The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over, and traditional job security is a thing of the past. Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn’t about cover letters or resumes. Instead, you will learn the best practices of Silicon Valley start-ups, and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, a small local business, or are launching your own venture, you need to know how to: Adapt your career plans as you change, the people around you change, and industries change Develop a competitive advantage to win the best jobs and opportunities Strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships Find the unique breakout opportunities that massively accelerate career growth Take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis Tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions A revolutionary new guide to thriving in today's fractured world of work, the strategies in this book will help you survive and thrive and achieve your boldest professional ambitions. The Start-Up of You empowers you to become the CEO of your career and take control of your future.©2012 Reid Hoffman (P)2012 Random House

    It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update. And when done right, it's more powerful than traditional persuasion, influence, or marketing techniques.Kawasaki argues that in business and personal interactions, your goal is not merely to get what you want but to bring about a voluntary, enduring, and delightful change in other people. By enlisting their own goals and desires, by being likable and trustworthy, and by framing a cause that others can embrace, you can change hearts, minds, and actions. For instance, enchantment is what enabled . . .A Peace Corps volunteer to finesse a potentially violent confrontation with armed guerrillas.A small cable channel (E!) to win the TV broadcast rights to radio superstar Howard Stern.??A seemingly crazy new running shoe (Vibram Five Fingers) to methodically build a passionate customer base.??A Canadian crystal maker (Nova Scotian Crystal) to turn observers into buyers.This book explains all the tactics you need to prepare and launch an enchantment campaign; to get the most from both push and pull technologies; and to enchant your customers, your employees, and even your boss. It shows how enchantment can turn difficult decisions your way, at times when intangibles mean more than hard facts. It will help you overcome other people's entrenched habits and defy the not-always-wise "wisdom of the crowd."Kawasaki's lessons are drawn from his tenure at one of the most enchanting organizations of all time, Apple, as well as his decades of experience as an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. There are few people in the world more qualified to teach you how to enchant people.As Kawasaki writes, "Want to change the world? Change caterpillars into butterflies? This takes more than run-of-the-mill relationships. You need to convince people to dream the same dream that you do." That's a big goal, but one that's possible for all of us.

    Providing strategies and solutions for the managers of today, this book offers answers for improving employee commitment and profitability by strategically acknowledging employee effort. How is it done? The deceptively simply answer: with carrots.

    Over 100,000 adults have benefitted from Tim Elmore’s insights in this landmark book, which has been updated and expanded to include new research, stories, practical solutions, and two bonus chapters to help adults connect with today’s teens and young adults.

    Christensen gave a powerful speech to the Harvard Business School's graduating class. Drawing upon his business research, he offered a series of guidelines for finding meaning and happiness in life. He used examples from his own experiences to explain how high achievers can all too often fall into traps that lead to unhappiness.The speech was memorable not only because it was deeply revealing but also because it came at a time of intense personal reflection: Christensen had just overcome the same type of cancer that had taken his father's life. As Christensen struggled with the disease, the question "How do you measure your life?" became more urgent and poignant, and he began to share his insights more widely with family, friends, and students.In this groundbreaking book, Christensen puts forth a series of questions: How can I be sure that I'll find satisfaction in my career? How can I be sure that my personal relationships become enduring sources of happiness? How can I avoid compromising my integrity—and stay out of jail? Using lessons from some of the world's greatest businesses, he provides incredible insights into these challenging questions.How Will You Measure Your Life? is full of inspiration and wisdom, and will help students, midcareer professionals, and parents alike forge their own paths to fulfillment.

    

    That is maverick marketing whiz Mike Veeck's Fun Is Good philosophy in a nutshell. And in this book, he demonstrates how it has worked, not only to make an evening at one of his minor league ballparks—full of laughs, zany promotions, and free giveaways—enjoyable for everyone, but also how it can turn any organization into a thriving one.

    Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.

    Now help is here, and consultants, independent contractors, the self-employed, “solopreneurs,” and everyone else living a freelancer’s life will never be alone again but instead can be part of a strong and vibrant community.Written by the authority on freelance working, Sara Horowitz, MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and founder of the national Freelancers Union and, most recently, the Freelancers Insurance Company, The Freelancer’s Bible will help those new to freelancing learn the ropes, and will help those who’ve been freelancing for a while grow and expand. It’s the one-stop, all-encompassing guide to every practical detail and challenge of being a nimble, flexible, and successful freelancer: the three essentials of getting clients and the three most important ways to keep them happy. Five fee-setting strategies. Thirteen tactics for making it through a prolonged dry spell. Setting up a home office vs. renting space. The one-hour contract. A dozen negotiating dos and don’ts. Building and maintaining your reputation. Dealing with deadbeats. Health Insurance 101. Record-keeping and taxes. Productivity, including a quiz: “What Is Your Ideal Day?” Building a community. Subcontracting and other strategies for taking your freelancing career to the next level. Retirement plans, plans for saving for education, and how to achieve financial freedom.

    A challenging customer, in his view, goes from being someone who poses an obstacle to quality work to someone with eye-opening ideas and concepts. Approached as an exercise in listening and learning, these conversations can become long-term lessons. Ambi has worked with some of the most respected brands and names in the Indian corporate world, and each of those assignments were for him masterclasses in leadership development. In this book, Ambi recounts conversations with some of the most iconic business leaders, such as Ratan Tata, Azim Premji, S. Ramadorai, Karsanbhai Patel, M. Damodaran, Dr V. Kurien and many others. He soaked up these conversations, in his own words, 'like a sponge’. This book is an attempt to walk us through some of those dialogues – both the illuminating and the difficult aspects of them – to help us understand how they were learning sessions. For anyone looking at turbocharging their business and career, the ‘Sponge Process’ that emphasises listening is a radical new way of engaging with clients and customers.

    Now they are revealed for you to learn and use in your own business and career. A remarkable and sometimes painful part of the process is uncovering the truth about yourself, including how your self-image was shaped sometimes carelessly and perhaps even cruelly. As you grasp the influence of these “old tapes,” you see how you have unknowingly sabotaged your potential for being at the top tier of sales professionals. You may be astonished to discover what inner dialogue and even demons you now may choose to control and override. The results? You enjoy a significant advantage over those you seek to impress and persuade, and master a predictable way to reach and exceed your career, business and financial goals. The enormous benefits of self-knowledge and imaginative new tools for self-management are at the heart of the challenging and exhilarating lifelong process of implementing the Sandler Success Principles.

    Whether you're coaching soccer or teaching a child to play the piano, writing a novel or trying to improve your golf swing, this revolutionary book shows you how to grow talent by tapping into a newly discovered brain mechanism.Drawing on cutting-edge neurology and firsthand research gathered on journeys to nine of the world's talent hotbeds—from the baseball fields of the Caribbean to a classical-music academy in upstate New York—Coyle identifies the three key elements that will allow you to develop your gifts and optimize your performance in sports, art, music, math, or just about anything. • Deep Practice--Everyone knows that practice is a key to success. What everyone doesn't know is that specific kinds of practice can increase skill up to ten times faster than conventional practice.• Ignition--We all need a little motivation to get started. But what separates truly high achievers from the rest of the pack? A higher level of commitment—call it passion—born out of our deepest unconscious desires and triggered by certain primal cues. Understanding how these signals work can help you ignite passion and catalyze skill development.• Master Coaching--What are the secrets of the world's most effective teachers, trainers, and coaches? Discover the four virtues that enable these "talent whisperers" to fuel passion, inspire deep practice, and bring out the best in their students.These three elements work together within your brain to form myelin, a microscopic neural substance that adds vast amounts of speed and accuracy to your movements and thoughts. Scientists have discovered that myelin might just be the holy grail: the foundation of all forms of greatness, from Michelangelo's to Michael Jordan's. The good news about myelin is that it isn't fixed at birth; to the contrary, it grows, and like anything that grows, it can be cultivated and nourished. Combining revelatory analysis with illuminating examples of regular people who have achieved greatness, this book will not only change the way you think about talent, but equip you to reach your own highest potential.

    This updated assessment includes reports and resources that go far beyond the standardized reports of the older assessment by providing you with personalized insight statements unique to your specific combination of strengths.Many people have little sense of their talents and strengths, much less the ability to build their lives around them. Instead, they are raised and taught to become experts in their weaknesses — and spend their lives trying to fix them — while their strengths lie dormant. Led by Don Clifton, the Father of Strengths-Based Psychology, Gallup created a revolutionary program to help people identify their talents; develop them into strengths; and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. Twenty years ago, Gallup released Now, Discover Your Strengths to bring this program to the world. At the heart of this book is CliftonStrengths, the assessment that is the product of decades of research and hundreds of thousands of interviews to identify the most prevalent human strengths. CliftonStrengths reveals 34 dominant talent themes that you can translate into personal and career success. To develop this assessment, Gallup conducted psychological profiles with more than 2 million individuals to help people around the world focus and perfect these themes. Since Now, Discover Your Strengths was first released two decades ago, more than 20 million people worldwide have taken the CliftonStrengths assessment. The 20th anniversary edition includes a unique access code to take CliftonStrengths — previously known as StrengthsFinder 2.0 — which is a significantly more robust program than the assessment that appeared in the original edition of the book. This web-based assessment analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your top five themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes you lead with — such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic and Strategic — the book will show you how to use your top themes for your own development, for your success as a manager and for the success of your organization. With accessible and profound insights into how to turn talents into strengths, and with immediate online feedback from the CliftonStrengths assessment at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and powerful business books ever written.

    Unfortunately, much of our work today consists of those boring, repetitive tasks.But maybe you’re one of the many who have gotten caught up in thinking work is just something you do to support your weekends. Work is that necessary evil, a means to an end, or just a curse from God. You probably take your role of providing for yourself and those depending on you seriously. But you don’t expect to enjoy your work—you just do what has to be done.Only now you’re seeing that even loyalty and dependability bring no guarantees. Lately you’ve seen coworkers who have been let go after years of faithful service. Perhaps your entire industryhas been shaken by outsourcing or changing technology. Maybe you’re tired of the long commute and being tied to your desk when you know you could make your own hours and still be productive. You may have ideas stirring that you think could create new income and time freedom.But here comes another Monday. Maybe feeling trapped is just the reality of the way things are. Doesn’t everyone dread Mondays? Doesn’t every responsible person just bury their dreams and passions in exchange for getting a paycheck? Absolutely not! All of us, no matter how old we are or what kind of work we’re doing, can learn to bring the same excitement to our jobs that we bring to whatever we love to do on our days off. I believe that each one of us can pursue work that is a reflection of our best selves—a true fulfillment of our callings.No More Mondays will show you that meaningful work really is within your grasp. And once you’ve opened the door and seen all the exciting career opportunities that await you—whether you decide to revolutionize your current job or launch a new career altogether—you’ll find you can’t go back to the old way of working.”From No More MondaysFor everyone who dreads going to work on Monday mornings, inspiring advice on how to find fulfilling work in an uncertain age. Do you hate Mondays? If so, what's keeping you at your current job? If you said a steady paycheck and the promise of a secure retirement, then you're in for a big disappointment. In today's volatile economy, there is nothing safe about punching the clock for a job you hate. As beloved talk-show host and bestselling author Dan Miller reveals, the only way to find true security is by following your calling and then finding or creating work that matches that calling and passion. No More Mondays’s practical, inspirational advice speaks to people looking for guidance on how to launch a new career or business, those who want to stay in their current jobs and give the old 9-to-5 model a twenty-first-century makeover, and managers desperate to understand the way people want to work today. For all of them, Dan Miller's message is loud and clear: If you're one of those people who dread going to work on Mondays, do something about it!

    Now, for the first time, Sharma makes his proprietary process available to you, so that you can get to your absolute best while helping your organization break through to a dramatically new level of winning in these wildly uncertain times. In The Leader Who Had No Title, you will learn: • How to work with and influence people like a superstar, regardless of your position• A method to recognize and then seize opportunities in times of deep change• The real secrets of intense innovation• An instant strategy to build a great team and become a "merchant of wow" with your customers• Hard-hitting tactics to become mentally strong and physically tough enough to lead your field• Real-world ways to defeat stress, build an unbeatable mind-set, unleash energy, and balance your personal lifeRegardless of what you do within your organization and the current circumstances of your life, the single most important fact is that you have the power to show leadership. Wherever you are in your career or life, you should always play to your peak abilities. This book shows you how to claim that staggering power, as well as transform your life—and the world around you—in the process.