To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others


Daniel H. Pink - 2012
    Bureau of Labor Statistics, one in nine Americans works in sales. Every day more than fifteen million people earn their keep by persuading someone else to make a purchase.But dig deeper and a startling truth emerges:Yes, one in nine Americans works in sales. But so do the other eight.Whether we’re employees pitching colleagues on a new idea, entrepreneurs enticing funders to invest, or parents and teachers cajoling children to study, we spend our days trying to move others. Like it or not, we’re all in sales now.To Sell Is Human offers a fresh look at the art and science of selling. As he did in Drive and A Whole New Mind, Daniel H. Pink draws on a rich trove of social science for his counterintuitive insights. He reveals the new ABCs of moving others (it's no longer "Always Be Closing"), explains why extraverts don't make the best salespeople, and shows how giving people an "off-ramp" for their actions can matter more than actually changing their minds.Along the way, Pink describes the six successors to the elevator pitch, the three rules for understanding another's perspective, the five frames that can make your message clearer and more persuasive, and much more. The result is a perceptive and practical book--one that will change how you see the world and transform what you do at work, at school, and at home.

Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time


Keith Ferrazzi - 2005
    As Ferrazzi discovered early in life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships--so that everyone wins. In "Never Eat Alone," Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps--and inner mindset--he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his Rolodex, people he has helped and who have helped him. The son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, Ferrazzi first used his remarkable ability to connect with others to pave the way to a scholarship at Yale, a Harvard MBA, and several top executive posts. Not yet out of his thirties, he developed a network of relationships that stretched from Washington's corridors of power to Hollywood's A-list, leading to him being named one of Crain's 40 Under 40 and selected as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the Davos World Economic Forum. Ferrazzi's form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity, helping friends connect with other friends. Ferrazzi distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handling usually associated with "networking." He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles. Among them: Don't keep score: It's never simply about getting what you want. It's about getting what you want and making sure that the people who are important to you get what they want, too. "Ping" constantly: The Ins and Outs of reaching out to those in your circle of contacts all the time--not just when you need something. Never eat alone: The dynamics of status are the same whether you're working at a corporation or attending a society event-- "invisibility" is a fate worse than failure. In the course of the book, Ferrazzi outlines the timeless strategies shared by the world's most connected individuals, from Katherine Graham to Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan to the Dalai Lama. Chock full of specific advice on handling rejection, getting past gatekeepers, becoming a "conference commando," and more, "Never Eat Alone" is destined to take its place alongside "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as an inspirational classic.

Ultimate Sales Machine


Chet Holmes - 2007
    And his advice starts with one simple concept: focus! Instead of trying to master four thousand strategies to improve your business, zero in on the few essential skill areas that make the big difference. Too many managers jump at every new trend, but don’t stick with any of them. Instead, says Holmes, focus on twelve critical areas of improvement—one at a time—and practice them over and over with pigheaded discipline. The Ultimate Sales Machine shows you how to tune up and soup up virtually every part of your business by spending just an hour per week on each impact area you want to improve. Like a tennis player who hits nothing but backhands for a few hours a week to perfect his game, you can systematically improve each key area. Holmes offers proven strategies for: • Management: Teach your people how to work smarter, not harder • Marketing: Get more bang from your Web site, advertising, trade shows, and public relations • Sales: Perfect every sales interaction by working on sales, not just in sales The Ultimate Sales Machine will put you and your company on a path to success and help you stay there!

5 Things Successful People Do Before 8 A.M.


Terri Savelle Foy - 2018
    you will get the insights, encouragement, and practical steps needed to create a powerful, life-changing daily routine.  Terri Savelle Foy shares with you the habits of successful people as well as her own personal habits that took her from a mundane, undisciplined life to living a life filled with purpose, self-discipline and God-given success.  This book will help you:  • Seize each day by taking control of your mornings.  • Become aware of (and change) your bad habits.  • Establish realistic habits that will revolutionize your life.  • Understand how to harness the power of self-discipline.  • Discover your purpose so you stay driven.  When you change your daily routine, you can change your life.

Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World


Michael Hyatt - 2012
    In this straightforward how-to, he offers down-to-earth guidance on crafting an effective and meaningful online platform.In Platform, you will learn how to:Extend your influence, monetize it, and build a sustainable career. Get noticed and start earning money in an increasingly noisy world.  Learn to amplify, update, polish, and organize your content for success.Platform goes behind the scenes into the world of social media success. You’ll discover what bestselling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to gain contacts, connections, and followers and win customers in today’s crowded marketplace.With proven strategies, easy-to-replicate formulas, and practical tips, this book makes it easier, less expensive, and more possible than ever to stand out from the crowd and launch a business.

Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work


Whitney Johnson - 2015
    An expert in driving innovation via personal disruption, Whitney Johnson, will help you understand how the frameworks of disruptive innovation can apply to you: if you want to be successful in unexpected ways, follow your own disruptive path. Dare to innovate. Dream big dreams. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself. In this book, you will learn how to apply these frameworks to building a business, career – and you.We are living in an era of accelerating disruption – those who can manage the S-curve waves of learning and maxing out will have a competitive advantage. But this is a skill set that needs to be learned. Disrupt Yourself will help people cope with the unpredictability of disruption, and use it to their competitive advantage.

Just F*ing Demo!: Tactics for Leading Kickass Product Demos


Rob Falcone - 2014
    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.

The Power of Broke: How Empty Pockets, a Tight Budget, and a Hunger for Success Can Become Your Greatest Competitive Advantage


Daymond John - 2016
    With no funding and a $40 budget, Daymond had to come up with out-of-the box ways to promote his products. Luckily, desperation breeds innovation, and so he hatched an idea for a creative campaign that eventually launched the FUBU brand into a $6 billion dollar global phenomenon.  But it might not have happened if he hadn’t started out broke - with nothing but a heart full of hope and a ferocious drive to succeed by any means possible. Here, the FUBU founder and star of ABC’s Shark Tank shows that, far from being a liability, broke can actually be your greatest competitive advantage as an entrepreneur. Why?  Because starting a business from broke forces you to think more creatively.  It forces you to use your resources more efficiently. It forces you to connect with your customers more authentically, and market your ideas more imaginatively. It forces you to be true to yourself, stay laser focused on your goals, and come up with those innovative solutions required to make a meaningful mark.  Drawing his own experiences as an entrepreneur and branding consultant, peeks behind-the scenes from the set of Shark Tank, and stories of dozens of other entrepreneurs who have hustled their way to wealth, John shows how we can all leverage the power of broke to phenomenal success. You’ll meet: ·         Steve Aoki, the electronic dance music (EDM) deejay who managed to parlay a series of $100 gigs into becoming a global superstar who has redefined the music industry ·         Gigi Butler, a cleaning lady from Nashville who built cupcake empire on the back of a family  recipe, her maxed out credit cards, and a heaping dose of faith ·         11-year old Shark Tank guest Mo Bridges who stitched together a winning clothing line with just his grandma’s sewing machine, a stash of loose fabric, and his unique sartorial flairWhen your back is up against the wall, your bank account is empty, and creativity and passion are the only resources you can afford, success is your only option.  Here you’ll learn how to tap into that Power of Broke to scrape, hustle, and dream your way to the top.From the Hardcover edition.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On


Jonah Berger - 2013
    People don't listen to advertisements, they listen to their peers. But why do people talk about certain products and ideas more than others? Why are some stories and rumors more infectious? And what makes online content go viral? Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger has spent the last decade answering these questions. He's studied why New York Times articles make the paper's own Most E-mailed List, why products get word of mouth, and how social influence shapes everything from the cars we buy to the clothes we wear to the names we give our children. In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission. Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.Contagious combines groundbreaking research with powerful stories. Learn how a luxury steakhouse found popularity through the lowly cheese-steak, why anti-drug commercials might have actually increased drug use, and why more than 200 million consumers shared a video about one of the seemingly most boring products there is: a blender. If you've wondered why certain stories get shared, e-mails get forwarded, or videos go viral, Contagious explains why, and shows how to leverage these concepts to craft contagious content. This book provides a set of specific, actionable techniques for helping information spread - for designing messages, advertisements, and information that people will share. Whether you're a manager at a big company, a small business owner trying to boost awareness, a politician running for office, or a health official trying to get the word out, Contagious will show you how to make your product or idea catch on.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success


Sean Ellis - 2017
    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.

How to be The Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs


Tim Draper - 2017
    To make that move. To fulfill your vision. I want to take you closer to your goal, whether that be starting a billion-dollar unicorn, building a revolution, or just helping you better understand that change of any kind starts with you. You can be the Startup Hero. Startup Heroes are the ones that drive progress, and whether you bring us to another planet or make your neighborhood a nicer, happier place, you can become a Startup Hero. This book is the first step. It helps you take that first step. The step will be different for everyone. It might be to call that customer. It might be to draw up a design concept. It might be to talk to your boss. With this book, I hope to guide people to think big, drive change and go full speed ahead. I am giving them a pledge to do their work for good, and I am giving them some of the tools they need to accomplish their goals. This book is hard. It takes you through a variety of activities, questions, stories and challenges (even puzzles and poems) working both the right and left side of your brain and all the parts in between. The activities I propose are challenging and sometimes even embarrassing. The questions I ask are probing and provoking. The stories I tell are used as examples to guide you toward what I call Startup Heroism. So, why would you read this book? Well, I have worked for 30 years for entrepreneurs. I have supported, funded and coached Startup Heroes all my working life. And I have tested the concepts of this book on the students at Draper University and they have come out to be some of the most interesting, dynamic, and motivated people the world has ever seen. In fact, we have had about 1000 students from over 60 different countries come through the program at this writing, and they have started more than 300 companies! I wrote this book so that some of the thinking that I applied to Draper University could be spread wider, in hopes that these messages would reach other potential Startup Heroes (maybe you) who might make an impact on the world, be proactive about their work, or at the very least, improve their lives. So, I implore you. Read this book, try this book, do this book, play this book, absorb this book, experience this book. It might surprise you. It might thrill you. It might drive you. It might kill you. At the very least, I hope it will give you a perspective on how real progress is made, and at the very best, it might just change your life.

Quitter: Closing the Gap Between Your Day Job and Your Dream Job


Jon Acuff - 2011
    At first I thought I was the only one who felt that way, but then I started to talk to people and realized we're becoming the "I'm, but" generation. When we talk about what we do for a living we inevitably say, "I'm a teacher, but I want to be an artist." "I'm a CPA, but I'd love to start my own business." "I'm a _____, but I want to be a ______." All too often, we hear that dreaming big means you quit your day job, sell everything you own, and move to Guam. But what if there were a different way? What if you could blow up your dream without blowing up your life? What if you could go for broke without going broke? What if you could start today? What if you already have everything you need to begin? From figuring out what your dream is to quitting in a way that exponentially increases your chance of success, Quitter is full of inspiring stories and actionable advice. This book is based on 12 years of cubicle living and my true story of cultivating a dream job that changed my life and the world in the process. It's time to close the gap between your day job and your dream job. It's time to be a Quitter.

Steal the Show: From Speeches to Job Interviews to Deal-Closing Pitches, How to Guarantee a Standing Ovation for All the Performances in Your Life


Michael Port - 2015
    Each of those moments requires you, in some way, to play a role, to heighten the impact of your words, and to manage your emotions and nerves. Every interaction is a performance, whether you’re speaking up in a meeting, pitching a client, or walking into a job interview.   In Steal the Show, New York Times best-selling author Michael Port draws on his experience as an actor and as a highly successful corporate speaker and trainer to teach readers how to make the most of every presentation and interaction. He demonstrates how the methods of successful actors can help you connect with, inspire, and persuade any audience. His key strategies for commanding an audience’s attention include developing a clear focus for every performance, making sure you engage with your listeners, and finding the best role for yourself in order to convey your message with maximum impact.  Michael Port is one of the most in-demand corporate speakers working today. His presentations are always powerful, engaging, and inspirational. And yes, audiences always give him a standing ovation.

Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)


Verne Harnish - 2014
    Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture. This book is written so everyone -- from frontline employees to senior executives -- can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. There's no reason to do it alone, yet many top leaders feel like they are the ones dragging the rest of the organization up the S-curve of growth. The goal of this book is to help you turn what feels like an anchor into wind at your back -- creating a company where the team is engaged; the customers are doing your marketing; and everyone is making money. To accomplish this, Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully -- many to $1 billion and beyond. Running a business is ultimately about freedom. Scaling Up shows business leaders how to get their organizations moving in sync to create something significant and enjoy the ride.

The 4-Hour Workweek


Timothy Ferriss - 2007
    Depending on when you ask this controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer: "I race motorcycles in Europe." "I ski in the Andes." "I scuba dive in Panama." "I dance tango in Buenos Aires." He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the "deferred-life plan" and instead mastered the new currencies-time and mobility-to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now. Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world.Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:- How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want?- How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs?- How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist?- How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent "mini-retirements"?- What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income?- How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it's beyond repair?- What automated cash-flow "muses" are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks?- How to cultivate selective ignorance-and create time-with a low-information diet?- What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are?- How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50-80% off?- How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office