Biz-Whiz—On the Go

How would you like Jack Welch, Peter Drucker or Michael Hammer to drive to work with you?

By Maggie Leyes

You’ve been meaning to read it, you really have. But, there on your bookshelf sits Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, covered in a fine layer of dust. You know the information is good—you’ve heard others speak highly of it—but you just don’t have the time to pick it up. Clients need attention, papers need signing, your family needs to see you.

There is a solution, a way for you to get the information you need from top business books without having to carve out the 10 or 20 hours needed to read them from cover to cover. Enter Audio-Tech Business Book Summaries Inc. This company does the hard work for you. Business editors, overseen by a board of Harvard Business School graduates, Fortune 500 senior executives and international management consultants, read and summarize the best of the new business and management books for you. These summaries arrive at your door—two per month—on CD or cassette. That means you can make your commute, or other downtime, more productive.

Business wisdom
A one-year subscription to Audio-Tech’s service ($149) gets you 24 summaries, each 45 minutes long. In addition to the CD or cassette, you get what Audio-Tech calls an e-transcript—a PDF—of each summary so you can keep the information on file, or on your hard drive, if you wish. If that subscription price sounds high, think of what those 24 books would have cost you. Giving each a conservative $20 price tag, that would be $480.

But wait, there’s more—a good deal is never without a freebie. When you sign up for the service, you also get summaries of eight classic business books, some that may be moldering on your shelf, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Good to Great by Jim Collins, What the Best CEOs Know by Jeffrey A. Krames, and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch. Audio-Tech also has 120 books already summarized, which you can purchase on a per-title basis.

Fortune magazine and The Wall Street Journal (you don’t have time to read those either, do you?) have given this system their nod. Perhaps it’s time to check it out so you can finally talk about one of the seven habits.