If you want to succeed in life or business, this book is a must.

    As recounted by Ben Rich, the operation's brilliant boss for nearly two decades, the chronicle of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works is a drama of cold war confrontations and Gulf War air combat, of extraordinary feats of engineering & achievement against fantastic odds. Here are up-close portraits of the maverick band of scientists & engineers who made the Skunk Works so renowned. Filled with telling personal anecdotes & high adventure, with narratives from the CIA & from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the 20th century.

    The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.As Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer explain in The Progress Principle, seemingly mundane workday events can make or break employees’ inner work lives. But it’s forward momentum in meaningful work—progress—that creates the best inner work lives. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day.The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. It also explains how to activate two forces that enable progress: (1) catalysts—events that directly facilitate project work, such as clear goals and autonomy—and (2) nourishers—interpersonal events that uplift workers, including encouragement and demonstrations of respect and collegiality.Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people’s performance.

    When people inside a company develop a shared sense of what's going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. They have the courage to take a risk on something new. And they have the gut-level certitude to stick with an idea that doesn't take off right away. People are Wired to Care, and many of the world's best organizations are, too. In pursuit of this idea, Patnaik takes readers inside big companies like IBM, Target, and Intel to see widespread empathy in action. But he also goes to farmers' markets and a conference on world religions. He dives deep into the catacombs of the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, with James Carville, the Ragin' Cajun, and John McCain, a national hero, to show how empathy can give you the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information. Wired to Care is a compelling tale of the power that people have to see the world through each other's eyes, told with passion for the possibilities that lie ahead if leaders learn to stop worrying about their own problems and start caring about the world around them. As Patnaik notes, in addition to its considerable economic benefits, increasing empathy for the people you serve can have a personal impact, as well: It just might help you to have a better day at work.

    It's the kind of book you don't read once, you go back to it on a regular basis. » - Carmen Gerea, CEO & Co-founder, UsabilityChefsLean B2B helps entrepreneurs and innovators quickly find traction in the enterprise.Used by thousands around the world and packed with more than 20 case studies, Lean B2B consolidates the best thinking around Business- to-Business (B2B) customer development to help entrepreneurs and innovators focus on the right things each step of the way, leaving as little as possible to luck.The book helps:• Assess the market potential of opportunities to find the right opportunity for your team• Find early adopters, quickly establish credibility and convince business stakeholders to work with you• Find and prioritize business problems in corporations and identify the stakeholders with the power to influence a purchase decision• Create a minimum viable product and a compelling offer, validate a solution and evaluate whether your team has found product-market fit• Identify and avoid common challenges faced by entrepreneurs and learn ninja techniques to speed up product-market validation« The book will pay itself off in the first couple of pages! » - Ben Sardella, Co-Founder, Datanyze« Treat this book like a map to show you where you are and a compass to show you the direction. I wish I could have read it 2 or 3 years ago. » – Jonathan Gebauer, Founder, exploreB2B« Lean B2B is filled with rock-solid advice for technology entrepreneurs who want a rapid-growth trajectory. Read it to increase your certainty and your success rate. » - Jill Konrath, Author of AGILE SELLING and Selling to Big Companies« Probably the most slept on book in the Lean startup market right now.... There is no sugarcoating here. Garbugli tells you exactly what needs to happen and how to make it happen... literally holds your hand and spells it out. I was really impressed with the overall depth and advice presented. » - AJ, B2B Entrepreneur« The book I read of which I have learned the most. » - Etienne Thouin, Founder and CTO, SQLNext Software« This book is essential reading for would-be entrepreneurs who face the daunting task of entering B2B markets. » – Paul Gillin, Co-Author, Social Marketing to the Business Customer

    In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives—from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture—can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends—flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning—and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly’s bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading—what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place—as this new world emerges.

    Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.Ridley derives these and other lessons, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even – a biological innovation -- life itself.

     It isn't enough to just do your job anymore. In order to thrive in today's marketplace, all of us-even the accountants-have to be ready to generate brilliant ideas on demand. Business creativity expert Todd Henry explains how to establish effective practices that unleash your creative potential. Born out of his consultancy and his popular podcast, Henry has created a practical method for discovering your personal creative rhythm. He focuses on five key elements: *Focus: Begin with your end goal in mind. *Relationships: Build stimulating relationships and ideas will follow. *Energy: Manage it as your most valuable resource. *Stimuli: Structure the right "inputs" to maximize creative output. *Hours: Focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. This is a guide for staying inspired and experiencing greater creative productivity than you ever imagined possible.

    More than a series of fascinating case studies, To Engineer Is Human is a work that looks at our deepest notions of progress and perfection, tracing the fine connection between the quantifiable realm of science and the chaotic realities of everyday life."Alert, inquisitive, unspecialized, wholly human...refreshingly eclectic." --The Spectator"Henry Petroski is an ardent engineer, and if he writes more good books like this, he might find himself nominated to become the meistersinger of the guild. [This is] a refreshing plunge into the dynamics of the engineering ethos...as straightforward as an I-beam."--Science

    Ideas for new businesses, solutions to the world's problems, and artistic breakthroughs are common, but great execution is rare. According to Scott Belsky, the capacity to make ideas happen can be developed by anyone willing to develop their organizational habits and leadership capability. That's why he founded Behance, a company that helps creative people and teams across industries develop these skills. Belsky has spent six years studying the habits of creative people and teams that are especially productive-the ones who make their ideas happen time and time again. After interviewing hundreds of successful creatives, he has compiled their most powerful-and often counterintuitive-practices, such as: •Generate ideas in moderation and kill ideas liberally •Prioritize through nagging •Encourage fighting within your team While many of us obsess about discovering great new ideas, Belsky shows why it's better to develop the capacity to make ideas happen-a capacity that endures over time.

    Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments.Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to:Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

    If you are seriously interested in understanding how you and your team can start down the path of improvement with XP, you must read this book."-- Francesco Cirillo, Chief Executive Officer, XPLabs S.R.L. "The first edition of this book told us what XP was--it changed the way many of us think about software development. This second edition takes it farther and gives us a lot more of the 'why' of XP, the motivations and the principles behind the practices. This is great stuff. Armed with the 'what' and the 'why, ' we can now all set out to confidently work on the 'how' how to run our projects better, and how to get agile techniques adopted in our organizations."-- Dave Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmers LLC "This book is dynamite! It was revolutionary when it first appeared a few years ago, and this new edition is equally profound. For those who insist on cookbook checklists, there's an excellent chapter on 'primary practices, ' but I urge you to begin by truly contemplating the meaning of the opening sentence in the first chapter of Kent Beck's book: 'XP is about social change.' You should do whatever it takes to ensure that every IT professional and every IT manager--all the way up to the CIO--has a copy of Extreme Programming Explained on his or her desk."-- Ed Yourdon, author and consultant "XP is a powerful set of concepts for simplifying the process of software design, development, and testing. It is about minimalism and incrementalism, which are especially useful principles when tackling complex problems that require a balance of creativity and discipline."-- Michael A. Cusumano, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management, and author of The Business of Software " Extreme Programming Explained is the work of a talented and passionate craftsman. Kent Beck has brought together a compelling collection of ideas about programming and management that deserves your full attention. My only beef is that our profession has gotten to a point where such common-sense ideas are labeled 'extreme.'..."-- Lou Mazzucchelli, Fellow, Cutter Business Technology Council "If your organization is ready for a change in the way it develops software, there's the slow incremental approach, fixing things one by one, or the fast track, jumping feet first into Extreme Programming. Do not be frightened by the name, it is not that extreme at all. It is mostly good old recipes and common sense, nicely integrated together, getting rid of all the fat that has accumulated over the years."-- Philippe Kruchten, UBC, Vancouver, British Columbia "Sometimes revolutionaries get left behind as the movement they started takes on a life of its own. In this book, Kent Beck shows that he remains ahead of the curve, leading XP to its next level. Incorporating five years of feedback, this book takes a fresh look at what it takes to develop better software in less time and for less money. There are no silver bullets here, just a set of practical principles that, when used wisely, can lead to dramatic improvements in software development productivity."-- Mary Poppendieck, author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit "Kent Beck has revised his classic book based on five more years of applying and teaching XP. He shows how the path to XP is both

    But when he took the helm in 2004, America was losing that war badly: despite vastly inferior resources and technology, Al Qaeda was outmaneuvering America’s most elite warriors. McChrystal came to realize that today’s faster, more interdependent world had overwhelmed the conventional, top-down hierarchy of the US military. Al Qaeda had seen the future: a decentralized network that could move quickly and strike ruthlessly. To defeat such an enemy, JSOC would have to discard a century of management wisdom, and pivot from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. Under McChrystal’s leadership, JSOC remade itself, in the midst of a grueling war, into something entirely new: a network that combined robust centralized communication with decentralized managerial authority. As a result, they beat back Al Qaeda. In this book, McChrystal shows not only how the military made that transition, but also how similar shifts are possible in all organizations, from large companies to startups to charities to governments. In a turbulent world, the best organizations think and act like a team of teams, embracing small groups that combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share what they’ve learned. Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career, the private sector, and sources as diverse as hospital emergency rooms and NASA’s space program, McChrystal frames the existential challenge facing today’s organizations, and presents a compelling, effective solution.

    With this practical book, you'll explore the often-misunderstood practice of user story mapping, and learn how it can help keep your team stay focused on users and their experience throughout the development process.You and your team will learn that user stories aren't a way to write better specifications, but a way to organize and have better conversations. This book will help you understand what kinds of conversations you should be having, when to have them, and what to keep track of when you do. Learn the key concepts used to create a great story map. Understand how user stories really work, and how to make good use of them in agile and lean projects. Examine the nuts and bolts of managing stories through the development cycle. Use strategies that help you continue to learn before and after the product's release to customers and usersUser Story Mapping is ideal for agile and lean software development team members, product managers and UX practitioners in commercial product companies, and business analysts and project managers in IT organizations—whether you're new to this approach or want to understand more about it.

    Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years--as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues--Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson's portrait touched millions of readers. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. He himself spoke candidly about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues offer an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.