business - Jason’s Feed

Book Review | It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy

It’s Your Ship was recommended to me from a former Vice President of my department at work. I finally found a copy available at my local library. It just happened to be a downloaded version of the audio book that I listened to. This was a wonderful book to listen to because the author himself reads the book to you. I really enjoy it when this is done, because you really feel like you are getting the story as it was intended to be told.

Captain Abrashoff tells a wonderful story of his growth as a leader through the Navy with many great examples. I was able to take much of this book and apply it to my team and department. The work he has put into this book and the audio really shows through. It was a great way to spend my commute for a few days. I looked forward to my time listening to this book.

If you are a novice leader or experienced leader I believe there is something from this book that you can take from it. I gave this book my highest rating of 5 out of 5 stars. It is defiantly worth your time. Grab the audio version if you can.

Book Review | Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

I listened to the audio format of Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time in March of this year. It has been some time since I listened to this book but I still remember, how enlightening it was to learn about Scrum. My work has been using this for some time now. Not my department specifically, but the IT departments that we interface with utilize it as well as JIRA.

I like to read business books mixed in with reading for enjoyment whenever I can find a good business book to slip into my to be read list. Which is not hard for me since I have just over 700 books on the Want to Read list on goodreads.

Jeff Sutherland the author of the book is the co-creator of Scrum, so who better to explain how it works and not just that but why Scrum was created in the first place. You not only get a great understanding of Scrum, but in this book you also get a behind the scenes history of its development.

If you are looking for something to get you acquainted with SCRUM this is where to start.

Print Book Sales are Up!

Good news, according to Publisher’s Weekly the sales of print books are up. Not dramatically, but still this is good news. For the second year in a row sales are up. 2.8% over last year and the year before that it was up 2.4%. Thats the right direction!

So, whats driving the growth? Independent and chain bookstores, as well as Amazon lead the growth with an increase of 5.4%, which offset a drop of 8.8% from mass retailers like Walmart. Looks like people are turing away from buying their books at Target and increasingly buying at Amazon.

I have to say I love getting a view of these numbers. As a reader and someone who wants to promote reading, this is great news. The article at Publisher’s Weekly had some analysis and tables, but I think seeing these numbers graphed helps tell the story better.

Below is the sales broken out by Category. We can see the fall in 2014 in Adult nonfiction and the increase again in 2015, although not quite to the point it was in 2013. Thats a shame, I love nonfiction. Fantastic to see Juvenile non fiction grow like this year over year. A 11.7% increase year-over-year!

One more graph and then I’m done, promise. I read all formats of books, print, audio, ebook, etc. But here is the sales for the last 3 years broken out for your perusal.

I’m very happy to see hardcover sales up, this means, to me at least, that people are purchasing copies to keep and re-read. They are building their libraries, hopefully, not just for themselves but for everyone in their family to enjoy. Board books are up the most at 14.5% year-over-year. This is very encouraging. This means to me, that people are buying books to read to their very small children. Start them young on a hobby (nay life choice) that will forever change them for the better!