Weinberg shows you exactly how to become a more effective consultant. He reveals specific techniques and strategies that really work.Through the use of vividly memorable rules, laws, and principles -- such as The Law of Raspberry Jam, The Potato Chip Principle, and Lessons from the Farm -- the author shows you how to-- price and market your services-- avoid traps and find alternative approaches-- keep ahead of your clients-- create a special "consultant's survival kit"-- trade improvement for perfection-- negotiate in difficult situations-- measure your effectiveness-- be yourselfYou will also find straightforward advice on marketing your services, including how to-- find clients-- get needed exposure-- set just-right fees-- gain trustThe Secrets of Consulting -- techniques, strategies, and first-hand experiences -- all that you'll need to set up, run, and be successful at your own consulting business.

    Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it's rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don't?This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource.In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore:Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristicsThe best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company's evolutionStrategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders

    Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.--back cover

    The reason? An inability to adapt quickly to new business realities. Established companies are at risk, but it’s no easier being an agile startup, because most of those fail due to their inability to scale. Tomorrow’s business winners—regardless of size or industry—will be the ones that know how to combine scale with agility. In Design to Grow, a Coca-Cola senior executive shares both the successes and failures of one of the world’s largest companies as it learns to use design to be both agile and big. In this rare and unprecedented behind-the-scenes look, David Butler and senior Fast Company editor, Linda Tischler, use plain language and easy-to-understand case studies to show how this works at Coca-Cola—and how other companies can use the same approach to grow their business. This book is a must-read for managers inside large corporations as well as entrepreneurs just getting started.

    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.

    And create Power it must, for without it your business is at risk. He explains why invention always comes first and then develops the Power Progression to enable you to target when your Power must be established: in the Origination, Take-Off or Stability phases of your business.Every business faces a do-or-die strategy moment: a crux directional choice made amidst swirling uncertainty. To get this right you need at your fingertips a real-time strategy compass to discern your true north. 7 Powers is that compass.

    In our increasingly interdependent world, winning requires more than just delivering on your own promises. It means ensuring that a host of partners -some visible, some hidden- deliver on their promises, too.In "The Wide Lens," innovation expert Ron Adner draws on over a decade of research and field testing to take you on far ranging journeys from Kenya to California, from transport to telecommunications, to reveal the hidden structure of success in a world of interdependence.A riveting study that offers a new perspective on triumphs like Amazon's e-book strategy and Apple's path to market dominance; monumental failures like Michelin with run-flat tires and Pfizer with inhalable insulin; and still unresolved issues like electric cars and electronic health records, The Wide Lens offers a powerful new set of frameworks and tools that will multiply your odds of innovation success."The Wide Lens" will change the way you see, the way you think - and the way you win.

    It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace's sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn't stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn't explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies' extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and it's practitioners include not just today's hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of GrowthHackers.com.Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more. An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

    Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of “sell it—do it, sell it—do it” that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try.This is the exact situation Mike Michalowicz found himself in when he was trying to grow his first company. Although it was making steady money, there was never very much left over and he was chasing customers left and right, putting in twenty-eight-hour days, eight days a week. The punishing grind never let up. His company was alive but stunted, and he was barely breathing. That’s when he discovered an unlikely source of inspiration—pumpkin farmers.After reading an article about a local farmer who had dedicated his life to growing giant pump­kins, Michalowicz realized the same process could apply to growing a business. He tested the Pumpkin Plan on his own company and transformed it into a remarkable, multimillion-dollar industry leader. First he did it for himself. Then for others. And now you. So what is the Pumpkin Plan?Plant the right seeds: Don’t waste time doing a bunch of different things just to please your customers. Instead, identify the thing you do better than anyone else and focus all of your attention, money, and time on figuring out how to grow your company doing it. Weed out the losers: In a pumpkin patch small, rotten pumpkins stunt the growth of the robust, healthy ones. The same is true of customers. Figure out which customers add the most value and provide the best opportunities for sustained growth. Then ditch the worst of the worst. Nurture the winners: Once you figure out who your best customers are, blow their minds with care. Discover their unfulfilled needs, innovate to make their wishes come true, and overdeliver on every single promise.Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

    'Here Comes Everybody' is an examination of how the spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form and exist within groups, with profound long-term economic and social effects, for good and for ill.

    They argue that if managers seriously want to develop effective strategies for competing in the new economy, they must understand the fundamental economics of information technology. Whether information takes the form of software code or recorded music, is published in a book or magazine, or even posted on a website, managers must know how to evaluate the consequences of pricing, protecting, and planning new versions of information products, services, and systems. The first book to distill the economics of information and networks into practical business strategies, Information Rules is a guide to the winning moves that can help business leaders navigate successfully through the tough decisions of the information economy.

    Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea, and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional.Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three thirty-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. is now one of the hottest enterprise software companies, still rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined. With revealing stories both funny and frank, Mikkel shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world to California and the unknown, and how the three friends were miraculously still together for Zendesk's IPO and (still growing) success.Much like Zendesk's mission itself--to remove friction, barriers, and mystery in order to make customer service easier and more approachable--Startupland removes some of the myths about startups and startup founders. Mikkel's advice, hard-won through experience, often bucks conventional wisdom and entrepreneurial tropes. He shares why failure (whether fast or slow) is awful, why a seemingly boring product or idea can be the most exciting, why giving back to the community is as important as the bottom line. From how to hire right (look for people who are not offended by swearing) to which personas generate the highest response rates, Mikkel answers the most pressing questions from the perspective of someone still in the trenches and willing to share the hard truth, warts and all.While there are books by consultants who tell you how to build businesses, or by entrepreneurs now running billion-dollar businesses, there are few books from people still in the trenches who acutely remember the difficult daily decisions, the thrill (and fears) of the early days, the problems that scale with growing a business, and the reason why they all went on the adventure in the first place. Startupland is indispensable reading for all entrepreneurs who want to make their ideas the next big thing. The book will inspire and empower you to follow your own dream and create your own story.

    Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong. For all that's been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway.Instead of buying the myths these compa-nies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions. How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they're almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? And as they race to become the world's first trillion-dollar company, can anyone chal-lenge them?In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world's most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can't match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career.Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.

    The world is more complex and volatile today than at any other time in our history. The tools of our modern existence are getting faster, cheaper, and smaller at an exponential rate, transforming every aspect of society, from business to culture and from the public sphere to our most private moments. The people who succeed will be the ones who learn to think differently. In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill that logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period: Emergence over AuthorityPull over PushCompasses over MapsRisk over SafetyDisobedience over CompliancePractice over TheoryDiversity over AbilityResilience over StrengthSystems over Objects Filled with incredible case studies and cutting-edge research and philosophies from the MIT Media Lab and beyond, Whiplash will help you adapt and succeed in this unpredictable world.

    and eat smaller competitors for breakfast.Not anymore. These days It's Not the Big that Eat the Small... It's the FAST that Eat the Slow! Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton discovered what separates today's icons of speed from everybody else.They asked questions like:What is the difference between speed and haste?Where does business go to spot trends before the competition?How can leaders help people stop dreading high velocity and rediscover the thrill of deciding, acting and staying fast?And studied the world's fastest companies like:H&M Europe's fast fashion phenomenon now poised to threaten apparel stores in America.AOL who gulped down Netscape and Time Warner in record time.Charles Schwab the new dominant name in discount and on-line financial services.The results are in this sensational book... a national bestseller, translated all over the globe and universally praised.Would you like to make speed a competitive tool in your business? Here's your roadmap!