Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Everyone Else Can Learn from the Innovation Capital of the World


Deborah Perry Piscione - 2013
    In the last two years, more than 100 incubators have popped up there, and the number of angel investors has skyrocketed. Today, 40 percent of all venture capital investments in the United States come from Silicon Valley firms, compared to 10 percent from New York. In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business. Drawing on interviews with investors, entrepreneurs, and community leaders, as well as a host of case studies from Google to Paypal, Piscione argues that Silicon Valley's unique culture is the best hope for the future of American prosperity and the global business community and offers lessons from the Valley to inspire reform in other communities and industries, from Washington, DC to Wall Street.

Management Control Systems


Robert N. Anthony - 1976
    Students uncover how real-world managers design, implement, and use planning and control systems to implement business strategies. The 12th edition builds on the strengths of prior editions by offering a rich diversity of cases balanced with current content and research.

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart


Ian Ayres - 2007
    In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without reading Super Crunchers.

Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases


Manuel G. Velasquez - 1982
     The ethical landscape of business is constantly changing, and the new edition of Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases has been revised to keep pace with those changes most effecting business: accelerating globalization, constant technological updates, proliferating of business scandals. Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases introduces the reader to the ethical concepts that are relevant to resolving moral issues in business; imparts the reasoning and analytical skills needed to apply ethical concepts to business decisions; identifies moral issues specific to a business; provides an understanding of the social, technological, and natural environments within which moral issues in business arise; and supplies case studies of actual moral conflicts faced by businesses. Teaching and Learning Experience Improve Critical Thinking - Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases provides summaries of basic ideas discussed within the text in its margins; presents conceptual materials first, and then offers discussion cases second through standardized chapters; all providing students the chance to critically think about the material they are learning. Engage Students - Study questions at the beginning of each chapter, definitions of key terms in the margins, a glossary, chapter-end study and discussion questions, end-of-chapter web resources, and chapter-opening concrete examples / cases all ensure students' complete understanding of the material. Support Instructors - Teaching your course just got easier! You can create a Customized Text or use our Instructor's Manual, Electronic "MyTest" Test Bank or PowerPoint Presentation Slides.

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More


Chris Anderson - 2006
    The New York Times bestseller that introduced the business world to a future that s already here -- now in paperback with a new chapter about Long Tail Marketing and a new epilogue.Winner of the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book of the Year.In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses -- the endlessly long tail of that same curve.

Rocket Man: Elon Musk In His Own Words


Jessica Easto - 2017
    Rocket Man: Elon Musk In His Own Words is a comprehensive guide to the inner workings of the man dubbed "the real Tony Stark." Hundreds of his best quotes, comprising thoughts on business, clean energy, innovation, engineering, technology, space, electric vehicles, entrepreneurship, life lessons, and more, provide an intimate and direct look into Silicon Valley's most ambitious industrialist.Even with no prior experience in the complex, ultra-high-barrier-of-entry automotive and space industries, Musk has excelled. Tesla, the first successful American car startup in more than 90 years, received more than 325,000 reservations for its economical Model 3 in a single week—advancing the company’s cause to “accelerate the advent of sustainable transport” via affordable, reliable electric vehicles. SpaceX, the first private company to launch, orbit, and recover a rocket and dock at the International Space Station, has drastically reduced the cost of launching and manufacturing reusable spacecraft, which the company sees as the first step toward its "ultimate goal" of making life multiplanetary. In the words of Richard Branson, "Whatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real."How could a young man who at one time seemed like "just" another Internet entrepreneur have gone on to build two highly disruptive companies and innovate technologies related to everything from electric batteries to rocket manufacturing? There's no better way to learn than through his own words.This book curates Musk quotes from interviews, public appearances, online postings, company blogs, press releases, and more. What emerges is a 'word portrait' of the man whose companies' swift rise to the top will undoubtedly keep their status-quo competitors scrambling to keep up.

Smart Power: Climate Change, the Smart Grid, and the Future of Electric Utilities


Peter Fox-Penner - 2010
    This and other developments will prompt utilities to undergo the largest changes in their history. Smart Power examines the many facets of this unprecedented transformation. This enlightening book begins with a look back on the deregulatory efforts of the 1990s and their gradual replacement by concerns over climate change, promoting new technologies, and developing stable prices and supplies. In thorough but non-technical terms it explains the revolutionary changes that the Smart Grid is bringing to utility operations. It also examines the options for low-carbon emissions along with the real-world challenges the industry and its regulators must face as the industry retools and finances its new sources and systems. Throughout the book, Peter Fox-Penner provides insights into the policy choices and regulatory reform needed to face these challenges. He not only weighs the costs and benefits of every option, but presents interviews with informed experts, including economists, utility CEOs, and engineers. He gives a brief history of the development of the current utility business model and examines possible new business models that are focused on energy efficiency.Smart Power explains every aspect of the coming energy revolution for utilities in lively prose that will captivate even the most techno-phobic readers.

Where Good Ideas Come from: The Natural History of Innovation


Steven Johnson - 2010
    But where do they come from? What kind of environment breeds them? What sparks the flash of brilliance? How do we generate the breakthrough technologies that push forward our lives, our society, our culture? Steven Johnson's answers are revelatory as he identifies the seven key patterns behind genuine innovation, and traces them across time and disciplines. From Darwin and Freud to the halls of Google and Apple, Johnson investigates the innovation hubs throughout modern time and pulls out the approaches and commonalities that seem to appear at moments of originality.

The Flipping Blueprint: The Complete Plan for Flipping Houses and Creating Your Real Estate-Investing Business


Luke Weber - 2017
    Everything you need to begin or continue your journey in real estate investing is here. How to present yourself to other real estate professionals, where to find the deals, how to talk to private lenders, where to find contractors, how to maximize profits on your flips and more. This is your guide to creating your real estate investing future. If you have ever thought about getting into real estate investing, this book will show you how to do it safely and securely.

The Upside of Down: How Chaos and Uncertainty Breed Opportunity in South Africa


Bruce Whitfield - 2020
    You are wasting your time.In a world of fake news, deep-fakes, manipulated feeds of information and divisive social-media agendas, it's easy to believe that our time is the most challenging in human history. It's just not true.It is a time of extraordinary opportunity. But only if you have the right mindset. Fear of the future breeds inaction and leads to strategic paralysis. We put off decisions until we can have certainty. We look for signals. We wait. And while we do that, the world moves on around us.Problem-solvers thrive in chaotic and uncertain times because they act to change their future. Winners recognise that in a world of growing uncertainty, you need to resort to actions on things you can control.And the only things over which you have absolute control are your attitude and your mindset. These, in turn, determine the actions you will take and that will define your future.A robust mindset is the one common characteristic Bruce Whitfield has identified in two decades of interrogating how South Africa's billionaires and start-up mavericks think differently. They are not naive Pollyannas. They don't ignore risk or hope that problems will go away. They constantly measure, manage, consider and weigh up opportunities in a tumultuous sea of uncertainty and find ways around obstacles.If, as Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller suggests, the stories we tell affect economic outcomes, then we need to tell different stories amidst the noise and haste of a rapidly evolving world.

Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders: The Three Essential Principles You Need to Become an Extraordinary Leader


Rajeev Peshawaria - 2011
    He knows precisely what makes the difference between those who are simply bosses and those who are superior leaders, and between those who continue to rise to the top levels and those who get stuck along the way.In this lively and remarkably empowering book, Peshawaria offers readers the opportunity to experience the highest level of leadership training available in the world. Introducing the three core principles he has observed are the foundation of the best leadership––that great leaders clearly define their purpose and values; that nobody can motivate another person because everyone comes premotivated; and that a leader’s job is not to directly produce results but to create the conditions that will harness the energy of others—he details his unique and proven program for achieving leadership excellence. Sharing a wealth of illuminating stories, from those of Mulally’s achievement at Ford and Mack’s at Morgan Stanley, to how Harvey Golub and Ken Chenault successfully restored American Express to long-term sustainable growth, how Neville Isdell turned the Coca-Cola Company around, and the continuing prowess of Jeff Bezos in growing Amazon.com, he first reveals how extraordinary leaders marshal and sustain the level of energy in themselves that is required and how they enlist a core group of proficient co-leaders. He then outlines how to harness the energy and talents of those at all levels of an organization, igniting their motivation by following his RED guidelines for addressing their core needs concerning their Role, their work Environment, and their career Development. Finally, he introduces his unique Brains, Bones, and Nerves framework for: developing a clear strategy for competitive advantage (the Brains); crafting an optimal organizational structure (the Bones); and fostering a highly cooperative and motivated company culture (the Nerves). Filled with specific tips about the vital questions to ask and simple but powerful steps to follow, Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders is a manager’s essential tool kit for long-term superior performance.

How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time


Matt Ridley - 2020
    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.

Digital Bank: Strategies to launch or become a digital bank


Chris Skinner - 2013
    Digital Bank not only includes extensive guidance and background on the digital revolution in banking, but also in-depth analysis of the activities of incumbent banks such as Barclays in the UK and mBank in Poland, as well as new start-ups such as Metro Bank and disruptive new models of banking such as FIDOR Bank in Germany. Add on to these a comprehensive sprinkling of completely new models of finance, such as Zopa and Bitcoin, and you can see that this book is a must-have for anyone involved in the future of business, commerce and banking

Tesla Motors: How Elon Musk and Company Made Electric Cars Cool, and Sparked the Next Tech Revolution


Charles Morris - 2014
    The most trusted sources in the auto industry have called its Model S the most advanced, safest and best-performing car ever built - and it doesn’t use a drop of gasoline. Tesla has changed the way the public perceives electric vehicles, and inspired the major automakers to revive their own dormant efforts to sell EVs. However, even amidst the avalanche of media coverage that followed the triumph of the Model S, few have grasped the true significance of what is happening. Tesla has redefined the automobile, sparked a new wave of innovation comparable to the internet and mobile computing revolutions, and unleashed forces that will transform not just the auto industry, but every aspect of society. The Tesla story is one part of an ongoing tide of change driven by the use of information technology to eliminate “friction” such as geographic distance, middlemen and outdated regulations. Tesla is simply applying the new order to the auto industry, but the automobile is such a pervasive influence in our lives that redefining how it is designed, built, driven and sold will have sweeping effects in unexpected areas. Just as Tesla built the Model S as an electric vehicle “from the ground up,” it has taken an outsider’s approach to the way it markets its cars. Its direct sales model has drawn legal challenges from entrenched auto dealers, who fear that their outdated business model will be destroyed. Its systems approach to the software and electronics in its cars has highlighted how far behind the technological times the major automakers are. It’s easy to see why readers find Tesla irresistible. CEO Elon Musk is a superstar entrepreneur, a “nauseatingly pro-US” immigrant and the leader of two other cutting-edge companies. Tesla dares to challenge the establishment behemoths and, so far at least, has handily beaten them at their own game. In this history of the 21st century’s most exciting startup, Charles Morris begins with a brief history of EVs and a biography of Tesla’s driving force, Elon Musk. He then details the history of the company, told in the words of the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who made it happen. There are many fascinating stories here: Martin Eberhard’s realization that there were many like himself, who loved fast cars but wanted to help the environment and bring about the post-oil age; the freewheeling first days, reminiscent of the early internet era; the incredible ingenuity of the team who built the Roadster; Tesla’s near-death experience and miraculous resurrection; the spiteful split between the company’s larger-than-life leaders; the gloves-off battles with hostile media such as Top Gear and the New York Times; and the media’s ironic about-face when the magnificent Model S won the industry’s highest honors, and naysayers became cheerleaders overnight. And the story is just beginning: Tesla has breathtakingly ambitious plans for the future.This book was updated May 1, 2015 to include the latest on the Gigafactory and the D package.

The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development


Donald G. Reinertsen - 2009
    He explains why invisible and unmanaged queues are the underlying root cause of poor product development performance. He shows why these queues form and how they undermine the speed, quality, and efficiency in product development.