Interesting and InformativeBooks - Hull on Estates and Succession Planning #218
Listen to: Interesting and Informative Books
This week on Hull on Estates and Succession Planning, Ian and Suzana discuss what they are currently reading for business and pleasure.
Some of the books they discuss are:
· The 50 Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes . . . and How to Avoid Them by Jean Blacklock and Sarah Kruger
· The High Road by Terry Fallis
· The Final Call by Kerry Fraser
· In Bound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shaw
· Say it with Series by Gene Zelazny
If you have any comments, send us an email at hullandhull@gmail.com or leave a comment on our blog.
Ian M. Hull - Click here for more information on Ian Hull.
Suzana Popovic-Montag – Click here for more information on Suzana Popovic-Montag.
Interesting and Informative Books – Hull on Estate and Succession Planning #218
Posted on November 29, 2010 by Hull & Hull LLP
Welcome to Hull on Estate and Succession Planning, a series of podcasts hosted by Ian Hull and Suzana Popovic-Montag. The podcast you’re listening to will provide information and insights into estate planning in Canada. From the offices of Hull & Hull in Toronto, here are Ian and Suzana.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: Hi and welcome to Hull on Estate and Succession Planning. You’re listening to episode 218 of our podcast.
Ian Hull: Hi Suzana.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: Hi there Ian.
Ian Hull: Well welcome back.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: Thank you very much.
Ian Hull: You’ve been much missed. We’ve had to do a couple solo performances.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: I apologize for that.
Ian Hull: So … no it’s all good. Never say sorry on a podcast. We’re always happy to have you. Alright so what we thought we would do today it came out of a recent sort of barrage of enquiries and when I say barrage it wasn’t in the thousands. But I had a few people asking me and…coincidently at the same time, what are you guys reading? What is Suzana reading? What are you reading these days? And I’m a bit of a zealot with technology so I’ve got my Amazon Kindle quite a while ago. I guess we both have had it for about a year and a half. All of the readers are excellent and quite frankly, I don’t really know enough about the other ones because I only use the Amazon Kindle because that’s the one we early adopted to. But we thought today we’d talk in our podcast a little bit about what are we reading in the sense of...it is…you know these are sources of materials that we’re getting from other podcasts and other bloggers.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: And I just wanted to start, Ian with firstly a book that has been done by Jean Blacklock and Sara Kruger. And I know we’ve previously referred to it and it’s “The 50 Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them”. And I think that this is an excellent book and as we’ve talked about in our earlier podcast, it really is one of those kinds of things that you hate to admit that you actually do read as a practitioner but it is full of sort of horror stories and things that we certainly try to avoid on a daily basis. So I think I highly recommend it and I know that you’ve enjoyed it and actually have some kudos attached to your name at the back of the book as well.
Ian Hull: I do have my name on the back, but not on the front where these good authors have properly placed themselves. It’s a great book, it’s a super sort of summary of some of the key mistakes in estate planning and it’s just literally out the last week or so. It’s called “The 50 Biggest Estate Planning Mistakes… and How to Avoid Them”. And I like the “and how to avoid them” because it’s not just all about saying how where the problems are, it’s also like we like to do, about what are the solutions.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: And as we go through the books that we talk about today, I just want to remind people that not necessarily all these books are available to be downloaded. Some of them still come in the traditional hard copy format. You actually have to go to the book store to purchase them. But certainly definitely worth trying to see if you can get them downloaded, if that’s your preferred way of reading these things.
Ian Hull: So as we, certainly for me, I sort of look at my category of book reading as, some fun stuff and non-business and business related. And I would say that “The 50 Biggest Estate Planning Tools” obviously illustrates a business related book. A non-business related book and one that we’ve about in previous podcasts is of course “The High Road”. And “The High Road” is the novel written by Terry Fallis and it’s just come out in soft cover. We have heard that it’s on as I’ve said in my previous podcast, it’s on Canada Reads. It’s one of the top ten books to read. So that’s a fun novel.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: That’s for sure.
Ian Hull: The other fun book we have, and we’ll come back to some business ones, is a great book by Kerry Fraser and it’s called “The Final Call”. And Kerry was good enough to invite me to the book launch a couple of weeks ago and we had a really interesting fun time down at Gretzy’s restaurant. And he spoke about this, it’s a phenomenal book and I’ve read it now, really enjoyed it, some great hockey stories for those of us who like the folklore of hockey. And some of us who remember Kerry Fraser, of course, being the referee that didn’t call the penalty on Wayne Gretzy in 1993, I think it was. And we didn’t make it into the finals against the Montreal Canadians. So that’s not his only call but it’s a great book and interesting book for sure. Now coming back to the business books, why don’t we talk about our next one?
Suzana Popovic-Montag: The next one is a great book by Brian Halligan and Darmesh Shaw and it’s called “In Bound Marketing -Getting Found using Google, Social Media and Blogs”.
Ian Hull: So this book is interesting to me because we read a ton of social media and blogging books, always trying to see sort of what other people are thinking. This is, in my view, anyway if not the best, one of the very best sources of how to get your head around all of the angles and all of the approaches that we want to consider when we’re blogging and podcasting. And I’ve got both of this. I actually have it on my Kindle and I have it on in a hard copy. Now it sounds a little strange but the Kindle has a reader on it and so I can listen to the book and I might pop around, go back and forth on chapters. And then I also sometimes, not all books, but I sometimes like a hard copy. This is one of those books that I’ve used so much that I keep coming back to it and so the hard copy was important.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: And I just wanted to take a chance just to read a little bit off the back of this in terms of understanding what in bound marketing is all about and how it’s contrasted with outbound marketing. And I think the authors succinctly state it when they say that when you want to connect with today’s buyer, you need to stop pushing your message out there and actually start pulling your customers or, in our case, your clients in. The rules of marketing have changed and the key to winning them is to use this change to your advantage. And it’s very interesting to have the focus on these social media techniques that we are so much looking into these days and how we’re trying to draw our clients in as opposed to pushing our messages out.
Ian Hull: Alright well this is, as I say, a terrific book and we can’t say enough about it. I will say, too, and thanks to Daniel Debow who is the CEO of Rypple, another phenomenal program that we’re using in our office and we've spoken about it at other podcasts. He’s the guy that called me up and said, I know you’re doing a lot of this work, this is the book to read. And he didn’t have to convince me for long because I’m really glad that he did and I’m glad that we’ve been able to enjoy it.
The last sort of few business related books we wanted to talk about are on my Kindle and they’re not actual hard copy books and they really are, you know, a big help to me. And the series that I have just purchased and bought and I’ve only gone through about half of them now is the series called “Say it With”. And it’s “Say it With Presentations”, “Say it With Charts” and “Say it with Charts, sort of, Revised” and in more detail. So there’s three books. They’re all written by Gene Zelazny. I’m saying it wrong but I’ll spell it right in the show notes. But the “Say It With” series that he has written is phenomenal, helps with presentation skills for both your visual and with charts and so forth and your presentation skills just generally and some of the techniques that are really useful.
The other book that I do say that is probably the very best marketing and presentation book I have on here is a book about Steve Jobs and I, of course, am forgetting the name because I’ve read it like three times and I haven’t read it for a little while. But it’s…we’ll put it in our show notes as well, and it’s a phenomenal book about… it’s a book on Steve Jobs and the theory, of course, behind that is that he is perceived by some as the greatest sort of on-line presenter and personal presenter in the business now. And that book has really been a big help.
So those are sort of just a summary of the books that we’ve used. The source is the Kindle, the hard copy books. And the last thing I just want to say is managertools.com, a series that we listen to all the time, their podcasts, they’re a phenomenal group. They’ve also put out a listing of book reviews and you can go on-line and track their down what they say and they’ve put down I think about fifty or a little less than fifty of their favorite books to read. And I highly recommend it. We’ve probably read about a third of their list and we’re working on it. So thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, welcome back Suzana.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: Thank you.
Ian Hull: And that’s the end of our attempt to give you a little bit of an idea of what we’re reading.
Suzana Popovic-Montag: Thanks very much.
You have been listening to Hull on Estate and Succession Planning by Ian
Hull and Suzana Popovic-Montag. The podcast that you have been listening
to has been provided as an information service. It is a summary of current
issues in estates and estate planning. It is not legal advice and you are reminded to always speak with a legal professional regarding your specific circumstance.
To listen to other Hull & Hull podcasts, or leave any questions or comments, please visit our website at hullestatemediation.com.
