Books

Brief Summary Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers. Haters are not your problem. . . . Ignoring them is. Eighty percent of companies say they deliver out¬standing customer service, but only 8 percent of their customers agree. This book will help you close that gap by reconfiguring your customer service to deliver knockout experiences. The near-universal adoption of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the science of complaints. Critics ("haters”) can now express their displeasure faster and more pub¬licly than ever. These trends have resulted in an overall increase in complaints and a belief by many businesses that they have to "pick their spots” when choosing to answer criticisms. Bestselling author Jay Baer shows why that approach is a major mistake. Based on an exten¬sive proprietary study of how, where, and why we complain, Hug Your Haters proves that there are two types of complainers, each with very differ¬ent motivations: ·Offstage haters. These people simply want solutions to their problems. They complain via legacy channels where the likelihood of a response is highest—phone, e-mail, and com¬pany websites. Offstage haters don’t care if any¬one else finds out, as long as they get answers. ·Onstage haters. These people are often disap¬pointed by a substandard interaction via tradi¬tional channels, so they turn to indirect venues, such as social media, online review sites, and discussion boards. Onstage haters want more than solutions—they want an audience to share their righteous indignation. Hug Your Haters shows exactly how to deal with both groups, drawing on meticulously researched case studies from businesses of all types and sizes from around the world. It includes specific play-books and formulas as well as a fold-out poster of "the Hatrix,” which summarizes the best strate¬gies for different situations. The book is also filled with poignant and hilarious examples of haters gone wild, and companies gone crazy, as well as inspirational stories of companies responding with speed, compassion, and humanity. Whether you work for a mom-and-pop store or a global brand, you will have haters—and you can’t afford to ignore them. Baer’s insights and tactics will teach you how to embrace complaints, put haters to work for you, and turn bad news into good outcomes. ISBN:9781101980675 Author:Jay Baer

Brief Summary Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age. From Microsoft's President and one of the tech industry's wisest thinkers, a frank and thoughtful reckoning with how to balance enormous promise and existential risk as the digitization of everything accelerates. Microsoft President Brad Smith operates by a simple core belief: when your technology changes the world, you bear a responsibility to help address the world you have helped create. This might seem uncontroversial, but it flies in the face of a tech sector long obsessed with rapid growth and sometimes on disruption as an end in itself. Now, though, we have reached an inflection point: Silicon Valley has moved fast and it has broken things. A new understanding has emerged that companies that create technology must accept greater responsibility for the future. And governments will need to regulate technology by moving faster and catching up with the pace of innovation that is impacting our communities and changing the world. In Tools and Weapons, Brad Smith takes us into the cockpit of one of the world's largest and most powerful tech companies as it finds itself in the middle of some of the thorniest emerging issues of our time. These are challenges that come with no preexisting playbook, including privacy, cybercrime and cyberwar, social media, the moral conundrums of AI, big tech's relationship to inequality and the challenges for democracy, far and near. While in no way a self-glorifying "Microsoft memoir," the book opens up the curtain remarkably wide onto some of the company's most crucial recent decision points, as it strives to protect the hopes technology offers against the very real threats it also presents. Every tool can be a weapon in the wrong person's hands, and companies are being challenged in entirely new ways to embrace the totality of their responsibilities. We have moved from a world in which Silicon Valley could take no prisoners to one in which tech companies and governments must work together to address the challenges and adapt to the changes technology has unleashed. There are huge ramifications to be thought through, and Brad Smith provides a marvelous and urgently necessary contribution to that effort. ISBN:9781984877710 Author:Brad Smith and Carol Ann Browne