By Erica Christoffer, Multimedia Web Producer, REALTOR® Magazine
Happy Earth Day!! It’s a great day to catch up on some green reading. Here are three recently published books that can give both you and your clients tips and resources for creating a more eco-friendly home or listing.
New Natural Home: Designs for Sustainable Living: This book is filled with eye candy-delicious images of homes from all over the world that will spark ideas on how to incorporate symbiotic living between a home and its surrounding environment. It also offers tips to reduce energy use and add sustainable elements, such as lighting, architectural elements, and landscaping.
DIY Projects for the Self-Sufficient Homeowner: 25 Ways to Build a Self-Reliant Lifestyle: A great gift for a recent buyer who’d green-minded and isn’t afraid of DIY projects. This book covers the basics for solar, hydro, greenhouse, and gardening projects – building a chicken run and beehive, for instance.
As covered over at our Styled, Staged & Sold blog today, the instillation of solar panels can boost a home’s resale value, according to a new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For those e-reader users out there, Solar Energy – Sustainable Green Energy For Your Home, Your Car And Your Business [Kindle Edition] covers the basics, from the pros and cons of residential solar energy systems, to making your own solar power source.
The most popular books this week in Business & Investing from Amazon.com.
1. Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz and Joanne Gordon
“Schultz’s first book, Pour Your Heart into It (Hyperion; 1997), described the founding and ideals of a young company determined to make its mark. Onward is Schultz’s story of the next and perhaps harder challenge of any entrepreneur’s journey: saving a mature company from losing its way, and rediscovering its purpose.”Pour Your Heart into It (Hyperion; 1997), described the founding and ideals of a young company determined to make its mark. Onward is Schultz’s story of the next and perhaps harder challenge of any entrepreneur’s journey: saving a mature company from losing its way, and rediscovering its purpose.”
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2. The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement by David Brooks
“This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.”
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3. StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath
“To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents. In StrengthsFinder 2.0 Gallup unveiled the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more. While you can read this book in one sitting, you’ll use it as a reference for decades.”
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4. The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience by Shep Hyken
“In this sequel to the Wall Street Journal bestselling book The Cult of the Customer, Shep Hyken shares seven powerful customer service strategies that any organization can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty. In a tough, competitive, and price-sensitive economy, customer service is one of the most essential tools to separate your business from the competition. These strategies work, as evidenced by the more than seventy case studies and examples that Hyken shares throughout the book. The studies, each insightfully dissected by the author, provide dozens of lessons that can and should be implemented immediately—by any organization, large or small.”
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5. Poke the Box by Seth Godin
“Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking— in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)— the person with the guts to say, ‘I want to start stuff.’”
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