September 2008 New Titles

12 new audio titles added to the library this month – all of them great titles.  I’ve just added almost all of them to my personal ‘want to listen to’ list!

We’ve had extremely positive feedback regarding the addition of DVD’s, so we’ll be adding a bunch more in the coming weeks.  Glad to see that the DVD’s are popular!

The new audio titles are:

Flight Plan: The Real Secret of Success; How to Achieve More Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible

The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World With Kindness

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (and their employees)

The Encore Effect: How to Achieve Remarkable Performance in Anything You Do

An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It

Comic Vocab: Laugh Your Way to a Better Vocabulary

The Last Lecture

Kick Start Your Success: Four Powerful Steps to Get What You Want Out of Your Life, Career, and Business

Transparency: Creating a Culture of Candor

The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea

True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership

Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay

DVDs Added To Cultivate To Improve Fitness/Wellness

We added 32 DVDs to Cultivate today. (bringing our total title count over 300!)  Most of these are in the Fitness, Wellness, and Parenting categories.  While audio for the commute will continue to be our main focus, many people have been asking for workout and fitness DVD’s.  We think it’s a great way to improve the selection of our wellness, fitness, and parenting sections.

When you log on there is now a category called ‘DVDs’  (clever, we know.)  Let us know what you think, and what areas you’d like to see added!

Interesting story about CD vs. MP3…

Derek Sivers is the founder of a website called CDbaby.com – a site to purchase music from independent musicians.  He has an interesting post on his blog about whether musicians should bother producing a hard-copy CD, or just go completely digital (the short story is that they should absolutely produce a CD.)

To make his point even clearer he ends with a great story about his visit with Apple to talk about getting some of the CDBaby material better placement on iTunes.  Here’s the story…

When visiting Apple iTunes, I had lunch with the guy who’s in charge of independent music editorial – the one who chooses who gets featured placement.

I asked him, “What’s the best way for me to turn you on to something I think you’ll love?”

His answer? “Send me the CD.”

I said, “Uh.. really? What if it’s already on iTunes? Shouldn’t I just send you the link?”

He said, “Yeah. I commute an hour each way to Apple’s office. I do all my real listening in the car, so I need the CD.”

(The whole post is here:  http://sivers.org/dd-only )

That’s exactly what we’ve found with Cultivate – the majority of people listen in their car, and in those cases the CD is usually easier to deal with than an ipod.  In our case CD’s let you reach everyone in your organization.

Referral Program Launched

Today we’ve announced the launch of our referral program. A number of our clients have come to us through word-of-mouth. Often the spouse of someone whose employer offers Cultivate will hear about the program, and recommend their HR team take a look at the program. So we want to make that conversation easier, and offer a little ‘thank you’ if the referral works out!

So today we’ve added the announcement to our login screen, with a link to a page that has more detailed information and a form people can fill out to start the referral process.

A couple of notes…..

1) If you think you may know a company that may be interested in our program, please read the whole FAQ section on this page: http://www.cultivateminds.com/referral-explanation.html

2) Any information submitted through the form will be kept confidential, and we will not spam! We won’t be sending them newsletters or other unwanted information.

Our hope here is to grow our business so we have the resources to continue to add new features and new titles. So if you know someone who works at a 50 – 500 employee company let them know about Cultivate!

New Feature – Company specific polls

We’ve launched a new feature – client specific polls. We’ve had polls in the past that were site wide (every person who logged on saw the same poll.) Now we can do custom polls on a company basis.  Now you can ask questions specific to your company’s initiatives and goals.  Just get in touch with us to set yours up.

If you want to see an example, we’ve put a ‘general’ poll on every client’s homepage – just log in to check it out. (And answer the poll while you’re at it!)

How to read business books…

Seth Godin (one of the worlds widest read bloggers) has a wonderful post up about how to read business books.

You can read the whole thing here:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/05/how-to-read-a-b.html

I think he’s got a lot of great points – about the importance of motivation, the reason that ‘summary’ titles aren’t as effective (because the motivation part gets stripped out), and the idea of finding 3 ‘things’ to change from each book.

His last point is important – the idea of sharing titles with team members. We’re working on making recommending titles to co-workers quick and easy. If you have any thoughts as to how this would work well for your workplace please feel free to comment!

If you are interested in improving what you ‘get’ out of the library, take a look at his post.

New Titles – June 2008

8 more titles just added to give your summer reading list a few more options! A wide range of titles, with a focus on new management titles.

You: The Owners Manual

Always wanted to know more about what makes you…well…you? This title can help.

The Starfish And The Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

A new title that discusses the power of ‘leaderless’ organizations and how they have been able to adapt and change so quickly because of their structure.

Hug Your People: The Proven Way to Hire, Inspire, and Recognize Your Employees and Achieve Remarkable Results

This title gets fantastic reviews on Amazon.com – a must read for any manager or HR practitioner.

The Dream Manager: Achieve Results Beyond Your Dreams by Helping Your Employees Fulfill Theirs

Another title for managers looking for new ideas on how to bring their team to another level.

It’s Not About The Coffee: Leadership Lessons from a Life at Starbucks

The former CEO of Starbucks talks about leadership values that helped drive the growth of the coffee chain.

Bad Childhood, Good Life

A title to help people move beyond childhood issues to have a happy and successful adult life.

The Future Of Management

A great customer suggestion! This book isn’t about gimicks – it’s a hard look at what doesn’t work with todays type of management and what can be done about it.

Pimsleur Basic Brazilian Portuguese

Due to the popularity of our Pimsleur Spanish title (our most rented!) we’ve added Brazilian Portuguese. Another customer suggestion – thanks!

Recycling the return envelopes…

A question we get from time to time is “what do we do with all the return envelopes?” Thanks to Dupont, we’re able to recycle them. We can’t put them in the ‘regular’ recycling – we need to collect them and ship them back to Dupont in a bag they provide us.

Here’s a bag that’s almost ready to ship back.

New look, new engine….

Just a quick update on this blog.  We moved our blogging ‘engine’ from Typepad to WordPress.  While we were at it we figured we’d spruce the thing up a little!   If you are visiting this blog for the first time and want to keep up with what’s happening at Cultivate use the link on the top of the widgets on the right to sign up for email updates.  Thanks!

Making it easier to find new titles…

We just added a new category to the library – New Titles Added In 2008.  It’s pretty self-explanatory…in it are all the new titles we’ve added in 2008!  As the library has grown it has become difficult for regular users to find ‘what’s new’.  This will make that a lot easier.  Titles will still be added to their appropriate categories as well.