt Dimensions which add insight into plane crashes, Gladwell does what he always does so well and that is make you think. I would say the book is well worth the read, even if you disagree with the importance that Gladwell places on ancillary “outsider” influences on success.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the #1 International Bestsellers, The Tipping Point and Blink. He is a staff writter for the The New Yorker and was formerly a business and science reporter at the Washington Post.

Those of you who have been in our courses know that we read a lot of material and make the best recommendations to you regarding resources that will help and assist you. Through 20,000 hours of live classroom education and over a decade of teaching real estate classes there has been only one book that we have been saying is a “MUST OWN” for every real estate professional – Michelle Lind’s “Arizona Real Estate, A Professional’s Guide to Law & Practice.”

As all of us should know, Michelle Lind acts as General Counsel for the Arizona Association of Realtors in Phoenix. Nearly every form that you use in your real estate practice Michelle Lind had a hand in creating. Her days are filled with providing advice and insight into risk management issues and legal questions for brokers and agents throughout the state.

You can now have Michelle Lind’s wisdom and guidance at your fingertips. This book is full of practical everyday information you need to know. We guarantee that no matter what level you may be at in your real estate practice you will find information in this book that you didn’t know, but should. At the end of each chapter Michelle provides great practice tips. They alone would be  worth the price. Do yourself and your practice a favor, you’ll be glad you have this book.

K Michelle Lind is General Counsel for the Arizona Association of REALTORS®