Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.

    It’s not about to-do lists and accountability charts. It’s about creating a framework for regular check-ins, key results, and most of all, the beauty of a good fail – and how to take a temporary disaster and turn it into a future success. In this book, Wodtke takes you through the fictional case study of Hanna and Jack, who are struggling to survive in their own startup. They fight shiny object syndrome, losing focus, and dealing with communication issues. After hard lessons, they learn the practical steps they need to do what must be done. The second half of the book demonstrates how to use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to help teams realize big goals in a methodical way, leaving nothing to chance. Laid out in a practical but compelling way, she makes the lessons of Hanna and Jack’s story clear and actionable. Ready to move your team in the right direction? Read this, and learn the system of creating your focus – and finding success. "Busy grinding without purpose is the secret death of too many startups. In this memorable story, Christina gives us a glimpse of a more satisfying kind of startup--still hard and chaotic but full of purpose and the chance to build something great." James Cham, Founder, Bloomberg Beta "This book is useful, actionable, and actually fun to read! If you want to get your team aligned around real, measurable goals, Radical Focus will teach you how to do it quickly and clearly." -Laura Klein, Principal, Users Know "Someone once told me that 'problems are just opportunities that haven’t presented themselves'. Since I was introduced to OKRs, they've been an invaluable tool for me, and our company. Christina's ideas have been instrumental, allowing me to better navigate the often ambiguous approach to goal setting and along the way creating a more open and accountable team and a clearer path for myself professionally. I personally can't thank her enough for the guidance." Scott Baldwin, Director of Services, Yellow Pencil "Radical Focus illustrates how to implement OKRs in an engaging, compact, realistic story. Best of all, Wodtke proves OKRs can be fun!" Ben Lamorte, OKRs.com

    Communications expert Carmine Gallo has studied and analyzed the very best of Jobs's performances, offering point-by-point examples, tried-and-true techniques, and proven presentation secrets in 18 "scenes," including:Develop a messianic sense of purposeReveal the Conquering heroChannel your inner ZenStage your presentation with propsMake it look effortlessWith this revolutionary approach, you'll be surprised at how easy it is to sell your ideas, share your enthusiasm, and wow your audience the Steve Jobs way."No other leader captures an audience like Steve Jobs does and, like no other book, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs captures the formula Steve uses to enthrall audiences."--Rob Enderle, The Enderle Group"Now you can learn from the best there is--both Jobs and Gallo. No matter whether you are a novice presenter or a professional speaker like me, you will read and reread this book with the same enthusiasm that people bring to their iPods."--David Meerman Scott, bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR and World Wide Rave

    It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.

    Our work follows us home, even on weekends and vacations.The result is stress, burnout, and strained relationships. Ironically, burning the candle at both ends makes work quality suffer too.Days full of busyness, where you go to bed wondering where all the time went and why so little got done, is primarily the product of habit. One action triggering another that fills every moment of the day, crowding out anything that's not an emergency.It's automated overwork. And when a person succumbs to the stress and leaves for greener pastures, this “burnout pattern” follows them around from one job to the next.But there's good news . . .Self-automation can become your advantage as well.And it's all laid out in the newest book from Michael Hyatt & Company, No-Fail Habits.No-Fail Habits reveals how you can permanently drop habits that don't serve you.You'll also discover how to identify negative triggers and replace them with actions, habits, and rituals that free your time and give you the mental space for deep work—the fertile soil of accomplishment.No-Fail Habits is the blueprint for leveraging habits to build a life of success at work and in your personal life. No-Fail Habits will help you achieve more than you ever thought possible.

    A simple, easy-to-follow guide, illustrated with plenty of full-color examples, this book will lead you through the process of creating great designs from start to finish. Good design principles are not rocket science, and using the information contained in this book will help you create stunning web sites.Understand the design process, from discovery to implementation Understand what makes "good design" Developing pleasing layouts using grids, the rule of thirds, balance and symmetry Use color effectively, develop color schemes and create a palette Use textures, lines, points, shapes, volumes and depth Learn how good typography can make ordinary designs look great Effective imagery: choosing, editing and placing images And much more Throughout the book, you'll follow an example design, from concept to completion, learning along the way. The book's full-color layout and large format (8" x 10") make The Principles Of Beautiful Wed Design a pleasure to read.Editorial Reviews"The Principles of Beautiful Web Design is a good book to kick start your graphic-design journey. The biggest benefit that I got from this book is the knowledge to learn from great designs as opposed to just admiring them in a state of awe." - Slashdot.org"Jason is a great writer, and the book is quite easy to read. It's put together wonderfully, including many full color screenshots and other forms of imagery that make the book a pleasure to read. I'd definitely recommend the book to anyone in Web design." - MondayByNoon"Jason Beaird covers web design in a way that non-designers can understand. He walks you through all of the aspects of design development from initial meeting to finished product. If you are just getting into web development, this is a must read." - Blogcritics.org"This is a thoroughly practical guide to web design that is very well written: good technical depth in easy-to-understand language with excellent illustrations and graphics that support the text. For many users it will be the only web-design text they will need. For those who want to further advance their skills and knowledge it will provide a sound foundation." - PC Update"His "Don't just tell, show!" style makes this book accessible to everyone... It strikes a carefully thought-out balance between describing principles and illustrating them. It is clear and well structured, with practical examples in every chapter." - Mitch Wheat

    So why then do so many audiences leave feeling like they've wasted their time? All too often, presentations don't resonate with the audience and move them to transformative action.Just as the author's first book helped presenters become visual communicators, Resonate helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action. The author's approach is simple: building a presentation today is a bit like writing a documentary. Using this approach, you'll convey your content with passion, persuasion, and impact.Author has a proven track record, including having created the slides in Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient TruthFocuses on content development methodologies that are not only fundamental but will move people to action Upends the usual paradigm by making the audience the hero and the presenter the mentor Shows how to use story techniques of conflict and resolution Presentations don't have to be boring ordeals. You can make them fun, exciting, and full of meaning. Leave your audiences energized and ready to take action with Resonate.

     Great coaches realize something that others do not: every moment matters! You must be intentional about everything you do. Whether you are coaching your local youth soccer team, leading your high school football program, or competing for an NCAA championship, Every Moment Matters will give you the tools and strategies to become the coach you always wished you had, and the coach today's athletes are craving. Get ready to have your best season ever!

    Conceived as a handbook and teaching aid for artists, instructors, and students, this timeless book presents Albers’s unique ideas of color experimentation in a way that is valuable to specialists as well as to a larger audience.Originally published by Yale University Press in 1963 as a limited silkscreen edition with 150 color plates, Interaction of Color first appeared in paperback in 1971, featuring ten representative color studies chosen by Albers. The paperback has remained in print ever since and is one of the most influential resources on color for countless readers.This new paperback edition presents a significantly expanded selection of more than thirty color studies alongside Albers’s original unabridged text, demonstrating such principles as color relativity, intensity, and temperature; vibrating and vanishing boundaries; and the illusions of transparency and reversed grounds. Now available in a larger format and with enhanced production values, this expanded edition celebrates the unique authority of Albers’s contribution to color theory and brings the artist’s iconic study to an eager new generation of readers.

    It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks.The author's model of constraints on innovation integrates insights from the vast literature on innovation with his own observations of hundreds of organizations. The book is filled with assessments, tools, and real-world examples.The author's research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on Fox News and on NPR's MarketplaceIncludes illustrative examples from leading organizations Offers a practical guide for bringing new ideas to fruition even within a previously rigid organizational culture This book gives people in organizations the conceptual framework and practical information they need to innovate successfully.

    We are trapped by techniques and assumptions of a prior era.Today challenges emerge at an ever-accelerating rate, and we struggle to find the imaginative answers we crave. When we do, biology and culture conspire to obstruct our progress.Think Wrong: How to Conquer the Status Quo and Do Work That Matters teaches you how to use Future's radical problem-solving system to reliably produce surprising, ingenious, and seemingly magical answers to your most wicked questions. This book provides you with new language, frameworks, and tools to conquer the status quo and drive change.Inside Think Wrong, designers and innovators John Bielenberg, Mike Burn, and Greg Galle show how pioneering teams of people have cultivated ways to challenge both their brains and the culture at large. These people learned to think wrong, and so can you.An introduction offers the fundamental groundwork of Think Wrong. The subsequent chapters present six practices developed by the authors: Be Bold, Get Out, Let Go, Make Stuff, Bet Small, and Move Fast. Using firsthand case studies of success, and offering Think Wrong Drills that you may use, Think Wrong is a field guide for applying this highly effective problem-solving system to challenges big and small. In addition to the drills provided in the book, Think Wrong readers are provided access to free online resources.

    Now, twenty-five years after its original publication, Conceptual Blockbusting has never been more relevant, powerful, or fresh. Integrating insights from the worlds of psychology, engineering, management, art, and philosophy, Adams identifies the key blocks (perceptual, emotional, cultural, environmental, intellectual, and expressive) that prevent us from realizing the full potential of our fertile minds. Employing unconventional exercises and other interactive elements, Adams shows individuals, teams, and organizations how to overcome these blocks, embrace alternative ways of thinking about complex problems, and celebrate the joy of creativity. With new examples and contemporary references, Conceptual Blockbusting is guaranteed to introduce a new generation of readers to a world of new possibilities.

    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

    But few of us are aware that it is also one of the most vital tools for success. In The Power of Why, Amanda Lang shows how curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions fuels innovation and can drive change not just in business but also in our personal lives.Weaving together the latest research with in-depth profiles of innovators from around the world, Lang explores how to harness and develop the power of curiosity. She reveals how a major retailer set out to discover what really makes men happy—and was stunned by the results. She finds out why, at one particular hospital, nurses think it’s better if they don’t wash their hands. She learns why the most common methods of brainstorming don’t actually work and discovers a new soccer ball that could change the world.A book that challenges conventional wisdom and offers practical, inspiring advice, The Power of Why shows how it’s possible to reignite your innate curiosity and overcome long-standing barriers—leaving you more creative, productive and fulfilled in your job and happier in your relationships.

    Now, HumanSigma is poised to do the same for sales and services. Human Sigma offers an innovative research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges facing sales and services companies today: how to effectively manage the employee-customer encounter to drive business success.Human Sigma offers an innovative, research-based approach to one of the toughest challenges businesses face today: how to effectively manage the employee-customer encounter to drive business success. Based on research spanning 10 million employees and 10 million customers around the world, the Human Sigma approach combines a proven method for assessing the health of the employee-customer encounter with a disciplined process for improving it. Human Sigma is based on five rules to bring excellence to how employees engage and interact with customers: RULE #1: E Pluribus Unum. Employee and customer experiences must be managed together — not as separate entities. RULE #2: Feelings Are Facts. Emotions drive and shape the employee-customer encounter. RULE #3: Think Globally, Measure and Act Locally. The employee-customer encounter must be measured and managed at the local level. RULE #4: There Is One Number You Need to Know. Employee and customer engagement interact to drive enhanced financial performance. And this interaction can be quantified and summarized with a single performance metric. RULE #5: If You Pray for Potatoes, You Better Grab a Hoe. Good intentions alone do not constitute a plan of action. Sustainable improvement in the employee-customer encounter requires disciplined local action coupled with a companywide commitment to changing how employees are recruited, positioned in roles, rewarded and recognized, and importantly, how they are managed. Essential reading for global business leaders, Human Sigma shows how sales and service companies can flourish in the new global economy. It reveals a profoundly different method for managing human systems for growth. Blending strategic analysis with hands-on, practical steps and advice, Human Sigma will change how you view your work, your employees and your customers forever.