Robin sent me the following list, which is recommended reading for the seminar she teaches for the Institute for Management Studies called “Authentic Leadership for Women.” It’s pretty thorough. I haven’t read most of these, so feel free to include your own reviews in the comments below.

1. A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century  by Scott Bedbury. This is a work by a guy who saw both Nike and Starbucks grow from the ground up. He has as complete an understanding of branding as anyone I’ve ever read, and he is a much better writer than most.
2. The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers  by Douglas Atkin. Atkin asks a fascinating question: We talk casually about brands as cults, but are they really? Do they meet the sociological definition? Then he goes inside both real cults and cult brands to find out, as well as interviewing sociologists. He has some surprising conclusions.
3. The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual  by Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls and David Weinburger. This 7-year old book accurately predicted how blogs would emerge and how the conversation between brands and consumers would be forever changed by the internet. It has a strident tone (and really does read like a manifesto), but it’s an excellent read.
4. Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers  by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book directly answers the question: Should your business have a blog? It comes from two of the best-known bloggers online (Scoble worked for Microsoft) and is very easy to read.
5. Emotional Branding: The New Paradigm for Connecting Brands to People  by Marc Gobe. Marc is known as a guru on design, and he helps uncover how much of good branding is actually great design. This book not only changed the way I think about branding, it changed the way I invest in stocks.

Thanks, David. I’ve got a few of them on order at my local library.

She recommends:

Thanks Christine!

Just in case you’re wondering how I can actually read all these books that I do AND still have a day job, I’ll confess: (1) I read very, very quickly; (2) I’m no longer afraid to stop reading a book if it doesn’t grab me in the first few pages; (3) I usually have one book on CD in my car; and (4) some of these reviews are updated versions of my all time favorites from my former “books & stuff” blog for the Downtown Women’s Club.