Smart Trust: Creating Prosperity, Energy, and Joy in a Low-Trust World

By Stephen M.R. Covey and Greg Link

(Free Press, $27, 320 pp.)

Trust is not a quality that we often see highlighted in news headlines or across mainstream media. Instead, it seems like the world is filled with corruption, deception, and mistrust.

In Stephen Covey and Greg Link's latest work, Smart Trust, the business partners take a look at the power of trust, its impact on the individual, and its impact within organizations. The book is filled with the authors' discoveries and insights made after exploring trust issues with successful leaders and organizations around the world.

Smart Trust is an easy-to-follow read that reveals how trust affects a variety of situations, both personal and professional. The book is divided into three sections: an overview of trust and the concept of "smart" trust, an explanation of the five actions of smart trust, and a concluding call to action.

Those who operate with smart trust choose to believe in trust, start with self, declare their intent and assume positive intent in others, do what they say they're going to do, and extend trust to others. The authors derived these actions from high-trust individuals, teams, and organizations across the globe. Each action includes a summary of the principles that support it, as well as descriptions of its opposite and counterfeit actions.

Two of the book's concepts especially stood out for me. First, within the "Blind Trust or Distrust" section, the authors ask, "Which glasses are you wearing?" They pose a series of questions to identify how the reader sees people, and to determine whether this perspective is shaped by a dominant paradigm. Smart trust action four—doing what you say you are going to do—offered the other takeaway, which is a reminder to readers that "walking your talk" is essential to remain on the smart trust path.

Smart Trust is organized into easy-to-digest chapters. The authors include a set of questions for readers to reflect on at the end of each chapter. These exercises help readers to identify their views on key takeaways and establish plans to practically apply the five actions.

A good read, this book's content is very relevant to the world that we live in today. Its subject matter touches one's personal and professional lives, and it even includes Dilbert cartoon strips for a bit of illustrative humor.

I give it four café au laits.

Guerrilla Marketing for Coaches: Six Steps to Building Your Million-Dollar Coaching Practice

Jay Conrad Levinson and Andrew Neitlich

(Morgan James Publishing, $19.95, 262 pp.)

Although the coaching industry keeps expanding, individual coaches struggle to establish a profitable business. Through its pragmatic and hands-on format, Guerrilla Marketing for Coaches instructs coaches how to build a thriving practice. The book uses proven concepts, such as Levinson and Neitlich's six steps to a profitable firm, which include the following rules: Use low-cost, high-impact tactics to get clients (rule two); and keep clients for life, or at least a long time (rule four). Guerrilla Marketing for Coaches is ideal for anyone who is looking to break into professional coaching or improve his existing practice.

Engage: The Trainer's Guide to Learning Styles

Jeanine O'Neill-Blackwell

(Pfeiffer, $45, 384 pp.)

Engage: The Trainer's Guide to Learning Styles is written for any training professional who wants to discover her natural training strengths and uncover new learner engagement strategies. Engage is loaded with information based on scientific research and illustrated through easy-to-understand visual graphics. O'Neill-Blackwell uses a four-step model that teaches the reader how to incorporate each learning style within any training scenario. Called the 4MAT System, the model emphasizes instructional design, team processing, leadership skills, communication, conflict resolution, decision making, problem solving, and creativity. With a variety of tools, activities, and tactics presented in a quick read, this book has the potential to quickly improve your training engagement skills.

Beyond Performance Management: Why, When, and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance

Jeremy Hope and Steve Player

(Harvard Business Review Press, $29.95, 416 pp.)

With so many new management tools produced each year, it is becoming increasingly difficult for managers to efficiently navigate the marketplace and confidently choose the best products and services for their purposes. This is where Beyond Performance Management can help. Hope and Player have found the most useful and easy-to-understand business tools and best practices that are relevant to all managers, and teach you how to use them. Benchmarking, Six Sigma, key value drivers, and strategic planning are some of the tools and processes that made the top 40 list. Beyond Performance Management is an excellent resource for any manager looking to increase performance and properly implement best practices.

What's on David Campbell's Bookshelf?

The autobiographies of Jill Ker Conway. The Road from Coorain is her story of growing up on a sheep ranch in Australia, which is fascinating. True North begins with her leaving Australia after getting her degree in history and flying to Harvard to get a PhD. Her third book, A Woman's Education, is really a leadership book because it's a memoir of her 10 years as president of Smith College. She's a wonderful writer.

In Extremis Leadership by Tom Kolditz is about leadership in situations where if the leader screws up, people die. It's about combat, skydiving, photographing tigers in the wild, and SWAT teams. He interviewed dozens of people who were in these kinds of jobs and asked them what they wanted in their leaders. They didn't care at all if the leaders were inspiring and motivational. They wanted somebody who was really good at what he was doing whether it was combat or skydiving and so forth.

Jim Collins's Good to Great almost has become a bible in the leadership world. Collins is a remarkable scientist.