Each year, OWA members get to select one book from the curated book selections as part of their membership benefits. Personally, this is one of my favorite OWA member benefits each year because I get to see books that other leaders in the profession are reading and recommending. Often times one or more of the selections become part of the book group discussion called OWA Reads where you can discuss and learn from key areas that others have gained.

Balancing your own professional development and growth is important to your continued career success. Just a few of the benefits of making time to read and focusing on your development include learning new ideas, helping spark creativity, expanding your vocabulary, and broadening your perspectives in a variety of areas.

This year there are 4 diverse choices that you can select from:

The Digital Sales Rep: Find and Close Your Target Clients Online With the 10+10 System

By Trudi Charest
The Digital Sales Rep is a practical step-by-step guide to prospecting and closing sales online. If you are in outside sales, inside sales, or managing a team of salespeople, you want to read this book. Selling in today’s world has changed. Salespeople need to be part marketer, part social media guru, part digital expert, part copywriter, part graphic designer, and of course, part salesperson. This book will show how you can easily be amazing at all of those tactics.

Learn how to mix digital efforts with traditional outreach to connect to 100+ target clients every single day. The days of pounding the pavement on the road as your only source of business acquisition are long gone. The most successful sales reps utilize the power of digital and social channels to effectively network and gain sales opportunities with clients that would otherwise be impossible to reach. These strategies don’t just open doors, they secure welcome invitations to talk about your products and services.

Trudi Charest is the co-founder of Marketing4ECPs, a digital marketing agency focused on eyecare. Known for developing, facilitating, and designing innovative training and marketing for the industry, she is an optician, author, speaker, marketer, entrepreneur, and an OWA board member.

Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

By Adam Grant
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.

Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds — and our own; he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he’s right but listen like he’s wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You’ll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don’t have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It’s an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.

Call Us What We Carry: Poems

By Amanda Gorman
Formerly titled The Hill We Climb and Other Poems, this luminous poetry collection by #1 New York Times bestselling author and presidential inaugural poet Amanda Gorman captures a shipwrecked moment in time and transforms it into a lyric of hope and healing. In Call Us What We Carry, Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, this beautifully designed volume features poems in many inventive styles and structures and shines a light on a moment of reckoning. Call Us What We Carry reveals that Gorman has become our messenger from the past and our voice for the future.

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

By Captain D. Michael Abrashoff

When Captain Abrashoff took over as commander of USS Benfold, it was like a business that had all the latest technology but only some of the productivity. Knowing that responsibility for improving performance rested with him, he realized he had to improve his own leadership skills before he could improve his ship. Within months, he created a crew of confident and inspired problem-solvers eager to take the initiative and responsibility for their actions. The slogan on board became “It’s your ship,” and Benfold was soon recognized far and wide as a model of naval efficiency. How did Abrashoff do it? Against the backdrop of today’s United States Navy, Abrashoff shares his secrets of successful management including:

• See the ship through the eyes of the crew. By soliciting a sailor’s suggestions, Abrashoff drastically reduced tedious chores that provided little additional value.
• Communicate, communicate, communicate. The more Abrashoff communicated the plan, the better the crew’s performance. His crew eventually started calling him “Megaphone Mike,” since they heard from him so often.
• Create discipline by focusing on purpose. Discipline skyrocketed when Abrashoff’s crew believed that what they were doing was important.
• Listen aggressively. After learning that many sailors wanted to use the GI Bill, Abrashoff brought a test official aboard the ship and held the SATs forty miles off the Iraqi coast.

From achieving amazing cost savings to winning the highest gunnery score in the Pacific Fleet, Captain Abrashoff’s extraordinary campaign sent shock waves through the U.S. Navy. It can help you change the course of your ship, no matter where your business battles are fought.

Which book will you be selecting this year?

If you have not yet ordered your book, you can do so here. Please make sure you are logged in to your OWA account. Make your selection before Monday, August 15, 2022.

If you would like to take part in OWA Reads this summer, the next book discussion will occur:

Thursday, July 28, 2022
7:30 PM – 8:30 PM CST

The book being discussed is: The Happiness Advantage: How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life. This book is not one of this year’s book selections but is also a good resource to consider for your professional development.
RSVP to attend here.

Written by: Sandra Mohr