Elon Musk: Lessons in Life and Business from Elon Musk


Ryan Foster - 2015
    It is an inspirational short read that will offer you a concise insight of his life, not only as a simple biography but also as a guide for self-improvement and innovative thinking. The main facts gathered here are drawn from interviews, articles and books about him and explain the simple principles, which he used to build his vast fortune. At the end of each chapter, you will find summarized tips that you can quickly access when you need inspiration or useful advice. Learn the most significant skills and qualities that made Musk one of the most famous and creative entrepreneurs of our time and follow his lessons.

FAQ ME


James Altucher - 2012
    I've then compiled the best questions, expanded my answers, and provided much original material to create this book, "FAQ ME".

Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business


Kindra Hall - 2019
    But what stories do you need to tell and how do you tell them?Stories That Stick provides a clear framework of ideals and a concise set of actions for you to take complete control of your own story, utilizing the principles behind the world’s most effective business storytelling strategies.Professional storyteller and nationally-known speaker Kindra Hall reveals the four unique stories you can use to differentiate, captivate, and elevate:the Value Story, to convince customers they need what you provide;the Founder Story, to persuade investors and customers your organization is worth the investment;the Purpose Story, to align and inspire your employees and internal customers; and the Customer Story, to allow those who use your product or service to share their authentic experiences with others.Telling these stories well is a simple, accessible skill anyone can develop. With case studies, company profiles, and anecdotes backed with original research, Hall presents storytelling as the underutilized talent that separates the good from the best in business.Stories That Stick offers specific, actionable steps readers can take to find, craft, and leverage the stories they already have and simply aren’t telling. Every person, every organization has at least four stories at their disposal. Will you tell yours?

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind: How to Be Seen and Heard in the Overcrowded Marketplace


Al Ries - 1980
    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 therePosition a follower so that it can occupy a niche not claimed by the leaderAvoid 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 nameBuild your strategy around your competition's weaknessesReposition a strong competitor and create a weak spotUse your present position to its best advantageChoose the best name for your productDetermine when-and why-less is moreAnalyze 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.

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty


Matthew Dixon - 2013
    But what if everyone is wrong?In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a book that turns conventional wisdom on its head.Companies devote untold time and resources trying to dazzle customers. Yet CEB's careful research proves that is wildly overrated: loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Forget bells and whistles and just solve your customer's problems. The Effortless Experience lays out the four pillars of a low-effort customer experience, with robust data, in­sights and profiles. Here are tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, 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.'A business detective story, in which cherished truths are systematically investigated-and frequently debunked' -Dan Heath, coauthor of Decisive, Switch, and Made to StickMatt Dixon is Executive Director of the Sales & Service Practice at CEB. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and his previous book, The Challenger Sale, was a Wall Street Journal bestsellerNick Toman is Senior Director of Research for CEB's Sales & Services Practice and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.Rick DeLisi is Senior Director of Advisory Services for CEB's Sales & Service Practice and a noted public speaker and facilitator.

Get A Grip: An Entrepreneurial Fable . . . Your Journey to Get Real, Get Simple, and Get Results


Gino Wickman - 2012
    After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.Their story is not unusual. The challenges they were facing are common, predictable, and solvable. Get A Grip tells the story of how Swan Services resolves its issues by implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System®. With the help of EOS, Eileen, Vic, and their leadership team master a set of managerial tools that allow them to get traction on their business, grow the business, and deliver better results for clients.The story of Swan Services is a fable, but the Entrepreneurial Operating System® is very real and has helped thousands of businesses worldwide. A complete entrepreneurial toolkit, EOS has helped thousands of businesses get to where they want to be.In Get A Grip, learn how Swan Services leaders learned to develop and commit to a clear vision, establish focus, build discipline, and create a healthier and more cohesive team.With characters and situations created from collective business experiences and stories, Get A Grip is a fable that will ring true for entrepreneurial leaders the world over and guide them to get their companies on track.

The Decision Book: Fifty Models for Strategic Thinking


Mikael Krogerus - 2011
    

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries


Peter Sims - 2011
    Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.           Based on deep and extensive research, including more than 200 interviews with leading innovators, Sims discovered that productive, creative thinkers and doers—from Ludwig van Beethoven to Thomas Edison and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—practice a key set of simple but ingenious experimental methods—such as failing quickly to learn fast, tapping into the genius of play, and engaging in highly immersed observation—that free their minds, opening them up to making unexpected connections and perceiving invaluable insights. These methods also unshackle them from the constraints of overly analytical thinking and linear problem solving that our education places so much emphasis on, as well as from the fear of failure, all of which thwart so many of us in trying to be more innovative.               Reporting on a fascinating range of research, from the psychology of creative blocks to the influential Silicon Valley–based field of design thinking, Sims offers engaging and wonderfully illuminating accounts of breakthrough innovators at work, including how Hewlett-Packard stumbled onto the breakaway success of the first hand-held calculator; the remarkable storyboarding process at Pixar films that has been the key to their unbroken streak of box office successes; the playful discovery process by which Frank Gehry arrived at his critically acclaimed design for Disney Hall; the aha revelation that led Amazon to pursue its wildly successful affiliates program; and the U.S. Army’s ingenious approach to counterinsurgency operations that led to the dramatic turnaround in Iraq.               Fast paced and as entertaining as it is illuminating, Little Bets offers a whole new way of thinking about how to break away from the narrow strictures of the methods of analyzing and problem solving we were all taught in school and unleash our untapped creative powers.

The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd


Allan Dib - 2016
    Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: • How to get new customers, clients, or patients and how make more profit from existing ones. • Why “big business” style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. • How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. • A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. • How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. • How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. • How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.

Overdeliver: Build a Business for a Lifetime Playing the Long Game in Direct Response Marketing


Brian Kurtz - 2019
    In this book, "titan" of direct marketing Brian Kurtz teaches you how to find and sell to your audience without ever losing sight of the people you are selling to, and without compromising on the respect and care they deserve.This book is about direct marketing, or "measurable marketing," in any medium. Direct marketing is the only way to get a specific return on your investment--every time you run a campaign, there has to be some way to measure it. Brian shows you how to track what is effective in marketing to the people in your target audience and how to diversify your marketing to ensure you can provide for them over the long haul.Brian explains the 4 Pillars of Being Extraordinary, the 5 Principles of Original Source, how to track the metrics that matter, strategies and tactics to build a responsive database (list building), how to tailor offers to your list, the 7 Characteristics of World-Class Copy-Writers, multichannel marketing, the importance of customer service, how to overdeliver, and so much more!

No Limits: The Art and Science of High Performance


Mukesh Bansal - 2020
    He has studied the science behind it, and worked closely with high performers across business, sports and entertainment, to understand what it takes to transcend apparent limitations and achieve true potential.Through his entrepreneurial experience and studying the field of health and fitness, Bansal came to understand the enormous power of plasticity: the ability of the human brain to rewire itself at will as we develop new skills. He also realised that high performers across domains rely on common tools that were embraced by ancient wisdom and are validated by modern science. Knowing that high performance is not a matter of genetics or luck is highly empowering. No Limits distils Bansal’s findings on talent, deliberate practice, mindset, habit, willpower and learning. It is a guide to maximising one’s potential with well-defined strategies. So, no matter what you do, you can be a superior version of yourself, performing at increasingly better levels, constantly reaching higher.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant


W. Chan Kim - 1994
    They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet, as this influential and immensely popular book shows, these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future.In the international bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves (spanning more than 100 years across 30 industries), the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves, which the authors call “value innovation,” create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade.Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture their own blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this bestselling business book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

Skills for New Managers


Morey Stettner - 2000
    This title includes practical techniques and examples.

Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning


Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - 2003
    In today's corporate upheaval, a new business paradigm is evolving. While many CEOs are being exposed for their greed, truly visionary leaders believe in a goal that benefits themselves as well as others. They realize that it is their vision and soul that attract loyal employees willing to go above and beyond the call of corporate duty. And their employees are realizing the same thing: while 80 percent of adults claim they'd work even if they didn't have to, the majority of them can hardly wait to leave their jobs and get home.Good Business starts with the premise that this is an age in which business and work have replaced religion and politics as central forces in contemporary life. The book reveals how business leaders, managers, and even employees can find their flow and contribute not only to their own happiness, but also to a just and evolving society. It identifies the factors crucial to the operation of a good business: trust, the commitment to fostering the personal growth of employees, and the dedication to creating a product that helps mankind. Good Business is sure to become a must-read text for anyone who values the positive contributions of individuals in the changing world of business.

A CEO Only Does Three Things: Finding Your Focus in the C-Suite


Trey Taylor - 2020
    Many owners and CEOs think they have to be involved in every aspect of their business. They spend valuable brainpower on low-priority decisions. Before long, they're overworked and burned out.Instead of doing everything, it's time to focus on the right things.A CEO Only Does Three Things zeroes in on the three pillars of business: culture, people, and numbers. Steeped in twenty-plus years of practical knowledge, training, and consulting with some of the world's largest companies, this indispensable guide shows how to articulate the right culture for your business, hire people with the right mindsets, and inspire your teams to produce optimal results.Hundreds of CEOs have used Taylor's methods to create fulfilled, efficient, professional lives, and you can join them. Learn how to focus on the work you love-and avoid CEO burnout.