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.

    In fact, these mantras — despite being long-accepted and adopted by business leaders everywhere — are completely wrongheaded. Worse, they are costing companies billions of dollars, driving away valuable employees and profitable customers, limiting performance, and stalling careers. Yet they are so deeply ingrained in organizational cultures that no one has questioned them. Until now. In Fierce Leadership, Scott teaches us how to spot the worst “best” practices in our organizations using a technique she calls “squid eye”–the ability to see the “tells” or signs that we have fallen prey to disastrous behaviors by knowing what to look for. Only then, she says, can we apply the antidote.. Informed by over a decade of conversations with Fortune 500 executives, this book is that antidote. With fierce new approaches to everything from employee feedback to corporate diversity to customer relations, Scott offers fresh and surprising alternatives to six of the so-called “best” practices permeating today’s businesses. This refreshingly candid book is a must-read for any manager or leader at any level who is ready to take a long hard look at what trouble might be lurking in their organization - and do something about it.

    Prahalad describes how the world's low-income markets offer opportunity for the world's wealthiest companies to seek fortune and bring prosperity to the poor.

    Globally accepted and written by one of the most foremost authors in the field, this is a necessary read for all managers, human resource workers, and anyone needing to understand and improve their people skills.

    And you have no idea what you signed up for. Or maybe you've been a stepmom for a while now, but things are getting you down. Who do you turn to for help? Where is the stepmothering support group that'll give you the advice you need? Who actually gets how hard being a stepmom can be?We do. We are the women who have chosen stepmotherhood and lived to tell the tale. This guide holds our solutions to help you:- Brave the crazy ex demands- Overcome the financial hurdles of a blended family- Be prepared for the legal battles and custody arrangements- Handle disrespectful children- Nourish your relationship- Manuever the emotional breakdowns of stepmotherhood- Build your own stepmom's club- Understand why you need your partner to have your backWritten by stepmoms for stepmoms, these tips, anecdotes, and words of advance will help you find success and support within your new family.We are the Stepmoms' Club --your club --and we're here to help you.

    Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how and without creating a culture that supports coaching.Nathan Jamail—a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses—trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies and learned that it takes not only different skills to achieve success, but a truly effective coach needs an organizational culture that creates and multiplies the success of every motivated team member. The Leadership Playbook shows leaders the skills necessary to be an effective coach and to build effective teams by:Fostering employees’ belief in the culture of a companyResolving issues proactively rather than reactively and creating an involvement that constantly pushes employees to be their bestFocusing on the more humane principles of leadership—gratitude, positivity, and recognition—that keep morale highHolding teams and individuals accountableConstantly recruiting talent ("building the bench") rather than filling positions only when they are emptyCombining research, interviews, and inspiring stories with the lessons that have earned Jamail the respect of the world’s foremost corporations including CISCO, FedEx, Sprint, the U.S. Army, and State Farm; The Leadership Playbook will dominate the category for years to come.

    In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy. This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product roadmap, and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you’ll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful. Whether you're a product manager, product owner, business analyst, program manager, project manager, scrum master, lead developer, designer, development manager, entrepreneur, or business owner, this book will show you how to: Articulate an inspiring vision and goals for your product Prioritize ruthlessly and scientifically Protect against pursuing seemingly good ideas without evaluation and prioritization Ensure alignment with stakeholders Inspire loyalty and over­-delivery from your team Get your sales team working with you instead of against you Bring a user­ and buyer-­centric approach to planning and decision-making Anticipate opportunities and stay ahead of the game Publish a comprehensive roadmap without over­committing

    Based on numerous interviews, this book reveals exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers, and is handling the transition into the post Jobs era.

    Yet the reality is often quite different. Robinson and Schroeder make a bold claim that the quality of a company's output is directly related to a business measure that few companies track or understand: the ideas of employees. Ironically, the authors show that most managers and organizations are better at suppressing ideas than encouraging them. Many well-managed companies would pride themselves if they implemented one or two ideas per employee each year on the frontline. Yet high-performing idea-driven companies may implement 50 to 100 or more ideas per employee per year--and they keep count, too. In fact, Robinson and Schroeder show that idea-driven organizations are relatively rare, despite their competitive advantages.The fundamental block to high-quality idea systems is leadership. Ideas are entirely voluntary, and employees won't generate or support them if they're misled. More than this, employees can't implement ideas if they need to seek approval at upper levels for simple improvements they understand better than their bosses. In organizations where ideas are brought to the core of strategy, systems, and management, the effect is electric. Employees are more engaged, productive, and creative. Businesses become more innovative and resilient with only minimal management inputs. The authors predict that idea-driven organizations will become the rule rather than exception. This book offers the complete guide to designing and leading this organization of the future.

    But twenty years into this movement, breakthrough innovations are still rare, and most companies find that 50 to 90 percent of their innovation initiatives flop. The cost of these failures to U.S. companies alone is estimated to be well over $100 billion annually.In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as outcome-driven innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous science from which randomness and uncertainty are eliminated.Based on more than 200 studies spanning more than seventy companies and twenty-five industries, Ulwick contends that, when it comes to innovation, the traditional methods companies use to communicate with customers are the root cause of chronic waste and missed opportunity. In What Customers Want, Ulwick demonstrates that all popular qualitative research methods yield well-intentioned but unfitting and dreadfully misleading information that serves to derail the innovation process. Rather than accepting customer inputs such as needs, benefits, specifications, and solutions, Ulwick argues that researchers should silence the literal voice of the customer and focus on the metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done. Using these customer desired outcomes as inputs into the innovation process eliminates much of the chaos and variability that typically derails innovation initiatives.With the same profound insight, simplicity, and uncommon sense that propelled The Innovator's Solution to worldwide acclaim, this paradigm-changing book details an eight-step approach that uses outcome-driven thinking to dramatically improve every aspect of the innovation process--from segmenting markets and identifying opportunities to creating, evaluating, and positioning breakthrough concepts. Using case studies from Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, AIG, Pfizer, and other leading companies, What Customers Want shows companies how to:Obtain unique customer inputs that make predictable innovation possibleRecognize opportunities for disruption, new market creation, and core market growth--well before competitors doIdentify which ideas, technologies, and acquisitions have the greatest potential for creating customer valueSystematically define breakthrough products and services conceptsInnovation is fundamental to success and business growth. Offering a proven alternative to failed customer-driven thinking, this landmark book arms you with the tools to unleash innovation, lower costs, and reduce failure rates--and create the products and services customers really want.

    Roff-Marsh calls these executives his silent revolutionaries. This revolution has been brewing for a long time. For the last 20 years, organizations’ ability to produce has overtaken their ability to sell, and, for at least as long, customers have unfailingly embraced every opportunity to avoid interacting with traditional field salespeople. Applying the division of labor to sales might not seem controversial, but this innocent-sounding idea decimates the sales management orthodoxy and replaces it with a strange new world where sales is primarily an inside activity, where salespeople earn fixed salaries and focus their attention exclusively on selling conversations, where regional sales offices become redundant, and where marketing and engineering become seamlessly integrated with sales.The Machine is a field guide for the executive who’s prepared to wrestle sales away from autonomous field-based artisans in favor of a tightly synchronized team of specialists. Readers will embrace The Machine either to exploit the new sales order or to avoid falling victim to it.

    Levitin shifts his keen insights from your brain on music to your brain in a sea of details.The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.

    Thanks to Bruce Kasanoff’s engaging writing and sage advice, this is an enjoyable book that’s full of new ideas to put into action immediately." -- Adam Grant, Wharton professor and bestselling author of Give and Take Do you feel uncomfortable blowing your own horn? Do you struggle to get your fair share of attention? If either is true, this little gem of a book is for you. It provides you with quick and effective tips on the most appropriate ways to make a name for yourself in our hyper-connected world. The book is organized around the author's "Simplify Your Future" framework for managing your career and life: Be generous and expert, trustworthy and clear, open-minded and adaptable, persistent and present.

    Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?

    It is the first book that shows how to connect the big picture of the new era of business with the nitty-gritty of what to do about it. Through a completely new way to understand and use the business model as the primary tool for confronting reality--a breakthrough that will become the management innovation of this decade--you'll know sooner rather than later whether your fundamental business premise is under assault, where your best opportunities lie, what you should change and what you should leave alone, and how to realistically plan the future of your business. The fundamentals of how a business makes money are being rapidly and permanently altered by sweeping structural changes. With their extraordinary depth and breadth of experience, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan are the ideal guides for everyone--entrepreneur, mid-level manager, or CEO--about what is to be done so you can get things right in this challenging, radically changed world. They start by showing you how to understand the most fundamental element of any business: whether you can realistically make the money you hope to in the game you're playing. Bossidy and Charan show how to use the business model to develop a robust, reality-based process for thinking about the speci?cs of your business in a holistic way. They show how to tie together the financial targets you must meet, the external realities you face, and internal activities such as strategy development, operating tactics, and selection and development of people. Through the lens of the business model, as well as the skillful use of initiatives and development of people with the right leadership characteristics, you'll see how Robert Nardelli at Home Depot, Jim McNerney at 3M, Dick Harrington at the Thomson Corporation, Michael Wisbrun at KLM, Joseph Tucci at EMC, and John Chambers at Cisco confronted reality. Whether they faced crisis or opportunity, all made the right kinds of changes through a combination of business savvy (the art of understanding the fundamentals driving a business) and business model thinking.