Recommended Resources
to help you thrive in your business & personal life
All recommendations are made by Steve Dulin
Christianity
Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis
“In the classic Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, the most important writer of the 20th century, explores the common ground upon which all of those of Christian faith stand together. Bringing together Lewis’ legendary broadcast talks during World War Two from his three previous books The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality, Mere Christianity provides an unequaled opportunity for believers and nonbelievers alike to hear this powerful apologetic for the Christian faith.” (From Amazon)
Personal
Boundaries
Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend
“Having clear boundaries is essential to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. A boundary is a personal property line that marks those things for which we are responsible. In other words, boundaries define who we are and who we are not. Boundaries impact all areas of our lives: Physical boundaries help us determine who may touch us and under what circumstances — Mental boundaries give us the freedom to have our own thoughts and opinions — Emotional boundaries help us to deal with our own emotions and disengage from the harmful, manipulative emotions of others — Spiritual boundaries help us to distinguish God’s will from our own and give us renewed awe for our Creator — Often, Christians focus so much on being loving and unselfish that they forget their own limits and limitations. When confronted with their lack of boundaries, they ask:
- Can I set limits and still be a loving person?
- What are legitimate boundaries?
- What if someone is upset or hurt by my boundaries?
- How do I answer someone who wants my time, love, energy, or money?
- Aren’t boundaries selfish?
- Why do I feel guilty or afraid when I consider setting boundaries?
Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. John Townsend offer biblically-based answers to these and oth.er tough questions, showing us how to set healthy boundaries with our parents, spouses, children, friends, co-workers, and even ourselves” (From Amazon)
The Other 90%
Robert K. Cooper
“For centuries, it has been assumed that there are vast limits to human capacity. Now, although a host of scientific discoveries prove this wrong, a mindset of limits persists, blocking us from our greatest possibilities and leaving us feeling bombarded by stress, change, and uncertainty. No matter how hard we work, no matter how much we give, we’re still not getting what we hoped for. There is another way.
Dr. Robert Cooper, a neuroscience pioneer and leadership advisor, urges us to take a radically different view of human capacity. We are mostly unused potential, he says, employing less than 10 percent of our brilliance or hidden talents. In easy-to-follow steps, he explains how to develop and apply the art and science of your hidden capacity.
The art is the motivation and inspiration coming from the wonderful stories that are the heart of The Other 90%. Dr. Cooper draws on his wide-ranging insights and experiences to show how it’s possible to make a difference in yourself and others.
However, inspiration without a way to turn vision into reality is an empty vessel. Combining art with science, Dr. Cooper provides extraordinary help in the form of specific, little-known practical ways to use the latest research in neuroscience, performance psychology, and work physiology for excelling in a pressure-filled world. He shows you how to:
- Increase energy at work — and have more energy for personal and family life.
- Activate the brain’s “alertness switches” to defeat pressure and stress.
- Use not only the brain in your head but the ones in your heart and gut.
- Motivate exceptional ingenuity and performance in yourself and others.
The most exciting breakthroughs will not come from advances in technology but from a deeper realization of what it means to be most human and alive. Many of the choices that can dramatically change our lives are simple and practical — yet few people know what these choices are or how to apply them in work and life. The Other 90% is your guide to new territory and new challenges.” (From Amazon)
How to Go on a Sabbatical
Steve Dulin
Steve Dulin shares practical steps to go on a life-giving sabbatical. This document is a companion to Session Four: Sabbatical on The MasterPlan Business Seminar on CD.
View How to Go on a Sabbatical
Business Ownership
Business by the Book
Larry Burkett
“What would happen if you made your business decisions by the book? By the Bible that is. This updated version of the best-selling Business by the Book offers radical principles of business management that go beyond the Ten Commandments and other biblical maxims. Business by the Book is a step-by-step presentation of how businesses should be run according to the Creator of all management rules: God.
Larry Burkett, founder and president of Christian Financial Concepts, provides business principles from his own experience as well as what God’s Word says on topics such as:
- Hiring and Firing Decisions
- Pay Increases and Promotions
- Management Selection
- Employee Pay Decisions
- Borrowing and/or Lending Decisions
- Forming Corporations and Partnerships
- Business Tithing
- Retirement
Whether you are the owner of a business, a corporate executive, or a manager, this best-selling classic is for you.” (From Amazon)
The One Hour Plan For Growth: How a Single Sheet of Paper Can Take Your Business to the Next Level
Joe Calhoon
“A proven system for creating a clear and compelling business growth plan.
There are 15 million businesses in the United States, and 13 million of them don’t utilize a planning process. Yet having a planning process is the most reliable predictor of whether a business will grow.
The One Hour Plan for Growth provides a proven system for any business to create a clear and compelling business growth plan that fits on a single sheet of paper in about one hour. This book is a quick read, and you and your people stay energized and focused on your top priorities.
- Covers the six essential elements of the dynamic business growth plan: Vision, Mission, Values, Objectives, Strategies, and Priorities
- Previously the top-rated speaker for Stephen Covey’s organization, the author is now a successful speaker and consultant with some of the world’s finest small and mid-sized companies
The book delivers a proven planning process that engages employees, develops leadership capacity, improves performance, and accelerates growth.” (From Amazon)
The MasterPlan Business Seminar on CD
Steve Dulin
Are you a Christian in business? Do you own your own business? Are you interested in starting a business? If so, the MasterPlan Business Seminar with successful businessman Steve Dulin is for you.
Steve brings a fresh and relevant perspective to the challenges you face as a business leader. At this seminar, he shares the biblical principles he followed to receive the blessing of the Lord on his business. Through fast-paced and humorous presentations, you’ll learn:
- How to Give Your Business to God
- How to Execute with Excellence
- How to Maximize Profitability
- How to Build Your Dream Team
- How to Evaluate and Strategize
- How to Determine Your “Land”
- How to Market
- How to Set Priorities
- How to Balance Life and Work
- How to Strengthen Your Relationship with God
- How to Hear God for Your Life and Business
This isn’t another seminar about sharing your faith in the marketplace. This is a seminar about doing things God’s way so you can reach your God-given potential as a businessperson and be blessed in every area of life.
Whether you’re a leader who wants to maximize the success of your team, an owner who desires to run your business God’s way or a businessperson who wants to take things to the next level, this will be a valuable resource for you.
Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
Gino Wickman
“Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you?
All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations—personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or, once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned. More than 2,000 companies have discovered what EOS can do.
In Traction, you’ll learn the secrets of strengthening the six key components of your business. You’ll discover simple yet powerful ways to run your company that will give you and your leadership team more focus, more growth, and more enjoyment. Successful companies are applying Traction every day to run profitable, frustration-free businesses—and you can too.
For an illustrative, real-world lesson on how to apply Traction to your business, check out its companion book, Get A Grip.” (From Amazon)
Leadership
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership
John Maxwell
“If you’ve never read The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, you’ve been missing out on one of the best-selling leadership books of all time. If you have read the original version, then you’ll love this new expanded and updated one.
Internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker, and author John C. Maxwell has taken this million-seller and made it even better:
- Every Law of Leadership has been sharpened and updated
- Seventeen new leadership stories are included
- Two new Laws of Leadership are introduced
- New evaluation tool will reveal your leadership strengths?and weaknesses
- New application exercises in every chapter will help you grow
Why would Dr. Maxwell make changes to his best-selling book?
“A book is a conversation between the author and reader,” says Maxwell. “It’s been ten years since I wrote The 21 Laws of Leadership. I’ve grown a lot since then. I’ve taught these laws in dozens of countries around the world. This new edition gives me the opportunity to share what I’ve learned.” (From Amazon)
Lead Like Jesus: Lessons from the Greatest Leadership Role Model of All Time
Ken Blanchard and Phil Hodges
“The more I read the Bible, the more evident it becomes that everything I have ever taught or written about effective leadership over the past 25 years, Jesus did to perfection. He is simply the greatest leadership role model of all time.” -Ken Blanchard
“With simple yet profound principles from the life of Jesus and dozens of stories and leadership examples from his life experiences, veteran author, speaker and leadership expert Ken Blanchard guides readers through the process of discovering how to lead like Jesus. He describes it as the process of aligning two internal domains-the heart and the head-and two external domains-the hands and the habits. These four dimensions of leadership form the outline for this very practical and transformational book.” (From Amazon)
Strengths Based Leadership: Review and Analysis of Rath and Conchie's Book
Businessnews Publishing
“The must-read summary of Tom Rath and Barry Conchie’s book, Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams and Why People Follow.
This complete summary of the ideas from Tom Rath and Barry Conchie’s book Strengths Based Leadership outlines the characteristics common to the best and most effective leaders and explains how you can identify and develop your personal strengths in an efficient way, thus providing you with the opportunity to learn how to become a leader in your own right.
Added-value of this summary:
- Save time
- Understand key concepts
- Expand your leadership skills
To learn more, read Strengths Based Leadership and follow the road to great leadership!” (From Amazon)
Productivity
Getting Things Done
David Allen
“Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text with important perspectives on the new workplace, and adding material that will make the book fresh and relevant for years to come. This new edition of Getting Things Done will be welcomed not only by its hundreds of thousands of existing fans but also by a whole new generation eager to adopt its proven principles.” (From Amazon)
Management
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Patrick Lencioni
“In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.
Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.” (From Amazon)
Necessary Endings
Dr. Henry Cloud
“If you’re hesitant to pull the trigger when things obviously aren’t working out, Henry Cloud’s Necessary Endings may be the most important book you read all year.” —Dave Ramsey, New York Times bestselling author of The Total Money Makeover
“Cloud is a wise, experienced, and compassionate guide through [life’s] turbulent passages.” —Bob Buford, bestelling author of Halftime and Finishing Well; founder of the Leadership Network
“Henry Cloud, the bestselling author of Integrity and The One-Life Solution, offers this mindset-altering method for proactively correcting the bad and the broken in our businesses and our lives. Cloud challenges readers to achieve the personal and professional growth they both desire and deserve—and gives crucial insight on how to make those tough decisions that are standing in the way of a more successful business and, ultimately, a better life.” (From Amazon)
Marketing
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
Paco Underhill
“Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty bestselling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture—full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail such as Internet behemoths Amazon and iTunes as well as the globalization of retail in the world’s emerging markets.
This enlightening edition includes new information on:
- The latest trends in online retail—what retailers are doing right and what they’re doing wrong—and how nearly every Internet retailer from iTunes to Amazon can drastically improve how it serves its customers.
- A guided tour of the most innovative stores, malls and retail environments around the world—almost all of which are springing up in countries where prosperity is new. An enormous indoor ski slope attracts shoppers to a mall in Dubai; an uber-luxurious Sao Paolo department store provides its customers with personal shoppers; a mall in South Africa has a wave pool for surfing.
The new Why We Buy is an essential guide that offers advice on how to keep your changing customers and entice new and eager ones.” (From Amazon)
Church Marketing 101: Preparing Your Church for Greater Growth
Richard Reising
“Demystifies basic marketing principles for churches and evaluates biblical principles for outreach so ministries can uncover and fix roadblocks that keep them from reaching out.” (From Amazon)
Sales
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In
Roger Fisher
“Since its original publication nearly thirty years ago, Getting to Yes has helped millions of people learn a better way to negotiate. One of the primary business texts of the modern era, it is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution.
Getting to Yes offers a proven, step-by-step strategy for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. Thoroughly updated and revised, it offers readers a straight- forward, universally applicable method for negotiating personal and professional disputes without getting angry-or getting taken.” (From Amazon)
Strategic Thinking
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Eliyahu Goldratt
“30th Anniversary Edition. Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry – even to your bosses – but not to your competitors.
Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant – or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days – Jonah – to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex’s fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.
One of Eli Goldratt’s convictions was that the goal of an individual or an organization should not be defined in absolute terms. A good definition of a goal is one that sets us on a path of ongoing improvement.
Pursuing such a goal necessitates more than one breakthrough. In fact, it requires many. To be in a position to identify these breakthroughs we should have a deep understanding of the underlying rules of our environment. Twenty-five years after writing The Goal, Dr. Goldratt wrote Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. In this article he provided the underlying rules of operations. This article appears at the end of this book.”
“Like Mrs. Fields and her cookies, The Goal was too tasty to remain obscure. Companies began buying big batches and management schools included it in their curriculums.” Fortune Magazine
“A survey of the reading habits of managers found that though they buy books by the likes of Tom Peters for display purposes, the one management book they have actually read from cover to cover is The Goal.” The Economist
“Goal readers are now doing the best work of their lives.” Success Magazine
A” factory may be an unlikely setting for a novel, but the book has been wildly effective.” Tom Peters
(From Amazon)
Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
W. Chan Kim
“The global phenomenon that has sold 3.6 million copies, is published in a record-breaking 44 languages and is a bestseller across five continents?now updated and expanded with new content.
In this perennial bestseller, embraced by organizations and industries worldwide, globally preeminent management thinkers W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne challenge everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success. Recognized as one of the most iconic and impactful strategy books ever written, Blue Ocean Strategy,now updated with fresh content from the authors, argues that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors but from creating “blue oceans”?untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any organization can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. This expanded edition includes:
- A new preface by the authors: Help! My Ocean Is Turning Red
- Updates on all cases and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to the present time
- Two new chapters and an expanded third one ? Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps ? that address the most pressing questions readers have asked over the past 10 years
A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this bestselling book charts a bold new path to winning the future. Consider this your guide to creating uncontested market space?and making the competition irrelevant.” (From Amazon)
Generosity
The Blessed Life
Robert Morris
“Our culture is saturated with false teaching on what it means to be blessed, but what does the Bible say about it? How can we truly live blessed lives? With humor, passion, and clarity, pastor and bestselling author Robert Morris presents the secrets of living a blessed life both financially and spiritually. He shows that when God changes your heart from selfishness to generosity, every part of your life-journey is affected.
“There is no greater adventure on Earth than simply living the life of generosity and abundance that is available to all of God’s people–but so few ever dare to live,” says Pastor Robert. “It is a journey of reward. It is the blessed life.”
First published in 2002, this newly revised and expanded edition includes new content from recent sermons, updated illustrations from years of the life-changing impact of its message, and testimonies from people experiencing the blessed life.” (From Amazon)
Influence
How to Win Friends and Influence People
Dale Carnegie
“You can go after the job you want—and get it!
You can take the job you have—and improve it!
You can take any situation—and make it work for you!
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time, How to Win Friends & Influence People will teach you:
- Six ways to make people like you
- Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking
- Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment
And much more! Achieve your maximum potential—a must-read for the twenty-first century with more than 15 million copies sold!” (From Amazon)
Marriage
Marriage on the Rock
Jimmy Evans
“BUILD YOUR MARRIAGE ON A SOLID FOUNDATION. From communication to money to sex, Marriage on the Rock is the best-selling book that clearly deals with all the major issues a couple will encounter. Leading marriage authority Jimmy Evans discusses practical real-life challenges and offers easy to understand solutions even if you are the only one willing to work on the relationship.” (From Amazon)
Finances
Financial Peace
Dave Ramsey
“Dave Ramsey knows what it’s like to have it all. By age twenty-six, he had established a four-million-dollar real estate portfolio, only to lose it by age thirty. He has since rebuilt his financial life and, through his workshops and his New York Times business bestsellers Financial Peace and More than Enough, he has helped hundreds of thousands of people to understand the forces behind their financial distress and how to set things right-financially, emotionally, and spiritually.
In this new edition of Financial Peace, Ramsey has updated his tactics and philosophy to show even more readers:
- How to get out of debt and stay out
- The KISS rule of investing—”Keep It Simple, Stupid”
- How to use the principle of contentment to guide financial decision making
- How the flow of money can revolutionize relationships
With practical and easy to follow methods and personal anecdotes, Financial Peace is the road map to personal control, financial security, a new, vital family dynamic, and lifetime peace.” (From Amazon)
Counsel does not only come from
people. You can receive wise counsel
from books, magazines, sermons,
videos and many other sources. The
wisest counsel you can receive is from
the Bible and the Holy Spirit.
Steve Dulin, Founder & President of MasterPlan Ministries
