Top Shelf Reading Picks:

Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer is the book that I so wanted Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell to be. Not that I’m dissing Gladwell, but it just didn’t address what I wanted to know about going with your gut in a business setting. Most entrepreneurs live on gut instinct. If we didn’t, we’d be duplicating others’ efforts and ideas. In essence, it’s our gut decisions that help us innovate, and I wanted to know 1. when to trust my own; and 2. how to influence my customers’ gut instincts.

At the outset of the book, Gigerenzer dabbles in the realm of Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less when he talks about how too much choice can cause indecision or lack of satisfaction. This is a philosophy I wholeheartedly believe in (and not just because I survived my child’s pre-k years).

Lesson for entrepreneurs: Clients want choice, but if you give them too many, it may prompt indecision, inaction or less satisfaction with the choice they made.

Gigerenzer also discusses name recognition and how that can play into decision making. Hence the basis for the old marketing adage that people need to hear your message at least three times and sometimes in three different mediums to make an impact. This section brought to mind a conversation I once had at a networking event where I met a young woman who worked at a PR firm that had, just that week, made headlines for a blatant, high-profile conflict of interest. A third woman had joined us and enthusiastically said, “Hey, I saw something about your company in the paper this week. Congrats, that’s great.â€? Clearly she had seen the PR company’s name, but either she hadn’t read the article or didn’t recollect it at the time. It just goes to show that having your company’s name in the paper even for bad reasons–unless it’s on par with Enron–can help with name recognition.

Lesson for entrepreneurs: You need to build a recognizable and memorable brand so that you’re in customers’  unconscious. I’ll have more on how to do this next month when I do a review of what I’m guessing will be my favorite business book of 2008: Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Created Extraordinary Brands. I’m partway through my advance copy.

Other lessons for entrepreneurs: I really enjoyed Gigerenzer section on corporate culture as it looked at how leaders influence companies by the little things they do. If they’re on email 24/7, the company is on email 24/7. He also has some really great ideas about how to share success across a team and make sure everyone feels on an equal footing. Why is this relevant to gut instincts? Because leaders can influence their employees’ gut feelings. There was also another interesting section on social instincts that questions the often-stated idea that humans are basically selfish and self-focused. If this were the case, Gigerenzer argues, we would not have family instincts and community instincts, and most humans want to belong to one or both groups.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: Gut Feelings is an intriguing look into something we’ve often struggled to explain: “I don’t know why, but my gut says I should do this.� The one thing I took away is that my gut is usually telling me something for a reason. Now if I can just get my customers’ guts to follow my own, then I’ll be all set.

Last year I had the honor of being an editor of Consolidation of Banking: or How Five Banks Bought 50% of America’s Biggest Business by Arnold G. Danielson. (Note to readers: full disclosure–yes, he’s my Dad. And, somehow, we got over our editorial differences … i.e., he’s from the traditional school of writing and I write “chick lit biz books.”) But I wouldn’t include it here if I didn’t think it had some entrepreneurial or, as some might say, “intrapreneurialâ€? interest.

As stated before on this blog, I believe an entrepreneur is someone who runs his or her company in a new and innovative manner that creates efficiencies in existing markets, new markets or new products and services. That being said, banking is probably–along with the legal industry–one of the industries least open to entrepreneurial thinking. However, there were a few innovations along the way: i.e., ATMs and debit cards, and a few very “outside the bank windowâ€? thinkers who basically bought up the entire industry.

Today we have the five largest banks–Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and Wachovia–holding almost 50 percent of domestic bank assets. This is up from 19 percent as recently as 1991. What is interesting to an entrepreneur is how some of the banks moved up the ranks through some creative and daring moves. Here are a few examples from the book of how Bank of America came to be.

Growth by acquisition and exploiting loopholes
Bank of America started as a small bank in Charlotte, North Carolina, which, like other aggressive banks at the time, grew by merger. But its growth was constrained by not being able to cross state lines until the early 1980s. Unlike other small banks with big ambitions, though, American Trust did not just wait for things to happen and always seemed to be a step ahead of others in making acquisitions work in its favor. In the 1970s, it used a loophole in banking laws to buy a trust company in Florida, and then in the 1980s argued and won its case that this trust company was really a bank, and that it should be allowed to buy other banks in Florida despite being based out-of-state. By then it had taken the name NCNB and was still relatively small but was on its way.

Profiting from crises and creative financing
In 1989, Bank of America, then-named NCNB, took advantage of a banking crisis in Texas to buy the biggest bank in that state, FirstRepublic–a bank bigger than itself–by persuading the regulators to let it do so using minimal cash and lot of tax credits. First Republic was the first bank bought by this method. Two years later, it was successful in a hostile takeover of its primary challenger for banking leadership in the South, C&S/Sovran–a bank of equal size–and by 1993, it was the third largest bank in the country. It also changed its name once more–this time to NationsBank.

A driven leader
In 1998, the predecessor of Bank of America (NationsBank) bought a struggling San Francisco-based Bank of America, took that name and made Charlotte a major banking center. Behind most of this growth was one man, Hugh McColl Jr., who was with the bank from the American Trust days until he retired as CEO of Bank of America in 2000.

The Top Shelf Bottom Line: This book will be primarily of interest to readers who work in the financial-services industry; but if, like me, you lived through your own bank being bought four times (BayBank > Bank of Boston > Fleet > Bank of America) or are curious as to how the banking industry got to where it is now, you may also find it of interest. And, it just goes to show that even a staid old industry can make changes with the right leader and innovative strategy.

**Final note: While I appreciate the wonders of ATMs and online banking (both are driving factors for which bank I choose), here’s one more entrepreneurial thought for banks. Get rid of banker’s hours. On the rare occasion I have to go the bank in person, I can’t possibly be expected to remember that banks often close at 4:00 or 4:30 p.m. Other retail establishments don’t do that. What’s up with that?

I‘m on LinkedIn — Now What???: A Guide to Getting the Most OUT of LinkedIn by Jason Alba (of www.jibberjobber.com) is a great read for anyone who’s put his or her resume up on LinkedIn and wondered, so what happens next? For some of us, all that happens is that a bunch of invites shows up. Some are fun, like the one I got from a guy I used to work with two careers ago; others were borderline spam from self-described “open networkersâ€? who value volume over quality. So I was accepting some and ignoring others (I was too afraid to decline as it seemed so rude; so many just sat there). But, could that really be what LinkedIn is all about?

Absolutely not, as Alba points out. After reading his book, even moi–the creator of several business networks–had to give myself a dope slap. I’m always preaching about how networking is not something that happens to you, it’s something you need to make happen for yourself. For some reason when it came to LinkedIn, I was very passive and just acted as if it were a public rolodex. So, while I was researching my own book about online networking, and reading books like Alba’s, I realized it’s not enough to sign up, just as in real life, you need to actually show up!

I’m on LinkedIn – Now What? is a quick read–which is all any of us has time for–but here are some of my favorite points:

• LinkedIn is a powerful tool, not a silver bullet.
• Get a “vanity urlâ€?–this is free, but you have to go to the edit profile screen to do it. Basically, you can change the generic one LinkedIn assigns you to one with “yournameâ€? in it. (This was a new one for me. And if you make your profile public, it’s more likely the search engines will pick it up).
• Write recommendations. This is the best way to not only get others to write recommendations for you, but it means your info shows up on others’ profiles with a link back to yours.
• Make sure you have the right e-mail address associated with the right account (i.e., if you’re jobhunting, you might want emails to go to a non-company e-mail address, such as a Yahoo! or Hotmail one).
• Alba also explains the benefits and how to use some of LinkedIn’s other functions, such as services, groups and answers (the latter is my favorite–it’s like a mini-focus group and actually the way I’ve made my best connections on LinkedIn).

For more about ways to use LinkedIn, you can see tips from both Alba and yours truly on http://www.linkedintelligence.com/smart-ways-to-use-linkedin/.

Top Shelf Bottom Line: LinkedIn might not be intuitive for people new to social networks, and I’m on LinkedIn – Now What? is a great reference for someone who wants to make the most out of his or her experience. The real benefit is that the book is focused only on LinkedIn. This keeps it streamlined and focused. I highly recommend it for: anyone who’s interested in testing the social networking waters in a professional platform, anyone who is on LinkedIn and feels his or her experience is lacking and for people looking to get more out of it.

**For more LinkedIn tips, visit Jason Alba’s “I’m on LinkedIn — Now What? blog.“**