What business books will you be reading this summer to improve your practice?

Reading is one of the best ways to learn. For your practice growth, you should be consuming a steady stream of new ideas and strategies that can help you excel. I’ve had numerous breakthroughs in my life. Many of those breakthroughs began with a small sentence or thought on the printed page.

Reading is an acquired skill. Few of us are born with the desire to read a book a week. I hardly ever read non-fiction books until my practice began to struggle. Then I started reading every good marketing and business book I could find.

Each month I read 4-6 books on a wide range of topics like: history, biography, theology, marketing, business, philosophy and good classical fiction (read aloud to the kids). Here are the top 4 books in the business/marketing category that I look forward to reading this summer. Grab one or two to read while you’re sitting on the beach or enjoying a break from the summer heat.

What books are you reading this summer? Let us know in the comment section below. (If you’d rather read books digitally, Amazon just recently dropped the price of their Kindle to $189.)

Dr. John Reizer, CHIROPRACTIC MARKETING TOOLS THAT WILL ABSOLUTELY GROW YOUR PRACTICE. This book has been on my to read list for awhile now. But it has finally made it to the top of my stack and should be a fast read at only 130 pages. There aren’t too many books published specifically for chiropractic marketing, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Dr. Reizer has to ad to the discussion. The bio says Dr. Reizer currently teaches as an adjunct professor at Sherman College of Chiropractic. The subject matter of the book ranges from the simply business cards and newspapers to more advanced strategies like writing your own newspaper ads, developing a weight loss campaign, and marketing to health clubs.

William Poundstone, Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It). The name and concept of this book fascinated me, especially when we consider that many chiropractors may soon be flocking to the cash practice model in light of recent health care reforms. In Priceless, Poundstone looks at how prices are set and how we don’t really know how much anything is worth. The inside flap reads:

“People used to download music for free; then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay for it. How? By charging 99 cents. Prada and other luxury stores stock a few obscenely expensive items — just to make the rest of their inventory seem like a bargain. Why do text messages cost money, while e-mails are free? Why do jars of peanut butter keep getting smaller in order to keep the price the ‘same’? The answer is simple: prices are a collective hallucination.”

Arthur C. Brooks, The Battle: How the Fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America’s Future. Being entrepreneurs like we are, and realizing the government already affects our business in many ways (and will do so even more in the future), this book should be on every chiropractors ‘to read list’. I added this book to my Amazon wish list when I read that WORLD magazine ranked it as their book of the year.

“Honoring a book on current political and economic questions is unusual for WORLD. Our books of the year in 2008 and 2009 were The Reason for God and The ESV Study Bible. We generally rate timeless higher than timely—but sometimes we have to pay attention to the immediate. Samuel Johnson said, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” As the United States careens toward a crucial fall election, The Battle is concentrating minds.”

Robert V. Levine, A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently. I’ve always heard that other cultures live at a slower pace than western cultures do. But I’ve never given much thought to how that affects business and society. Dr. Levine is a psychologist who’s spent much of his life studying time. The book description says, “Levine raises some fascinating questions. How do we use our time? Are we being ruled by the clock? What is this doing to our cities? To our relationships? To our own bodies and psyches? Are there decisions we have made without conscious choice?”

I first heard of this book, which is about 12 years old, from the following video.

Do you read books on business and marketing?

Successful business experts recommend reading at least one non-fiction book a month. And I agree, you should continue learning no matter your age, your success level, or your intelligence.

I read a lot. Usually 2-3 business/marketing/improvement books a month, plus one fiction novel. Here’s the top 6 of the business books I read in 2008. All of them could benefit you as a chiropractor. Buy them. Read them. Profit from them.

1. The One Page Business Plan. I made a business plan when I opened my practice, but I thought it was a one time event. Later, coaches and consultants would talk about “vision” and “mission” statements, but the way they described them sounded “fake”, like something you tell yourself just to feel better.

The One Page Business Plan is different. It’s straight and to the point. This book is really more of a workbook (with the forms on CD)  that takes you step by step through creating a very simple, yet powerful one page business plan. It also acknowledges that your plan can change each year and make it easy to edit as you go.

2. QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life. This is a great little book you can read in one day. It’s about taking responsibility for everything you do and asking yourself what you can do to make things better.

This is a great training tool for new employees. Have them read it the first week they start working for you. It makes them take a different look at the “blame game” so many people play.

3. The Legend of the Monk and the Merchant: Principles for Successful Living. Another very short book that you can read in a day (my wife read it in 3 hours!). It teaches biblical principles about success and running a business. Each principle is taught with short stories through a young teen learning from his wise grandfather.

A great book, especially for Christian business owners that personally giving to churches or charities.

4. 6 Steps to Free Publicity. At only $14, this is the best lesson you could get on how to get free publicity for your practice. It’s up-to-date nature includes using websites, emails and press releases to get your practice noticed.

While you won’t use everything you learn in this book, there’s more than enough here to market your practice for free and reap the benefits of good publicity.

5. Think and Grow Rich. I’m not sure why I put off reading this classic book on successful living for so long. It’s probably been mentioned or recommended to me by more successful people than any other. But this year I finally got around to reading it. Even though the first edition of this book was written in 1937, I was shocked at how good these principles really are.

While I’m not a fan of a couple of chapters in the book, 80% of this book is golden. There are quotes, stories, and lessons in this book that you can ponder on for a lifetime.

6. Changing the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions for Your Business. This book is probably the best overview of modern marketing available. It’s just been released, and I’m not even done with it completely, but I had to get it on this list. It covers 12 different channels any business can use to market their product or services, including direct mail, the internet, radio, direct print, and more.

It gives some good examples, and isn’t all fluff like so many other books about marketing. I also appreciate how it mostly focuses on measurable direct-response marketing, not pie-in-the sky branding that’s usually a waste of money.

That’s my list. What books on business and success would you ad? Comment below and let everyone know which books had a big impact on you in 2008.