7 Books That Changed Our Lives, Will They Change Yours? - Essential Summer Reading

It’s summertime. Do you know what that means? That’s right. It’s time for your summer reading list. I bet you thought you were too old for such things.

In this episode, we share 7 essential books for any Customer Experience professional to read, ideally in a tropical locale with a fruity drink in hand.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

From books on Customer Experience to books about psychology to 1990s bestselling business books, we have a wide variety of reading material for Customer Experience professionals. These books will help you understand why customer behavior is the way it is and how you can help move that behavior to a place that delivers customer-driven growth. Best of all, we save the best for last.

Here are the 7 books we think you should read this summer:

1. The Experience Economy: Competing for Customer Time, Attention, and Money by B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore
2. The End of Average How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness by Todd Rose
3. Who Moved My Cheese? By Dr. Spencer Johnson
4. Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial and Error for Business, Politics, and Society by Jim Manzi
5. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
6. The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success by Megan McArdle
7. The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives for Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level by Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton

See what we did there?

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

• 02:56 Colin introduces his first book, The Experience Economy cowritten by Joe Pine, a recent guest on the podcast from a few weeks back.
• 05:05 Ryan introduces his first book, The End of Average, and explained the basic idea of the book and the implications for Customer Experience.
• 06:53 Colin recommends Who Moved My Cheese?, a 90s bestseller that changed his life by urging him to start his own global Customer Experience Consultancy.
• 12:54 Ryan shares a book called Uncontrolled, a book that emphasizes the importance of experimentation.
• 17:15 Colin gives a brief summary of the seven habits shared in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
• 22:19. Ryan suggests The Up Side of Down, which shares the idea that failure is critical to growth and lessons learned from failure can lead to future successes.
• 24:40. We save the best for last with The Intuitive Customer, our book that explores the 7 imperatives for taking your experience to a new level of greatness.

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 289,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy LLC as one of the best management consultancies for the last two years. Follow Colin on Linkedin and Twitter.