Leverage

The book is overly filled with newly-invented jargons such as Brand Differentiator, Brand Relevance, Range Brand, Sub-brand with Brand Differentiator, which can make readers overwhelmed with decoding the content.

A responsible writer on Branding should help readers simplify the complex and make it easy for them to know the true picture of branding.

This book is not entirely new. About 20% of the content(I would say more than the author admitted in the Preface) is based on Aaker's old books like Brand Equity, Building Brand Identity, and Brand Leadership. Examples are predictable and have been used before in his old books, mostly including Intel, Marriott, and the like. The cases drawn for this book can be very biased since Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Dove and so forth are world-class,big budget brands. Of course they have the know-how and abundant resources to build successful brands. Aaker should quote some medium or low budget brand cases that turn themselves into successful brands.

As a Vice-Chairman of Prophet, a brand consultancy, readers may worry about Aaker's (not just a Brand/Marketing Professor from Berkeley now!) objectivity in examples selections as well.

Besides, the Clients that Prophet serve are mostly not the world-class brands(except just one or two, like Adidas). This may reduce the credibility of Aaker as a branding expert in the first place since he wrote about the world-class brands, not really building the world-class brands himself or with his colleagues.

There is a tendency for authors to rush out new books these days. In fact, quality does count. For authors who have been preaching the importance of good quality in the branding process, they should walk the talk themselves!

David A. Aaker's new book is another great piece on branding from the distinguished author of several classics within brand strategy. The book provides in-depth knowledge about portfolio management and inspires readers to reach further in their own corporations. Guidelines and best practices in one single place. Aaker's book is a must for all brand marketeers.

After reading about this book in Investor's Business Daily, The New York Times, and the Financial Times, I just had to see what everybody was raving about. I've concluded that David Aaker is a genuis.

David L. Dotlich and Peter C. Cairo discuss how to use action coaching to improve individual effectiveness and boost your overall organization. Their approach begins with fostering self-awareness and then uses this awareness to motivate change that the organization needs. Action coaching involves a series of steps and some specific coaching tools. While this book provides a fairly well-organized and well-written introduction to the concept, it covers familiar training and development ground. If you are a beginner in this area, the repetition of steps and processes will come in handy. Experienced trainers will find the coaching tools quite familiar and the assessment questions fairly obvious. Thus, we at getAbstract.com recommend this book for those who are new to training and development, or for employees who are considering getting coached.

Dotlich and Cairo have put together a fine and practical book that really helps focus coaching skills towards results. They give a very specific approach to developing an action plan to produce results from coaching. In fact they address four kinds of results - self-awareness results, performance improvement results, performance breakthroughs and finally full-blown transformations. Maybe most important for modern organizations is the anal;ysis of coaching skills in the context of the organizational needs, not just individual developmental needs. We develop and support people because our organization needs their current compliment of skills enhanced with other skills or it needs to rehabilitate a counterproductive approach. Although much of their work is not necesarily new, I believe they have packaged it to be more usable and accesible. I would highly recommend this book for someone looking for a chance to evaluate their own coaching skills, develop an improvement action plan and maintain high levels of motivation to improve their performance. Who know, maybe even transform their performance!