To the almost universal disdain of their friends and professors, these two turned down tempting job offers, borrowed money from friends and family, loaded up on credit card debt, and decided to start a single-product company to manufacture and market a computer mouse shaped like the head of a golf club. They watched enviously as nearly all of their friends became millionaires in the dot-com boom, but they persevered and forged their own path. To chart their progress and to keep themselves motivated against the odds, they kept a diary that recorded the realities of their everyday life as entrepreneurs. Out of their diary entries grew The MouseDriver Chronicles, an intimate, insightful, and often funny look into the minds of two entrepreneurs and how they brought a simple idea to market. From The MouseDriver Chronicles: "School was just about over, and the wondrous combination of brick-baking heat and relentless high humidity that defines summer in south Philadelphia wasn't too far off. We couldn't afford to wait around for it. We needed to blaze to San Francisco and get rolling. Fine. No problem. Except we didn't yet have an office in San Francisco. Or a place to live. Or MouseDrivers in stock. We had all our plans and ambition, but everything real about running a business was ahead of us. Immediately ahead."

    What happens next in the fifth stage, or Fifth Paradigm, will not be an evolution, but a revolution.Almost everything about how marketing is done today, including the very notion of a brand itself, will require a complete re-imagination.As Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard, one of the world’s most recognizable and decorated brands, Raja Rajamannar shares the forward-thinking ways all businesses must rethink their entire marketing landscape to remain relevant and be successful.In Quantum Marketing, readers will:Understand the evolution of marketing and how to be at the forefront of future change.Get clarity on the right marketing strategies and tactics to pursue amidst an ever-evolving industry.Achieve breakthroughs in innovative thinking to compete in modern business. Gain perspective from top marketers across industries.Quantum Marketing is for all business people who seek to understand how rapidly marketing is evolving, what marketers are doing to get ready for this shift, and what the new world will look like for companies, consumers, and society as the race to develop revolutionary marketing strategies reaches a whole new level.

    How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?   Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor. The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo.

    Truly effective companies (and marketers) create content experiences, drawing the customer into an immersive infinite scroll that mirrors the consumer experience of Netflix, Spotify, and other billion-dollar brands.Randy Frisch will push you to rethink how you approach content for complex buyer journeys. The current mindset is all about volume-the more content created, the better. But the reality is that almost 70 percent of content created within an organization is never used, and there's little point investing in content marketing if you're not leveraging the assets you create.In this book, Frisch unpacks the Content Experience Framework, arming your organization to deliver personalized experiences that leverage your content to engage your audiences at scale-as well as identify and ramp up the key players in your organization who need to own this process.

    (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.

    Making matters worse, those leading the demos can rarely afford to spend months at a time figuring out how to improve their success rates. In Just F*Ing Demo!, Rob Falcone outlines the tactics that helped him overcome these challenges, lead clear, relevant demos, and exceed revenue generation goals quarter after quarter. The book will teach readers: - How to structure a demo; - How to ask questions that uncover what your audience truly cares about; - How to translate audience needs into a flow that is extremely easy to follow; - How to use simple but powerful interpersonal tactics within the demo itself. Just F*Ing Demo! distills Falcone’s highly successful training program into an intentionally concise yet impactful read. From the entrepreneur seeking investment to the sales professional chasing a deal, anyone can carve out a few hours, read this book, and immediately make their demos kick ass.

    Learn to apply their proven insight and methods for success into your own life!

    Networking.In this New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA TODAY bestseller, master networker Joe Sweeney shares his networking secrets from a long and successful career as a business owner, sports agent and executive and investment banking consultant. His first secret: master networkers are focused on giving, not getting.With today’s difficult economy and uncertain workplace, networking has never been more important. Sweeney’s simple but effective 5/10/15 networking plan will give you a leg up in the current job market, help you stay employed, or, if you’ve been laid off, find your next job. The cliché that who you know is more important than what you know has never been truer. Sweeney illustrates his insights with dozens of helpful examples from his own life (along with a few fascinating insider sports stories).With special sections on networking for women and minorities, insights into the usefulness (and handicaps) of social networking sites, how to get (and why you need) a wingman and profiles of other master networkers, Networking Is a Contact Sport is a practical and essential guide for anyone who wants to get ahead in today’s economy.

    For decades, understanding management—what works, and what doesn't—has been the pursuit of the world's best and brightest. Globally, there are more than 1,500 credible schools offering master's degrees in business administration, and hundreds of magazines and newspapers and thousands of books devoted to the subject. What's been missing is a simple and convenient way to disseminate the best ideas and practices to managers everywhere, at all levels and in all kinds of industries and organizations. The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management draws the best from the existing body of knowledge and research, and summarizes it in a simple, clear, and useful way. Focusing on classic and contemporary works that have been recommended by members of The Wall Street Journal CEO Council—all chief executives of large and successful global companies—it is an invaluable reference and essential tool for every manager, new and experienced alike.

    How can we ever get our organizations to succeed if so few employees believe in their senior leaders? The Leadership Contract explains why leadership, and specifically leadership culture, is the only real differentiator between the organizations that thrive and those that fall behind. This book explains how to establish a leadership contract that is fully understood and agreed upon by business leaders to ensure the success of their company.The book lays out the four terms and conditions of the leadership contract and enlists leaders in making a conscious decision to lead, including the understanding that leadership is a decision, entails an obligation, is difficult, and requires a community.Designed for top-level executives, mid-level managers, front-line leaders, and emerging leaders, the book identifies the shortcomings of current leadership methods and explains how to adopt new policies and mentalities to make you a better leader and ensure business success Author Vince Molinaro, Ph.D., CMC is the author of two successful books, Leadership Solutions and The Leadership Gap and is also a Certified Management Consultant Create the contract that ensures your leadership will take your organization to new heights.

    It's certainly no walk in the park. And, depending on where you've been for your information when it comes to SEO, it might be outdated, or just flat-out wrong. Why is that? Search has been evolving at an uncanny rate in recent years. And, if you're not in the know, then you could end up spinning your wheels and wasting valuable and precious time and resources on techniques that no longer work. The main reason for the recent changes: to increase relevancy. Google's sole mission is to provide the most relevant search results at the top of its searches, in the quickest manner possible. But, in recent years, due to some mischievous behavior at the hand of a small group of people, relevancy began to wane. SEO 2016 :: Understanding Google's Algorithm Adjustments The field of SEO has been changing, all led by Google's onslaught of algorithm adjustments that have decimated and razed some sites while uplifting and building others. Since 2011, Google has made it its mission to hunt out and demote spammy sites that sacrifice user-experience, focus on thin content, or simply spend their time trying to trick and deceive their way to the top of its search results. At the same time, Google has increased its reliance on four major components of trust, that work at the heart of its search algorithm: Trust in Age Trust in Authority Trust in Content Relevancy In this book, you'll learn just how each of these affects Google's search results, and just how you can best optimize your site and content to ensure that you're playing by Google's many rules. And, although there have been many algorithm adjustments over the years, four major ones have shaped and forever changed the search engine landscape: Google Panda Google Penguin Google Hummingbird Google Mobilegeddon We'll discuss the nature of these changes and just how each of these algorithm adjustments have shaped the current landscape in search engine optimization. So what does it take to rank your site today? In order to compete at any level in SEO, you have to earn trust - Google's trust that is. But, what does that take? How can we build trust quickly without jumping through all the hoops? SEO is by no means a small feat. It takes hard work applied consistently overtime. There are no overnight success stories when it comes to SEO. But there are certainly ways to navigate the stormy online waters of Google's highly competitive search. Download SEO 2016 :: Learn Search Engine Optimization Lift the veil on Google's complex search algorithm, and understand just what it takes to rank on Google searches today, not yesterday.

    Whether you are a newly elected president, CEO, or executive at any level, what you do in your first 100 days will be absolutely pivotal to your success or failure. Your First 100 Days in a New Executive Job will help you to seal your leadership, build a team you can count on, and have a bottom line impact before your first few months on the job is up. It will take you through all the steps of successful executive onboarding and show you how to avoid the typical pitfalls. Hargrove emphasizes the importance of getting clear on your going-in mandate—your contract with key stake holders. He also shows you how to use your first 100 days to declare an Impossible Future that represents the difference you want to make, while delivering on your Day Job. According to Hargrove, the key idea is to go for "quick wins" that establish a virtuous circle of increasing credibility and help you to avoid a vicious circle of decreasing credibility. This book will expand your aspirations and motivations, and give you a treasure trove of practical, down-to-earth tips to immediately apply in your new leadership role. * Have a story ready day one, as key stakeholders look for signals immediately—take symbolic action within 72 hours * Develop a "teachable point of view"—This is how we intend to win in this business * Build a team of 'A' players—get the right people on the bus * Declare an Impossible Future that unites warring tribes * Jump start your vision with 30, 60, 90-day catalytic breakthrough projects * Master the political chessboard and culture—It's all politics! * Drive bottom-line results before the end of your first 100 day

    Second only to the sewing machine.'So writes entrepreneur David Hieatt who has based his entire marketing strategy around a simple email newsletter. And it's worked. His company has grown into a creative global jeans business with a fiercely loyal community. Now, David shares his insight, strategy and methodology so you can do the same. In Do Open you will discover:Why giving is your secret to successHow to get people's attention when time is your biggest competitorWhy creating beats sharingHow a small team can winBuild community. Build your brand. Build long-term growth. Discover why the humble newsletter is pure and utter gold.

    . .Culture is not about bringing your dog to work, free lunches, unlimited vacation, or even casual Fridays. Culture is not a collection of personal preferences.Our thinking about culture has been kidnapped and polluted by the spectacular, attention-grabbing fads that 99 percent of organizations cannot implement. It is time to get beyond these "here today, gone tomorrow" illusions that foster entitlement, complacency, and mediocrity, so we can start implementing the timeless principles that are: The Culture Solution.The six foundational principles of a Dynamic Culture are universal and unchanging. In The Culture Solution, business consultant and New York Times bestselling author of The Dream Manager and Off Balance presents the six enduring principles of a Dynamic Culture in a way that is both intensely practical and inspiring. If you want to . . . grow your business; attract, grow, and retain top talent; learn the key to hiring in the 21st century; teach every person in your organization that they have a role to play in making the culture better today than it was yesterday . . . this book is for you and every person on your team.The thing is and it's quite simple, really everybody wants to belong to a Dynamic Culture. That's why today, more than ever before, organizations are searching for a Culture Solution. Too many books are written just for the leaders of an organization. Finally, we have a definitive and authoritative book about culture that everyone in your organization can and should read.Perhaps you don't believe it is possible to create a Dynamic Culture in your particular type of business. Prepare yourself to be convinced that the culture of any organization can be transformed using the six principles outlined in these pages.As an author, speaker, and consultant, Matthew Kelly has become a once-in-a-generation voice. He has an astounding ability to cut through the noise and deliver a message that is both timely and timeless and he does it in a way that will give you goosebumps, stop you dead in your tracks to reflect on ideas so profound that you simply cannot read on, and make you think he wrote this book just for you. This is what makes Kelly one of the most refreshing and authentic voices of our time. Once every twenty-five years or so a book comes along that completely redefines the way we think about work and the life of an organization. This is that book. Culture will be the most significant issue in business in the coming decades are you ready to create a Dynamic Culture?