They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

    The Apollo moon landing of 1961 was one of those events—the invention of the Apple personal computer was another. In this book, John Sculley—former CEO of both Pepsi and Apple—claims we are in an era that is giving birth to numerous groundbreaking events and inventions—moonshots—that will change the way we live and work for generations to come. The time is ripe, according to Sculley, for a new breed of innovative entrepreneurs to build businesses across industries that will bring in billions of dollars—while changing people’s lives for the better. And in this book, he’ll show you how to do it. Moonshot! lays out a roadmap for building a truly transformative business, beginning with a can’t-fail concept and drawing on clear examples from companies who’ve done innovation right.

    This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company’s stock price—an innovation premium—which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization’s people, processes, and guiding philosophies.Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s DNA is an essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

    The book teaches the basic methods for defining, planning, and tracking a project, as well as techniques for leading and building strong project teams.This new edition includes: Downloadable, customizable project management formsStudy aids for passing the popular Project Management Professional certification examGuidelines for building high-performance project teamsNew examples of project management at work in the 21st centuryEric Verzuh (Seattle, WA) is certified by the Project Management Institute and is President of The Versatile Company, which delivers project management training and consulting services to such companies as Adobe Systems, Inc., GE, Lockheed Martin, Nordstrom, and the United States Postal Service. He is also the author of The Portable MBA in Project Management (0-471-26899-2), from Wiley.

    Millions will fail. Millions more will be received with yawns. A rare few will establish the most profound connection, in which presenter and audience understand each other perfectly, discover common ground and, together, decide to act.

    A lack of proper validation kills more businesses than anything else. As Joel Barker says, “Speed is only useful if you’re running in the right direction.” Will It Fly? will help you make sure you are clear for takeoff. It answers questions like: - Does your business idea have merit? - Will it succeed in the market you’re trying to serve, or will it just be a waste of time and resources? - Is it a good idea for you? In other words, will it fly?Chock-full of practical suggestions you can apply to your business idea today, Will It Fly? combines action-based exercises and real-world case studies with anecdotes from the author’s personal experience of making money online, hosting successful podcasts, testing niche sites, and launching several online businesses.Will It Fly? will challenge you to think critically, act deliberately, and dare greatly. You can think of the book as your business flight manual, something you can refer to for honest and straight-forward advice as you begin to test your idea and build a business that takes off and soars.In five parts, Will It Fly? will guide you through the validation of your next business idea:- Part one, Mission Design, helps you make sure your target idea aligns with and supports your goals. - Part two, Development Lab, walks you through uncovering important details about your idea that you haven't even thought about. - Part three, Flight Planning, is all about assessing current market conditions. - Part four, Flight Simulator, focuses on the actual validating and testing of an idea with a small segment of a target market. - Finally, Part five, All Systems Go, is for final analysis to help you make sure your idea is one you are ready to move forward with.

    They report to the board on the health of their workforce, their financials, their customers, and their partnerships, but rarely the health of their information assets. Corporations typically exhibit greater discipline in tracking and accounting for their office furniture than their data. Infonomics is the theory, study, and discipline of asserting economic significance to information. It strives to apply both economic and asset management principles and practices to the valuation, handling, and deployment of information assets. This book specifically shows: CEOs and business leaders how to more fully wield information as a corporate asset CIOs how to improve the flow and accessibility of information CFOs how to help their organizations measure the actual and latent value in their information assets. More directly, this book is for the burgeoning force of chief data officers (CDOs) and other information and analytics leaders in their valiant struggle to help their organizations become more infosavvy. Author Douglas Laney has spent years researching and developing Infonomics and advising organizations on the infinite opportunities to monetize, manage, and measure information. This book delivers a set of new ideas, frameworks, evidence, and even approaches adapted from other disciplines on how to administer, wield, and understand the value of information. Infonomics can help organizations not only to better develop, sell, and market their offerings, but to transform their organizations altogether.

    OKRs translate a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The three layers of organization: Dreams, OKRs, and To dos, offer a balance between long-term goals and short-term planning, between outcomes that are desired by the organization and actual performance KPIs that drive these outcomes, between harder and softer performance measures. Francisco Mello, founder of Qulture.Rocks, the leading performance management software company, takes you through the history of using goals for management, from MBOs to OKRs, and presents OKRs with a constant focus on its key differences from older frameworks such as MBOs.

    Creating high-quality software for the enterprise involves a much different set of challenges. In this practical book, two expert product managers provide straightforward guidance for people looking to join the thriving enterprise market.Authors Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines explain critical differences between enterprise and consumer products, and deliver strategies for overcoming challenges when building for the enterprise. You'll learn how to cultivate knowledge of your organization, the products you build, and the industry you serve.Explore why:Identifying customer vs user problems is an enterprise project manager's main challengeEffective collaboration requires in-depth knowledge of the organizationAnalyzing data is key to understanding why users buy and retain your productHaving experience in the industry you're building products for is valuableProduct longevity depends on knowing where the industry is headed

    Whether you've already got a business or you're itching to start one, this is a recipe for getting more traction.Think about it: what if you could launch like Apple or the big Hollywood studios? What if your prospects eagerly counted down the days until they could buy your product? What if you could create such powerful positioning in your market that you all but eliminated your competition? And you could do all that no matter how humble your business or budget?Since 1996 Jeff Walker has been creating hugely successful online launches. After bootstrapping his first Internet business from his basement, he quickly developed an underground process for launching new products and businesses with unprecedented success.But the success-train was just getting started; once he started teaching his formula to other entrepreneurs, the results were simply breathtaking. Tiny, home-based businesses started doing launches that sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars in sales with their launches.Launch is the treasure map into that world; an almost secret world of digital entrepreneurs who create cash-on-demand paydays with their product launches and business launches.Whether you have an existing business, or you have a service-based business and want to develop your own products so you can leverage your time and your impact, or you're still in the planning phase, this is how you start fast. This formula is how you engineer massive success.Now the question is this : are you going to start slow, and fade away from there? Or are you ready for a launch that will change the future of your business and your life?

    Leading Scrum coach and trainer Kenny Rubin illuminates the values, principles, and practices of Scrum, and describes flexible, proven approaches that can help you implement it far more effectively. Whether you are new to Scrum or years into your use, this book will introduce, clarify, and deepen your Scrum knowledge at the team, product, and portfolio levels. Drawing from Rubin's experience helping hundreds of organizations succeed with Scrum, this book provides easy-to-digest descriptions enhanced by more than two hundred illustrations based on an entirely new visual icon language for describing Scrum's roles, artifacts, and activities. Essential Scrum will provide every team member, manager, and executive with a common understanding of Scrum, a shared vocabulary they can use in applying it, and practical knowledge for deriving maximum value from it.

    Cooper details many of these meta functions to explain his central thesis: programmers need to seriously re-evaluate the many user-hostile concepts deeply embedded within the software development process. Rather than provide users with a straightforward set of options, programmers often pile on the bells and whistles and ignore or de-prioritise lingering bugs. For the average user, increased functionality is a great burden, adding to the recurrent chorus that plays: "computers are hard, mysterious, unwieldy things." (An average user, Cooper asserts, who doesn't think that way or who has memorised all the esoteric commands and now lords it over others, has simply been desensitised by too many years of badly designed software.) Cooper's writing style is often overblown, with a pantheon of cutesy terminology (i.e. "dancing bearware") and insider back-patting. (When presenting software to Bill Gates, he reports that Gates replied: "How did you do that?" to which he writes: "I love stumping Bill!") More seriously, he is also unable to see beyond software development's importance--a sin he accuses programmers of throughout the book. Even with that in mind, the central questions Cooper asks are too important to ignore: Are we making users happier? Are we improving the process by which they get work done? Are we making their work hours more effective? Cooper looks to programmers, business managers and what he calls "interaction designers" to question current assumptions and mindsets. Plainly, he asserts that the goal of computer usage should be "not to make anyone feel stupid." Our distance from that goal reinforces the need to rethink entrenched priorities in software planning. -- Jennifer Buckendorff, Amazon.com

    Since then, twelve more children have been abducted, and the man responsible is still at large. With the abductor taunting the detectives with mysterious texts, they have pushed themselves to the brink, and their obsession of bringing the kidnapper to justice could cost them everything.

    BE BRAVE AND START SOMETHING YOU LOVE.Does this sound familiar... You tick all the right boxes; school, university, corporate career. You have a sensible profession, a fancy job title, proud parents, decent salary, pricey holidays…but there’s a nagging feeling that something isn’t quite right? A realisation that you’re not completely fulfilled? Surely you should be as happy as Larry – are you being ungrateful? HELL NO. You want a different life – no spreadsheets, no commute, no late nights at the office. But if not that…then what? That is exactly what Escape The City are here to do – show you what other options are open to you.Escape The City is a community based website built around a simple concept: there is more to life than doing unfulfilling work in big corporate companies. The online platform is designed to help corporate professionals find exciting jobs, start their own businesses, and go on big adventures. The Escape Manifesto is here to support, inspire and encourage us all to make big and brave transitions in our lives.• Examines the reasons why so many people are unsatisfied with the corporate world• Explores the alternatives and the common barriers to achieving your dreams• Advice and support for making the transition to something new and developing a strategy for work and life• Contains tons of real-life examples of people who have made the leap

      Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath| Key Takeaways, Analysis & Review Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard (2010) is about how to bring about change in an organization. Its main focus is changing behavior by appealing to the rational and emotional sides of people’s psyches. To generate change, authors Chip and Dan Heath maintain, a leader must connect with both sides, the rational and the emotional. This is because sometimes, one side can work against the other and sabotage successful change. The rational side tends to analyze possibilities for change so much that it becomes unable to act—so change never occurs. The emotional side is ready, or even eager, to act on change, but it can act compulsively and without focus. This means that changes based solely on emotion are likely to fail. To bring about real change, a leader must stimulate the emotional side of a group’s psyche to get the process of change underway, then harness its rational side to give this change a concerted direction…  This companion to Switch includes: Overview of the book Important People Key Takeaways Analysis of Key Takeaways and much more!