Occasionally, when I am travelling, I will find an airport with a decent bookstore. And I will indulge my habit of buying management books to try and get a competitive advantage when dealing with all sales people, even those that work in the same company that I do.

You see, when you understand how sales people think, and how they will try and position the types of services that I am capable of providing, then I am able to defend myself when they dream up some cockamamie scheme that will help them cover their butt for just one more quarter.

This time, it is Hope is not a Strategy and Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done. Started Hope, and will likely get to Execution later this week. Then I am going to go back and read Solution Selling. Then, after I indulge in all of this competitive detective work, I hope that someone buys me a copy of High Performance MySQL, if only because I love what Jeremy has to say on his blogs (here and here).

So, if you see some non-Web performance related rantings this week, it’s most likely cause of what I am reading offline.