I thought I’d use a quick blog post here to tell you about three of my holiday gifts this year that might interest a lot of you.  With it being a few days after Christmas, a lot of stores are running big sales, and you could probably pick these up at big discounts.

Dragon Naturally Speaking Software – This is a speech recognition software that works with your computer to directly translate what you say into a microphone into a word processing document or email. My hope is that it’ll make it easy for me to dictate blogs and emails while in the car on my 40-minute commute to and from Cressey Performance each day.

Admittedly, I am still feeling this one out, as it takes some “calibrating” to learn how to interpret your voice correctly (I read John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address into it the other night).  However, I’m really psyched about how this could improve my efficiency in 2010; check it out for yourself.

What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures – Tony Gentilcore (and others) turned me on to Malcolm Gladwell’s writing in 2009, and I absolutely loved it (including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers).  This is his newest work, and it is actually a collection of his short pieces that were featured in The New Yorker, where Gladwell is a staff writer.

Tony got me the audio CDs for this, and I listened to it on my hours and hours of driving to and from Maine for the holiday.  It’s excellent: very entertaining, educational, and thought provoking. Something pretty cool: you can buy all four of these books from Gladwell on Amazon for under $40 right now (including free shipping).  That’s a tremendous value.

Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow – This book by Chip Conley was actually a gift to me from Alwyn Cosgrove about a month ago, and I’m about halfway through it.  As I’ve read, it’s made me realize several reasons that we’ve been successful in our business model at Cressey Performance (including 15% growth this year in spite of the “recession”).  Regardless of the industry in which you work, if you manage employees, I’d highly recommend it.