The Definitive Guide - Best Books for Business Majors

We’ve scoured the web to find the most frequently recommended books for business majors and put them here, for your convenience.

Bookmark this page because it is continuously updated!

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Author: Stephen R. Covey

“In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity–principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.” – Amazon Book Description

Think and Grow Rich: The Original, an Official Publication of The Napoleon Hill Foundation
Author: Napoleon Hill

“Think and Grow Rich is the most important financial book ever written. Napoleon Hill researched more than forty millionaires to find out what made them the men that they were. In this book he imparts that knowledge to you. Once you’ve read this book you will understand what gives certain people an edge over everyone else. By following the advice laid out clearly in this book you’ll be the one with an edge. It’s time to stop wondering what it’s like to be rich and start knowing. This book has changed countless lives and it can change yours! Unlike many of the other editions on the market today, this edition is complete and unabridged!” – Amazon Book Description

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Author: Timothy Ferriss

“Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.” – Amazon Book Description

Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition
Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

“The first edition of Crucial Conversations exploded onto the scene and revolutionized the way millions of people communicate when stakes are high. This new edition gives you the tools to: Prepare for high-stakes situations Transform anger and hurt feelings into powerful dialogue Make it safe to talk about almost anything Be persuasive, not abrasive.” – Amazon Book Description

How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age
Author: Dale Carnegie

“Dale Carnegie’s time-tested advice has carried millions upon millions of readers for more than seventy-five years up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. Now the first and best book of its kind has been rebooted to tame the complexities of modern times and will teach you how to communicate with diplomacy and tact, capitalize on a solid network, make people like you, project your message widely and clearly, be a more effective leader, increase your ability to get things done, and optimize the power of digital tools. “– Amazon Book Description

The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy
Author: Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

“The bestselling The Millionaire Next Door identifies seven common traits that show up again and again among those who have accumulated wealth. Most of the truly wealthy in this country don’t live in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue-they live next door. This new edition, the first since 1998, includes a new foreword for the twenty-first century by Dr. Thomas J. Stanley.” – Amazon Book Description

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
Author: Daniel H. Pink

“Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.” – Amazon Book Description

We: How to Increase Performance and Profits through Full Engagement

Author: Rudy Karsan and Kevin Kruse “What if every single employee-every single one-worked in their dream job, utilized their best talents, worked with an inspirational leader and was fully engaged in their role? For companies, this scenario leads to breakthroughs in productivity, customer service, profitability, and shareholder value. For individuals, it means better health, stronger relationships with family and friends, and greater happiness. We sketches the landscape of today’s changing job environment and gives managers and individual employees alike a road map to full engagement.

Anchored with specific metrics, based on studies of 10 million people, includes engagement, retention, customer loyalty, and profitability
Scientific research and academic insights are translated into actionable steps
Authors have extensive experience in cutting-edge human resources solutions

Achieve breakthrough results for yourself and your organization with the power of full engagement fromWe.” – Amazon Book Description

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?

Author: Seth Godin “In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you-your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose. There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art. Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations. They may not be famous but they’re indispensable. And in today’s world, they get the best jobs and the most freedom. As Godin writes, “Every day I meet people who have so much to give but have been bullied enough or frightened enough to hold it back. It’s time to stop complying with the system and draw your own map. You have brilliance in you, your contribution is essential, and the art you create is precious. Only you can do it, and you must.” – Amazon Book Description

The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It

Author: Michael E. Gerber “In this first new and totally revised edition of the 150,000-copy underground bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. He walks you through the steps in the life of a business from entrepreneurial infancy, through adolescent growing pains, to the mature entrepreneurial perspective, the guiding light of all businesses that succeed. He then shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business whether or not it is a franchise. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way. ” – Amazon Book Description

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future

Author: Daniel H. Pink “The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic “right-brain” thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t. Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment–and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mindtakes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that’s already here.” – Amazon Book Description

The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

Author: Josh Kaufman “Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether. Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges. The Personal MBA explains concepts such as:

The Iron Law of the Market: Why every business is limited by the size and quality of the market it attempts to serve-and how to find large, hungry markets.
The 12 Forms of Value: Products and services are only two of the twelve ways you can create value for your customers.
The Pricing Uncertainty Principle: All prices are malleable. Raising your prices is the best way to dramatically increase profitability – if you know how to support the price you’re asking.
4 Methods to Increase Revenue: There are only four ways a business can bring in more money. Do you know what they are?

True leaders aren’t made by business schools – they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experience they need to succeed. Read this book and you will learn the principles it takes most business professionals a lifetime of trial and error to master.” – Amazon Book Description

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Author: Malcolm Gladwell “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas. “– Amazon Book Description

Rework

Author: Jason Fried and David Hansson “Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses. What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you. 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 they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.” – Amazon Book Description

Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service

Author: Ari Weinzweig “Entrepreneurial phenomenon Ari Weinzweig, co-founder of the much-loved Zingerman’s Deli, shares the secrets to providing world-class customer service. Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is a beloved deli with some of the most loyal clientele around. It has been praised for its products and service in media outlets far and wide, including the New York Times, Men’s Journal, Inc. Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, and Fast Company. And what started out as a small deli has grown to a flourishing restaurant, catering service, bakery, mail-order operation, creamery, and training business. Booming business and loyal customers are proof enough that the Zingerman’s team knows a thing or two about customer service. Now in Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service, co-founder Ari Weinzweig shares the unique Zingerman method of treating customers, giving the reader step-by-step instructions on what to teach staff, how to train them, how to implement the training, how to measure their success, and finally, how to reward performance. Some of Zingerman’s time-tested principles: –Customers who get a great product but poor service won’t be as loyal as those who are disappointed with a product but get great service. –You’ll get more complaints if people believe you care enough to listen to them. And that’s a good thing. –Employees who are rewarded, respected, and well cared for treat customers the same way.” – Amazon Book Description

Don’t Send a Resume: And Other Contrarian Rules to Help Land a Great Job

Author: Jeffery Fox “Anyone who thinks getting a good job is easy in this booming economy should think again. The real plum jobs are out there, but theyre harder to get than ever. Now, bestselling author and innovative thinker Jeffrey J. Fox, steps up to the plate once again with this no-nonsense collection of surprising and daring rules for landing the right job. Fox offers a Job Getting Blueprint, a Job Seekers Glossary, several first interview questions, as well as the basic form and variations for a boomerang letter. His rules not only help todays job seekers devise a winning strategy, but also show them how to prepare for and make the best impression in an interview.” – Amazon Book Description

Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive

Author: Noah Goldstein, Steven Martin, Robert Cialdini “What one word can you start using today to increase your persuasiveness by more than fifty percent? Which item of stationery can dramatically increase people’s responses to your requests? How can you win over your rivals by inconveniencing them? Why does knowing that so many dentists are named Dennis improve your persuasive prowess? Every day we face the challenge of persuading others to do what we want. But what makes people say yes to our requests? Persuasion is not only an art, it is also a science, and researchers who study it have uncovered a series of hidden rules for moving people in your direction. Based on more than sixty years of research into the psychology of persuasion, Yes! reveals fifty simple but remarkably effective strategies that will make you much more persuasive at work and in your personal life, too. Co-written by the world’s most quoted expert on influence, Professor Robert Cialdini, Yes! presents dozens of surprising discoveries from the science of persuasion in short, enjoyable, and insightful chapters that you can apply immediately to become a more effective persuader. Why did a sign pointing out the problem of vandalism in the Petrified Forest National Park actually increase the theft of pieces of petrified wood? Why did sales of jam multiply tenfold when consumers were offered manyfewer flavors? Why did people prefer a Mercedes immediately after giving reasons why they prefer a BMW? What simple message on cards left in hotel rooms greatly increased the number of people who behaved in environmentally friendly ways? Often counterintuitive, the findings presented in Yes! will steer you away from common pitfalls while empowering you with little known but proven wisdom. Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.” – Amazon Book Description

The Way to Wealth
Author: Benjamin Franklin “The first American book on personal finance, The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin is still the best and wisest money book ever written. Originally published in 1758 as the preface to Poor Richard’s Almanack, this little gem has been through innumerable printings and sold millions of copies to those in search of smart but entertaining advice about hard work, earning and saving money and debt. As the 21st Century charges along and the current economic climate continues to send out mixed messages, Franklin’s simple but wise commentary on the value of industry and frugality resonates as much for us today as it did for listeners nearly 350 years ago. Here is a sample: • “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.” • “If you would be wealthy, think of saving, as well as of getting.” • “If you would have your business done, go; if not, send.” • “Think what you do when you run into debt; you give to another power over your liberty.” • “Creditors have better memories than debtors.” Although older than the United States itself, The Way to Wealth is still very popular. It is handed out by major companies and financial institutions to friends, clients, and customers and is the January, 2004 selection of The Washington Post’s the Color of Money Book Club. As Michelle Singletary, director of the Club wrote in a column about The book, “At just 30 pages, this pocket–size book takes less than an hour to read but will give you a lifetime of financial wisdom—that is if you’re wise enough to follow the advice.” – Amazon Book Description

Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company
Author: Michael S. Malone “The definitive history of Hewlett-Packard and its legendary founders, based on unprecedented access to private archives This is the most authoritative version ever of the most famous start-up story in business history. In 1938, working out of a small garage in Palo Alto, California, two young Stanford graduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built their first product, an audio oscillator. It was the start not only of a legendary company but of an entire way of life in Silicon Valley—and, ultimately, our modern digital age. Others have written about the rise of Hewlett-Packard, including Packard himself in a bestselling memoir. But acclaimed journalist Michael S. Malone is the first to get the full story, based on unlimited and exclusive access to corporate and private archives, along with hundreds of employee interviews. Malone draws on his new material to show how some of the most influential products of our time were invented, and how a culture of innovation led HP to unparalleled success for decades. He also shows what was really behind the groundbreaking management philosophy—”the HP Way”—that put people ahead of products or profits. There have been attempts in recent years to discredit the HP Way as soft and outdated. But Malone argues that the HP Way was a hard-nosed business philosophy that combined simple objectives, trust in employees to make the right choices, and ruthless self-appraisal. It created an innovative and ferociously competitive company—arguably the world’s greatest company. This business adventure story will be perfect for entrepreneurs, young managers, and students, not to mention the tens of thousands of current and former HP employees.” – Amazon Book Description

Blog Schmog: The Truth About What Blogs Can (and Can’t) Do for Your Business
Author: Robert W. Bly “Blog Schmog takes a look at the blogging phenomenon and its impact on politics, writing, marketing, public relations, publishing, journalism, and all other forms of communication. Written from a skeptic’s point of view, Robert Bly holds blogging up to close scrutiny, giving practical, easy-to-use tips that can help you master blogging and its application. This book cuts through the hype surrounding blogging, enabling you to get a true and accurate picture of blogging’s potential as well as its limitations. Inside you’ll discover how the blogosphere operates along with real-world advice from blogging experts on how to write an effective, reader-oriented blog.” – Amazon Book Description

Coolhunting: Chasing Down the Next Big Thing
Author: Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper ‘Coolhunting‘ and ‘swarm creativity’ are powerful concepts about identifying emerging trends and discovering the key trendsetters. They are about uncovering hidden innovation and innovators and they include the how and why new ideas and new knowledge are converted into products and services that correspond to the collective human mindset. Coolhunting involves making observations and predictions as part of the search for cutting-edge trends. It is a way of capturing what the ‘collective mind’ is thinking, and using what is captured to one’s advantage. For an example of this ‘collective mind’ concept, on the television show “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, contestants unsure of the answer to a question had the option of asking the audience or phoning a so-called ‘expert’. Far more often than did the experts, the collective intelligence of the audience produced the correct answer. This is a simple example of swarm creativity. Humans swarm around like-minded people, with whom they not only feel comfortable but also can collaborate to produce winning ideas. The volume includes sidebars that expand concepts and present engaging anecdotes, as well as illustrations (charts, graphs, tables, and pictures) to help guide the reader through the explanations of concepts or simply to make for a more enjoyable read. The book includes many examples from history and from more recent business cases. Some of the examples are: how the CEO of Continental Airlines, participating in an online forum of frequent flyers, brought 200 of these people together in Houston at a dinner to discuss how the company could improve its services; how 10 research labs, collaborating globally to discover the causes of the SARS disease, were able to share newly acquired knowledge and achieve tremendous results very quickly; and, how Linux, an organization with no one officially in charge, became the only serious contender to the strictly hierarchical organization that developed Microsoft Windows. – Amazon Book Description

Crazy Bosses: Fully Revised and Updated
Author: Stanley Bing “Since the latter part of the century just past, Stanley Bing has been exploring the relationship between authority and madness. In one bestselling book after another, reporting from his hot-seat as an insider in a world-renowned multinational corporation, he has tried to understand the inner workings of those who lead us and to inquire why they seem to be powered, much of the time, by demons that make them obnoxious and dangerous, even to themselves. In What Would Machiavelli Do?, Bing looked at the issue of why mean people do better than nice people, and found that in their particular form of insanity lay incredible power. In Throwing the Elephant: Zen and the Art of Managing Up, he offered a spiritual path toward managing the unruly executive beast. And in Sun Tzu Was a Sissy, he taught us how to become one of them, and wage war on the playing field that ends in a dream home in Cabo. Now he returns to his roots to offer the last word on the entity that shapes our lives and stomps through—and on—our dreams: The Crazy Boss. Students of Bing—and there are many, secreted inside tortured organizations, yearning for blunt instruments with which to fight—will note that he has walked this ground before, looking for answers. In 1992, he published the first edition of Crazy Bosses, which was fine, as far as it went. Now, some 15 years and several dozen insane bosses later, he has updated and rethought much of the work. Back in the last century, Bing was a small, trembling creature, looking up at those who made his life miserable and analyzing the mental illness that gave them their power. Today, while still trembling much of the time, he is in fact one of those people his prior work has warned us against. His own hard-won wisdom and now institutionalized dementia make this new edition completely fresh and indispensable to anyone who works for somebody else or lives with somebody else, or would like to. In short, Bing is back on his home turf in this funny, true, and essential book, peering with his keen and frosty eye at the crazy boss in all his guises: the Bully, the Paranoid, the Narcissist, the Wimp, and the self-destructive Disaster Hunter. If you loved the original, classic Crazy Bosses, you’ll be thrilled to plunge back into the new, refurbished pool. If you are new to the book, strap yourself in: it’s going to be a crazy ride.” – Amazon Book Description

New Ideas from Dead CEOs: Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office
Author: Todd G. Buchholz “New Ideas from Dead CEOs uncovers the secrets of success of great CEOs by giving readers an intimate look at their professional and personal lives. Why did Ray Kroc’s plan for McDonald’s thrive when many burger joints failed? And how, decades later, did Krispy Kreme fail to heed Kroc’s hard-won lessons? How did Walt Disney’s most dismal day as a young cartoonist radically change his career? When Estée Lauder was a child in Queens, New York, the average American spent $8 a year on toiletries. Why did she spot an opportunity in selling high-priced cosmetics, and why did she pound on Saks’s doors? How did Thomas Watson Jr. decide to roll the dice and put all of IBM’s chips on computing, when his father thought it could be a losing idea? We learn about these CEOs’ greatest challenges and failures, and how they successfully rode the waves of demographic and technological change. New Ideas from Dead CEOs not only gives us fascinating insights into these CEOs’ lives, but also shows how we can apply their ideas to the present-day triumphs and struggles of Sony, Dell, Costco, Carnival Cruises, Time Warner, and numerous other companies trying to figure out how to stay on top or climb back up. The featured CEOs in this book were not candidates for sainthood. Many of them knew “god” only as a prefix to “dammit.” But they were devoted to their businesses, not just to their egos and their personal bank accounts and yachts. Extraordinarily fresh and deeply thoughtful, Todd G. Buchholz’s New Ideas from Dead CEOs is a truly enjoyable and fun—yet serious and realistic—look at what we still have to learn and absorb from these decomposing CEOs.” – Amazon Book Description

No Yelling: The 9 Secrets of Marine Corps Leadership You Must Know to Win in Business
Author: Wally Adamchik “Drawing upon real-life experiences from those on active duty as well as those now in the civilian sector, this book illustrates how to emulate the leadership principles that are the hallmark of the U.S. Marine Corps. Based on findings gleaned from more than 100 interviews, this guide presents the key factors that are at the heart of the marine’s approach along with side-by-side comparisons of their application in military and civilian settings. A series of questions is provided at the end of each chapter to facilitate group discussion on topics ranging from integrity and setting the example to the commander’s intent and rehearsals and critiques prompting a personal analysis that leads the individual to review the process and develop their own methods for implementation. Questions from these sections also serve as the basis for a year-long curriculum for leadership development.” – Amazon Book Description

Rules for Renegades: How to Make More Money, Rock Your Career, and Revel in Your Individuality
Author: Christine Comaford-Lynch WANT A RICHER LIFE? BREAK ALL THE RULES “Renegade entrepreneur-and runaway success story-Christine Comaford-Lynch has lived the kind of life most of us can only dream about. From model to monk to multimillionaire, she does what she wants-and gets things done. Now, in ten outrageous life lessons, she’ll show you how to make your dreams come true. Your way. Your rules. Rules for Renegades distills what Christine has learned as she succeeded (and failed) in business, built strong relationships (and some disasters), and evolved spiritually and professionally. If you want to become financially independent, she’ll show you how to do it. If you want to build your confidence and self-esteem, she’ll give you a crash course. If you want a meaningful life full of rich connections, she’ll share her secrets. Ultimately, she lets you in on the greatest secret of all-how to build a fulfilling life while rocking your career. She has also filled her book with lots of cool free stuff: links to a sample business plan outline, tutorials on sales and marketing techniques, and tools to help you enhance your own power. You’ll learn the surprising truth behind her most offbeat rules. . .

Everything’s an Illusion, So Pick One That’s Empowering.
Rock Rejection and Finesse Failure.
Learn to Love Networking.
Work Your Money Mojo.

Rules for Renegades is not just the story of a remarkable entrepreneur. It’s an amazing approach to life that breaks the rules-and makes life work for you.” – Amazon Book Description

Typo: The Last American Typesetter or How I Made and Lost 4 Million Dollars
Author: David Silverman “Two months before David Silverman’s 32nd birthday, he visited the Charles Schwab branch in the basement of the World Trade Center to wire his father’s life savings towards the purchase of the Clarinda Typesetting company in Clarinda, Iowa. Typo tells the true story of the Clarinda company’s last rise and fall — and with it one entrepreneur’s story of what it means to take on, run, and ultimately lose an entire life’s work. This book is an American dream run aground, told with humor despite moments of tragedy. The story reveals the impact of losing part of an entire industry and answers questions about how that impacts American business. The reader sees in Clarinda’s fate the potential peril faced by every company, and the lessons learned are applicable to anyone who wants to run his or her own business, succeed in a large corporation, and not be stranded by the reality of shifting markets, outsourcing, and, ultimately, capitalism itself.” – Amazon Book Description

Your Management Sucks: Why You Have to Declare War on Yourself . . . and Your Business
Author: Mark Stevens “Like a mirror, Your Management Sucks reveals important truths that you may deal with . . . or choose to ignore or put on the back burner. Everyone manages someone or something . . . your own life and career, an administrative assistant, hundreds or thousands of people. How well or poorly you manage has a profound impact on your personal success. Mark Stevens makes the compelling point that at any given time everyone’s management sucks. It can, however, be improved and rethought so you can move away from patterns and habits that you can easily fall victim to. Start by declaring constructive war on yourself. Look in the mirror and identify those invisible traps and barriers. Then leave the land of business-as-usual with the seven-point plan Stevens has used to build both his own extraordinary career and his marketing and strategy consulting firm. You’ll soon find that you’re in the fast lane, easily outpacing your passive peers who rarely, if ever, challenge the how and why of what they do. Mark Stevens—a street-smart kid from Queens, New York, who has gone on to phenomenal success—not only gives advice to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial start-ups, he takes his own. Concerned that his business, MSCO, would continue its steady but limited growth, he announced one morning during breakfast with his wife, “Honey, I’m going to fire everyone.” That intention, while actually carried out over a lengthy period of time, was based on one simple insight—that his team of good people wouldn’t be able to put MSCO over the top to make it the best. From that episode came the ideas that form the core of Your Management Sucks: • Developing your own personal killer app—the “differentiator” that will make you more than the sum of your parts • Unleashing your virtual Manhattan Project: the plan that will change your life, your business, and the world • Challenging the oxymoron of conventional wisdom • Applying C+A+M: The universal equation for perpetual growth In the same straight-talking, no-BS style of his last book, Your Marketing Sucks, Stevens offers brass-tacks examples of management approaches that do—and don’t—work and inspires people to ask themselves the tough questions they need to answer in order to become true leaders. Your Seven-Point Declaration of War on Management That Sucks 1. Unleash the Power of a Personal Philosophy: Don’t just rock the boat of your business, be prepared to capsize it. 2. Challenge the Oxymoron of Conventional Wisdom: The so-called smart thing is all too often stale thinking masquerading as truth. 3. Take a Good Look in the Mirror . . . Do You See a Leader? The worst damn thing in the world you can do is copy success. Be an original. 4. Develop Your Personal Killer App: Become greater than the sum of your parts. 5. Unleash Your Manhattan Project: Implement the plan that will change your world and your life. 6. Capture Ideas with a Butterfly Net: Seek out what you need to know and use it for personal growth. 7. Apply C+A+M, the Universal Equation for Perpetual Growth: Win customers and make them deliriously happy.” – Amazon Book Description

Buddha 9 To 5: The Eightfold Path to Enlightening Your Workplace and Improving Your Bottom Line
Author: Nancy Spears “Managers and employees are seeking a new vision for today’s workplace – one that balances best practices and the bottom line. Based on the Buddhist practice of the Eightfold Path, “Buddha: 9 to 5” provides managers with a hands-on set of tools to reawaken themselves, their employees and their companies. The results are enlivened workplace that is positive, productive and innovative. It shows readers how to apply the Buddhist concepts of intention, mindfulness and right action to business – and reap prosperity not just in profits but in stronger connections with employees, customers and the community.” – Amazon Book Description

Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter
Author: Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown “A thought-provoking, accessible, and essential exploration of why some leaders (“Diminishers”) drain capability and intelligence from their teams, while others (“Multipliers”) amplify it to produce better results. Including a foreword by Stephen R. Covey, as well the five key disciplines that turn smart leaders into genius makers, Multipliers is a must-read for everyone from first-time managers to world leaders.” – Amazon Book Description

On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System Author: Henry Paulson “From the Foreword, by Rep. Barney Frank, especially written for the trade paper edition: “For many people, what will be most striking about this foreword is the fact that I wrote it. It’s not every day a partisan, liberal Democrat gets a call from a conservative, high-ranking member of the George W. Bush administration asking for a favorable introduction to anything. But when former secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, Jr., called, I was quick to agree to express in print my enthusiasm for his excellent recounting of some of the most important and controversial events in our recent national history.” ON THE BRINK is Hank Paulson’s first-person account of the catastrophic economic events of 2008. From the man who was in the very middle of this perfect economic storm, Paulson puts the reader in the room for all the intense moments as he addressed urgent market conditions, weighed critical decisions, and debated policy and economic considerations with of all the notable players-including the CEOs of top Wall Street firms as well as Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner, Sheila Bair, Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, and then-President George W. Bush. More than an account about numbers and credit risks gone bad, ON THE BRINK is an extraordinary story about people and politics-all brought together during the world’s impending financial Armageddon. “ – Amazon Book Description

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Author: Tony Hsieh “Now in trade paperback, the hip, iconoclastic CEO of Zappos shows how a different kind of corporate culture can make a huge difference in achieving remarkable results — by actually creating a company culture that values happiness –and then delivers on it.

Pay brand-new employees $2,000 to quit
Make customer service the responsibility of the entire company-not just a department
Focus on company culture as the #1 priority
Apply research from the science of happiness to running a business
Help employees grow-both personally and professionally
Seek to change the world
Oh, and make money too . . .

Sound crazy? It’s all standard operating procedure at Zappos, the online retailer that’s doing over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales annually. After debuting as the highest-ranking newcomer in Fortune magazine’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list in 2009, Zappos was acquired by Amazon in a deal valued at over $1.2 billion on the day of closing. In DELIVERING HAPPINESS, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh shares the different lessons he has learned in business and life, from starting a worm farm to running a pizza business, through LinkExchange, Zappos, and more. Fast-paced and down-to-earth, DELIVERING HAPPINESS shows how a very different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success-and how by concentrating on the happiness of those around you, you can dramatically increase your own.” – Amazon Book Description

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth
Author: James M. Tabor “The deepest cave on earth was a prize that had remained unclaimed for centuries, long after every other ultimate discovery had been made: both poles by 1912, Everest in 1958, the Challenger Deep in 1961. In 1969 we even walked on the moon. And yet as late as 2000, the earth’s deepest cave—the supercave—remained undiscovered. This is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find it, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong. In 2004, two great scientist-explorers are attempting to find the bottom of the world. Bold, heroic American Bill Stone is committed to the vast Cheve Cave, located in southern Mexico and deadly even by supercave standards. On the other side of the globe, legendary Ukrainian explorer Alexander Klimchouk—Stone’s polar opposite in temperament and style, but every bit his equal in scientific expertise, physical bravery, and sheer determination—has targeted Krubera, a freezing nightmare of a supercave in the Republic of Georgia, where underground dangers are compounded by the horrors of separatist war in this former Soviet republic. Blind Descent explores both the brightest and darkest aspects of the timeless human urge to discover—to be first. It is also a thrilling epic about a pursuit that makes even extreme mountaineering and ocean exploration pale by comparison. These supercavers spent months in multiple camps almost two vertical miles deep and many more miles from their caves’ exits. They had to contend with thousand-foot drops, deadly flooded tunnels, raging whitewater rivers, monstrous waterfalls, mile-long belly crawls, and much more. Perhaps even worse were the psychological horrors produced by weeks plunged into absolute, perpetual darkness, beyond all hope of rescue, including a particularly insidious derangement called The Rapture. James M. Tabor was granted unprecedented access to logs, journals, photographs, and video footage of these expeditions, as well as many hours of personal interviews with surviving participants. Blind Descent is an unforgettable addition to the classic literature of discovery and adventure. It is also a testament to human survival and endurance—and to two extraordinary men whose relentless pursuitof greatness led them to heights of triumph and depths of tragedy neither could have imagined.” – Amazon Book Description

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Author: Michael Lewis “The real story of the crash began in bizarre feeder markets where the sun doesn’t shine and the SEC doesn’t dare, or bother, to tread: the bond and real estate derivative markets where geeks invent impenetrable securities to profit from the misery of lower–and middle–class Americans who can’t pay their debts. The smart people who understood what was or might be happening were paralyzed by hope and fear; in any case, they weren’t talking. Michael Lewis creates a fresh, character-driven narrative brimming with indignation and dark humor, a fitting sequel to his #1 bestseller Liar’s Poker. Out of a handful of unlikely–really unlikely–heroes, Lewis fashions a story as compelling and unusual as any of his earlier bestsellers, proving yet again that he is the finest and funniest chronicler of our time.” – Amazon Book Description

Adventures among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions
Author: Mark W. Moffett “Intrepid international explorer, biologist, and photographer Mark W. Moffett, “the Indiana Jones of entomology,” takes us around the globe on a strange and colorful journey in search of the hidden world of ants. In tales from Nigeria, Indonesia, the Amazon, Australia, California, and elsewhere, Moffett recounts his entomological exploits and provides fascinating details on how ants live and how they dominate their ecosystems through strikingly human behaviors, yet at a different scale and a faster tempo. Moffett’s spectacular close-up photographs shrink us down to size, so that we can observe ants in familiar roles; warriors, builders, big-game hunters, and slave owners. We find them creating marketplaces and assembly lines and dealing with issues we think of as uniquely human—including hygiene, recycling, and warfare. Adventures among Ants introduces some of the world’s most awe-inspiring species and offers a startling new perspective on the limits of our own perception. • Ants are world-class road builders, handling traffic problems on thoroughfares that dwarf our highway systems in their complexity • Ants with the largest societies often deploy complicated military tactics • Some ants have evolved from hunter-gatherers into farmers, domesticating other insects and growing crops for food” – Amazon Book Description

The End of Wall Street
Author: Roger Lowenstein The roots of the mortgage bubble and the story of the Wall Street collapse-and the government’s unprecedented response-from our most trusted business journalist. “The End of Wall Street is a blow-by-blow account of America’s biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression. Drawing on 180 interviews, including sit-downs with top government officials and Wall Street CEOs, Lowenstein tells, with grace, wit, and razor-sharp understanding, the full story of the end of Wall Street as we knew it. Displaying the qualities that made When Genius Failed a timeless classic of Wall Street-his sixth sense for narrative drama and his unmatched ability to tell complicated financial stories in ways that resonate with the ordinary reader- Roger Lowenstein weaves a financial, economic, and sociological thriller that indicts America for succumbing to the siren song of easy debt and speculative mortgages. The End of Wall Street is rife with historical lessons and bursting with fast-paced action. Lowenstein introduces his story with precisely etched, laserlike profiles of Angelo Mozilo, the Johnny Appleseed of subprime mortgages who spreads toxic loans across the landscape like wild crabapples, and moves to a damning explication of how rating agencies helped gift wrap faulty loans in the guise of triple-A paper and a takedown of the academic formulas that-once again- proved the ruin of investors and banks. Lowenstein excels with a series of searing profiles of banking CEOs, such as the ferretlike Dick Fuld of Lehman and the bloodless Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, and of government officials from the restless, deal-obsessed Hank Paulson and the overmatched Tim Geithner to the cerebral academic Ben Bernanke, who sought to avoid a repeat of the one crisis he spent a lifetime trying to understand-the Great Depression. Finally, we come to understand the majesty of Lowenstein’s theme of liquidity and capital, which explains the origins of the crisis and that positions the collapse of 2008 as the greatest ever of Wall Street’s unlearned lessons. The End of Wall Street will be essential reading as we work to identify the lessons of the market failure and start to reb…” – Amazon Book Description

The Upside of Irrationality (Enhanced Edition): The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
Author: Dan Ariely “This enhanced e-book of The Upside of Irrationality contains more than 50 minutes of video. Each chapter includes a video summary from the author as he explores the many ways in which our behavior often leads us astray in terms of our romantic relationships, our experiences in the workplace, and our temptations to cheat.” – Amazon Book Description

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Young Readers
Author: William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer “When fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba’s Malawi village was hit by a drought, everyone’s crops began to fail. Without enough money for food, let alone school, William spent his days in the library . . . and figured out how to bring electricity to his village. Persevering against the odds, William built a functioning windmill out of junkyard scraps, and thus became the local hero who harnessed the wind. Lyrically told and gloriously illustrated, this story will inspire many as it shows how – even in the worst of times – a great idea and a lot of hard work can still rock the world.” – Amazon Book Description

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
Author: Jim Collins “The Challenge: Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards: Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons: The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t. The Findings: The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?” – Amazon Book Description

The One Thing You Need to Know: … About Great Managing, Great Leading, and Sustained Individual Success
Author: Marcus Buckingham “Following the success of the landmark bestsellers First, Break All the Rules and Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham offers a dramatically new way to understand the art of success. With over 1.6 million copies of First, Break All the Rules (co-authored with Curt Coffman) and Now, Discover Your Strengths (co-authored with Donald O. Clifton) in print, Cambridge-educated Buckingham is considered one of the most respected business authorities on the subject of management and leadership in the world. With The One Thing You Need to Know, he gives readers an invaluable course in outstanding achievement — a guide to capturing the essence of the three most fundamental areas of professional activity. Great managing, leading, and career success — Buckingham draws on a wealth of applicable examples to reveal that a controlling insight lies at the heart of the three. Lose sight of this “one thing” and even the best efforts will be diminished or compromised. Readers will be eager to discover the surprisingly different answers to each of these rich and complex subjects. Each could be explained endlessly to detail their many facets, but Buckingham’s great gift is his ability to cut through the mass of often-conflicting agendas and zero in on what matters most, without ever oversimplifying. As he observes, success comes to those who remain mindful of the core insight, understand all of its ramifications, and orient their decisions around it. Buckingham backs his arguments with authoritative research from a wide variety of sources, including his own research data and in-depth interviews with individuals at every level of an organization, from CEO’s to hotel maids and stockboys. In every way a groundbreaking book, The One Thing You Need to Know offers crucial performance and career lessons for business people at all career stages.” – Amazon Book Description

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
Author: Patrick Lencioni “In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEOand The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech’s CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni’s utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.” – Amazon Book Description

The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue EXCELLENCE
Author: Thomas J. Peters “Business uber-guru Tom Peters is back with his first book in a decade, The Little Big Things. In this age of economic recession and financial uncertainty, the patented Peters approach to business and management—no-nonsense, witty, down-to-earth, insightful—is more pertinent now than ever. As essential for small-business owners as it is for the heads of major corporations, The Little Big Things is a rousing call-to-arms to American business to get “back to the basics” of running a successful enterprise. “– Amazon Book Description

Winning
Author: Jack Welch “Jack Welch knows how to win. During his forty-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits. Since Welch retired in 2001 as chairman and chief executive officer of GE, he has traveled the world, speaking to more than 250,000 people and answering their questions on dozens of wide-ranging topics. Inspired by his audiences and their hunger for straightforward guidance, Welch has written both a philosophical and pragmatic book, which is destined to become the bible of business for generations to come. It clearly lays out the answers to the most difficult questions people face both on and off the job. Welch’s objective is to speak to people at every level of an organization, in companies large and small. His audience is everyone from line workers to MBAs, from project managers to senior executives. His goal is to help everyone who has a passion for success. Welch begins Winning with an introductory section called “Underneath It All,” which describes his business philosophy. He explores the importance of values, candor, differentiation, and voice and dignity for all. The core of Winning is devoted to the real “stuff” of work. This main part of the book is split into three sections. The first looks inside the company, from leadership to picking winners to making change happen. The second section looks outside, at the competition, with chapters on strategy, mergers, and Six Sigma, to name just three. The next section of the book is about managing your career—from finding the right job to achieving work-life balance. Welch’s optimistic, no excuses, get-it-done mind-set are riveting. Packed with personal anecdotes and written in Jack’s distinctive no b.s. voice, Winning offers deep insights, original thinking, and solutions to nuts-and-bolts problems that will change the way people think about work.” – Amazon Book Description

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials)
Author: Jim Collins “Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day — as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: “What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?” 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.” – Amazon Book Description

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
Author: Alfred Lansing “The astonishing saga of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s survival for over a year on the ice-bound Antarctic seas, as Time magazine put it, “defined heroism.” Alfred Lansing’s scrupulously researched and brilliantly narrated book — with over 200,000 copies sold — has long been acknowledged as the definitive account of the Endurance’s fateful trip. To write their authoritative story, Lansing consulted with ten of the surviving members and gained access to diaries and personal accounts by eight others. The resulting book has all the immediacy of a first-hand account, expanded with maps and illustrations especially for this edition.” – Amazon Book Description

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What The Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!
Author: Robert T. Kiyosaki “Rich Dad Poor Dad, the #1 Personal Finance book of all time, tells the story of Robert Kiyosaki and his two dads—his real father and the father of his best friend, his rich dad—and the ways in which both men shaped his thoughts about money and investing. The book explodes the myth that you need to earn a high income to be rich and explains the difference between working for money and having your money work for you.” – Amazon Book Description

The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership
Author: Steven B. Sample “In this offbeat approach to leadership, college president Steven B. Sample-the man who turned the University of Southern California into one of the most respected and highly rated universities in the country-challenges many conventional teachings on the subject. Here, Sample outlines an iconoclastic style of leadership that flies in the face of current leadership thought, but a style that unquestionably works, nevertheless. Sample urges leaders and aspiring leaders to focus on some key counterintuitive truths. He offers his own down-to-earth, homespun, and often provocative advice on some complex and thoughtful issues. And he provides many practical, if controversial, tactics for successful leadership, suggesting, among other things, that leaders should sometimes compromise their principles, not read everything that comes across their desks, and always put off decisions.” – Amazon Book Description

Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
Author: The Arbinger Institute “Since its original publication in 2000, Leadership and Self-Deception has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon. Its sales continue to increase year after year, and the book’s popularity has gone global, with editions now available in over twenty languages. Through a story everyone can relate to about a man facing challenges on the job and in his family, the authors expose the fascinating ways that we can blind ourselves to our true motivations and unwittingly sabotage the effectiveness of our own efforts to achieve success and increase happiness. This new edition has been revised throughout to make the story even more compelling. And drawing on the extensive correspondence the authors have received over the years, they have added a section that outlines the many ways that readers have been using Leadership and Self-Deception to improve their lives and workplaces—areas such as team building, conflict resolution, and personal growth and development, to name a few. Read this extraordinary book and discover what millions already have learned—how to consistently tap into an innate ability that dramatically improves both your results and your relationships.” – Amazon Book Description

The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable
Author: Patrick Lencioni “In this stunning follow-up to his best-selling book, The Five Temptations of a CEO, Patrick Lencioni offers up another leadership fable that’s every bit as compelling and illuminating as its predecessor. This time, Lencioni’s focus is on a leader’s crucial role in building a healthy organization–an often overlooked but essential element of business life that is the linchpin of sustained success. Readers are treated to a story of corporate intrigue as the frustrated head of one consulting firm faces a leadership challenge so great that it threatens to topple his company, his career, and everything he holds true about leadership itself. In the story’s telling, Lencioni helps his readers understand the disarming simplicity and power of creating organizational health, and reveals four key disciplines that they can follow to achieve it.” – Amazon Book Description

Who
Author: Geoff Smart “In this instant New York Times Bestseller, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent. The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate. Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to • avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods • define the outcomes you seek • generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople • ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate • attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.” – Amazon Book Description

The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees)
Author: Patrick Lencioni “A bestselling author and business guru tells how to improve your job satisfaction and performance. In his sixth fable, bestselling author Patrick Lencioni takes on a topic that almost everyone can relate to: the causes of a miserable job. Millions of workers, even those who have carefully chosen careers based on true passions and interests, dread going to work, suffering each day as they trudge to jobs that make them cynical, weary, and frustrated. It is a simple fact of business life that any job, from investment banker to dishwasher, can become miserable. Through the story of a CEO turned pizzeria manager, Lencioni reveals the three elements that make work miserable — irrelevance, immeasurability, and anonymity — and gives managers and their employees the keys to make any job more fulfilling. As with all of Lencioni?s books, this one is filled with actionable advice you can put into effect immediately. In addition to the fable, the book includes a detailed model examining the three signs of job misery and how they can be remedied. It covers the benefits of managing for job fulfillment within organizations — increased productivity, greater retention, and competitive advantage — and offers examples of how managers can use the applications in the book to deal with specific jobs and situations. Patrick Lencioni (San Francisco, CA) is President of The Table Group, a management consulting firm specializing in executive team development and organizational health. As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives and executive teams in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to high-tech startups to universities and nonprofits. His clients include AT&T, Bechtel, Boeing, Cisco, Sam?s Club, Microsoft, Mitsubishi, Allstate, Visa, FedEx, New York Life, Sprint, Novell, Sybase, The Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Lencioni is the author of six bestselling books, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He previously worked for Oracle, Sybase, and the management consulting firm Bain & Company.” – Amazon Book Description

Success Built to Last: Creating a Life that Matters
Author: Jerry Porras “Imagine discovering what successful people have in common, distilling it into a set of simple practices, and using them to transform your career and your life. That?s what Jerry Porras, Stewart Emery, and Mark Thompson?leading thinkers in organizational development and self- improvement have done inSuccess Built to Last. Two hundred remarkable human beings from around the world are included, notably:

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon.com
Warren Buffett
Bill Clinton
Frances Hesselbein, former CEO, Girl Scouts of America
Maya Angelou
Bill Gates

Each shares how he or she harvested victories, learned from failures, and found the courage to be true to their passions. By following a set of simple principles culled from these inspiring interviews, readers can transform their business and personal lives?and discover the true meaning of success.” – Amazon Book Description

Leadership Axioms: Powerful Leadership Proverbs
Author: Bill Hybels The best leaders not only lead well but also reflect on their leadership long enough and thoughtfully enough to articulate the philosophies that cause them to do so. Whether serving in the marketplace or in ministry, as executives or rank-and-file employees, as salaried staff or volunteer servants, good leaders can pinpoint the rationale for their actions and decisions with the ease of reciting their home address. In Axiom, author Bill Hybels divulges the God-given convictions that have dictated his leadership strategy for more than three decades as senior pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. Oriented toward four key leadership categories: 1. Vision and strategy (“Promote Shameless Profitability,” “Take a Flyer”) 2. Teamwork and communication (“Obi-Wan Kenobi Isn’t for Hire,” “Disagree without Drawing Blood”) 3. Activity and assessment (“Develop a Mole System,” “Sweat the Small Stuff”) 4. Personal integrity (“Admit Mistakes, and Your Stock Goes Up,” “Fight for Your Family”) … Axiom brokers accessible wisdom from one leader’s journey, as well as emboldens you to nail down the reasons why you lead like you lead.” – Amazon Book Description

Rapid Transformation: A 90-Day Plan for Fast and Effective Change
Author: Behnam N. Tabrizi “Profound organizational transformation takes years and, in most cases is unsuccessful, right? Not according to change expert Behnam Tabrizi. In Rapid Transformation: A 90-Day Plan for Fast and Effective Change , Tabrizi shows you how to accomplish successful transformational change in your firm in just 90 days. Based on ten years of research into more than 500 leading companies including 3M, IBM, GE, Nissan, Apple, Bay Networks, Verisign, HP and Best Buy–this book demystifies fast, effective change and lays out a clear roadmap for achieving it. Tabrizi’s 90-day transformational model comprises three main phases, each lasting 30 days. The model enables you to analyze your company’s specific challenge, develop a new course of action, and carry out the plan. Moreover, you apply the model in parallel with the normal workings of your organization–so you don’t have to put your company on hold for the sake of the change effort. With its detailed recipe and insightful stories from actual corporate reinventions, this book defies long-held assumptions about change and provides a practical and immediately actionable guide.” – Amazon Book Description

Designing the Smart Organization: How Breakthrough Corporate Learning Initiatives Drive Strategic Change and Innovation
Author: Roland Deiser “Filling a gap in the literature, this book offers an innovative interdisciplinary approach to learning for corporate strategic development, linking the domains of strategy, organizational design, and learning. To demonstrate how this process drives the boundaries of the practice way beyond the established notion of simple training and management education, the book is filled with detailed case studies from leading global organizations, including Siemens, ABB, BASF, the US Army, PricewaterhouseCoopers, EADS, Novartis, and more. These studies reveal how large-scale corporations are using the power of dynamic corporate learning approaches to drive innovation, enhance cultural values, master post-merger integration, transform business models, enhance leadership culture, build technological expertise, foster strategic change processes, and ultimately increase bottom line results. For any company that wants to compete in the 21^st century, Designing the Smart Organization offers inspiring perspectives for integrating corporate learning as a core business practice that will create sustainable strategic and organizational capabilities.” – Amazon Book Description

Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions That Spark Game-Changing Innovation
Author: Phil McKinney “Generating and executing great ideas is the key to staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. It seems so basic. Why is it so hard to actually get right? The real problem is that we’re teaching people to ask the wrong questions -or none at all. There has to be a better way. In Beyond the Obvious, McKinney helps the reader to dig deeper and get back to asking the right questions-the ones all organizations must ask to survive. Full of real-world examples, this book will change the way you operate, innovate, and create, and it all begins with battle-tested questions Phil has gathered on note cards throughout his career and shared for the first time.

What are the rules and assumptions my industry operates under? What if the opposite were true?
What will be the buying criteria used by my customer in five years?
What are my unshakable beliefs about what my customers want?
Who uses my product in ways I never anticipated?

These questions will re-frame the way you see your products, your customers, and the way the two interact. Whether you’re a company of thousands or a lean start-up, Beyond the Obvious will give you the skills and easy-to-follow plan you need to make both the revolutionary changes and nuanced tweaks required for success.” – Amazon Book Description

The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations through Social Media
Author: Marcia Conner and Tony Bingham “Most business books on social media have focused exclusively on using it as a marketing tool. Many employers see it as simply a workplace distraction. But social media has the potential to revolutionize workplace learning. People have always learned best from one another—social media enables this to happen unrestricted by physical location and in all kinds of extraordinarily creative ways. The New Social Learning is the most authoritative guide available to leveraging these powerful new technologies. Tony Bingham and Marcia Conner explain why social media is the ideal solution to some of the most pressing educational challenges organizations face today, such as a widely dispersed workforce and striking differences in learning styles, particularly across generations. They definitively answer common objections to using social media as a training tool and show how to win over even the most resistant employees. Then, using examples from a wide range of organizations—including Deloitte & Touche, IBM, TELUS, and even the CIA—Bingham and Conner help readers sort through the dizzying array of technological options available and decide when and how to use each one to achieve key strategic goals. Social media technologies—everything from 140-character “microsharing” messages to media-rich online communities to complete virtual environments and more—enable people to connect, collaborate, and innovate on levels never before dreamed of. They make learning dramatically more dynamic, stimulating, enjoyable, and effective. This greatly anticipated book helps organizations create a contemporary learning strategy that is as timely as it is transformative.” – Amazon Book Description

Change the Culture, Change the Game: The Breakthrough Strategy for Energizing Your Organization and Creating Accountability for Results
Author: Roger Connors and Tom Smith “Two-time New York Times bestselling authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith show how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset-their people. Change the Culture, Change the Game joins their classic book, The Oz Principle, and their recent bestseller, How Did That Happen?, to complete the most comprehensive series ever written on workplace accountability. Based on an earlier book, Journey to the Emerald City, this fully revised installment captures what the authors have learned while working with the hundreds of thousands of people on using organizational culture as a strategic advantage.” – Amazon Book Description

From Values to Action: The Four Principles of Values-Based Leadership Author: Harry M. Kraemer Respected former CEO, professor, and speaker examines what it takes to become a values-based leader “In this highly-anticipated book, Harry Kraemer argues that today’s business environment demands values-based leaders who, in “doing the right thing,” deliver outstanding and lasting results. The journey to becoming a values-based leader starts with self-reflection. He asks, “If you are not self-reflective, how can you know yourself? If you do not know yourself, how can you lead yourself? If you cannot lead yourself, how can you lead others?” Kraemer identifies self-reflection as the first of four principles that guide leaders to make choices that honor their values and candidly recounts how these principles helped him navigate some of the toughest challenges he faced in his career.

Offers a framework for adopting the principles of values-based leadership?self-reflection, balance, true self-confidence, and genuine humility?to lead organizations effectively
Based on Kraemer’s popular Kellogg MBA course on values-based leadership
A recognized expert in values-based leadership, Kraemer is a sought after speaker on the subject

Lively and engaging, Kraemer’s book comes at a critical time when true leadership in every facet of society is desperately needed. “– Amazon Book Description

Reverse Innovation: Create Far From Home, Win Everywhere
Author: Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble “Reverse Innovation is the new business idea everyone is talking about. Why? Because it presents the blueprint for scaling growth in emerging markets, and importing low-cost and high impact innovations to mature ones. Innovation is no longer the exclusive domain of the Silicon Valley elite. Reverse Innovation will open your eyes to the fact that the dynamics of global innovation are changing—and if you want your firm to survive, you’d better pay attention. The gap between rich nations and emerging economies is closing. No longer will innovations travel the globe in only one direction, from developed to developing nations. They will also flow in reverse. CEOs of the world’s most influential companies agree and have citedReverse Innovation as their playbook for the next generation of global growth. Authors Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth explain where, when, and why reverse innovation is on the rise and why the implications are so profound. Learn how to make innovation in emerging markets happen and how such innovations can unlock even greater opportunity throughout the world. You’ll follow some of the world’s leading companies (including GE, Deere & Company, P&G, and PepsiCo) through stories that illustrate exactly what works and what doesn’t. If you’re in a Western economy, you need to accept that the future lies far from home. But the idea is not just for Western audiences. If innovation is at the heart of your company or your career, no matter where you practice business, Reverse Innovation is a phenomenon you need to understand. This book will help you do that.” – Amazon Book Description

Closing the Execution Gap: How Great Leaders and Their Companies Get Results
Author: Richard Lepsinger “Why can some companies get things done day-to-day and deliver consistent results? Based on an extensive research from more than 400 companies, this book outlines five baseline factors critical for effective execution and five factors that differentiate companies that are most effective at executing plans and initiatives. It also explores the seven specific things leaders at all levels can do to close the execution gap in their company or team and help people get things done day-to-day. This is an essential guide for consistently executing effective plans and initiatives.” – Amazon Book Description

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant
Author: W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne “Written by the business world’s new gurus, Blue Ocean Strategy continues to challenge everything you thought you knew about competing in today’s crowded market place. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that lasting success comes from creating ‘blue oceans’: untapped new market spaces ripe from growth. And the business world has caught on – companies around the world are skipping the bloody red oceans of rivals and creating their very own blue oceans. With over one million copies sold worldwide, Blue Ocean Strategy is quickly reaching “must read” status among smart business readers. Have you caught the wave?” – Amazon Book Description

Leaders Make the Future: Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World
Author: Bob Johansen “We are in a time of accelerating disruptive change. In a VUCA world—one characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity—traditional leadership skills won’t be enough, noted futurist Bob Johansen argues. Drawing on the latest forecasts from the Institute for the Future—the first futures think tank ever to outlive its forecasts—this powerful book explores the external forces that are shaking the foundations of leadership and unveils ten critical new leadership skills. How adroit are you at dilemma flipping—turning problems that can’t be solved into opportunities? Can you develop bio-empathy—the ability to learn from and apply the principles of nature in your leadership? Are you able to practice immersive learning—dive into very different-from-you physical and online worlds and learn from them? Johansen provides role models, tools, and advice to help you develop these and seven other future leadership skills. In addition, Johansen deals with two new forces that are shaping the future. The first is the “digital natives”—people fifteen years and younger who have grown up in a digital world. The second is cloud-based supercomputing, which will enable extraordinarily rich new forms of connection, collaboration, and commerce. In this thoroughly updated and expanded second edition, Johansen is joined by the prestigious Center for Creative Leadership. CCL’s contributions help readers understand the new leadership skills by linking them to existing skills, and they provide analytics and exercises so readers can more fully develop these new skills.” – Amazon Book Description

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Author: Dan Ariely “Why do our headaches persist after we take a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a fifty-cent aspirin? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup? When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we’re making smart, rational choices. But are we? In this newly revised and expanded edition of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller, Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, we consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They’re systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.” – Amazon Book Description

Behavioral Economics for Dummies
Author: Morris Altman A guide to the study of how and why you really make financial decisions “While classical economics is based on the notion that people act with rational self-interest, many key money decisions—like splurging on an expensive watch—can seem far from rational. The field of behavioral economics sheds light on the many subtle and not-so-subtle factors that contribute to our financial and purchasing choices. And in Behavioral Economics For Dummies, readers will learn how social and psychological factors, such as instinctual behavior patterns, social pressure, and mental framing, can dramatically affect our day-to-day decision-making and financial choices. Based on psychology and rooted in real-world examples, Behavioral Economics For Dummies offers the sort of insights designed to help investors avoid impulsive mistakes, companies understand the mechanisms behind individual choices, and governments and nonprofits make public decisions.

A friendly introduction to the study of how and why people really make financial decisions
The author is a professor of behavioral and institutional economics at Victoria University

An essential component to improving your financial decision-making (and even to understanding current events), Behavioral Economics For Dummies is important for just about anyone who has a bank account and is interested in why—and when—they spend money.” – Amazon Book Description

All Marketers Are Liars: The Underground Classic That Explains How Marketing Really Works–and Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All
Author: Seth Godin All marketers tell stories. And if they do it right, we believe them. We believe that wine tastes better in a $20 glass than a $1 glass. We believe that an $80,000 Porsche is vastly superior to a $36,000 Volkswagen that’s virtually the same car. We believe that $125 sneakers make our feet feel better—and look cooler—than a $25 brand. And believing it makes it true. As Seth Godin showed in this controversial book, great marketers don’t talk about features or even benefits. Instead, they tell a story—a story we want to believe, whether it’s factual or not. In a world where most people have an infinite number of choices and no time to make them, every organization is a marketer, and all marketing is about telling stories. Marketers succeed when they tell us a story that fits our worldview, a story that we intuitively embrace and then share with our friends. Think of the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or Fiji water, or the iPod. But beware: If your stories are inauthentic, you cross the line from fib to fraud. Marketers fail when they are selfish and scurrilous, when they abuse the tools of their trade and make the world worse. That’s a lesson learned the hard way by telemarketers, cigarette companies, and sleazy politicians. But for the rest of us, it’s time to embrace the power of the story. As Godin writes, “Stories make it easier to understand the world. Stories are the only way we know to spread an idea. Marketers didn’t invent storytelling. They just perfected it.” – Amazon Book Description

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business
Author: Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman “Blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other platforms are giving everyone a “voice,” including organizations and their customers. So how do you create the stories, videos, and blog posts that cultivate fans, arouse passion for your products or services, and ignite your business? Content Rules equips you for online success as a one-stop source on the art and science of developing content that people care about. This coverage is interwoven with case studies of companies successfully spreading their ideas online—and using them to establish credibility and build a loyal customer base.

Find an authentic “voice” and craft bold content that will resonate with prospects and buyers and encourage them to share it with others
Leverage social media and social tools to get your content and ideas distributed as widely as possible
Understand why you are generating content—getting to the meat of your message in practical, commonsense language, and defining the goals of your content strategy
Write in a way that powerfully communicates your service, product, or message across various Web mediums
Boost your online presence and engage with customers and prospects like never before with Content Rules.” – Amazon Book Description

Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customers by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing
Author: Lee Odden Attract, engage, and inspire your customers with an “Optimize and Socialize” content marketing strategy “Optimize is designed to give readers a practical approach to integrating search and social media optimization with content marketing to boost relevance, visibility, and customer engagement. Companies, large and small, will benefit from the practical planning and creative content marketing tactics in this book that have been proven to increase online performance across marketing, public relations, and customer service. Learn to incorporate essential content optimization and social media engagement principles thereby increasing their ability to acquire and engage relevant customers online. Optimize provides insights from Lee Odden, one of the leading authorities on Content and Online Marketing. This book explains how to:

Create a blueprint for integrated search, social media and content marketing strategy
Determine which creative tactics will provide the best results for your company
Implement search and social optimization holistically in the organization
Measure the business value of optimized and socialized content marketing
Develop guidelines, processes and training to scale online marketing success

Optimize offers a tested approach for a customer-centric and adaptive online marketing strategy that incorporates the best of content, social media marketing, and search engine optimization tactics.” – Amazon Book Description

The New Rules of Marketing & PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly
Author: David Meerman Scott “The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition is the pioneering guide to the future of marketing, an international bestseller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages. It offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales. It shows how large and small companies, nonprofits, and other organizations can leverage Web-based content to get the right information to the right people at the right time for a fraction of the cost of big-budget campaigns. Including a wealth of compelling case studies and real-world examples of content marketing and inbound marketing success, this is a practical guide to the new reality of reaching buyers when they’re eager to hear from you.

Includes updated information, examples, and case studies plus an examination of newly popular tools such as Infographics, photo-sharing using Pinterest and Instagram, as well as expanded information on social media such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn
David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist, bestselling author of eight books including three international bestsellers, advisor to emerging companies including HubSpot, and a professional speaker on topics including marketing, leadership, and social media. Prior to starting his own business, he was marketing VP for two U.S. publicly traded companies and was Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest information companies.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR offers the single resource for entrepreneurs, business owners, nonprofit managers as well as those working in marketing or publicity departments to build a marketing and PR strategy to grow any business.” – Amazon Book Description

Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand
Author: Robert Rose & Joe Pulizzi “Let’s face it…content marketing is all the rage. Brands around the world are spending (on average) over 25% of their total marketing budget on content marketing. What’s been missing…until now…is the book that tells marketers exactly how to put content marketing to work. Managing Content Marketing shows you, in detail, how to manage content marketing within your organization. Whether you come from a small company or multi-billion dollar brand, this book gives you the ammunition and the ideas to develop a storytelling process that will create passionate subscribers to your brand. World-renowned content marketing experts Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi have teamed up to help marketing pros and business owners develop a content marketing plan that goes beyond theories and explains exactly how to turn that plan into reality. Managing Content Marketing will teach you to: –Build the Business Case for Content Marketing –Develop a Content Marketing Strategy that Works for Your Business –Tell a Consistent Story that Engages Your Customers –Determine the Right Marketing Channels to Implement –Create an Internal and External Workflow for Content Marketing –Measure Content Marketing and Communicate Results to Internal Stakeholders” – Amazon Book Description

Return on Influence: The Revolutionary Power of Klout, Social Scoring, and Influence Marketing
Author: Mark Schaefer “Return on Influence is the first book to explore how brands are identifying and leveraging the world’s most powerful bloggers, tweeters, and YouTube celebrities to build product awareness, brand buzz, and new sales. In this revolutionary book, renowned marketing consultant and college educator Mark W. Schaefer shows you how to use the latest breakthroughs in social networking and influence marketing to achieve your goals through:

In-depth explanations of the sources of online influence—and how they can work for or against you
Interviews with more than 50 experts, including tech blogger Robert Scoble, Influence author Robert Cialdini, and industry thought leaders such as Mitch Joel, Jay Baer, and Christopher S. Penn
An insider’s look at the controversial social scoring company Klout and its process for assigning influence numbers to everyone
Practical, actionable tips to increase your own personal power and online influence
More than a dozen original social influence marketing case studies

Even if you already use social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, or blogging to maintain an online presence, this eye-opening, action-ready guide shows you how to reach the “superconnectors” who ignite epidemics through word-of-mouth influence . . . and become one yourself. This is the future of marketing at your fingertips: low-cost, high-speed, influence driven, and powerful. Filled with fascinating case studies, interviews, and insider advice, this essential guide prepares you for the next wave of social networking. This is how to win friends and influence people in the digital age—with a Return on Influence.” – Amazon Book Description

Marketing White Belt: Basics For the Digital Marketer
Author: Christopher Penn “Have you had people ask you how to get started in digital marketing? Are you working with social media practitioners who lack a firm grounding in the basics of marketing? Do you sometimes wish you had the fundamentals of marketing at your fingertips? Then grab a copy of Marketing White Belt: Basics for the Digital Marketer today. In this guide, join Christopher Penn, Vice President of Strategy at Blue Sky Factory and professor of Internet Marketing at the University of San Francisco, as he covers the 4Ps, SWOT, Strategy, ROI, funnels, and many other basics in a tight, compact format that will help bring you or a colleague up to speed very quickly in the basics of marketing. It’s everything you need to get someone started on marketing basics, while not being overly dense (and thus productivity-dampening). Each concept has a series of exercises that will let you test your knowledge and apply it to the business situations you’re facing at your company.” – Amazon Book Description

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Author: Charles Duhigg “In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize–winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential. At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, being more productive, and achieving success understands how habits work. As Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.” – Amazon Book Description

Likeonomics: The Unexpected Truth behind Earning Trust, Influencing Behavior, and Inspiring Action
Author: Rohit Bhargava How to become a trusted resource for consumers in a society of constant manipulation “People decide who to trust, what advice to heed, and which individuals to forge personal or transactional relationships with based on a simple metric of believability. Success, in turn, comes from understanding one basic principle: how to be more trusted. Likeonomics offers a new vision of a world beyond Facebook where personal relationships, likeability, brutal honesty, extreme simplicity, and basic humanity are behind everything from multi-million dollar mergers to record-breaking product sales. There is a real ROI to likeability, and exactly how big it is will amaze you. Likeonomics provides real-world case studies of brands and individuals that have used these principles to become wildly successful, including:

An iconic technology brand that awakened a revolution among their employees by standing for something bigger than their products
A Portuguese singer who used YouTube to rack up more than 30 million views and launch her professional career. A regional team of financial advisors that went from being last in the nation among 176 branches to first, and stayed there for 13 of the next 15 years
A tiny professional sports talent agent who achieved the impossible by landing the #1 drafted player in the NFL draft as a client through the power of relationships
Author Rohit Bhargava is a founding member of the world’s largest group of social media strategists at Ogilvy, where he has led marketing strategy for clients including Intel, Pepsi, Lenovo, Seiko, Unilever, and dozens of other large companies

With Likeonomics as a guide, readers will get unconventional advice on how to stand out in a good way, avoid the hype and strategic traps of social media, and appeal to customers in a way that secures your company as a trusted and believable resource.” – Amazon Book Description

Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing
Author: Roger Dooley Practical techniques for applying neuroscience and behavior research to attract new customers “Brainfluence explains how to practically apply neuroscience and behavior research to better market to consumers by understanding their decision patterns. This application, called neuromarketing, studies the way the brain responds to various cognitive and sensory marketing stimuli. Analysts use this to measure a consumer’s preference, what a customer reacts to, and why consumers make certain decisions. With quick and easy takeaways offered in 60 short chapters, this book contains key strategies for targeting consumers through in-person sales, online and print ads, and other marketing mediums. This scientific approach to marketing has helped many well-known brands and companies determine how to best market their products to different demographics and consumer groups. Brainfluence offers short, easy-to-digest ideas that can be accessed in any order.

Discover ways for brands and products to form emotional bonds with customers
Includes ideas for small businesses and non-profits
Roger Dooley is the creator and publisher of Neuromarketing, the most popular blog on using brain and behavior research in marketing, advertising, and sales

Brainfluence delivers the latest insights and research, giving you an edge in your marketing, advertising, and sales efforts.” – Amazon Book Description

Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking
Author: Andy Sernovitz Master word of mouth marketing with this fun, practical, hands-on guide. “With straightforward advice and humor, word of mouth expert Andy Sernovitz will show you how the world’s most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth. Learn the five essential steps that make word of mouth work and everything you need to get started. Understand how easy it is to work with social media, viral marketing, evangelists, and buzz. Start using simple techniques that start conversations: – 3 Reasons People Talk About You – 4 Rules of Word of Mouth Marketing – 5 Ts of Word of Mouth Marketing – 6 Big Ideas: Deep Stuff That Changes Marketing Forever Find out what sparks the irrepressible enthusiasm of Apple and TiVo fans. Understand why everyone is talking about a certain restaurant, car, band, or dry cleaner — and why other businesses and products are ignored. Discover why some products become huge successes without a penny of promotion — and why some multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns fail to get noticed. Open your eyes to a new way of doing business: Honest marketing makes more money, because customers who trust you will talk about you. Learn how to be the remarkable company that people want to share with their friends.” –Amazon Book Description

Unlimited Power: The New Science Of Personal Achievement
Author: Anthony Robbins Anthony Robbins calls it the new science of personal achievement. You’ll call it the best thing that ever happened to you. “If you have ever dreamed of a better life, Unlimited Power will show you how to achieve the extraordinary quality of life you desire and deserve, and how to master your personal and professional life. Anthony Robbins has proven to millions through his books, tapes, and seminars that by harnessing the power of the mind you can do, have, achieve, and create anything you want for your life. He has shown heads of state, royalty, Olympic and professional athletes, movie stars, and children how to achieve. With Unlimited Power, he passionately and eloquently reveals the science of personal achievement and teaches you: * How to find out what you really want * The Seven Lies of Success * How to reprogram your mind in minutes to eliminate fears and phobias * The secret of creating instant rapport with anyone you meet * How to duplicate the success of others * The Five Keys to Wealth and Happiness Unlimited Power is a revolutionary fitness book for the mind. It will show you, step by step, how to perform at your peak while gaining emotional and financial freedom, attaining leadership and self-confidence, and winning the cooperation of others. It will give you the knowledge and the courage to remake yourself and your world. Unlimited Power is a guidebook to superior performance in an age of success.” – Amazon Book Description

Marketing in the Age of Google, Revised and Updated: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy
Author: Vanessa Fox Search has changed everything. Has your business harnessed its full potential? “A business’s search strategy can have a dramatic impact on how consumers interact with that business. But even more importantly, search engine activity provides amazingly useful data about customer behavior, needs, and motivations. In this non-technical book for executives, business owners, and marketers, search engine strategy guru Vanessa Fox—who created Google’s portal for site owners, Google Webmaster Central—explains what every marketer or business owner needs to understand about search rankings, search data, comprehensive search strategies, and integrating your strategy into the businesses processes.

Updated statistics, tools, and recommendations
Details about the latest changes from Google, Bing, and the overall search landscape
Explanation and recommendations related to Google’s substantial new search algorithm, know as “Panda”
Discussion of the changing landscape of the integration of search and social media, including the addition of Google+ to the mix

Traditional marketing isn’t enough anymore. Businesses need to evolve as customer behavior evolves.Marketing in the Age of Google shows you how.” – Amazon Book Description

Online Marketing Inside Out (Online Marketing: Sitepoint)
Author: Brandon Eley & Shayne Tilley “Online Marketing Inside Out is an invaluable book for anyone wanting to market products or services online – whether or not marketing is part of your job description. Small-business entrepreneurs and web-site owners will benefit from this information-packed book, as will traditional marketers with little or no experience of online marketing. With so many potential customers online this book will show you how to reach and interact with them through podcasting, blogs, social networks, video, email, and contextual advertising. This book doesn’t just cover the basics, it is inspiring reading for anyone looking for new ways to reach new and larger customer bases. You will learn about:

The changing face of marketing
The new frontier of PR and media
Using your web site to generate income
Getting the most from the search engine crowd
Promote your message through socializing
Implementing profitable email marketing campaigns
Getting others to sell your products for you
Spreading your message through online advertising.” – Amazon Book Description

Ogilvy on Advertising
Author: David Ogilvy “A candid and indispensable primer on all aspects of advertising from the man Time has called “the most sought after wizard in the business”. “ – Amazon Book Description

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind
Author:Al Ries and Jack Trout “One of the most important communication books I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it!’ – Spencer Johnson, author of “Who Moved My Cheese?” and co-author of “The One Minute Manager”. ‘…Ries and Trout taught me everything I know about branding, marketing, and product management. When I had the idea of creating a very large thematic community on the Web, I first thought of “Positioning”…’ – David Bohnett, Chairman and Founder of GeoCities. The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, “Positioning” describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind – one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.Writing in their trademark witty, fast-paced style, advertising gurus Ries and Trout explain how to: make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market – and stays there; position a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leader; and, avoid letting a second product ride on the coattails of an established one.” Positioning” also shows you how to: use leading ad agency techniques to capture the biggest market share and become a household name; build your strategy around your competition’s weaknesses; reposition a strong competitor and create a weak spot; use your present position to its best advantage; choose the best name for your product; determine when – and why – less is more; and, analyze recent trends that affect your positioning. Ries and Trout provide many valuable case histories and penetrating analyses of some of the most phenomenal successes and failures in advertising history. Revised to reflect significant developments in the five years since its original publication, “Positioning” is required reading for anyone in business today.” – Amazon Book Description

Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (And Other Social Networks)
Author: Dave Kerpen The secret to successful word-of-mouth marketing on the social web is easy: BE LIKEABLE. “A friend’s recommendation is more powerful than any advertisement. In the world of Facebook, Twitter, and beyond, that recommendation can travel farther and faster than ever before. Likeable Social Media helps you harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing to transform your business. Listen to your customers and prospects. Deliver value, excitement, and surprise. And most important, learn how to truly engage your customers and help them spread the word.” – Amazon Book Description

Neuromarketing: Understanding the Buy Buttons in Your Customer’s Brain
Author: Patrick Renvoise & Christophe Morin “How can the latest brain research help increase your sales? Because paople are inundated daily by an average of 10,000 sales messages, selling is now tougher than ever. That’s why you need to learn what neuroscience has uncovered that will immediately increase your selling and influencing effectiveness. Unveiling the latest brain research and revolutionary marketing practices, authors Patrick Renvoisé and Christophe Morin teach highly effective techniques to help you deliver powerful, unique, and memorable presentations that will have a major, lasting impact on potential buyers such as:

The 6 stimuli that always trigger a response
The 4 steps to align content and delivery of your message
The 6 message building blocks to address the “old brain”
The 7 powerful impact boosters to set your delivery apart from the rest

Once you know how the decision-making part of the brain works, you’ll quickly begin to deliver more convincing sales presentations, close more deals, create more effective marketing strategies, and radically improve your ability to influence others.” – Amazon Book Description

Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist™ Author: Brian Massey Finally-a book that shows marketers how to truly achieve real results from their websites. “Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist, takes the mystery out of how to create high-performing sites. By walking the reader through five online formulas-aka “customer creation equations”-he shows you how to determine the best formula your own particular business structure and how to optimize it for stellar results. Key to this process is setting up a “digital conversion lab,” and Brian shows you how. Jam-packed with easy-to-understand equations for things like increasing your conversion rate and decreasing your abandonment rate-as well as practical strategies for attracting prospects, turning buyers into triers, and morphing buyers into loyal brand advocates-this book will enable anyone to stop hoping for success and start enjoying higher profits. The Advanced Curriculum in Visitor Studies gives readers additional guidance on how to really understand their targets and customers-an understanding that is at the heart of all successful websites, and businesses, everywhere.” – Amazon Book Description

Conversion: The Last Great Retail Metric
Author: Mark Ryski ”A retail brand is built from the cumulative effects of its shoppers’ experiences over time, making learning from these experiences a strategic priority for retailers in order to drive business value. Converting customers into buyers is the first step in creating a sustained partnership that results in value for all. The strategies introduced in this book will help retailers of all sizes and categories convert their customers’ experiences into future buyers. “-Amazon Book Description

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)
Author: Robert B. Cialdini “Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say “yes”—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book. You’ll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.” – Amazon Book Description

Power Stories: The 8 Stories You Must Tell to Build an Epic Business
Author: Valerie Khoo Learn to tell stories that have the power to inspire, motivate, and sell “Storytelling in business is a skill that’s rarely taught—and often forgotten. But it gives those who get it right the power to inspire and engage people more than any pie chart or spreadsheet ever will. Stories foster a deeply human connection, and Power Stories: The 8 Stories You Must Tell to Build an Epic Business gives readers the skills they need to master this lost art to make sales and seal deals. Whether it’s in person or online, storytelling is an influential and persuasive tool. This book reveals how to discover the stories sitting under your nose and harness them for your business. From power stories readers need to know to how to turn prospects into customers, and customers into raving fans, the book covers exactly how and when to employ the power of storytelling, and is packed with proven strategies and real-life examples that bring the key concepts to life.

Explains why storytelling is the ultimate tool for business success, revealing the 8 stories that any professional needs to be able to tell
Includes proven strategies, tools, and techniques for mastering the lost art of storytelling in the business world, including the use of online tools and platforms
Features real-life examples of businesses and entrepreneurs from around the world who have used storytelling to grow and thrive

Written by Valerie Khoo, a respected small business commentator and successful entrepreneur, Power Stories gives professionals everywhere the tools they need to craft and tell great stories to create a competitive advantage.” – Amazon Book Description

Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking
Author: Malcolm Gladwell “In his landmark bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell redefined how we understand the world around us. Now, in Blink, he revolutionizes the way we understand the world within. Blink is a book about how we think without thinking, about choices that seem to be made in an instant-in the blink of an eye-that actually aren’t as simple as they seem. Why are some people brilliant decision makers, while others are consistently inept? Why do some people follow their instincts and win, while others end up stumbling into error? How do our brains really work-in the office, in the classroom, in the kitchen, and in the bedroom? And why are the best decisions often those that are impossible to explain to others? In Blink we meet the psychologist who has learned to predict whether a marriage will last, based on a few minutes of observing a couple; the tennis coach who knows when a player will double-fault before the racket even makes contact with the ball; the antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance. Here, too, are great failures of “blink”: the election of Warren Harding; “New Coke”; and the shooting of Amadou Diallo by police. Blink reveals that great decision makers aren’t those who process the most information or spend the most time deliberating, but those who have perfected the art of “thin-slicing”-filtering the very few factors that matter from an overwhelming number of variables.” – Amazon Book Description

Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
Author: Seth Godin You’re either a Purple Cow or you’re not. You’re either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice. What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don’t? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last? Face it, the checklist of tired ‘P’s marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed -Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few-aren’t working anymore. There’s an exceptionally important ‘P’ that has to be added to the list. It’s Purple Cow. Cows, after you’ve seen one, or two, or ten, are boring. A Purple Cow, though…now that would be something. Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat out unbelievable. Every day, consumers come face to face with a lot of boring stuff-a lot of brown cows-but you can bet they won’t forget a Purple Cow. And it’s not a marketing function that you can slap on to your product or service. Purple Cow is inherent. It’s built right in, or it’s not there. Period. In Purple Cow, Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable. It’s a manifesto for marketers who want to help create products that are worth marketing in the first place.” – Amazon Book Description

Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours
Author:Robert Pozen “Required reading for professionals—and aspiring professionals—of all levels.” —Shirley Ann Jackson, President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Former Chairman of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission “Read this book if you want to learn how to run efficient and effective meetings—or how to avoid them altogether.” —J. Michael Cook, Director of Comcast and IFF, Chairman and CEO Emeritus of Deloitte “Robert C. Pozen, one of the business world’s most successful—and productive—executives, reveals the surprising secrets to workplace productivity and high performance. Extreme Productivity is an essential handbook for every business professional, empowering them with proven methods for prioritizing efficiently and maximizing time at work, while leading a full and productive personal life as well.”-Amazon Book Description

Wait: The Art and Science of Delay
Author: Frank Partnov “What do these scenarios have in common: a professional tennis player returning a serve, a woman evaluating a first date across the table, a naval officer assessing a threat to his ship, and a comedian about to reveal a punch line? In this counterintuitive and insightful work, author Frank Partnoy weaves together findings from hundreds of scientific studies and interviews with wide-ranging experts to craft a picture of effective decision-making that runs counter to our brutally fast-paced world. Even as technology exerts new pressures to speed up our lives, it turns out that the choices we make––unconsciously and consciously, in time frames varying from milliseconds to years––benefit profoundly from delay. As this winning and provocative book reveals, taking control of time and slowing down our responses yields better results in almost every arena of life … even when time seems to be of the essence. The procrastinator in all of us will delight in Partnoy’s accounts of celebrity “delay specialists,” from Warren Buffett to Chris Evert to Steve Kroft, underscoring the myriad ways in which delaying our reactions to everyday choices––large and small––can improve the quality of our lives.” – Amazon Book Description

The Design of Everyday Things
Author:Donald A. Norman “First, businesses discovered quality as a key competitive edge; next came service. Now, Donald A. Norman, former Director of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of California, reveals how smart design is the new competitive frontier. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how–and why–some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.” – Amazon Book Description

Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Author: Steve Krug “Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject. Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic–with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read. If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.” – Amazon Book Description

The Talent Code: Greatness Isn’t Born. It’s Grown. Here’s How.
Author: Daniel Coyle “What is the secret of talent? How do we unlock it? In this groundbreaking work, journalist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel Coyle provides parents, teachers, coaches, businesspeople—and everyone else—with tools they can use to maximize potential in themselves and others. Whether you’re coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism. Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world’s talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice–Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn’t know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice. • Ignition–We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development. • Master Coaching–What are the secrets of the world’s most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these “talent whisperers” to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students. These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo’s to Michael Jordan’s. The good news about myelin is that it isn’t fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.” – Amazon Book Description

So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love
Author:Cal Newport “In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice. Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers. Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it. With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to “be so good they can’t ignore you,” Cal Newport’s clearly written manifesto is mandatory reading for anyone fretting about what to do with their life, or frustrated by their current job situation and eager to find a fresh new way to take control of their livelihood. He provides an evidence-based blueprint for creating work you love. SO GOOD THEY CAN’T IGNORE YOU will change the way we think about our careers, happiness, and the crafting of a remarkable life.” – Amazon Book Description

Confidence: Overcoming Low Self-Esteem, Insecurity, and Self-Doubt Author: Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic Ph.D. “Millions of people are plagued by low self-confidence. But in Confidence, personality expert Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic shows us that high confidence makes us less likeable, less employable, and less successful in the long run. He reveals the benefits of low confidence (including being more motivated and self-aware), teaches us how to know when to fake it, get ahead at work, improve our social skills, feel better emotionally and physically, and much more. With this engaging, practical study of our minds and emotions, we can become more capable in every facet of life. Based on decades of research, including the author’s own groundbreaking work, and filled with fascinating anecdotal evidence, this will appeal to readers of The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal and Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson. Confidence will shatter every myth you’ve ever believed about self-confidence and its effects on us—ranging from the very personal to the global level.” – Amazon Book Description

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
Author: Matthew Dixon “In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they’ve turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject—customer loyalty—with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive wordof-mouth. The reality: Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service. If you put on your customer hat rather than your manager or marketer hat, this makes a lot of sense. What do you really want from your cable company, a free month of HBO when it screws up or a fast, painless restoration of your connection? What about your bank—do you want free cookies and a cheerful smile, even a personal relationship with your teller? Or just a quick in-and-out transaction and an easy way to get a refund when it accidentally overcharges on fees? The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver. The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.” – Amazon Book Description

In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies
Author: Thomas J. Peters “The “Greatest Business Book of All Time” (Bloomsbury UK), In Search of Excellence has long been a must-have for the boardroom, business school, and bedside table. Based on a study of forty-three of America’s best-run companies from a diverse array of business sectors, In Search of Excellence describes eight basic principles of management — action-stimulating, people-oriented, profit-maximizing practices — that made these organizations successful. Joining the HarperBusiness Essentials series, this phenomenal bestseller features a new Authors’ Note, and reintroduces these vital principles in an accessible and practical way for today’s management reader.” – Amazon Book Description

Silicon Sky: How One Small Start-up Went Over the Top to Beat the Big Boys into Satellite Heaven
Author: Gary Dorsey “For more than a decade some of the world’s most powerful defense companies have raced to launch the first constellation of low-earth orbit commercial satellites. The prize? An explosive global market for personal communications worth billions of dollars. Fresh out of Harvard Business School, twenty-something David Thompson entered the fray with an insane idea: to build his own rockets, satellites and a multi-million-dollar corporation that could go head-to-head against the big guys. His electrifying grab for the heavens—huge start-up costs, mind-blowing technical obstacles, and dark tangos with investors—is told by acclaimed writer Gary Dorsey, who was there reporting from inside. The story of their obsessive gamble in the high-stress game of space commerce is told through the lives of Thompson’s managers, markets, and “freshouts”—a brilliant team of young engineers from the country’s best universities. Like The Soul of a New Machine, Silicon Sky—part of the celebrated Sloan Technology Series—reads like fast-paced fiction, tracing the advent not just of a single company, but of a quickly emerging technological industry.” – Amazon Book Description

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
Author: Geoffrey A. Moore “The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment. This third edition brings Moore’s classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore’s most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.” – Amazon Book Description

The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business
Author: Clayton M. Christensen “Absolutely brilliant. Clayton Christensen provides an insightful analysis of changing technology and its importance to a company’s future success.” —Michael R. Bloomberg “This book ought to chill any executive who feels bulletproof —and inspire entrepreneurs aiming their guns.” —Forbes “The Innovator’s Dilemma is the revolutionary business book that has forever changed corporate America. Based on a truly radical idea—that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right—this Wall Street Journal, Business Week and New York Times Business bestseller is one of the most provocative and important business books ever written. Entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs ignore its wisdom and its warnings at their great peril.” – Amazon Book Description

Thinking, Fast and Slow Author: Daniel Kahneman Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012
Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011 “In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.” – Amazon Book Description

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Author: Chip and Dan Heath “Why is it so hard to make lasting changes in our companies, in our communities, and in our own lives? The primary obstacle is a conflict that’s built into our brains, say Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the critically acclaimed bestseller Made to Stick. Psychologists have discovered that our minds are ruled by two different systems—the rational mind and the emotional mind—that compete for control. The rational mind wants a great beach body; the emotional mind wants that Oreo cookie. The rational mind wants to change something at work; the emotional mind loves the comfort of the existing routine. This tension can doom a change effort—but if it is overcome, change can come quickly. In Switch, the Heaths show how everyday people—employees and managers, parents and nurses—have united both minds and, as a result, achieved dramatic results: ● The lowly medical interns who managed to defeat an entrenched, decades-old medical practice that was endangering patients. ● The home-organizing guru who developed a simple technique for overcoming the dread of housekeeping. ● The manager who transformed a lackadaisical customer-support team into service zealots byremoving a standard tool of customer service In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.” – Amazon Book Description

Status Anxiety
Author: Alain de Botton “Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love. To demonstrate his thesis, de Botton ranges through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins. Whether it’s assessing the class-consciousness of Christianity or the convulsions of consumer capitalism, dueling or home-furnishing, Status Anxiety is infallibly entertaining. And when it examines the virtues of informed misanthropy, art appreciation, or walking a lobster on a leash, it is not only wise but helpful.” – Amazon Book Description

Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Author: Michael Lewis “Moneyball is a quest for the secret of success in baseball. Following the low-budget Oakland Athletics, their larger-than-life general manger, Billy Beane, and the strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts, Michael Lewis has written not only “the single most influential baseball book ever” (Rob Neyer, Slate) but also what “may be the best book ever written on business” (Weekly Standard). “I wrote this book because I fell in love with a story. The story concerned a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, who had turned themselves into one of the most successful franchises in Major League Baseball. But the idea for the book came well before I had good reason to write it—before I had a story to fall in love with. It began, really, with an innocent question: how did one of the poorest teams in baseball, the Oakland Athletics, win so many games?” With these words Michael Lewis launches us into the funniest, smartest, and most contrarian book since, well, since Liar’s Poker. Moneyball is a quest for something as elusive as the Holy Grail, something that money apparently can’t buy: the secret of success in baseball. The logical places to look would be the front offices of major league teams, and the dugouts, perhaps even in the minds of the players themselves. Lewis mines all these possibilities—his intimate and original portraits of big league ballplayers are alone worth the price of admission—but the real jackpot is a cache of numbers—numbers!—collected over the years by a strange brotherhood of amateur baseball enthusiasts: software engineers, statisticians, Wall Street analysts, lawyers and physics professors. What these geek numbers show—no, prove—is that the traditional yardsticks of success for players and teams are fatally flawed. Even the box score misleads us by ignoring the crucial importance of the humble base-on-balls. This information has been around for years, and nobody inside Major League Baseball paid it any mind. And then came Billy Beane, General Manager of the Oakland Athletics. Billy paid attention to those numbers —with the second lowest payroll in baseball at his disposal he had to—and this book records his astonishing experiment in finding and fielding a team that nobody else wanted. Moneyball is a roller coaster ride: before the 2002 season opens, Oakland must relinquish its three most prominent (and expensive) players, is written off by just about everyone, and then comes roaring back to challenge the American League record for consecutive wins. In a narrative full of fabulous characters and brilliant excursions into the unexpected, Michael Lewis shows us how and why the new baseball knowledge works. He also sets up a sly and hilarious morality tale: Big Money, like Goliath, is always supposed to win…how can we not cheer for David?” – Amazon Book Description

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Author: Simon Sinek “Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty? In studying the leaders who’ve had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way-and it’s the complete opposite of what everyone else does. People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire.” – Amazon Book Description

The Art of War
Author: Sun Tzu “Featuring the Chinese text on the left and the English translation on the right, this is a beautifully bound book that would make a unique gift or collector’s item. Written in the 6^th century BC, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is still used as a book of military strategy today. Napoleon, Mae Zedong, General Vo Nguyen Giap and General Douglas MacArthur all claimed to have drawn inspiration from it. And beyond the world of war, business and management gurus have also applied Sun Tzu’s ideas to office politics and corporate strategy. Using a new translation by James Trapp and including editorial notes, this edition of The Art of War is printed on high quality paper and bound by traditional Chinese book-making techniques, and has been nominated for two prizes in the British Book Design & Production Awards 2011. It contains the full 13 chapters on such topics as laying plans, attacking by stratagem, weaponry, terrain and the use of spies. Sun Tzu addresses different campaign situations, marching, energy and how to exploit your enemy’s weaknesses.” – Amazon Book Description

The Emperor’s Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations
Author: Marcus Aurelius “In the tradition of The Art of Living and Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations—a practical book of timeless advice from one of the most powerful individuals in history—available for the first time in a highly accessible translation, including several unique features for contemporary readers and users of daily wisdom guides. Essayist Matthew Arnold described the man who wrote these words as “the most beautiful figure in history.” Possibly so, but he was certainly more than that. Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire at its height, yet he remained untainted by the incalculable wealth and absolute power that had corrupted many of his predecessors. Marcus knew the secret of how to live the good life amid trying and often catastrophic circumstances, of how to find happiness and peace when surrounded by misery and turmoil, and of how to choose the harder right over the easier wrong without apparent regard for self-interest. The historian Michael Grant praises Marcus’s book as “the best ever written by a major ruler,” and Josiah Bunting, superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, calls it “the essential book on character, leadership, duty.” Never intended for publication, the Meditations contains the practical and inspiring wisdom by which this remarkable emperor lived the life not of a saintly recluse, but of a general, administrator, legislator, spouse, parent, and judge besieged on all sides. The Emperor’s Handbook offers a vivid and fresh translation of this important piece of ancient literature. It brings Marcus’s words to life and shows his wisdom to be as relevant today as it was in the second century. This book belongs on the desk and in the briefcase of every business executive, political leader, and military officer. It speaks to the soul of anyone who has ever exercised authority or faced adversity or believed in a better day.” – Amazon Book Description

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change
Author: Stephen R. Covey “One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated readers for 25 years. It has transformed the lives of Presidents and CEOs, educators and parents— in short, millions of people of all ages and occupations” – Amazon Book Description

Outliers: The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell “In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band. Brilliant and entertaining, Outliers is a landmark work that will simultaneously delight and illuminate.” – Amazon Book Description

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust Author: Chris Brogan and Julien Smith “Today’s online influencers are Web natives who trade in trust, reputation, and relationships, using social media to accrue the influence that builds up or brings down businesses online. In Trust Agents, two social media veterans show you how to tap into the power of social networks to build your brand’s influence, reputation, and, of course, profits. In this revised paperback version, learn how businesses are using the latest online social tools to build networks of influence and how you can use those networks to positively impact your business. Combining high-level theory and practical actions, this guide delivers actionable steps and case studies that show how social media can positively impact your business.

New edition features specific first moves for entering social media for small businesses, educators, travel and hospitality enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and corporations
Authors both have a major presence on the social Web as well as years of online marketing and new media experience

If you want your business to succeed, don’t sit on the sidelines while new markets and channels grow. Instead, use the Web to build trust with your consumers using Trust Agents.” – Amazon Book Description

Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers
Author: Seth Godin The man Business Week calls “the ultimate entrepreneur for the Information Age” explains “Permission Marketing”—the groundbreaking concept that enables marketers to shape their message so that consumers will willingly accept it. “Whether it is the TV commercial that breaks into our favorite program, or the telemarketing phone call that disrupts a family dinner, traditional advertising is based on the hope of snatching our attention away from whatever we are doing. Seth Godin calls this Interruption Marketing, and, as companies are discovering, it no longer works. Instead of annoying potential customers by interrupting their most coveted commodity—time—Permission Marketing offers consumers incentives to accept advertising voluntarily. Now this Internet pioneer introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about advertising products and services. By reaching out only to those individuals who have signaled an interest in learning more about a product, Permission Marketing enables companies to develop long-term relationships with customers, create trust, build brand awareness — and greatly improve the chances of making a sale.” – Amazon Book Description

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery
Author: Garr Reynolds “Best-selling author and popular speaker Garr Reynolds is back in this newly revised edition of his classic, best-selling book, Presentation Zen, in which he showed readers there is a better way to reach the audience through simplicity and storytelling, and gave them the tools to confidently design and deliver successful presentations. In this new edition, Garr gives his readers new, fresh examples to draw inspiration from, with a whole new chapter for those who present on more technical and educational topics based on techniques used by many presenters who give high-level talks at TED and other powerhouse events. Whether the reader is in research, technology, business, or education–this book will show them how to take what could look like a really dry presentation and reinvigorate the material in totally fresh (and sometimes interactive!) ways that will make it memorable and resonate with the audience. Staying true to the mission of the first), Garr combines solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity to help readers along the path to simpler, more effective presentations that will be appreciated, remembered, and best of all, acted upon.” – Amazon Book Description

SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance
Author: Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. “The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics was a worldwide sensation, selling over four million copies in thirty-five languages and changing the way we look at the world. Now, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner return with SuperFreakonomics, and fans and newcomers alike will find that the freakquel is even bolder, funnier, and more surprising than the first. Four years in the making, SuperFreakonomics asks not only the tough questions, but the unexpected ones: What’s more dangerous, driving drunk or walking drunk? Why is chemotherapy prescribed so often if it’s so ineffective? Can a sex change boost your salary? SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
How much good do car seats do?
What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?
Did TV cause a rise in crime?
What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

Levitt and Dubner mix smart thinking and great storytelling like no one else, whether investigating a solution to global warming or explaining why the price of oral sex has fallen so drastically. By examining how people respond to incentives, they show the world for what it really is – good, bad, ugly, and, in the final analysis, super freaky. Freakonomics has been imitated many times over – but only now, with SuperFreakonomics, has it met its match.” – Amazon Book Description

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Author: Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? How much do parents really matter? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He studies the riddles of everyday life—from cheating and crime to parenting and sports—and reaches conclusions that turn conventional wisdom on its head. “Freakonomics is a groundbreaking collaboration between Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, an award-winning author and journalist. They set out to explore the inner workings of a crack gang, the truth about real estate agents, the secrets of the Ku Klux Klan, and much more. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, they show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives—how people get what they want or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.” – Amazon Book Description

The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century
Author: Thomas L. Friedman “One mark of a great book is that it makes you see things in a new way, and Mr. Friedman certainly succeeds in that goal,” the Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in The New York Times reviewingThe World Is Flat in 2005. In this new edition, Thomas L. Friedman includes fresh stories and insights to help us understand the flattening of the world. Weaving new information into his overall thesis, and answering the questions he has been most frequently asked by parents across the country, this third edition also includes two new chapters–on how to be a political activist and social entrepreneur in a flat world; and on the more troubling question of how to manage our reputations and privacy in a world where we are all becoming publishers and public figures. “The World Is Flat 3.0 is an essential update on globalization, its opportunities for individual empowerment, its achievements at lifting millions out of poverty, and its drawbacks–environmental, social, and political, powerfully illuminated by the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree.” – Amazon Book Description

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion
Author: Gary Vaynerchuk “Do you have a hobby you wish you could do all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take those passions and make a living doing what you love. In CRUSH IT! Why NOW Is The Time To Cash In On Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed in this book, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, any reader will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, CRUSH IT! is the ultimate driver′s manual for modern business. Gary Vaynerchuk has captured attention with his pioneering, multi-faceted approach to personal branding and business. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to build his family′s local retail wine business into a national industry leader, Gary rapidly leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, http://tv.winelibrary.com, his video blog about wine. Gary has always had an early-to-market approach, launching Wine Library′s retail website in 1997 and Wine Library TV in February of 2006. His lessons on social media, passion, transparency, and reactionary business are not to be missed!” – Amazon Book Description

Shogun
Author:James Claville “A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in an extraordinary saga of a time and a place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust, and the struggle for power…” – Amazon Book Description

Atlas Shrugged
Author: Ayn Rand “With this acclaimed work and its immortal query, “Who is John Galt?”, Ayn Rand found the perfect artistic form to express her vision of existence. Atlas Shrugged made Rand not only one of the most popular novelists of the century, but one of its most influential thinkers. Atlas Shrugged is the astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world–and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, Atlas Shrugged stretches the boundaries further than any book you have ever read. It is a mystery, not about the murder of a man’s body, but about the murder–and rebirth–of man’s spirit. Atlas Shrugged is the “second most influential book for Americans today” after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club” – Amazon Book Description

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement
Author: David Brooks “With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way: The unconscious mind, it turns out, is not a dark, vestigial place, but a creative one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made—the natural habitat of The Social Animal. Brooks reveals the deeply social aspect of our minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. He demolishes conventional definitions of success and looks toward a culture based on trust and humility. The Social Animal is a moving intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. It is an essential book for our time—one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.” – Amazon Book Description

James Buchanan: The American Presidents Series: The 15th President, 1857-1861
Author: Jean H. Baker A provocative reconsideration of a presidency on the brink of Civil War “Almost no president was as well trained and well prepared for the office as James Buchanan. He had served in the Pennsylvania state legislature, the U.S. House, and the U.S. Senate; he was Secretary of State and was even offered a seat on the Supreme Court. And yet, by every measure except his own, James Buchanan was a miserable failure as president, leaving office in disgrace. Virtually all of his intentions were thwarted by his own inability to compromise: he had been unable to resolve issues of slavery, caused his party to split-thereby ensuring the election of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln-and made the Civil War all but inevitable. Historian Jean H. Baker explains that we have rightly placed Buchanan at the end of the presidential rankings, but his poor presidency should not be an excuse to forget him. To study Buchanan is to consider the implications of weak leadership in a time of national crisis. Elegantly written, Baker’s volume offers a balanced look at a crucial moment in our nation’s history and explores a man who, when given the opportunity, failed to rise to the challenge.” – Amazon Book Description

Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
Author: James M. McPherson “As we celebrate the bicentennial of Lincoln?s birth, this study by preeminent, bestselling Civil War historian James M. McPherson provides a rare, fresh take on one of the most enigmatic figures in American history. Tried by War offers a revelatory (and timely) portrait of leadership during the greatest crisis our nation has ever endured. Suspenseful and inspiring, this is the story of how Lincoln, with almost no previous military experience before entering the White House, assumed the powers associated with the role of commander in chief, and through his strategic insight and will to fight changed the course of the war and saved the Union.” – Amazon Book Description

Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else
Author: Geoff Colvin “Asked to explain why a few people truly excel, most people offer one of two answers. The first is hard work. Yet we all know plenty of hard workers who have been doing the same job for years or decades without becoming great. The other possibility is that the elite possess an innate talent for excelling in their field. We assume that Mozart was born with an astounding gift for music, and Warren Buffett carries a gene for brilliant investing. The trouble is, scientific evidence doesn’t support the notion that specific natural talents make great performers. According to distinguished journalist Geoff Colvin, both the hard work and natural talent camps are wrong. What really makes the difference is a highly specific kind of effort-“deliberate practice”-that few of us pursue when we’re practicing golf or piano or stockpicking. Based on scientific research, Talent is Overrated shares the secrets of extraordinary performance and shows how to apply these principles. It features the stories of people who achieved world-class greatness through deliberate practice-including Benjamin Franklin, comedian Chris Rock, football star Jerry Rice, and top CEOs Jeffrey Immelt and Steven Ballmer.” – Amazon Book Description

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
Author: Matt Ridley “In a bold and provocative interpretation of economic history, Matt Ridley, the New York Times-bestselling author of Genome and The Red Queen, makes the case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—what Ridley calls cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity. Fans of the works of Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel), Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money), and Thomas Friedman (The World Is Flat) will find much to ponder and enjoy in The Rational Optimist.” – Amazon Book Description

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Author: David Foster Wallace “Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend. Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.” – Amazon Book Description

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust
Author: Diana B. Henriques The inside story of Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, with surprising and shocking new details from Madoff himself. Who is Bernie Madoff, and how did he pull off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history? These questions have fascinated people ever since the news broke about the respected New York financier who swindled his friends, relatives, and other investors out of $65 billion through a fraud that lasted for decades. Many have speculated about what might have happened or what must have happened, but no reporter has been able to get the full story — until now. “In The Wizard of Lies, Diana B. Henriques of The New York Times — who has led the paper’s coverage of the Madoff scandal since the day the story broke — has written the definitive book on the man and his scheme, drawing on unprecedented access and more than one hundred interviews with people at all levels and on all sides of the crime, including Madoff’s first interviews for publication since his arrest. Henriques also provides vivid details from the various lawsuits, government investigations, and court filings that will explode the myths that have come to surround the story. A true-life financial thriller, The Wizard of Lies contrasts Madoff’s remarkable rise on Wall Street, where he became one of the country’s most trusted and respected traders, with dramatic scenes from his accelerating slide toward self-destruction. It is also the most complete account of the heartbreaking personal disasters and landmark legal battles triggered by Madoff’s downfall — the suicides, business failures, fractured families, shuttered charities — and the clear lessons this timeless scandal offers to Washington, Wall Street, and Main Street.” – Amazon Book Description

Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures—and Yours
Author: Tarun Khanna “Much attention is being paid to business opportunity in China and India, the world’s most populous nations. According to Tarun Khanna, it’s the new entrepreneurial emergence of these two nations that will have the greatest impact on business, politics, and global society as a whole. Billions of Entrepreneurs is an elegantly written book that mixes on-the-ground stories with thorough research to show how Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs are creating change through new business models, and bringing hope to countless people across the globe.” – Amazon Book Description

Comebacks: Powerful Lessons from Leaders Who Endured Setbacks and Recaptured Success on Their Terms
Authors: Andrea Redmond and Patricia Crisafulli “In tough economic times, when careers are derailed and leaders are forced to rewrite their professional plans, this book enlightens and uplifts. Comebacks features an all-star cast of ten leaders who endured setbacks-for some a public fall in the midst of media scrutiny-then reassessed and moved ahead with new purpose. Based on revealing interviews, the book presents a behind-the–headlines glimpse into the lives of leaders; how they drew upon resources, both internal and external, to move on; and the lessons that helped them redefine success. Leaders profiled include:

Jacques Nasser, former CEO of Ford Motor Co., recently appointed Chairman of BHP Billiton, the world’s largest natural resources company
Patricia Dunn, former Chair of Hewlett-Packard, vilified for her alleged role in corporate espionage only to be exonerated from all charges, today active in philanthropy
Jamie Dimon (JP Morgan), Herbert “Pug” Winokur (Enron Corp.), David Neeleman (JetBlue), and more

Redmond, a top executive recruiter, and Crisafulli, author of The House of Dimon, show how all leaders face adversity, but true leaders turn adversity into success.” – Amazon Book Description

The Road Ahead: Completely Revised and Up-to-Date
Author: Bill Gates “In a study complete with CD-ROM, the founder of Microsoft presents his vision for the future in which he sees the digital technologies of the coming years changing the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate.” – Amazon Book Description

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Author: Joshua Foer “An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes.” He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship too deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.” – Amazon Book Description

How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
Author: Stanley Fish “Outspoken New York Times columnist Stanley Fish offers an entertaining, erudite analysis of language and rhetoric in this delightful celebration of the written word. Drawing on a wide range of great writers, from Philip Roth to Antonin Scalia to Jane Austen and beyond, Fish’s How to Write a Sentence is much more than a writing manual—it is a penetrating exploration into the art and craft of sentences.” – Amazon Book Description

Ask the Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job
Author: Nick A. Corcodilos “Offers detailed advice and insider tips for making it in today’s new business world, the age of downsizing, by explaining how to interview properly and show off one’s best skills in a short period of time in order to make an impression. Original.” – Amazon Book Description

Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life
Author: Shelley Carson Research-based techniques that show everyone how to expand creativity and increase productivity “Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson?s provocative book, published in partnership with Harvard Health Publications, reveals why creativity isn’t something only scientists, investors, artists, writers, and musicians enjoy; in fact, all of us use our creative brains every day at home, work and play.? Each of us has the ability to increase our mental functioning and creativity by learning to move flexibly among several brain states.

Explains seven brain states or “brainsets” and their functions as related to creativity, productivity, and innovation
Provides quizzes, exercises, and self-tests to activate each of these seven brainsets to unlock our maximum creativity

Your Creative Brain, called by critics a? New classic? In the field of creativity, offers inspiring suggestions that can be applied in both one’s personal and professional life.” – Amazon Book Description

Henry IV Part I
Author: William Shakespeare “William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist (1564-1616). This ebook presents «Henry IV Part I», from William Shakespeare. A dynamic table of contents enables to jump directly to the chapter selected. TABLE OF CONTENTS -01- ABOUT THIS BOOK -02- DRAMATIS PERSONAE -03- ACTUS PRIMUS. PART I. HENRY IV -04- ACTUS SECUNDUS. PART I. HENRY IV -05- ACTUS TERTIUS. PART I. HENRY IV -06- ACTUS QUARTUS. PART I. HENRY IV -07- ACTUS QUINTUS. PART I. HENRY IV” – Amazon Book Description

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599
Author: James Shapiro “1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen. James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.” – Amazon Book Description

The Age of Unreason
Author:Charles Handy “In an era when change is constant, random, and, as Handy calls it, discontinuous, it is necessary to break out of old ways of thinking in order to use change to our advantage. Handy examines how dramatic changes are transforming business, education, and the nature of work. We can see it in astounding new developments in technology, in the shift in demand from manual to cerebral skills, and in the virtual disappearance of lifelong, full-time jobs. Handy maintains that discontinuous change requires discontinuous, upside-down thinking, and discusses the need for new kinds of organizations, new approaches to work, new types of schools, and new ideas about the nature of our society.” – Amazon Book Description

Competing for the Future
Author: Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad “New competitive realities have ruptured industry boundaries, overthrown much of standard management practice, and rendered conventional models of strategy and growth obsolete. In their stead have come the powerful ideas and methodologies of Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad, whose much-revered thinking has already engendered a new language of strategy. In this book, they develop a coherent model for how today’s executives can identify and accomplish no less than heroic goals in tomorrow’s marketplace. Their masterful blueprint addresses how executives can ease the tension between competing today and clearing a path toward leadership in the future.” – Amazon Book Description

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Author: Michael E. Porter “Now nearing its sixtieth printing in English and translated into nineteen languages, Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity—like all great breakthroughs—Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies—lowest cost, differentiation, and focus—which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter’s framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. 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.” -Amazon Book Description

Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ
Author: Daniel Goleman “Everyone knows that high IQ is no guarantee of success, happiness, or virtue, but until Emotional Intelligence, we could only guess why. Daniel Goleman’s brilliant report from the frontiers of psychology and neuroscience offers startling new insight into our “two minds”—the rational and the emotional—and how they together shape our destiny. Through vivid examples, Goleman delineates the five crucial skills of emotional intelligence, and shows how they determine our success in relationships, work, and even our physical well-being. What emerges is an entirely new way to talk about being smart. The best news is that “emotional literacy” is not fixed early in life. Every parent, every teacher, every business leader, and everyone interested in a more civil society, has a stake in this compelling vision of human possibility.” – Amazon Book Description

The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management
Author: Peter Drucker “Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher, Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than sixty years. Now for readers everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of organizations, individuals, and society, there is The Essential Drucker—an invaluable compilation of essential materials from the works of a management legend. Containing twenty-six core selections, The Essential Drucker covers the basic principles and concerns of management and its problems, challenges, and opportunities, giving managers, executives, and professionals the tools to perform the tasks that the economy and society of tomorrow will demand of them.” – Amazon Book Description

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
Author: Peter Senge “This revised edition of Peter Senge’s bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire. The updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will: • Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them • Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity • Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets • Teach you to see the forest and the trees • End the struggle between work and personal time” – Amazon Book Description

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Author: Eliyahu Goldratt “Written in a fast-paced thriller style, The Goal, a gripping novel, is transforming management thinking throughout the world. It is a book to recommend to your friends in industry – even to your bosses – but not to your competitors. Alex Rogo is a harried plant manager working ever more desperately to try improve performance. His factory is rapidly heading for disaster. So is his marriage. He has ninety days to save his plant – or it will be closed by corporate HQ, with hundreds of job losses. It takes a chance meeting with a professor from student days – Jonah – to help him break out of conventional ways of thinking to see what needs to be done. The story of Alex’s fight to save his plant is more than compulsive reading. It contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas, which underline the Theory of Constraints (TOC), developed by Eli Goldratt.” – Amazon Book Description

Guerilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business
Author: Jay Conrad Levinson “When Guerrilla Marketing was first published in 1983, Jay Levinson revolutionized marketing strategies for the small-business owner with his take-no-prisoners approach to finding clients. Based on hundreds of solid ideas that really work, Levinson’s philosophy has given birth to a new way of learning about market share and how to gain it. In this completely updated and expanded fourth edition, Levinson offers a new arsenal of weaponry for small-business success including * strategies for marketing on the Internet (explaining when and precisely how to use it) * tips for using new technology, such as podcasting and automated marketing * programs for targeting prospects and cultivating repeat and referral business * management lessons in the age of telecommuting and freelance employees Guerrilla Marketing is the entrepreneur’s marketing bible — and the book every small-business owner should have on his or her shelf.” – Amazon Book Description

The Human Side of Enterprise
Author: Douglas McGregor “What are your assumptions (implicit as well as explicit) about the most effective way to manage people?” “So began Douglas McGregor in this 1960 management classic. It was a seemingly simple question he asked, yet it led to a fundamental revolution in management. Today, with the rise of the global economy, the information revolution, and the growth of knowledge-driven work, McGregor’s simple but provocative question continues to resonate-perhaps more powerfully than ever before. Heralded as one of the most important pieces of management literature ever written, a touchstone for scholars and a handbook for practitioners, The Human Side of Enterprise continues to receive the highest accolades nearly half a century after its initial publication. Influencing such major management gurus such as Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, McGregor’s revolutionary Theory Y-which contends that individuals are self-motivated and self-directed-and Theory X-in which employees must be commanded and controlled-has been widely taught in business schools, industrial relations schools, psychology departments, and professional development seminars for over four decades. In this special annotated edition of the worldwide management classic, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Senior Research Scientist in MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division, shows us how today’s leaders have successfully incorporated McGregor’s methods into modern management styles and practices. The added quotes and commentary bring the content right into today’s debates and business models. Now more than ever, the timeless wisdom of Douglas McGregor can light the path towards a management style that nurtures leadership capability, creates effective teams, ensures internal alignment, achieves high performance, and cultivates an authentic, value-driven workplace–lessons we all need to learn as we make our way in this brave new world of the 21st century.” – Amazon Book Description

Leading Change, With a New Preface
Author:John P. Kotter The international bestseller—now with a new preface by author John Kotter. “Millions worldwide have read and embraced John Kotter’s ideas on change management and leadership. From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented M&A activity to scandal, greed, and ultimately, recession—we’ve learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. It’s the rule. Now with a new preface, this refreshed edition of the global bestseller Leading Change is more relevant than ever. John Kotter’s now-legendary eight-step process for managing change with positive results has become the foundation for leaders and organizations across the globe. By outlining the process every organization must go through to achieve its goals, and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work. Leading Change is widely recognized as his seminal work and is an important precursor to his newer ideas on acceleration published in Harvard Business Review. Needed more today than at any time in the past, this bestselling business book serves as both visionary guide and practical toolkit on how to approach the difficult yet crucial work of leading change in any type of organization. Reading this highly personal book is like spending a day with the world’s foremost expert on business leadership. You’re sure to walk away inspired—and armed with the tools you need to inspire others. “– Amazon Book Description

On Becoming a Leader
Author: Warren Bennis “Deemed the dean of leadership gurus” by Forbes magazine, Warren Bennis has for years persuasively argued that leaders are not bornthey are made. Delving into the qualities that define leadership, the people who exemplify it, and the strategies that anyone can apply to achieve it, his classic work On Becoming a Leader has served as a source of essential insight for countless readers. In a world increasingly defined by turbulence and uncertainty, the call to leadership is more urgent than ever. Featuring a provocative new introduction, this new edition will inspire a fresh generation of potential leaders to excellence.” – Amazon Book Description

Out of the Crisis Author: W. Edwards Deming
“Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment. “According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management’s failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them. Previously published by MIT-CAES” – Amazon Book Description

My Years with General Motors

Author: Alfred P. Sloan Jr. “From the book flap: Only a handful of business books have reached the status of a classic, having withstood the test of over thirty years’ time. Even today, Bill Gates praises MY YEARS WITH GENERAL MOTORS as the best book to read on business, and Business Week has named it the number one choice for its “bookshelf of indispensable reading.” MY YEARS WITH GENERAL MOTORS became an instant bestseller when it was first published in 1963. It has since been used a a manual for managers, offering personal glimpses into the practice of the “discipline of management” by the man who perfected it. This is the story no other businessman could tell–a distillation of half a century of intimate leadership experience with a giant industry and an inside look at dramatic events and creative business management.” – Amazon Book Description

The One Minute Manager
Author: Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson “For more than twenty years, millions of managers in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses nationwide have followed The One Minute Manager’s techniques, thus increasing their productivity, job satisfaction, and personal prosperity. These very real results were achieved through learning the management techniques that spell profitability for the organization and its employees. The One Minute Manager is a concise, easily read story that reveals three very practical secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands. The book also presents several studies in medicine and the behavioral sciences that clearly explain why these apparently simple methods work so well with so many people. By the book’s end you will know how to apply them to your own situation and enjoy the benefits. That’s why The One Minute Manager has continued to appear on business bestseller lists for more than two decades, and has become an international sensation.” – Amazon Book Description

Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution
Author: James Champy and Michael Hammer “The most successful business book of the last decade, Reengineering the Corporation is the pioneering work on the most important topic in business today: achieving dramatic performance improvements. This book leads readers through the radical redesign of a company’s processes, organization, and culture to achieve a quantum leap in performance. Michael Hammer and James Champy have updated and revised their milestone work for the New Economy they helped to create—promising to help corporations save hundreds of millions of dollars more, raise their customer satisfaction still higher, and grow ever more nimble in the years to come.” – Amazon Book Description

The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and Other Top Companies are Honing Their Performance
Author: Peter S. Pande, Robert P. Neuman and Roland R. Cavanagh “This title is an implementation blueprint for Six Sigma! “”The Six Sigma Way” demystifies Six Sigma with a real-world ‘how-to ‘guide. A good investment for any business planning to launch Six Sigma.” – John Biedry, VP Quality and Compliance, Sears Home Services. Cost reduction …productivity improvement …customer retention …these are the promises of the Six Sigma quality management system. “The Six Sigma Way” reveals how GE, Motorola, and numerous other companies are successfully using Six Sigma to fine-tune products and processes, improve performance, and increase profits. Now you can read the roadmap for implementing Six Sigma in your manufacturing or service organization.The authors – who have worked with some of the most visible Six Sigma companies including GE – provide step-by-step guidance and practical implementation guidelines. Whether your goal is to fix a process problem or implement Six Sigma company-wide, “The Six Sigma Way” will help you develop an approach customized for your company’s needs and the challenges of the twenty-first century business environment. “The Six Sigma Way”: addresses the challenges and politics of launching, leading, and training people for Six Sigma; focuses on implementing the major steps and quality improvement tools in the Six Sigma system; and features insights, comments, and examples from business leaders and managers using Six Sigma in their organizations.” – Amazon Book Description

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production
Author: Taiichi Ohno “In this classic text, Taiichi Ohno–inventor of the Toyota Production System and Lean manufacturing–shares the genius that sets him apart as one of the most disciplined and creative thinkers of our time. Combining his candid insights with a rigorous analysis of Toyota’s attempts at Lean production, Ohno’s book explains how Lean principles can improve any production endeavor. A historical and philosophical description of just-in-time and Lean manufacturing, this work is a must read for all students of human progress. On a more practical level, it continues to provide inspiration and instruction for those seeking to improve efficiency through the elimination of waste.” – Amazon Book Description

Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life Author: Spencer Johnson “With Who Moved My Cheese? Dr. Spencer Johnson realizes the need for finding the language and tools to deal with change–an issue that makes all of us nervous and uncomfortable. Most people are fearful of change because they don’t believe they have any control over how or when it happens to them. Since change happens either to the individual or by the individual, Spencer Johnson shows us that what matters most is the attitude we have about change. When the Y2K panic gripped the corporate realm before the new millenium, most work environments finally recognized the urgent need to get their computers and other business systems up to speed and able to deal with unprecedented change. And businesses realized that this was not enough: they needed to help people get ready, too. Spencer Johnson has created his new book to do just that. The coauthor of the multimillion bestsellerThe One Minute Manager has written a deceptively simple story with a dramatically important message that can radically alter the way we cope with change. Who Moved My Cheese? allows for common themes to become topics for discussion and individual interpretation. Who Moved My Cheese? takes the fear and anxiety out of managing the future and shows people a simple way to successfully deal with the changing times, providing them with a method for moving ahead with their work and lives safely and effectively.” – Amazon Book Description

The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
Author: Noam Wasserman “Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder’s Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder’s Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.” – Amazon Book Description

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
Author: Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson and Dick Costolo “As each new generation of entrepreneurs emerges, there is a renewed interest in how venture capital deals come together. Yet there is little reliable information focused on venture capital deals. Nobody understands this better than authors Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. For more than twenty years, they’ve been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings, and now, with the Second Edition ofVenture Deals, they continue to share their experiences in this field with you. Engaging and informative, this reliable resource skillfully outlines the essential elements of the venture capital term sheet–from terms related to economics to terms related to control. It strives to give a balanced view of the particular terms along with the strategies to getting to a fair deal. In addition to examining the nuts and bolts of the term sheet, Venture Deals, Second Edition also introduces you to the various participants in the process and discusses how fundraising works.

Fully updated to reflect the intricacies of startups and entrepreneurship in today’s dynamic economic environment
Offers valuable insights into venture capital deal structure and strategies
Brings a level of transparency to a process that is rarely well understood

Whether you’re an experienced or aspiring entrepreneur, venture capitalist, or lawyer who partakes in these particular types of deals, you will benefit from the insights found throughout this new book.” – Amazon Book Description

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Author: Eric Ries “Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs – in companies of all sizes – a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in an age when companies need to innovate more than ever.” – Amazon Book Description

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
Author: Steven Gary Blank The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures – The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book. Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for success. If your organization is starting a new venture, and you’re thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing and business development you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany. Essential reading for anyone starting something new. 3,000 fixed sentences, 10,000 new commas. Same revolutionary ideas.

The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Author: Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits “This book is both an introduction for those unfamiliar with lean concepts and highly actionable for lean practitioners. It is a user friendly guide, written to be accessible to marketing professionals, Engineers startup founders and entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, and anyone else involved in building scalable startups. Existing companies will benefit to from applying Customer Development principles described in detail herein: for example, startups struggling to achieve market traction, or well established companies seeking to spark new innovation. This is a business book for startups like no other. No fluff, but rather sound principles and concrete steps to take to build your business. Get up to speed on Customer Development now.” – Amazon Book Description

The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets
Author: Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits and Eric Ries The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet. Anyone can be visionary. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to: Apply actionable tips, tricks, and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce the time and budget for product development Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets along with bonus online videos You are not a Visionary . . . yet. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to become one. Most of us believe entrepreneurial visionaries are born, not made. Our media glorify business outliers like Bezos, Branson, Gates, and Jobs as heroes with X-ray vision who can look to the future, see clearly what will be, imagine a fully formed product or experience, and then simply make the vision real. Many in our entrepreneur community still believe that to be visionary, we must merely execute on a seemingly good idea and ignore all doubt. With this mindset, companies build doomed products in a vacuum; enterprises make ill-fated innovation investment decisions; and employees and shareholders come along for an uncomfortable ride. Falling prey to the Myth of the Visionary confuses talented entrepreneurs, product managers, innovators, and investors. It leads us to heartbreaking, costly, and preventable failures in new product and venture development. The Lean Entrepreneur moves us beyond this myth. It combines powerful customer insight, rapid experimentation, and easily actionable data from the Lean Startup methodology to empower individuals, companies, and entire teams to evolve their vision, solve problems, and create value at the speed of the Internet. Anyone can be visionary. The Lean Entrepreneur shows you how to:

Apply actionable tips, tricks, and hacks from successful lean entrepreneurs
Leverage the Innovation Spectrum to disrupt existing markets and create new ones
Drive strategies for efficient market testing with Minimal Viable Products
Engage customers with Viability Testing and radically reduce the time and budget for product development
Rapidly create cross-functional innovation teams that devour roadblocks and set new benchmarks
Bring your organization critical focus on the power of loyal customers and valuable products you can build to serve them
Leverage instructive tools, skill-building exercises, and worksheets along with bonus online videos

Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Author: Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur “Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model–or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”” – Amazon Book Description

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days
Author: Jessica Livingston “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.” – Amazon Book Description

Watership Down: A Novel
Author: Richard Adams “A phenomenal worldwide bestseller for more than forty years, Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Set in England’s Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage, and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.” – Amazon Book Description \

The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow “A lot of professors give talks titled “The Last Lecture.” Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them. And while they speak, audiences can’t help but mull the same question: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy? When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave–“Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”–wasn’t about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because “time is all you have…and you may find one day that you have less than you think”). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living. In this book, Randy Pausch has combined the humor, inspiration and intelligence that made his lecture such a phenomenon and given it an indelible form. It is a book that will be shared for generations to come.” – Amazon Book Description

A Short History of Nearly Everything
Author: Bill Bryson “In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson trekked the Appalachian Trail—well, most of it. In A Sunburned Country, he confronted some of the most lethal wildlife Australia has to offer. Now, in his biggest book, he confronts his greatest challenge: to understand—and, if possible, answer—the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. To that end, he has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians, travelling to their offices, laboratories, and field camps. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful minds. A Short History of Nearly Everything is the record of this quest, and it is a sometimes profound, sometimes funny, and always supremely clear and entertaining adventure in the realms of human knowledge, as only Bill Bryson can render it. Science has never been more involving or entertaining.” – Amazon Book Description

Man’s Search for Meaning Author: Viktor Frankl “Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory-known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)-holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful. At the time of Frankl’s death in 1997, Man’s Search for Meaning had sold more than 10 million copies in twenty-four languages. A 1991 reader survey for the Library of Congress that asked readers to name a “book that made a difference in your life” found Man’s Search for Meaning among the ten most influential books in America. Beacon Press, the original English-language publisher of Man’s Search for Meaning, is issuing this new paperback edition with a new Foreword, biographical Afterword, jacket, price, and classroom materials to reach new generations of readers.” – Amazon Book Description

The Forever War
Author: Joe Haldeman “The Earth’s leaders have drawn a line in the interstellar sand–despite the fact that the fierce alien enemy they would oppose is inscrutable, unconquerable, and very far away. A reluctant conscript drafted into an elite Military unit, Private William Mandella has been propelled through space and time to fight in the distant thousand-year conflict; to perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive the ordeal and return home. But “home” may be even more terrifying than battle, because, thanks to the time dilation caused by space travel, Mandella is aging months while the Earth he left behind is aging centuries…” – Amazon Book Description

Cosmos
Author: Carl Sagan When Cosmos was first broadcast in 1980, our world–and the context of Carl Sagan’s eloquent “personal journey”–was a different place. The late Dr. Sagan would be pleased to witness the cooling of the Cold War, the continued exploration of space, and ongoing efforts to curb our destructive dependence on fossil fuels. For Sagan’s series is far more than a guided tour through “billions and billions” of stars and galaxies. It remains a profound plea for the unity of humankind, for the recognition that “we are a way for the universe to know itself,” with an obligation to know our origin, our place in the universe, and our future potential. In the course of 13 fascinating hours, Cosmos spans its own galaxy of topics to serve Sagan’s theme, each segment deepening our understanding of how we got from there (simple microbes in the primordial mud) to here (space-faring civilization in the 21st century). In his “ship of the imagination,” Sagan guides us to the farthest reaches of space and takes us back into the history of scientific inquiry, from the ancient library of Alexandria to the NASA probes of our neighboring planets. Upon this vast canvas Sagan presents the “cosmic calendar,” placing the 15-billion-year history of the universe into an accessible one-year framework, then filling it with a stunning chronology of events, both interstellar and earthbound.

Leadership for a Better World: Understanding the Social Change Model of Leadership Development
Author: Susan R. Komives & Wendy Wagner “The Social Change Model of Leadership Development particularly appeals to undergraduate students because it’s an approach to leadership development that views leadership as a purposeful, collaborative, values-based process that uses multiple perspectives to enact positive social change. This accessible textbook engages the reader in understanding the nature of social change and the dimensions of leadership that help one become an effective change agent. It includes case studies, reflection questions, and learning activities to help facilitate engagement with the model. Written and edited by some of the country’s most recognized and active scholars and educators in student leadership, the book has been field-tested by leadership faculty.” – Amazon Book Description

Nosh for Students – A Fun Student Cookbook – Photo with Every Recipe
Author: Joy May “Soon after the author’s son went off to university with no cooking experience he returned after having made himself ill with chocolate bars, milk and pizza for his only means of survival. Joy decided her son needed a cookbook. After trawling the bookshop shelves for a book that was not only suitable for his level of cooking expertise but also one that would inspire him to actually cook she realised there was nothing out there that worked for him. So she wrote one herself. Realising that one of the keys to getting her son to try the recipes was to show him what it was going to look like in the end. Therefore, she made sure that there was a photo with every recipe. So, setting about photographing every dish on her dining room table, she created the first ever edition of Nosh4Students back in 2001. Now in its fourth edition the book has a refreshed layout, new photography and brand new addition online content to support the book itself. It is suitable for students like Ben with busy lives, a low budget and hungry stomachs.” – Amazon Book Description

The Lorax
Author: Dr. Seuss “Unless someone like you…cares a whole awful lot…nothing is going to get better…It’s not.” “Long before saving the earth became a global concern, Dr. Seuss, speaking through his character the Lorax, warned against mindless progress and the danger it posed to the earth’s natural beauty. “– Amazon Book Description

I Was There: A Century of Alumni Stories about the University of Alberta, 1906–2006 (University of Alberta Centennial Series)
Author: Ellen Schoeck & Jim Edwards “I Was There shares the insights and experiences of the generations of students, professors, and staff who lived and worked at the U of A for the past 100 years. First-person stories and period photographs present a unique insight into university lore from the vantage point of those who were most intimately involved in making the university what it is today: the students and alumni.” – Amazon Book Description

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Your Guide to The Best Books for Business Majors

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