By John Spence
I am often asked how I am able to read more than 100 business books a year, and the answer is simple: airplanes. As someone who travels more than 200 days a year, I spend a lot of time in airports and on airplanes, and I try to spend every minute of it reading, listening to audio books or watching instructional/inspirational videos. So let me recommend a few good books that you could easily finish between here and Dallas, plus some other resources that are wonderful for improving your business acumen while traveling.
If I were going to visit a client to try to close a big deal, I would probably bring along a copy of Jeffrey Gitomer’s “Little Red Book of Selling,” a fun, approachable and somewhat aggressive book that implores you to stop whining and start selling! Jeffrey is an in-your-face author who is not afraid to tell it like it is and challenge you to be a better sales person.
If I were on my way to negotiate a big deal I would be reading “Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In,” by Roger Fisher, William Ury and Bruce Patton. This is a classic book on win-win negotiations that offers some great tools and techniques for being a rigorous, but not ruthless, negotiator.
If I wanted to pick up some tips on how to run my business better I might read “Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service,” by Ken Blanchard to improve my company’s customer service, or perhaps “Purple Cow,” by Seth Godin to help me think differently about how to market my business.
Of course if I didn’t feel like trying to tackle an entire book on a flight, I would swing into the airport news stand and grab a copy of the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, Inc., Fast Company or Strategy + Business. Each of these magazines has some wonderful business information and ideas in them. However, one of the most productive practices I have is to grab two or three magazines that I would normally never read like Wired or Mac World to expose myself to some new and different ideas.
If I did not feel like reading and instead wanted to listen to and audio book, I could choose from my collection of hundreds of great podcasts, lectures and audio books from iTunesU, (most of them completely free), or if the plane had WiFi, I would watch a few of the amazing talks from TED.com or one of the videos from BigThink.com.
To me, travel time is learning time, a chance for long stretches of uninterrupted focus on topics and ideas that I am eager to improve in, which is probably why I don’t mind delayed flights as much as other people; I just smile and open up another book.