Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence


Philip Kotler - 2009
    Unlike past recessions, today's crises have precipitated a need for businesses to develop a new mindset, one that takes into account intermittent periods of disturbance, allowing them to thrive while under the constant threat of chaos. Chaotics presents a revolutionary set of guidelines designed to help businesses: - detect sources of turbulence - prepare scenarios - predict resulting vulnerabilities and opportunities - develop responses to ensure long-term resilience and success - avoid risk while advancing the interests of the company - build flexibility into the balance sheet - price strategically - adjust products to meet new customer values - and more Complete with metrics and measurements, Chaotics outlines a powerful new system for managing waves of uncertainty affecting customers, employees, and other stakeholders. In this climate of increased turbulence, no organization can survive with less.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success from the World’s Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs


Guy Raz - 2020
    Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).   Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

Integrity Selling for the 21st Century: How to Sell the Way People Want to Buy


Ron Willingham - 1987
    In the same industry, I have observed countless people who had been taught to sell with high integrity. Ironically, their customer satisfaction, profit margins, and salesperson retention were significantly higher." -- Ron Willingham If you've tried manipulative, self-focused selling techniques that demean you and your customer, if you've ever wondered if selling could be more than just talking people into buying, then Integrity Selling for the 21st Century is the book for you. Its concept is simple: Only by getting to know your customers and their needs -- and believing that you can meet those needs -- will you enjoy relationships with customers built on trust. And only then, when you bring more value to your customers than you receive in payment, will you begin to reap the rewards of high sales.Since the publication of Ron Willingham's enormously successful first book, Integrity Selling, his sales program has been adopted by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, such as Johnson & Johnson and IBM, as well as the American Red Cross and the New York Times. In his new book, Integrity Selling for the 21st Century, Willingham explains how his selling system relates to today's business climate -- when the need for integrity is greater than ever before.Integrity Selling for the 21st Century teaches a process of self-evaluation to help you become a stellar salesperson in any business climate. Once you've established your own goals and personality traits, you'll be able to evaluate them in your customers and adapt your styles to create a more trusting, productive relationship.Drawing upon Willingham's years of experience and success stories from sales forces of the more than 2,000 companies that have adopted the Integrity Selling system, Ron Willingham has created a blueprint for achieving success in sales while staying true to your values.

Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success


Leonard L. Berry - 1999
    From Berry's exacting study of fourteen mature, highly successful, labor-intensive companies comes an astonishing revelation: the single most important factor in building a lasting service business is not a matter of savvy business practice, but of humane values. In all fourteen award-winning companies -- Bergstrom Hotels, The Charles Schwab Corporation, Chick-fil-A, The Container Store, Custom Research Inc., Dana Commercial Credit, Dial-A-Mattress, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Midwest Express Airlines, Miller SQA, Special Expeditions, St. Paul Saints, USAA, and Ukrop's Super Markets -- values-driven leadership connects with strategic focus, executional excellence, control of destiny, trust-based relationships, generosity, investment in employee success, acting small, and brand cultivation to drive customer satisfaction, innovation, and growth. Dedicating a chapter to each of these nine drivers, this book is the most far-reaching and insightful vision ever presented of the principles and step-by-step actions that continuously bring success to life in a company. Berry's comprehensive model reveals the soul that underlies the strategies and day-to-day operations of great service companies, guiding the thousands of daily decisions of individual employees. Clear, compelling, pathbreaking, Discovering the Soul of Service is essential reading for managers everywhere.

Go Pro - 7 Steps to Becoming a Network Marketing Professional


Eric Worre - 2013
    At that event he made the decision to Go Pro and become a Network Marketing expert. Since that time, he has focused on developing the skills to do just that. In doing so, Eric has touched and been touched by hundreds of thousands of people around the world. Now he shares his wisdom in a guide that will ignite your passion for this profession and help you make the decision to Go Pro and create the life of your dreams. In this definitive guidebook, you will learn to: -Find prospects -Invite them to yourproduct or opportunity -Present your product -Follow up with your prospects -Help them become customers or distributors -Help them get started right -Grow your team by promoting events -And much, much more. Eric s wish is for you to make the decision to become a Network Marketing Professional. For you to truly Go Pro. Because it is a stone-cold fact that Network Marketing is a better way. Now let s go tell the world.

Customer Satisfaction Is Worthless Customer Loyalty Is Priceless


Jeffrey Gitomer - 1998
    Nationally syndicated columnist and sales trainer, Jeffrey Gitomer shows you how to convert "satisfied" customers into "loyal" customers.

Brand Seduction: How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands


Daryl Weber - 2016
    They see brand-building as an unteachable art guided by their intuition and experience. But at its core, marketing aims to seed ideas into people's minds, make them feel a certain way, and, ultimately, get them to act.In Brand Seduction, Daryl reveals the latest psychological and neuroscientific discoveries about how our minds process brand information and make decisions, and the important roles our emotions and unconscious play in our selections.Welcome to the new world of neuromarketing.Through simple language, engaging stories, and real-world examples, Brand Seduction shows you how to decode, build, and use these hidden brand fantasies to grow your brand and business. You'll learn:• The surprising unconscious side of brands.• The biggest myths about consumer psychology.• The real role of emotions in building brands.• Practical tools to use neuroscience to inspire better marketing.Everyone seems to have a different idea of what brands are, how they work, and how they are built. Brand Seduction digs deeper into the nature of brands, how they exist and behave in the mind, and how marketers and business leaders can use this understanding to "seduce" customers and grow their businesses.

Ultimate Leadership: Winning Execution Strategies for Your Situation


Russell E. Palmer - 2008
    Very often it is not about them failing to get results that are needed, but them failing to understand the various constituent groups they have to interact with. This book is organized according to the contexts that leaders are most likely to encounter.

HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter)


Michael E. PorterRobert S. Kaplan - 2010
    Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution.HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy will inspire you to:• Distinguish your company from rivals• Clarify what your company will and won't do• Craft a vision for an uncertain future• Create blue oceans of uncontested market space• Use the Balanced Scorecard to measure your strategy• Capture your strategy in a memorable phrase• Make priorities explicit• Allocate resources early• Clarify decision rights for faster decision making"This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter, "The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy," "Building Your Company's Vision," "Reinventing Your Business Model," "Blue Ocean Strategy," "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution," "Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System," "Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action," "Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance," and "Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance."

Teaming to Innovate


Amy C. Edmondson - 2013
    (Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.

The Leadership Secrets of Santa Claus: How to Get Big Things Done in YOUR "Workshop" All Year Long


Eric Harvey - 2003
    These are the leadership traits of the Santa Claus in each of us! This is truly the gift that keeps on giving!

Peter Drucker's Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today's Leaders


Peter F. Drucker - 2015
    Drucker. Peter Drucker's Five Most Important Questions provides insightful guidance and stirring inspiration for today's leaders and entrepreneurs. By applying Drucker's leadership framework in the present context of today's leaders and those who lead with them, this book is an essential resource for people leading, managing and working in all three sectors—public, private and social. Readers will gain new perspectives and develop a solid foundation upon which to build a successful and bright future. They will learn how to focus on why they are doing what they're doing, how to do it better, and how to develop a realistic, motivational plan for achieving their goals. This brief, clear, and accessible guide — peppered with commentary from distinguished management gurus, contemporary entrepreneurs and dynamic millennial leaders —will challenge readers and stimulate spirited discussion and action within any organization, inspiring positive change and new levels of excellence. In addition to contributions from Jim Collins, Marshall Goldsmith, and Judith Rodin, the book features new insights from some of today's most influential leaders in business (GE and Salesforce.com), academia (Harvard Business School and Northwestern University), social enterprise (Levo League, Pencils of Promise and Why Millennials Matter) and the military (United States Military Academy), who have been directly influenced by Drucker's theory of management.

The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future


Chris Guillebeau - 2012
      Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck.  Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.    There are many others like Chris – those who’ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful.  Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do.  You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful.   In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he’s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies.  In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.   Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment.  It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you don’t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for.  You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees.  All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.   Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick.  Among Chris’s key principles: if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish – sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins.   In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold.  Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives.  And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs.  This remarkable book will start you on your way.

Changing How the World Does Business: Fedex's Incredible Journey to Success - The Inside Story


Roger Frock - 2006
    The company's early years were an unending series of legal, financial, and operational crises that continually threatened its ability to stay in business. Yet FedEx's leaders and employees were incredibly resourceful and resilient. Pilots used personal credit cards to gas up planes, paychecks weren't cashed, and in one of the most famous episodes, founder Fred Smith literally gambled the company's last remaining funds to keep the planes flying. Becuase Roger Frock was with the companies from the start, he is able to chronicle these real-life hardships and hard-fought triumphs as only an insider can. With humor and insight, he describes how FedEx overcame impossible odds to become one of the world's greatest success stories, a revolutionary company that truly changed the way the world does business.

Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You


John Warrillow - 2010
    Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren't confident that the company-even if it's profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency. Alex turns to Ted, an entrepreneur and old family friend, who encourages Alex to pursue three criteria to make his business sellable: * Teachable: focus on products and services that you can teach employees to deliver. * Valuable: avoid price wars by specialising in doing one thing better than anyone else. * Repeatable: generate recurring revenue by engineering products that customers have to repurchase often.