station meeting where we had decided to stay put for the time being, God did ... as hostages by government soldiers who were caught behind enemy lines. ...

    These factors remain critical, especially given today's unprecedented business climate. But Rich Karlgaard--Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director--takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage. It fosters innovation, it accelerates strategy and execution, and it cannot be copied or bought. It is found in a perhaps surprising place--your company's values.Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times. Karlgaard shares these stories and identifies the five key variables that make up every organization's "soft edge"Trust: Northwestern Mutual has built a $25 million dollar revenue juggernaut on trust, the foundation of lasting success. Learn how to create an environment that engenders trust and propels high performance.Smarts: In most technical fields your formal education quickly becomes out of date. How do you keep up? Learn how the Mayo Clinic, Stanford University women's basketball team, and others stay on top by relentlessly pursuing an advantage through smarts.Teamwork: Since collaboration and innovation are a must in the global economy, effective teamwork is vital. Learn how global giant FedEx stays focused and how nimble Nest Labs relies on lean teams with cognitive diversity.Taste: Clever product design and integration are proxies for intelligence because they make customers feel smart. But taste goes further into deep emotional engagement. Specialized Bicycles calls it "the elusive spot between data truth and human truth." How can you consistently make products or services that trigger these emotional touch points?Story: Companies that achieve lasting success have an enduring and emotionally appealing story. What's your company's story? How do you tell it your way? Gain the ability to create a powerful narrative in a world where outsiders often exercise the louder voice.

    

    The demands to deliver at a consistently high level can be unforgiving. The loneliness. The weight of responsibility. The relentless second-guessing and criticism. The pressure to build all-star teams. The 24/7 schedule that requires superhuman stamina. The tough decisions that often leave no one happy. The expectation to always have the right answer when it can be hard just to know the right question. These challenges are brought into their highest and sharpest relief in the corner office, but they are hardly unique to chief executives. All leaders face their own version of these tests, and the authors drawing on the distilled wisdom, stories and lessons from hundreds of chief executives to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO. These foundational leadership skills will make all aspiring executives more effective in their role today, and to lift the trajectory of their career. The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider's guide to navigating leadership's toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories. Adam Bryant has conducted in-depth interviews with more than 600 CEOs. Kevin Sharer spent more than two decades as president and then CEO of Amgen, where he led its expansion from $1 billion in annual revenues to nearly $16 billion. He has served on many boards and is a sought-after mentor for CEOs of global companies. Leadership is getting harder as the speed of disruption across all industries accelerates. The CEO Test will better prepare you to succeed whether you're a CEO or just setting out to become one"--

    This means channeling resources into the right efforts, striking a balance between innovation and control, and getting everyone pulling in the same direction.How to accomplish all this? Continually ask the right questions, advises Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons. By posing these provocative questions, you identify critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on the most important choices you must make, and understand what's at stake in each one.In this concise guide, Simons presents the seven key questions you and your team must regularly explore together:·Who is your primary customer? Have you organized your company to deliver maximum value to that customer?·How do your core values prioritize shareholders, employees, and customers? Is everyone in your company committed to those values?·What critical performance variables are you tracking? How are you creating accountability for performance on those variables?·What strategic boundaries have you set? Does everyone know what actions are off-limits?·How are you generating creative tension? Is that tension catalyzing innovation across units?·How committed are your employees to helping each other? Are they sharing responsibility for your company’s success?·What strategic uncertainties keep you awake at night? How are you riveting everyone's attention on those uncertainties?These questions force you to reexamine the unspoken assumptions underlying your strategy and analyze how it's implemented through your business processes and structures. Simons' extensive examples then help you understand your options and make the tough choices needed for your company to excel at execution.Drawing on decades of research into performance management systems and organization design, Seven Strategy Questions is a no-nonsense, must-read resource for all leaders in your organization.

    

    The Idea Book is 150 pages of ideas, 150 empty pages for your own idea. It’s an idea book. The “book part” consists of 63 different chapters on how you can develop new ideas. Every chapter ends with a practical activity, or exercise, where the reader can practice the lesson of that chapter. The book is full of stories, anecdotes, and quotes about how to generate ideas. The “notebook part” is a place for you to work on and store your best ideas. Follow the tradition of a long line of creatives who have used a small, black notebook to catch their ideas. The combination of creativity boosts from the chapters, and a beautiful notebook for your ideas makes The Idea Book the perfect companion for anyone who wants to nurture their creativity.

    Whether you were maturely young or immaturely old or a little bit of both, this book was written for you to understand that it is never too soon or too late to start your journey towards success.This is for the child you once were - when you believed everything was possible and nothing was out of reach; may this book be a leading factor in that child's rebirth.

    It encourages readers to expect more from companies, to give more of themselves, and to fall back in love with their work and their lives.

    Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth.Now, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigrant tech entrepreneur turned academic with appointments at Duke, Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities, draws on his new Kauffman Foundation research to show that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups. He argues that increased competition from countries like China and India and US immigration policies are leaving some of the most educated and talented entrepreneurial immigrants with no choice but to take their innovation elsewhere. The consequences to our economy are dire; our multi-trillion dollar loss will be the gain of our global competitors.With his signature fearlessness and clarity, Wadhwa offers a concise framework for understanding the Immigrant Exodus and offers a recipe for reversal and rapid recovery.

    These companies, to be sure, broke new science and engineering ground—yet their most lasting legacy may well be their pioneering approach to business itself. They blazed a path that led to Intel, Apple, Oracle, Genentech, Gilead, Sun, Adobe, Cisco, Yahoo, eBay, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Twitter, and many, many others.What causes a fledgling company to break through and prosper? At the highest level, the blueprint is always the same: An upstart team with outsized ambition somehow possesses an uncanny ability to surpass customer expectations, upend whole industries, and topple incumbents. But how do they do it? If only we could observe the behaviors of such a company from the inside. If only we were granted a first-person perspective at a present-day Silicon Valley startup-cum-blockbuster. What might we learn? This document—the story of Data Domain’s rise from zero to one billion dollars in revenue—is your invitation to find out. For anyone curious about the process of new business formation, Tape Sucks offers a provocative, ripped-from-the-headlines case study. How does a new company bootstrap itself? What role does venture capital play? Why do customers and new recruits take a chance on a risky new player? Frank Slootman, who lived and breathed the Data Domain story for six years, offers up his clear-eyed, “first-person shooter” version of events. You’re with him on the inside as he and his team navigate the tricky waters of launching a high-technology business. You’ll feel—deep in your gut—the looming threat of outside combatants and the array of challenges that make mere survival an accomplishment. You’ll catch a glimpse of an adrenalin-fueled place where victories are visceral, communication wide open, and esprit de corps palpable. The upshot is that the principles of the early entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley are alive and well. Their straightforward ideas include employee-ownership, tolerance for failure, unfettered meritocracy, faith in the power of technology breakthroughs, a preference for handshakes and trust over contracts and lawsuits, pragmatism, egalitarianism, and a belief in the primacy of growth and reinvestment over dividends and outbound profits. Tape Sucks is an honest, informed perspective on technology wave riding. It allows you to observe a high-growth business at close range and get an unvarnished picture of how things really work.

    Unfortunately, the Bispham is on duty, and he's taken exception to the Rove Captain and his men."Master of the Winds," by Sharon Lee follows two hopeful young people during their test to become the Kitemaster's apprentice. Only one can succeed.Lee and Miller join forces in "Candlelight," the story of a family-by-intent, and the craft that holds them together.

    Book annotation not available for this title.

    These 100 eye-opening ways to create wealth are drawn from the author's successful careers, with many touching personal stories as well as stories and examples from the hundreds of clients these master coaches have advised. This book is chock full of ways to make money, deepen life's pleasure, increase personal wage-earning power and start fresh entrepreneurial ideas right at home. Written for the age of the home-business entrepreneur, the book appeals to everyone from company CEOs, to life coaches, to stay at home moms, to internet fans to people who are simply thinking of converting that hobby into wealth. This is the deepest and most penetrating study yet of the psychology of prosperity, and the action steps necessary to produce wealth.

    You need to communicate in a way that always enchants your audience and you need to retain that focus in an increasingly noisy world. In Brand Brilliance, bestselling author and branding expert Fiona Humberstone will take you on a comprehensive journey. She will help you to define your dream clients, refine your message and up your marketing game. This book will bring substance and clarity to your brand, bring into focus the things that really matter and enable you to communicate with flair and intention"--Provided by publisher.