Recommended books for marketing
Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got
And just how easy can it be? One entrepreneur took the concept of the ballpoint pen and refined it into a mulimillion-dollar idea: roll-on deodorant. Fred Smith of Federal Express took the methods that banks use for clearing checks to develop an overnight delivery company that has revolutionized the way we do business. Now, what have you seen– or are going to see– that you could take and turn to your advantage?
In Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition, the program focuses on helping you spot the hidden assets, overlooked opportunities, and untapped resources around you, and gives you, and gives you fresh eyes with which to see and capitalize on them. You’ll also learn how to adapt and apply these tools to your unique circumstances to maximize your income, influence, power, and success.
Relentless: From Good to Great to Unstoppable (Tim Grover Winning Series)
Direct, blunt, and brutally honest, Grover breaks down what it takes to be unstoppable: you keep going when everyone else is giving up, you thrive under pressure, you never let your emotions make you weak. In “The Relentless 13,” he details the essential traits shared by the most intense competitors and achievers in sports, business, and all walks of life. Relentless shows you how to trust your instincts and get in the Zone; how to control and adapt to any situation; how to find your opponent’s weakness and attack. Grover gives you the same advice he gives his world-class clients—“don’t think”—and shows you that anything is possible. Packed with previously untold stories and unparalleled insight into the psyches of the most successful and accomplished athletes of our time, Relentless shows you how even the best get better . . . and how you can too.
Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded
Since its first publication in 1960, Maltz’s landmark best seller has inspired and enhanced the lives of more than 30 million readers. In this updated edition, with a new introduction and editorial commentary by Matt Furey, president of the Psycho-Cybernetics Foundation, the original text has been annotated and amplified to make Maltz’s message even more relevant for the contemporary audience.
“Before the mind can work efficiently, we must develop our perception of the outcomes we expect to reach. Maxwell Maltz calls this Psycho-Cybernetics; when the mind has a defined target it can focus and direct and refocus and redirect until it reaches its intended goal.” (Tony Robbins, from Unlimited Power)
Maltz was the first researcher and author to explain how the self-image (a term he popularized) has complete control over an individual’s ability to achieve (or failure to achieve) any goal. And he developed techniques for improving and managing self-image – visualization, mental rehearsal, relaxation – that have informed and inspired countless motivational gurus, sports psychologists, and self-help practitioners for more than 50 years.
The teachings of psycho-cybernetics are timeless because they are based on solid science and provide a prescription for thinking and acting that lead to quantifiable results.
Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior
“Jonah Berger has done it again: written a fascinating book that brims with ideas and tools for how to think about the world.” —Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit
If you’re like most people, you think your individual tastes and opinions drive your choices and behaviors. You wear a certain jacket because you liked how it looked. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong.
Without our realizing it, other people’s behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous. Even strangers have an impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes toward a welfare policy shift if we’re told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same). But social influence doesn’t just lead us to do the same things as others. In some cases we imitate others around us. But in other cases we avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. We stop listening to a band because they go mainstream. We skip buying the minivan because we don’t want to look like a soccer mom.
By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it—and learn how we can use this knowledge to exercise more control over our own behavior. In Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger “is consistently entertaining, applying science to real life in surprising ways and explaining research through narrative. His book fascinates because it opens up the moving parts of a mysterious machine, allowing readers to watch them in action” (Publishers Weekly).
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Hooked is a guide to building products people use because they want to, not because they have to. Written for product managers, designers, marketers, startup founders, and people eager to learn more about the things that control our behaviors, this audiobook gives listeners:
Practical insights to create user habits that stick.
Actionable steps for building products people love.
Behavioral techniques used by Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and other habit-forming products.
New for second edition! An additional case study for building health habits.
Nir Eyal distilled years of research, consulting, and practical experience to write a manual for creating habit-forming products. Nir has taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Hasso Plattner Institute of Design. His writing on technology, psychology, and business appears in the Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, TechCrunch, and Psychology Today. He is also the author of Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life.
Hooked: Contagious: Why Things Catch On
Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It’s more influential than advertising and far more effective.
Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.
Contagious is filled with fascinating information drawn from Berger’s research. You will be surprised to learn, for example, just how little word of mouth is generated online versus elsewhere. Already praised by Dan Ariely and Dan Gilbert, and sold in nine countries, this book is a must-listen for people who want their projects and ideas to succeed.
Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know about Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
Based on an MBA course Provost has taught at New York University over the past ten years, Data Science for Business provides examples of real-world business problems to illustrate these principles. You’ll not only learn how to improve communication between business stakeholders and data scientists, but also how participate intelligently in your company’s data science projects. You’ll also discover how to think data-analytically, and fully appreciate how data science methods can support business decision-making.
Understand how data science fits in your organization—and how you can use it for competitive advantage
Treat data as a business asset that requires careful investment if you’re to gain real value
Approach business problems data-analytically, using the data-mining process to gather good data in the most appropriate way
Learn general concepts for actually extracting knowledge from data
Apply data science principles when interviewing data science job candidates
Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work
An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson will help you understand how the frameworks of disruptive innovation can apply to you: If you want to be successful in unexpected ways, follow your own disruptive path. Dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself.
In this audiobook you will learn how to apply these frameworks to building a business, a career – and you. We are living in an era of accelerating disruption – those who can manage the S-curve waves of learning and maxing out will have a competitive advantage. But this is a skill set that needs to be learned. Disrupt Yourself will help people cope with the unpredictability of disruption and use it to their competitive advantage.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.
Mastery
What did Charles Darwin, middling schoolboy and underachieving second son, do to become one of the earliest and greatest naturalists the world has known? What were the similar choices made by Mozart and by Caesar Rodriguez, the U.S. Air Force’s last ace fighter pilot? In Mastery, Robert Greene’s fifth book, he mines the biographies of great historical figures for clues about gaining control over our own lives and destinies. Picking up where The 48 Laws of Power left off, Greene culls years of research and original interviews to blend historical anecdote and psychological insight, distilling the universal ingredients of the world’s masters.
Temple Grandin, Martha Graham, Henry Ford, Buckminster Fuller – all have lessons to offer about how the love for doing one thing exceptionally well can lead to mastery. Yet the secret, Greene maintains, is already in our heads. Debunking long-held cultural myths, he demonstrates just how we, as humans, are hardwired for achievement and supremacy. Fans of Greene’s earlier work and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers will eagerly devour this canny and erudite explanation of just what it takes to be great.
Start Your Own Business, Sixth Edition: The Only Startup Book You’ll Ever Need
Start Your Own Business, Sixth Edition: The Only Startup Book You’ll Ever Need
Take a moment to consider how many things you want to learn to do. What’s on your list? What’s holding you back from getting started? Are you worried about the time and effort it takes to acquire new skills – time you don’t have and effort you can’t spare?
Research suggests it takes 10,000 hours to develop a new skill. In this nonstop world when will you ever find that much time and energy?
To make matters worse, the early hours of practicing something new are always the most frustrating. That’s why it’s difficult to learn how to speak a new language, play an instrument, hit a golf ball, or shoot great photos. It’s so much easier to watch TV or surf the web…
In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you’ll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well.
This method isn’t theoretical: it’s field-tested. Kaufman invites readers to join him as he field tests his approach by learning to program a Web application, play the ukulele, practice yoga, re-learn to touch type, get the hang of windsurfing, and study the world’s oldest and most complex board game.
What do you want to learn?
The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
“Thoughtful, funny, and compulsively readable, this guide shows how ordinary people can build solid livings, with independence and purpose, on their own terms.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Happiness Project
Still in his early thirties, Chris Guillebeau completed a tour of every country on earth and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.
Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and focused on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.
Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise”—even if you don’t consider it such—and what other people will pay for. You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.
Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick. Among Chris’s key principles: If you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish—sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins.
In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold. Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable book will start you on your way.
The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs
In a praiseworthy effort to distill some of the most important lessons of entrepreneurship, Kevin D. Johnson, president of multimillion-dollar company Johnson Media Inc. and a serial entrepreneur for several years, shares the essential beliefs, characteristics, and habits of elite entrepreneurs. Through the conviction of his own personal experiences, which include a life-changing visit to Harvard Business School, and the compelling stories of modern-day business tycoons, Johnson transforms an oftentimes complex topic into a lucid and accessible one.
In this riveting book written for new and veteran entrepreneurs, Johnson identifies one hundred key lessons that every entrepreneur must learn in seven areas: Strategy, Education, People, Finance, Marketing and Sales, Leadership, and Motivation. Lessons include how to think big, who makes the best business partners, what captivates investors, when to abandon a business idea, where to avoid opening a business bank account, and why too much formal education can hinder your entrepreneurial growth.
Smart and insightful, The Entrepreneur Mind: 100 Essential Beliefs, Characteristics, and Habits of Elite Entrepreneurs is the ultimate primer on how to think like an entrepreneur.
10 Days to Faster Reading
Break the Bad Habits That Slow You Down
Develop Your Powers of Concentration
Cut Your Reading Time in Half
Use Proven, Specially Designed Reading Techniques
Boost the Power of Your Peripheral Vision
Learn How to Scan and Skim a Written Report …And All in 10 Days!
The Ten-Day MBA 4th Ed.: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Skills Taught In America’s Top Business Schools
How to Read a Financial Report: Wringing Vital Signs Out of the Numbers
Financial reports are used to provide a range of vital information, including an organization’s cash flow, financial condition, and profit performance (aka The Big Three Financial Statements). Financial statements are often complex and extremely difficult to understand for anyone other than accounting and finance professionals. How to Read a Financial Report enablesinvestors, lenders, business leaders, analysts, and managers to read, analyze, and interpret financial accounting reports. Designed specifically for non-specialists, this reader-friendly resource covers the fundamentals of financial reporting in jargon-free English.
Topics such as sales revenue & recognition, costs of goods sold, sources & uses of capital/cash, non-cash expenses (e.g., depreciation expense), income tax obligations, understanding profits & financial stability, and financial statement ratios & analysis are covered throughout the book.
Now in its ninth edition, this bestselling guide has been thoroughly revised to reflect changes in accounting and financial reporting rules, current practices, and recent trends. New and expanded content explains managing cash flow, illustrates the deceitful misrepresentation of profits in some financial reports (aka Financial Engineering), and more. Further, end-of-chapter activities help readers learn the intricacies of the balance sheet and cash flow statement, while updated sections address shifts in regulatory standards. Written by two highly experienced experts in financial accounting, this resource:
Enables readers to cut through the noise and focus on what financial reports and financial statements are really saying about a company
Clarifies commonly misunderstood aspects of financial reporting and how companies can “financially engineer” operating results
Offers comprehensive, step-by-step guidance on analyzing financial reports
Provides numerous examples and explanations of various types of financial reports and analysis tools
Customer Experience Strategy – Design & Implementation: Outgrow your competitors by making your business to business customers happier (Customer Strategy)
We will show you how
You probably have lots ideas that will make things better for customers, but you don’t have the time, money or people to implement everything. How should you go about choosing the best ideas? How can you secure the resources you need to be successful? How can you bring more customer focus to your entire company? I want to help you to make all of that happen.
Three keys to success
I learned about customer experience in the clothing industry, and went on to lead it in three of the largest high-tech companies. Three things remained constant throughout that time. First, you are probably wrong if you think you know what customers want, but have not actually asked them. Second, it can be really hard to get the people and other resources you need to improve things for customers. Third, unless you take a systematic approach to creating and implementing a customer experience improvement strategy, you cannot possibly be successful.
Use my experience to accelerate yours
Whether you are starting a new position in customer experience or have many successful years behind you, I believe I can provide new insights that will help you to get things done quickly. I have made many mistakes over many years. I learned from them, and have now documented what I learned. I have faced all sorts of problems. I have solved almost all of them, perhaps not perfectly. Hopefully you can learn what I learned, and do even better.
Strategy is all about resource allocation
I have learned one fundamental thing about designing business strategy and customer experience strategy. It is all about allocation of resources: people and money. Any investment you make in people and money must return more than it costs. If you don’t already have the people and money, you have to ask for them. The people you ask will want you to justify your proposal, based on facts. You will also have to appeal to their emotions. I will show you how to do that.
Engage both hearts and minds
I have also learned one thing about persuading leaders and employees to adopt, fund, and implement a customer experience strategy. You can only be successful by engaging people’s emotions, rather than simply presenting the facts. My work was far more successful once I understood exactly how to engage both hearts and minds, based on the principles of behavioural economics.
Artwork that makes it memorable
I have the good fortune to have a brother who combines two rare talents. He has an Oxford doctorate in cognitive psychology, and he is a successful artist. He also has a weird sense of humor. He has used this special combination to make many points in the book far more memorable. You won’t find this in any other strategy books.
Updated in March 2019
I updated my research on the relationship between customer and employee satisfaction (now covers 398 large businesses selling to US consumers) in March 2019, and updated the corresponding section of the book. This and a series of other minor improvements brought new versions of the Kindle and print editions of the book in early March 2019.
Now what?
So, how do you go about deciding what to do next? That is what this book is all about. It provides a straightforward methodology for studying what your customers and partners want, and other major factors that drive decisions. There is a special focus on communication. I have used it successfully at large and small scale. I have used it at HP to drive country strategies, business unit strategies and M&A strategies. I have used it for a small software company with only four employees. It scales well. I believe it is the best possible way of developing a customer experience strategy in a short time. It does work. You do need it. You are just a click or two away. You know what to do now.
UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship
Make no mistake, this life exists. I know, because it has been mine for nearly 20 years. And in a few short years, it can be yours as well. Better, you won’t need five tedious decades of thankless jobs, buzz killing frugality, and patient investing with our trusted friends on Wall Street.
Unfortunately, you have been scripted to believe that such a life is out of your reach, or only possible for a certain type of person. Someone with a certain college degree, a certain amount of VC funding, or a certain contact list of connected friends from Stanford. I am here to tell you, that none of it is true.
While I have been entrepreneur most of my life, I am no one special. You won’t read about me over at Tech Crunch or in some Silicon Valley newsletter. While I have been an Internet entrepreneur since the old “you’ve got mail” AOL days, I have never been funded by venture capitalists, I have never had a payroll with more than five people on it, and I have never studied computer science at school.
Despite this, I am able to create profitable businesses that create the type of unscripted life described above.
Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions
On an iceberg near the coast of Antarctica, group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home—and almost no one listens to him.
The characters in the story—Fred, Alice, Louis, Buddy, the Professor, and NoNo—are like people you probably recognize in your own organization, including yourself. Their tale is one of resistance to change and heroic action, seemingly intractable obstacles and clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles. The penguins offer an inspiring model as we all struggle to adapt to new circumstances.
Our Iceberg Is Melting is based on John Kotter’s pioneering research into the eight steps that can produce needed change in any sort of group. After finishing the story, you’ll have a powerful framework for influencing your own team, no matter how big or small.
This tenth anniversary edition preserves the text of the timeless story, together with new illustrations, a revised afterword, and a Q&A with the authors about the responses they’ve gotten over the past decade. Prepare to be both enlightened and delighted, whether you’re already a fan of this classic fable or are discovering it for the first time.
Build a Business, Not a Job: Grow Your Business & Get Your Life Back
According to the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index, the average small business owner works 52 hours a week, with more than 20 percent working seven days a week. The U.S. Census Bureau says 88.6 percent of all U.S.-based companies still require the owner to be there as the primary person responsible for core functions like producing their product or service, managing the day-to-day operations, or managing the financial aspects of the business.
If you’re a business owner who wants to accelerate your company’s growth, but do it in a way that enables you to get your life back, this book is for you
Join Wall Street Journal best-selling author David Finkel and former chairperson of the National Association of Manufacturers Stephanie Harkness as they give you a concrete, step-by-step map to empower you to build an owner-independent company and get your life back.
You’ll Learn:
•The only sustainable way to escape the Self-Employment Trap™.
•The 4 most costly excuses that hold business owners back.
•The 8 essential building blocks upon which to scale your company.
•25 formats to package your business systems.
•A powerful 1-page quarterly action plan format.
•6 time mastery strategies to free up a full day each week to build your business.
•How a skilled surgeon tamed his medical practice not by working more, but rather by working less and empowering his systems, team, and culture to do more.
•How a contractor escaped the 70-hour-a-week trap, doubled his sales, and cut his work hours in half (and how you can too.)
•How a second-generation manufacturer took over his family business and brought it from the brink of failure to record profits.
•How a niche software company owner grew her company’s market value tenfold, while at the same time enjoying a greater sense of time freedom than she ever thought possible.
•And much more.
These two world-class entrepreneurs will show you how to sustainably grow your company, increase your profitability, and enjoy more time freedom. You will learn how to truly build a business, not a job.
David Finkel is CEO of Maui Mastermind®, one of the world’s premier business coaching companies, which has worked with more than 100,000 business owners, helping them grow their companies and get their lives back. Over the past 25 years, David and the other Maui advisors have personally scaled companies with an aggregate market value of $63 billion. He is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of 11 books, including SCALE. He lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Stephanie Harkness is a serial entrepreneur with more than 35 years’ experience and eight successful businesses under her direct leadership. The former chairperson of the National Association of Manufacturers, past recipient of its prestigious Freedom Award, and #5 on the Business Journal’s Top 50 Women Business Owners in California.
The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business
An MBA at a top school is an enormous investment in time, effort and cold, hard cash. And if you don’t want to work for a consulting firm or an investment bank, the chances are it simply isn’t worth it.
Josh Kaufman is the rogue professor of modern business education. Feted by everyone from the business media to Seth Godin and David Allen, he’s torn up the rulebook and given thousands of people worldwide the tools to teach themselves everything they need to know.
The Personal MBA teaches simple mental models for every subject that’s key to commercial success. From the basics of products, sales & marketing and finance to the nuances of human psychology, teamwork and creating systems, this book distils everything you need to know to take on the MBA graduates and win.
‘File this book under: NO EXCUSES’ Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Linchpin
‘Finally, here’s a 10.99 MBA. Well on its way to becoming a business classic. You’re pretty much guaranteed to get your money’s worth – if not much, much more’ Jason Hesse, Real Business
‘Josh Kaufman has synthesized the most important topics in business into a book that truly lives up to its title. It’s rare to find complicated concepts explained with such clarity. Highly recommended’ Ben Casnocha, author of My Start-Up Life
Josh Kaufman is an acclaimed blogger and consultant who helps people improve their business skills. He previously worked at Proctor & Gamble. Since 2005 Josh has been helping people learn about business without remortgaging their lives through his website.
ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever
That means anyone can start a business. And you can do it without working miserable 80-hour weeks or depleting your life savings. You can start it on the side while your day job provides all the cash flow you need. Forget about business plans, meetings, office space – you don’t need them.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages.
It’s time to rework work.
Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You
Most business owners started their company because they wanted more freedom—to work on their own schedules, make the kind of money they deserve, and eventually retire on the fruits of their labor.
Unfortunately, according to John Warrillow, most owners find that stepping out of the picture is extremely difficult because their business relies too heavily on their personal involvement. Without them, their company—no matter how big or profitable—is essentially worthless.
But the good news is that entrepreneurs can take specific steps—no matter what stage a business is in—to create a valuable, sellable company. Warrillow shows exactly what it takes to create a solid business that can thrive long into the future.
The Psychology of Selling: Increase Your Sales Faster and Easier Than You Ever Thought Possible
The purpose of this book is to give you a series of ideas, methods, strategies, and techniques that you can use immediately to make more sales, faster and easier than ever before.
It’s a promise of prosperity that sales guru Brian Tracy has seen fulfilled again and again. More sales people have become millionaires as a result of listening to and applying his ideas than from any other sales training process ever developed.
Choose Yourself!
This book will teach you to do just that. With dozens of case studies, interviews and examples–including the author, investor and entrepreneur James Altucher’s own heartbreaking and inspiring story–Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.
New tools and economic forces have emerged to make it possible for individuals to create art, make millions of dollars and change the world without “help.” More and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth).
Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts
Classic. Evergreen. Cult. Backlist. We can all identify with products that seem to last forever and just keep selling. But how can we create things that can and should last, especially in an environment where short-term gain and flash-in-the-pan success are so often the benchmark, where Hollywood movies are written off after a weekend or Silicon Valley start-ups are considered to have failed if they don’t go viral?
Enter Ryan Holiday and his concept of the Perennial Seller, products that exist in every creative industry, timeless, dependable resources and unsung money-makers, increasing in value over time and outlasting and outstretching the competition.
Holiday shows us that creating a classic doesn’t have to be a fluke or just a matter of luck. In Perennial Seller he takes us back to the first principles of the models and thinking that underpin the creation of something built to last. Featuring interviews with some of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs and creatives and grounded in a deep study of the classics from every genre, the book shares a mindset and approach we can all adopt to make and market a classic work. Whether you have a book or a business, a song or the next great screenplay, Holiday reveals the recipe for perennial success.
The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review)
That’s because “ideating” is energizing and glamorous. By contrast, execution seems like humdrum, behind-the-scenes dirty work. But without execution, Big Ideas go nowhere.
In The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble reveal how to execute an innovation initiative—whether a simple project or a grand, gutsy gamble.. Drawing on examples from innovators as diverse as Allstate, BMW, Timberland, and Nucor, the authors explain how to:
• Build the Right Team: Determine who’ll be on the team, where they’ll come from, how they’ll be organized, how much time they’ll devote to the project, and how they’ll navigate the delicate and conflict-rich partnership between innovation and ongoing operations.
• Manage a Disciplined Experiment: Decide how team members can quickly test their assumptions , translate results into new knowledge, and measure progress. Give innovation leaders a tough but fair performance evaluation.
Practical and provocative, this new book takes you step-by-step through the innovation execution process—so your Big Ideas deliver their full promise.
Talking to Humans: Success starts with understanding your customers
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter’s ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing.
Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter’s rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding
Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries. Combining The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding, this book proclaims that the only way to stand out in today’s marketplace is to build your product or service into a brand—and provides the step-by-step instructions you need to do so.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding also tackles one of the most challenging marketing problems today: branding on the Web. The Rieses divulge the controversial and counterintuitive strategies and secrets that both small and large companies have used to establish internet brands. The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the essential primer on building a category-dominating, world-class brand.
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
True North: Discover Your Authentic Leadership
Discover Your True North is the best-selling leadership classic that enables you to become an authentic leader by discovering your True North. Originally based on first-person interviews with 125 leaders, this book instantly became a must-read business classic when it was introduced in 2007. Now expanded and updated to introduce 48 new leaders and new learning about authentic global leaders, this revisited classic includes more diverse, global, and contemporary leaders of all ages. New case studies include Warren Buffett, Indra Nooyi, Arianna Huffington, Jack Ma, Paul Polman, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Zuckerberg, and many others. Alongside these studies, former Medtronic CEO Bill George continues to share his personal stories and his wisdom by describing how you can become the leader you want to be, with helpful exercises included throughout the book.
Being a leader is about much more than title and management skills―it’s fundamentally a question of who we are as human beings. Discover Your True North offers a concrete and comprehensive program for becoming an authentic leader, and shows how to chart your path to leadership success.
Once you discover the purpose of your leadership, you’ll find the true leader inside you. This book shows you how to use your natural leadership abilities to inspire and empower others to excellence in today’s complex global world. Discover Your True North enables you to become the leader you were born to be, and stay on track of your True North.
The Analects of Confucius
The Analects of Confucius” consists of 20 books (chapters), translated into English by William Jennings, with contextual footnotes.
The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
A Wall Street Journal and Businessweek bestseller. Named by Fast Company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations.
The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, by renowned author Clayton M. Christensen.
His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller—one of the most influential business books of all time—innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership.
Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
Sharp, cogent, and provocative—and consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without.
Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty
In today’s uncertain world, managers can’t forecast their business needs accurately, never mind their talent needs. An open labor market means inevitable leaks in your talent pipeline. And intensifying competition demands a maniacal focus on costs. Traditional investments in talent management wind up being hugely expensive, especially when employees you’ve carefully cultivated leave your firm for a rival.
In Talent on Demand, Peter Cappelli examines the talent management problem through a radical new lens. Drawing from state-of-the-art supply chain management and numerous company examples, he presents four new principles for ensuring that your organization has the skills it needs–when it needs them. In this book, you’ll discover how to:
· Balance developing talent in-house with buying it on the open market
· Improve the accuracy of your talent-need forecasts
· Maximize returns on your talent investments
· Replicate external job market dynamics by creating an in-house market that links available talent to jobs
Practical and provocative, Talent on Demand gives you the ideas and tools you’ll need to match the supply of talent to your demand for it–today and tomorrow.
AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness
Gary Vaynerchuk—the inspiring and unconventional entrepreneur who introduced us to the concept of crush it—knows how to get things done, have fun, and be massively successful. A marketing and business genius, Gary had the foresight to go beyond traditional methods and use social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to reach an untapped audience that continues to grow.
#AskGaryVee showcases the most useful and interesting questions Gary has addressed on his popular show. Distilling and expanding on the podcast’s most urgent and evergreen themes, Gary presents practical, timely, and timeless advice on marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and everything else you’ve been afraid to ask but are dying to know. Gary gives you the insights and information you need on everything from effectively using Twitter to launching a small business, hiring superstars to creating a personal brand, launching products effectively to staying healthy—and even buying wine.
Whether you’re planning to start your own company, working in digital media, or have landed your first job in a traditional company, #AskGaryVee is your essential guide to making things happen in a big way.
Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World
From the author:
In 2017, several of my close friends died in rapid succession. It was a very hard year, as it was for many people.
It was also a stark reminder that time is our scarcest, non-renewable resource.
With a renewed sense of urgency, I began asking myself many questions:
Were my goals my own, or simply what I thought I should want?
How much of life had I missed from underplanning or overplanning?
How could I be kinder to myself?
How could I better say “no” to the trivial many to better say “yes” to the critical few?
How could I best reassess my priorities and my purpose in this world?
To find answers, I reached out to the most impressive world-class performers in the world, ranging from wunderkinds in their 20s to icons in their 70s and 80s. No stone was left unturned.
This book contains their answers—practical and tactical advice from mentors who have found solutions. Whether you want to 10x your results, get unstuck, or reinvent yourself, someone else has traveled a similar path and taken notes.
This book, Tribe of Mentors, includes many of the people I grew up viewing as idols or demi-gods. Less than 10% have been on my podcast (The Tim Ferriss Show, more than 200 million downloads), making this a brand-new playbook of playbooks.
No matter your challenge or opportunity, something in these pages can help.
Among other things, you will learn:
• More than 50 morning routines—both for the early riser and those who struggle to get out of bed.
• How TED curator Chris Anderson realized that the best way to get things done is to let go.
• The best purchases of $100 or less (you’ll never have to think about the right gift again).
• How to overcome failure and bounce back towards success.
• Why Humans of New York creator Brandon Stanton believes that the best art will always be the riskiest.
• How to meditate and be more mindful (and not just for those that find it easy).
• Why tennis champion Maria Sharapova believe that “losing makes you think in ways victories can’t.”
• How to truly achieve work-life balance (and why most people tell you it isn’t realistic).
• How billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz transformed the way he engages with difficult situations to reduce suffering.
• Ways to thrive (and survive) the overwhelming amount of information you process every day.
• How to achieve clarity on your purpose and assess your priorities.
• And much more.
This reference book, which I wrote for myself, has already changed my life. I certainly hope the same for you.
I wish you luck as you forge your own path.
All the best,
Tim Ferriss
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it’s done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less
“The pick of 2014’s management books.” –Andrew Hill, Financial Times
“One of the top business books of the year.” –Harvey Schacter, The Globe and Mail
Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization’s success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows.
Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries– including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare– Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people– rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.
Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.