Best of
Business
2022
The Power Law: Inside Silicon Valley's Venture Capital Machine
Sebastian Mallaby - 2022
Innovations rarely come from "experts." Elon Musk was not an "electric car person" before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, which are the only innovations that really matter, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future can't be predicted, it can only be discovered, through iterative venture-backed experiments. It is the nature of the game that most of these experiments will fail, but a very few successes will succeed at such a scale that they will more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC sector, and all of Silicon Valley, and the wider tech sector shaped in its image. The implications of that power law echo around the world.In The Power Law, Sebastian Mallaby has parlayed unprecedented access to the most successful venture capitalists of all time - the key figures at Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz, among others--into a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis that unfurls the whole history of incubating tech companies, in the Valley and ultimately all over the world. We learn the unvarnished truth, often for the first time, about some of the most iconic successes and infamous disasters in Valley history, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the avalanche of venture money that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber. We're taken inside the different strategic models of the storied venture firms, their virtues and drawbacks. We see the impact of culture, within VC partnerships and the companies they nurture--the importance of consciously tending it, and the disasters that ensue when power is concentrated in the wrong hands.VCs' relentless search for power-law grand slams brews an obsession with the ideal of the lone entrepreneur-genius, and companies seen as potential unicorns are given intoxicating amounts of power, with sometimes disastrous results. On a deeper, more systemic level, the need to make outsized bets on unproven talent reinforces bias that channels money and support to, e.g., a certain kind of white guy from Stanford, with women and minorities still represented, within VCs themselves and the companies they support, at woefully low levels. This doesn't just have social justice implications: China's homegrown VC sector, having learned at the Valley's feet, is exploding, and in short order now has far more women VC heads than America has ever had. Still and all, Silicon Valley VC remains the most successful and influential incubator of business innovation in the world: it is not where ideas come from so much as where they go, to become the products and companies that create the future. Of all the people in the world gambling on the future, this group has made, not just a science of it, but many competing sciences, and The Power Law, by taking us so deeply inside their game, give us the benefit of thinking more keenly about our own future through their eyes.
Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity
Frank Slootman - 2022
In Amp It Up Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model--and they don't need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day.Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them.Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
Jimmy Soni - 2022
“Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Code BreakerToday, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.
Unbreakable: How I Turned My Depression and Anxiety into Motivation and You Can Too
Jay Glazer - 2022
The Three Chairs: How Great Leaders Drive Communication, Performance, and Engagement
Karyn Gordon - 2022
But if you don't learn foundational leadership skills, research shows you will face problems with communication, performance, engagement, and employee retention. The stakes are high.How can you quickly learn essential leadership skills? While most organizations and professionals value leadership development, it is often time-intensive and impractical.In The Three Chairs, Dr. Karyn Gordon provides a proven framework to transform anyone's ability to lead others. Nominated for the 2021 RBC Canadian Women Entrepreneur Award, Dr. Karyn has spent over 20 years teaching more than 500,000 people across 17 countries. Her unique approach, based on the 5 Leadership EQ Skills(TM), will show you how to:Identify Great Leadership: Understand the most essential attitudes in yourself and othersMaster Communication: Give and receive feedback to drive team accountabilityEnhance Proper Goal-Setting: Build a confident mindset and alignment on key objectivesImprove Decision-Making: Drive performance, time-management, and delegationReduce Stress And Anxiety: Increase wellness and reduce burnoutIncrease Employee Engagement: Boost retention and build a better cultureThe Three Chairs is the breakthrough leadership book for the 21st century. Discover tools you can easily apply at work and home that get results for everyone from CEOs to students. See yourself more clearly, engage more deeply with those around you, and equip yourself to be a confident great leader.
The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale
John A. List - 2022
But scale isn't just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It's about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one—whether you’re growing a small business, rolling out a diversity and inclusion program, or delivering billions of doses of a vaccine. Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve “high voltage”—the ability to be replicated at scale. In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains. You’ll learn: • How celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expanded his restaurant empire by focusing on scalable “ingredients” (until it collapsed because talent doesn’t scale) • Why the failure to detect false positives early on caused the Reagan-era drug-prevention program to backfire at scale • How governments could deliver more services to more citizens if they focused on the last dollar spent • How one education center leveraged positive spillovers to narrow the achievement gap across the entire community • Why the right set of incentives, applied at scale, can boost voter turnout, increase clean energy use, encourage patients to consistently take their prescribed medication, and more. By understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large. Because a better world can only be built at scale.
LifePass: Develop the Mindset, Techniques, and Goals to Optimize Your Life
Payal Kadakia - 2022
When Payal Kadakia let go of the pressure to achieve a traditional kind of success, she tuned into her calling and built ClassPass into a billion-dollar business. In LifePass, she shares her signature goal-setting method that not only changed her approach to her career, but her entire life. You will learn to push through limits, fuel your life with purpose, and become an expert at achieving your goals—both professionally and personally. It's time to live by your own rules. LifePass shows you how.
Romance Your Goals
Zoe York - 2022
In order to find success at genre fiction writing, authors need to figure out which projects will move them towards their ideal career. In Romance Your Goals, New York Times and USA Today bestselling romance author Zoe York lays out a new framework for creating a chain of goals, achievable mile markers that point you in the right direction. This book includes:* decision-making tools you can add to your career management toolbox* further expansion on the Series 2.0 concept, and how progressive career growth can happen without breakout bestseller success* support for knowing when to take your writing career in a new direction
Founder Brand: Turn Your Story Into Your Competitive Advantage
Dave Gerhardt - 2022
Now the challenge of standing out in the crowd begins—and how you differentiate yourself counts.Building a brand and growing a business can be expensive and time-consuming. But you have a key advantage and secret strategy, one that will set you apart no matter your industry, product, or company size. You have a story, and it's one of your most valuable assets.In Founder Brand, marketing expert Dave Gerhardt reveals how to build your brand by positioning yourself as the story, heart, and soul of your business. This is a tactical guidebook that first shows you how to tell your story, then how to put your story to use as a marketing strategy. You'll learn how social media provides a bridge between you and your customers, the platforms that are appropriate for your business, and how to measure results to truly determine value. This book is the ultimate resource for founders, CEOs, and marketing teams trying to find their company's niche, strategize for the future, and create brand awareness that establishes the credibility and trust your products deserve.
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Art of Disruption
Sebastian Mallaby - 2022
When it comes to innovation, a legendary venture capitalist told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. Most attempts at discovery fail, but a few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives venture capital, Silicon Valley, the tech sector, and, by extension, the world. Drawing on unprecedented access to the most celebrated venture capitalists of all time, award-winning financial historian Sebastian Mallaby tells the story of this strange tribe of financiers who have funded the world's most successful companies, from Google to SpaceX to Alibaba. With a riveting blend of storytelling and analysis, The Power Law makes sense of the seeming randomness of success in venture capital, an industry that relies, for good and ill, on gut instinct and personality rather than spreadsheets and data. We learn the unvarnished truth about some of the most iconic triumphs and infamous disasters in the history of tech, from the comedy of errors that was the birth of Apple to the venture funding that fostered hubris at WeWork and Uber to the industry's notorious lack of women and ethnic minorities. Now the power law echoes around the world: it has transformed China's digital economy beyond recognition, and London is one of the top cities for venture capital investment. By taking us so deeply into the VCs' game, The Power Law helps us think about our own future through their eyes.
Split the Pie: A Radical New Way to Negotiate
Barry Nalebuff - 2022
Negotiations are incredibly stressful and can bring out the worst in people. Wouldn't it be better if there were a principled way to negotiate? Wouldn't it be even better if there were a way to treat people fairly and get treated fairly in a negotiation?Split the Pie offers a new approach that does both--a field-tested method that reframes how negotiations play out. Barry Nalebuff, a professor at Yale School of Management, helps identify what's really at stake in a negotiation: the "pie." The negotiation pie is the additional value created through an agreement to work together. Seeing the relevant pie will change how you think about fairness and power in negotiation. You'll learn how to get half the value you create, no matter your size.Filled with examples and in-depth case studies, Split the Pie is a practical and theory-based approach to negotiation. You'll see how it helped reframe a high-stakes negotiation when Coca-Cola purchased Honest Tea, a company Barry cofounded with his former student Seth Goldman. The pie framework also works for everyday negotiations. You'll learn how to deploy logic to determine truly equitable solutions and employ empathy to expand the pie and sell your solution. Split the Pie allows both sides to focus their energy on making the biggest possible pie--to have your pie and eat it too.
Converted: The Data-Driven Way to Win Customers' Hearts
Neil HoyneNeil Hoyne - 2022
In his first book, he offers a simple, research-backed playbook that anyone can use to
find their best customers and develop relationships that last.
Under pressure for quick results and facing fierce marketplace competition, too many marketers are boxed into spaghetti-to-the-wall forms of digital marketing that limit the potential of their long hours, countless experiments, and warehouses of data. And in the end, they watch their competition sprint ahead.But what if you built a business around long-term relationships with customers, using data to understand who they are, what they need, and where to find more customers just like them? You can. And you'll leave your competitors, with all of their data and their short-term thinking, to poke around in the scraps. In Converted, you will learn how to:- Understand the full value of each relationship - Engage in an ongoing conversation with your best customers - Ask the right questions so you can anticipate your customers' needs - Find more great customersA real person is always on the other end of the transaction. Converted shows you how to win their hearts.
The No B.S. Small Business Book: How to Win When Most Fail
Casey Graham - 2022
Small Business Book, you will learn how to get ruthlessly honest about yourself, your business, and what you really want from both—and how to get it.You'll roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty, applying practical business strategies gleaned from decades of experience building and exiting successful companies.If you want to gain massive traction from achieving massive clarity as you take massive action at all levels of business and life as a no-B.S. business owner, then buckle up…This is the business book you've been waiting for.
The Book Bible: How to Sell Your Manuscript—No Matter What Genre—Without Going Broke or Insane
Susan Shapiro - 2022
So why not yours? In The Book Bible, New York Times bestseller and wildly popular Manhattan writing professor Susan Shapiro reveals the best and fastest ways to break into a mainstream publishing house. Unlike most writing manuals that stick to only one genre, Shapiro maps out the rules of all the sought-after, sellable categories: novels, memoirs, biography, how-to, essay collections, anthologies, humor, mystery, crime, poetry, picture books, young adult and middle grade, fiction and nonfiction. Shapiro once worried that selling 16 books in varied sub-sections made her a literary dabbler. Yet after helping her students publish many award-winning bestsellers on all shelves of the bookstore, she realized that her versatility had a huge upside. She could explain, from personal experience, the differences in making each kind of book, as well as ways to find the right genre for every project and how to craft a winning proposal or great cover letter to get a top agent and book editor to say yes. This valuable guide will teach both new and experienced scribes how to attain their dream of becoming a successful author.
See, Solve, Scale: How Anyone Can Turn an Unsolved Problem into a Breakthrough Success
Danny Warshay - 2022
You might assume these ventures started because the founders were born entrepreneurs. You might assume that these folks had technical or finance degrees, or worked at fancy consulting firms, or had some other specialized knowledge. Yet that isn’t the case. Entrepreneurship is not a spirit or a gift. It is a process that anyone can learn, and that anyone can use to turn a problem into a solution with impact.In See, Solve, Scale, Danny Warshay, the creator of the Entrepreneurial Process course and founding Executive Director of Brown’s Center for Entrepreneurship, shares the same set of tools with aspiring entrepreneurs around the world. He overturns the common misconception that entrepreneurship is a hard-wired trait or the sole province of high-flying MBAs, and provides a proven method to identify consequential problems and an accessible process anyone can learn, master, and apply to solve them.Combining real-world experience backed by surprising research-based insights, See, Solve, Scale guides the reader through forming a successful startup team and through the three steps of the process: find and validate a problem, develop an initial small-scale solution, and scale a long-term solution. It also details eleven common errors of judgment that entrepreneurs make when they rely on their intuition and provides instruction for how to avoid them.Leveraging Warshay’s own entrepreneurship successes and his 15 years of experience teaching liberal arts students, See, Solve, Scale debunks common myths about entrepreneurship and empowers everyone, especially those who other entrepreneurship books have ignored and left behind. Its lasting message: Anyone can take a world-changing idea from conception to breakthrough entrepreneurial success.
Indomitable: A Working Woman's Notes on Work, Life and Leadership
Arundhati Bhattacharya - 2022
Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Entrepreneurs at the Innovation Game
Andrew Binns - 2022
These Corporate Explorers have the insight, resilience, and discipline to overcome the obstacles and build new ventures from inside even the largest organizations.Corporate Explorers are part entrepreneurs, using innovation disciplines to jump start cutting-edge ideas, and part change leaders, capable of creating support for investment. They see that corporations already own the ideas, resources, and—critically—the talent to build new ventures. Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Bosch, LexisNexis, and Analog Devices enable managers to put these assets to use and gain an upper hand over startups that threaten to disrupt them.Corporate Explorer is a guidebook to the practices that enable these managers to go from idea into action. It demonstrates how success is not only possible but may offer entrenched companies better odds than venture-capital backed startups.This actionable and proven framework explains how managers can become successful corporate innovators; it includes tools to:-Learn how to apply innovation practices with greater discipline-Turn great ideas into a full-time job as an innovation leader-Experiment with and scale original business models-Transform innovation programs into a thriving source of new business-Attract, retain, and motivate entrepreneurial talent-Energize employees by creating a realistic way to innovateThese lessons come from the trailblazers of corporate innovation—Andrew Binns (Change Logic), Charles O'Reilly (Stanford Graduate School of Business), and Michael Tushman (Harvard Business School)—who have decades of experience helping entrepreneurial-minded executives activate employees to become Corporate Explorers.Entrepreneurs take notice—it's time for Corporate Explorers to set the pace and chart the course for disruption.
Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World
Laura Northrup - 2022
Within a global landscape of racism, violence, misogyny, mass incarceration, and other intersecting systems of oppression, our society is sick, our communities are suffering, and our relationships with our own bodies and minds are disconnected. But within a mass-market, numb-out culture that's commodified wellness and reduced the political act of self-care to a hashtag, what does it mean to be a healer? And what does it mean to build a sustainable, values-driven practice in an unjust capitalist system?In How to Build A Successful Healing Practice, therapist Laura Mae Northrup navigates the complexities of being a healer and staying true to your calling in a world built from systems designed to extract, oppress, and exploit. She addresses fundamental tensions that arise for practicing healers working in our late-stage capitalist culture, like how to: - Maintain your ethical framework while prioritizing financial growth--and reconciling your calling as a healer with the need to take payment - Market and brand your practice authentically, without feeling like a shill - Examine your "shadow why" looking honestly at the baggage, unexamined biases, and unconscious motivations you bring to your work - Resist burnout and recognize your limits within an extractive culture that valorizes overwork - Connect to your emotional needs and spiritual goals, and honor their place in your healing practiceStructured in accessible, to-the-point chapters with practical writing and reflection prompts, Northrup offers readers real and honest approaches to thriving as healers, going deeper than the promise of a million-dollar practice or a minimum-effort game plan. Written for healers of all modalities--especially those that have been sidelined, underfunded, underresearched, or delegitimized within a Western capitalist framework--this book offers a nuanced, political, and social-justice informed guide to building the practice you want--and thriving as the healer you were born to be.
Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup
Andrew Gazdecki - 2022
He founded Bizness Apps as a broke, twenty-something entrepreneur and sold it to a private equity firm before the age of thirty—after going head-to-head with Apple over a blanket App Store policy that threatened to ruin him.He’s been a growth consultant for several more multimillion-dollar startups. His companies have been featured in TechCrunch more than a dozen times.Now, he shares his remarkable story in Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Follow Gazdecki’s journey: starting a company at the age of twenty-one and hiring, then leading, over one hundred employees without any real work experience of his own.This honest, personal look behind the scenes reveals both his successes and his mistakes as he labored to build a compelling brand story and catalyze growth on a shoestring budget, almost lost everything, and finally sold the company for millions at the age of twenty-nine.
Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers
Chip Heath - 2022
In Making Numbers Count, Chip Heath argues that it's crucial for us all to be able to interpret and communicate numbers and stats more effectively so that data comes alive. By combining years of research into making ideas stick with a deep understanding of how the brain really works, Heath has discerned six critical principles that will give anyone the tools to communicate numbers with more transparency and meaning. These ideas - including simplicity, concreteness and familiarity - reveal what's compelling about a number and show how to transform it into its most understandable form. And if we can do this when we're using numbers, Heath tells us, then the idea of data won't drive people to panic. We're not hungry for numbers - there's an unfathomable amount of information being generated each year - but we are starved for meaning. The ability to communicate and understand numbers has never mattered more.
Balancing Acts: Unleashing the Power of Creativity in Your Life and Work
DANIEL LAMARRE - 2022
Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre shares his experiences leading the awe-inspiring organization, and teaches readers what it takes for anyone, regardless of position or industry, to embrace the value of creative leadership.Without creativity, there is no business. At the core of Cirque du Soleil’s lavish, multi-million-dollar productions is Vice Chairman Daniel Lamarre, who has mastered the ability to bring business and creativity together across multiple languages and cultures in a way that has never been seen before. The secrets he shares in Balancing Acts are rooted in tremendous faith in your own creative skills, even if you are convinced you have none, and those of the sharpest minds within your organization.In this book, Daniel shares the untold stories behind Cirques biggest shows, including Beatles Love, Michael Jackson One, the aquatic marvel, O, and many more. Through these tales of triumph and trials, he will teach you:How to shatter the perceived limitations standing in the way of your ability to think creatively and innovatively;When to step up and when to step back so that your team can create a masterpiece that doesn’t break the bank;How in using the methods Daniel has uncovered, modern companies with entrenched bureaucracies can bring creativity and business together to foster innovation; andHow to use creative thinking to lead your organization to new heights.Whether you work for one of the most creative organizations on the planet like Cirque du Soleil, in a stuffy corporate job, or somewhere in between—Balancing Acts is filled with principles that can strengthen and accelerate any business on the planet.
The Good Entrepreneur: An Insider’s Guide to Building a Principled Business and a Powerful Personal Legacy
Nick Kennedy - 2022
All you need is an idea, some hard work, and commitment. But how do you know if a business is truly successful? Simple metrics like revenue, customer adoption, and profits may reflect an entrepreneur’s capabilities, but those overshadow the true spirit of an entrepreneur—their legacy.Good entrepreneurs choose to walk a path of positive change that’s bigger than money, or status, or success.After spending hundreds of hours in a prison visiting his father and the same amount flying in a private plane, entrepreneur Nick Kennedy started a search for meaning beyond the airline that he launched, grew, and sold. In The Good Entrepreneur, he charts the pathway to creating both a successful business and an intentional legacy. With these inspirational stories and innovative strategies to success, harness the power of entrepreneurship and start your own journey of lasting positive change.- You wonder how your life fits into the bigger picture.- You don’t have a clear vision for your business and life.- You don’t know how to cross the chasm from the life you were given and the life you want.- How entrepreneurism has served as a catalyst for humankind - And how your work contributes to this legacy.- Twelve foundational principles - To create a company and life of purpose.- The untold stories of the entrepreneurial journey - The good, the bad and the ugly told in unflinching honesty.Real success is worth more than products or profit. Get The Good Entrepreneur now and lead a purposeful, entrepreneurial life that leaves behind a legacy that matters.
Joyous Leadership: Stories of Learnings Along the Way
John Mark Watson - 2022
Four in Trouble: MMFM Bisexual Reverse Harem Romance (Four at War)
Mia Masters - 2022
The Voltage Effect
John a List - 2022
If you care about changing the world, or just want to make better decisions in your own life, The Voltage Effect is for you.' Angela Duckworth, CEO of Character Lab and New York Times bestselling author of Grit ________________ Why do some ideas make it big while others fail to take off? According to award-winning behavioural economist John List, the answer comes down to a single question: Can the idea scale? Countless enterprises fall apart the moment they scale; their positive results fizzle, they lose valuable time and money, and the great electric charge of potential that drove them early on disappears. In short, they suffer a voltage drop. Yet success and failure are not about luck - in fact, there is a rhyme and reason as to why some ideas fail and why some make it big. Certain ideas are predictably scalable, while others are predictably destined for disaster. In The Voltage Effect, University of Chicago economist John A. List explains how to identify the ideas that will be successful when scaled, and how to avoid those that won't. Drawing on his own original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, government, education, and public health, he details the five signature elements that cause voltage drops, and unpacks the four proven techniques for increasing positive results - or voltage gains - and scaling great ideas to their fullest potential. By understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large. Because a better world can only be built at scale. ________________ 'One of the best economics books I have ever read - and an instant classic in behavioral economics.' Cass R. Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University, and New York Times bestselling co-author of Nudge 'Thought-provoking and engaging. A must-read.' Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT and co-author of Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor.
The Success Factor: Developing the Mindset and Skillset for Peak Business Performance
Ruth Gotian - 2022
The key to their success is that they do all four of these things in tandem. Based on research and in-person interviews with astronauts, Nobel laureates, and Olympic champions
The Success Factor
outlines the methodological approach that individuals aspiring to improve their performance can adopt to achieve success.Using these four shared attributes as a guide,
The Success Factor
helps you reach peak performance by applying the lessons of high achievers in your own life: identify your passion using a Passion Audit; learn how and where to find a mentor and how to build a mentoring team; develop your own community of practice; pursue your interests through informal learning; and manage your time and energy.
The Success Factor
comes with online resources that feature a downloadable Passion Audit worksheet, mentoring team worksheet, scripts for approaching potential mentors and a list of uncommon places to find a mentor, such as webinars, book clubs and social media.
Win from Within: Build Organizational Culture for Competitive Advantage
James Heskett - 2022
Many business leaders know this, yet few are doing much to improve their organizations' cultures. They are discouraged by misguided beliefs that an executive's tenure and an organization's attention span are too short for meaningful transformation.James L. Heskett provides a roadmap for achievable and fast-paced culture change. He demonstrates that an effective culture supplies the trust that makes managing change of all kinds easier. It provides a foundation on which changes in strategy can be based, and it's a competitive edge that can't easily be hacked or copied. Examining leading companies around the world, Heskett details how organizational culture makes employees more loyal, more productive, and more creative. He discusses how to quantify its effects in order to sell the notion of culture change to the organization and considers how to preserve an organization's culture in the face of the trend toward remote work hastened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Showing how leadership can bring about significant changes in a surprisingly short time span, Win from Within offers a playbook for developing and deploying culture that enables outsized results. It is a groundbreaking demonstration of organizational culture's role as a foundation for strategic success--and its measurable impact on the bottom line.
Exit Right: How to Sell Your Startup, Maximize Your Return and Build Your Legacy
Mert Iseri - 2022
Without decades of experience in mergers and acquisitions, founders don't have the tools they need to get the best results for themselves, their teams, or the new parent company.Through dozens of interviews with M leaders at the biggest Silicon Valley acquirers—as well as attorneys, bankers, and founders who have been through the trenches—Exit Right delivers the hard-earned lessons that lead to successful exits. From negotiation to valuation to breaking down a term sheet, managing legal costs, and handling emotional turbulence—this unparalleled guide covers every critical aspect of a technology startup sale.Learn where deals get into trouble, how to create alignment between negotiating parties, and what terms you should care about most. Above all, learn how to win in both the short and the long term, maximizing your price while positioning your company for a legacy you can be proud of.
Step Up: How to Build Your Influence at Work
Michelle Gibbings - 2022
That's the theme of the book. In today's fast-paced world, organisations and the people who work there are going through rapid change. Most successful leaders are able to make the most of these dynamic environments. They understand themselves, understand others and understand how to manage and motivate behavioural change. It is through these core skills that they are able to prosper through change, and gather the influence they need to be successful. These skills are relevant for everyone - regardless of their role or hierarchical position However, Step Up has been written specifically for people who are more technically focused, but are at that stage in their career where they know they need to change if they want to advance. They can be accountants, financial planners, risk management experts, financial controllers, engineers, scientists or even doctors. They are people who associate with their technical craft first, even though they may now be in a leadership role. Author, and change management expert, Michelle Gibbings believes that there are skills, practices and techniques that individuals, teams and organisations can apply to make change work. She shares these in her new book and they include learning how to: - Own your mindset - Strengthen your integrity - Be agile and know the system - Appeal to human insight and motivate - Create a story - Nurture relationships - Communicate with influence - Negotiate wisely. Step Up is practically focused and theoretically based. Every idea that is presented has at its core some form of scientific research or evidence that backs up the position. It includes practical things that you can do to build your platform for influence. 'To my mind, change is about getting stuff done and to get stuff done in an organisation you need to be influential' says Gibbings.
Hybrid Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review (HBR Insights Series)
Harvard Business Review - 2022
Promotions Are So Yesterday: Redefine Career Development. Help Employees Thrive.
Julie Winkle Giulioni - 2022
Beyond, between, and besides the climb up the positional ladder, there are many other ways that employees can―and want to―grow. However, many organizations still operate under the notion that promotions are the only option for career development, leaving employees disengaged, managers frustrated, and the business disadvantaged in its efforts to retain talent.The good news is that career development is so much more than promotions alone, and managers are in a powerful position to redefine career development and create positive results for their employees and their organizations in this area.In Promotions Are So Yesterday, Julie Winkle Giulioni offers you a new approach for developing your employees' careers and helping them thrive in a company when promotions are not readily available. Discover an easy-to-apply framework of seven alternative dimensions of development (contribution, competence, confidence, connection, challenge, contentment, and choice) that will engage your employees―dynamic opportunities for growth that are completely within your control as a manager.Promotions Are So Yesterday is filled with practical advice, nearly 100 questions to spark reflection and productive dialogue, and actionable templates and tools that managers can use with employees. Help bring your employees and your organization to even greater achievement with a strategy that will increase your employees' job satisfaction, performance, knowledge, and skills, and strengthen your organization's workforce.
win.: Billion Dollar Secrets for Winning Business and Life
Spencer Humm - 2022
Smart Growth: How to Grow Your People to Grow Your Company
Whitney Johnson - 2022
Helping people develop their potential—enabling them to articulate and become the self they want to be, are capable of being, and that best serves them and others in the short and long term—is what we as individuals and leaders strive toward.But how do we grow? It turns out it happens in a predictable way, which means we can understand where we are in our growth and chart a way forward. In this compact, complete guide, Whitney Johnson dives more deeply than ever into the S Curve of Learning so that you can envision how growth happens and direct yourself and others in your organization to create a culture that fosters it.The growth and learning journey comes in three phases: the Launch Point, the Sweet Spot, and Mastery. Compelling examples of successful people will show you when and why growth is slow, how to keep going, what to do when growth and learning are almost too fast to keep up with, and how to leap from one growth journey to another.As individuals grow, so do organizations and societies. Growth is learning put into action—action that betters the world as we better ourselves and our small niches, both personal and professional, within it. Growth occurs when learning is internalized—when we try something new and invest the effort to move it from being something we do to something we are.
Decide and Conquer: 44 Decisions that will Make or Break All Leaders
David Siegel - 2022
Learn the right framework now that can make all the difference later when faced with terrible options, deep anxiety and fear of failure.Access the decision framework David Siegel used when he took over as CEO of Meetup, the world’s leading platform for making connections and finding your community. Let David’s success during one of the most tumultuous times in his company’s history help guide you on your own path. Decide and Conquer helps all leaders navigate the big decisions that will impact their future and make their organizations a success. David outlines the 44 challenges leaders face when starting a new position, then shows you the decision framework he applied to overcome challenges in his own role. David takes you on an epic journey of corporate and personal survival that includes industry titans like Adam Neumann, Barry Diller, Jack Welch, Bill Ackman, and other leaders.In Decide and Conquer, you will learn to:Apply principles like open communication, transparency, and kindness to inform great decision making.Set yourself up to succeed, even before you start, by removing potential roadblocks before they become a problem.Be a bold and decisive leader and not succumb to fear. By applying the principles he had learned in previous leadership positions, David was able to make the many critical decisions that would mean life or death for Meetup when WeWork decided to sell the company.From deciding to accept the position and negotiating terms to managing a seemingly endless series of crises during the sale and global pandemic, Decide and Conquer walks readers through the key decisions they will face with invaluable advice for each one.
Tiny Business, Big Money: Strategies for Creating a High-Revenue Microbusiness
Elaine Pofeldt - 2022
Following her previous book, The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, Pofeldt gives readers the steps toward their next entrepreneurial venture, including testing an idea’s market viability while limiting risk, finding cash without giving up control, protecting your personal time and avoiding burn out, and knowing when it is time to start micro-scaling.Pofeldt’s focus is always on staying lean financially so that you can achieve your personal goals on an average person’s budget. In this book, Pofeldt profiles nearly 60 microbusinesses that have all reached $1 million in annual revenue without losing control or selling out. Tiny Business, Big Money also includes the results of a survey with the founders of 50 seven-figure microbusinesses that got to $1 million with no payroll or very small teams, which provides deeper visibility into their shared principles of success that you can apply to your own small business.
Stress-Free Productivity: A Personalised Toolkit to Become Your Most Efficient, Creative Self
Alice Boyes - 2022
The tricks that work for your colleague may not work as well for you. Or perhaps they don't work at all. The fact is that everyone has their own productivity quirks to make them work efficiently and effectively. They just don't know how to crack them.In this innovative guide, Dr Alice Boyes will help you diagnose your unique productivity profile and give you the framework to formulate a powerhouse personalised system. Drawing on groundbreaking research, countless examples, and quizzes in every chapter, this book will help you be the most growth-oriented, most effective and efficient, and most creative and visionary version of yourself.
Host Coach: A Blueprint for Creating Financial Freedom Through Short-Term Rental Investing
Culin Tate - 2022
Not just for income, but for quality of life.If you are considering beginning your Airbnb investing journey – everything from where to invest to creating your listing and support team, or if you are a seasoned investor looking to diversify your portfolio or optimize your current listings for maximum profits – this book is for you!Host Coach can help you address many important aspects of Airbnb investing, including:● Discovering Your Investing Drive● Pinpointing Where to Buy● Finding Your Financing● Designing With Guests in Mind● Crafting an Attention-Getting Listing● Pricing for Occupancy● Navigating Your First 30 Days Live● Streamlining Operations● Growing Your PortfolioEarly Praise for Host Coach:“Started reading it this evening, and I can’t put it down! Storytelling, facts, genuine - this is an MBA level case study wrapped in HGTV style and served at the most relevant time.”- Tea Williams, Senior Business Executive, Technology Enthusiast"The perfect blueprint for anyone looking to build a portfolio of high ROI vacation rental investments, with tactical advice and real-world examples. Following Culin's advice, we've purchased over 20 properties in the past two years -- and are outperforming 95% of our peers!"-Tony Cappaert, CEO, Blue Maple vacation rental investment fund
Design Leadership Ignited: Elevating Design at Scale
Eric Quint - 2022
It also requires a leader who helps to design the organization, making design a strategic capability that advances innovation and enhances customer experiences. To examine the foundations of strong design leadership, the authors performed extensive in-depth interviews with design leaders working for Fortune 500 organizations across industries and geographies. Based on these insights, the book takes the position that a core challenge to successful design leadership is the ability to effectively balance long-term goals and short-term outcomes that can be contradictory in nature. This book provides insights and guidelines that will help design and business leaders recognize these often contradictory challenges and leverage them to the benefit of both the design function and the organization at large. Through a combination of practitioner experience and empirical research, the authors demonstrate how design can be used as a strategic capability to advance innovation and enhance customer experience"--
Bootstrap Your Life: How to turn £500 into £350 million
Oliver Cookson - 2022
Self-sufficient and self-taught, Oliver always had an eye for opportunities and pursued them obsessively. His breakthrough came when he combined his passion for health and fitness with his skills as a web developer. By embracing a disruptive, agile approach to business, offering unparalleled choice, and identifying trends ahead of the competition, Oliver was able to grow Myprotein® rapidly into a top international, award-winning brand.In Bootstrap Your Life, Oliver doesn't just share his journey but uses simple language to break down every aspect of his thinking, providing a thorough step-by-step guide on how to think like an entrepreneur. His approach to marketing, innovation, strategy, leadership and other key elements are explained in great detail using memorable analogies that anyone can relate to.Oliver explains how bootstrapping his life catapulted him from an ordinary life in the suburbs of Greater Manchester to being included in the Sunday Times Rich List with a personal net worth of over a third of a billion pounds. His message is clear: bootstrap your life!