Episode 703: Business Psychology

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Welcome to Reading With Libraries!
Thank you for joining us on the SEVENTH SEASON of our Reader’s Advisory podcast! We have more genres to discuss, new books to recommend, and we’re so glad you’re here to join us. We always enjoy our book group podcast, and we hope you do, too! 

Today’s books are fun, and should give you some ideas about assorted business, psychology, self-help, and other books that you can recommend to your patrons – as well as enjoying them yourself! Our Guest Host this week is new to the book group, and we are happy to welcome him: Shaun Keeley is the Director of Student Life, from the St Cloud Technical and Community College. Thanks for joining us, Shaun!

Our organization is the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. At CMLE, we work with all types of libraries. We started this podcast to provide information for our library community doing Reader’s Advisory work. It’s hard to be an expert on ALL of the great books out there! So we pick a new genre each week to chat about and hopefully provide you with some insight into what may be an unfamiliar genre!

Beverages:

Each week we like to connect the theme of our books with our beverages! This week we are enjoying cocktails from the website The Mantry, Easy Cocktails To Help You Impress Even Yourself. As we are working on building our skills in other areas, you can try out some of these drinks without spending too much time on them. 

  • Big Hibiscus Tea Sangria For pepper-heads, the best part of truck-stop tacos is sometimes the styrofoam big gulp of sweet-tart jamaica you chug to extinguish a hubris-induced chili burn. Steven Smith balances that refreshing hibiscus zing with a pinch of ginger, sweet rose, and exotic Indian sarsaparilla. Cold, with a squirt of honey, handful of summer fruit, and shot (or two) of your booze of choice, it’s a perfect sangria; piping hot, a morning-after soother.

Ingredients

  • 4 bags Steven Smith Big Hibiscus Tea
  • 1/2 gallon water
  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 6-8 shots Vodka or Pisco
  • Fresh sliced fruit ie. oranges, blood oranges, lemons, strawberries, apples
  • Large glass pitcher

Directions

1) Boil ½ gallon of water. Let tea steep for 20 minutes.

2) Stir in Honey until dissolved, let cool.

3) Add fruit, booze

4) Pour into the pitcher with ice and place in the fridge

5) Serve over ice

  • Dark & Stormy Cocktail: Morris Kitchen’s handcrafted ginger syrup reminds us quality cocktails at home can be cheaper than coors light. Go for the Dark & Stormy, just fill a glass with ice, add 3 oz seltzer, ½ oz Ginger Syrup and lime. Slowly pour 2oz rum on top to keep color separate, garnish with a lime. Make a round of these and we promise nobody will care you may not have the proper glassware…

Ingredients

  • ½ oz Morris Kitchen Ginger Syrup
  • 2 oz Dark Rum
  • 1 oz Lime Juice
  • 3 oz Seltzer
  • Lime Wedge

Directions

Fill a highball glass with ice. Add seltzer, Ginger Syrup and lime. Stir. Slowly pour rum on top to keep color separate. Garnish with a lime wedge.

  • Bourbon Sarsaparilla Float  Sarsaparilla is small, deciduous woody vine, historically used by Native Americans for medicinal purposes which eventually stocked the shelves of Wild West saloons in the form of a soda in the 19th century. Commonly referred to as the “original” Root Beer, P&H’s take boasts a lighter, cleaner flavor extracted from the real thing with no chemical crap. We recommend introducing the float to adulthood by filling a frosted mug with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, Sarsaparilla and an ounce of Bourbon.

Ingredients

  • 1 oz P&H; Sarsaparilla Syrup
  • 1oz Bourbon
  • 1 Scoops Vanilla Ice Cream 
  • Seltzer or Soda

Directions

1) Add bourbon with P&H; Sarsaparilla Soda Syrup to a frosty glass 

2) Pour in Seltzer within 3 fingers from top

3) Drop in a good sized scoop of ice cream

Genre Discussion:

The field of Business Psychology is always going to be interesting, because it combines the two things we spend our lives doing: going to work, and working on ourselves. Learning new skills, trying to streamline life, focusing on making life better for the people around us – all of these can be business psychology skills.

“In the words of Darren Kaplan, the Co-founder, and CEO of the analytics firm HiQ, “When you understand human behavior, you improve your chances of making your business succeed.” So, at its heart, business is all about using the right strategy for motivating employees, making a connection with customers, or influencing an investor to believe in your project.”

If you are a manager, you want to figure out how to get the most work done yourself, as well as getting the best from the people around you. If you are a parent, you want to figure out how to structure the things you are doing so everyone is successful and happy (or, at least quiet!). If you are doing any kind of work on a hobby, understanding how to get better and how to do it well are crucial for fun. In all of these areas, you can use business psychology ideas to improve your performance, make it more fun, or at least reduce the stress of the situation.

Of course, this universality of ideas makes these books very popular. We are going to share several suggestions today, and you can probably think of a few more while we talk. And, as always, we have some suggested lists of books you can browse, in addition to the books we will be discussing today. Check out our show notes page for all of these things, so you are ready to talk books!

Suggested Reading Resources:

Our Book Discussion

We have our beverages, we are familiar with this week’s genre, let’s get to the book discussion! We will give you a list of all the books we share today. You can click on any of these links to go to Amazon.com for more information. If you buy anything while you are there, Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits from your purchase. Thanks in advance for helping to support the mission of CMLE – we appreciate it! 

After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles―counterintuitive tactics and strategies―you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

Manson makes the argument, backed by both academic research and well-timed poop jokes, that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade but on learning to stomach lemons better. Human beings are flawed and limited – “not everybody can be extraordinary; there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault”. Manson advises us to get to know our limitations and accept them. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting painful truths, we can begin to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek. 

There are only so many things we can give a f*ck about, so we need to figure out which ones really matter, Manson makes clear. While money is nice, caring about what you do with your life is better, because true wealth is about experience. A much-needed grab-you-by-the-shoulders-and-look-you-in-the-eye moment of real talk, filled with entertaining stories and profane, ruthless humor, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a refreshing slap for a generation to help them lead contented, grounded lives.

Most of us have a habit we’d like to change, and there’s no shortage of expert advice. But as we all know from tough experience, no magic, one-size-fits-all solution exists. It takes work to make a habit, but once that habit is set, we can harness the energy of habits to build happier, stronger, more productive lives.

In Better Than Before, acclaimed writer Gretchen Rubin identifies every approach that actually works. She presents a practical, concrete framework to allow readers to understand their habits—and to change them for good. 

Infused with Rubin’s compelling voice, rigorous research, and easy humor, and packed with vivid stories of lives transformed, Better Than Before explains the (sometimes counterintuitive) core principles of habit formation and answers the most perplexing questions about habits: 

• Why do we find it tough to create a habit for something we love to do? 

• How can we keep our healthy habits when we’re surrounded by temptations? 

• How can we help someone else change a habit? 

Rubin reveals the true secret to habit change: first, we must know ourselves. When we shape our habits to suit ourselves, we can find success—even if we’ve failed before.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool?

What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?

How much do parents really matter?

These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head.

Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more.

Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.

Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman, by Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.

System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation―each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives―and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

Conclusion:

Thank you so much for joining us on Reading With Libraries! 

Special thanks to our Guest Host, Shaun! We’re so glad you were able to join us today!

Join us next Thursday with another genre, more guest hosts for our book group, and more books to share and discuss. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast so you don’t miss a single episode! And if you want to hear more about the work we do in libraries or expand your library skills, check out our podcast Linking Our Libraries!

Bring your book ideas, bring your beverages, and join us back here on Thursday!