News from Columbia Business School Publishing

It’s been a good past few days for titles from Columbia Business School Publishing with several notable reviews:

Success recently wrote about the soon-to-be-published Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks: One CEO’s Quest for Meaning and Authenticity, by August Turak. In the article, it lists four valuable lessons from the book:

1. Always honor your promises—even small or trivial ones. People will gauge your reliability on the big things by how you handle the little ones.

2. Keep promises to yourself because doing so correlates with willpower and self-control, virtues that are essential to trustworthiness. Willpower is like any other muscle; it needs daily exercise to stay in shape.

3. Under-commit and over-deliver. Only make promises that you know you will be able to keep. The quickest way to lose respect is to bail on your promises.

4. Protect your personal brand. Get in the habit of asking yourself, “How will this decision affect my personal brand?” In the long run, your reputation is your most valuable asset.

Forbes joins the chorus of admirers (Warren Buffett, etc.) for Howard Marks’s The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor. In a review they write:

This isn’t yet another “how to invest” book or a tired rehashing of received investment “wisdom” that looks more like something found in a fortune cookie and which rarely seems to hold up in practice.

Instead, Marks gives us the insightful thoughts of a man who struggles with his own investing decisions on a daily basis. There are no shortcuts, formulas or easy tricks. But there is a wealth of experience and thoughtful contemplation from a real “in the trenches” investor who has been doing this a long time.

Over at Beyond Proxy, Brendan Moynihan, coauthor of What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars, discusses what famed investor Jim Paul learned from his ups and downs on Wall Street:

Finally, 800CEOREAD revisited two of its top 100 business books, including More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded), by Michael Mauboussin. The review praises the book for offering insight that will be useful for years to come, explaining:

What’s the value of this peculiar approach to “finding financial wisdom in unconventional places”? Mauboussin explains it efficiently in the first lines of his Introduction: “More Than You Know‘s core premise is simple to explain but devilishly difficult to live: you will be a better investor, executive, parent, friend–person–if you approach problems from a multidisciplinary perspective. It’s the difference between moving into a fixer-upper home with a full set of power tools versus a simple screwdriver.” And this edition offers all the more tools for your advantage.