Problem Solving 101: A Simple Book for Smart People


Ken Watanabe - 2007
    His goal was to help shift the focus in Japanese education from memorization to critical thinking, by adapting some of the techniques he had learned as an elite McKinsey consultant.He was amazed to discover that adults were hungry for his fun and easy guide to problem solving and decision making. The book became a surprise Japanese bestseller, with more than 370,000 in print after six months. Now American businesspeople can also use it to master some powerful skills.Watanabe uses sample scenarios to illustrate his techniques, which include logic trees and matrixes. A rock band figures out how to drive up concert attendance. An aspiring animator budgets for a new computer purchase. Students decide which high school they will attend.Illustrated with diagrams and quirky drawings, the book is simple enough for a middleschooler to understand but sophisticated enough for business leaders to apply to their most challenging problems.

Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers


Lois P. Frankel - 2004
    Although you may not be aware of it, girlish behaviors such as these are sabotaging your career!Dr. Lois Frankel reveals why some women roar ahead in their careers while others stagnate. She's spotted a unique set of behaviors--101 in all--that women learn in girlhood that sabotage them as adults. Now, in this groudbreaking guide, she helps you eliminate these unconscious mistakes that could be holding you back--and offers invaluable coaching tips you can easily incorporate into your social and business skills. If you recognize and change the behaviors that say "girl" not "woman", the results will pay off in carrer opportunites you never thought possible--and in an image that identifies you as someone with the power and know-how to occupy the corner office.

Case Interview Secrets: A Former McKinsey Interviewer Reveals How to Get Multiple Job Offers in Consulting


Victor Cheng - 2012
    Victor Cheng, a former McKinsey management consultant, reveals his proven, insider's method for acing the case interview. Having personally secured job offers from McKinsey, Bain & Company, Monitor, L.E.K, Oliver Wyman, and A.T. Kearney, he has also been a McKinsey case interviewer providing you with a hands-on, real-world perspective on what it really takes to land job offers. Cheng 's prot g es work in all the major strategy management consulting firms, including McKinsey, The Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company, Monitor Company, A.T. Kearny, Oliver Wyman, L.E.K, Roland Berger, Accenture, and Deloitte, as well as in the strategic planning departments of numerous Fortune 500 companies. Whether you re an undergraduate, MBA, PhD, or experienced-hire applicant candidate, you ll discover: * What case interviewers really say about you behind closed doors but wouldn t dare tell you until now * The subtle yet specific performance differences that separate those who get management consulting offers from those who don t * The 10 biggest mistakes candidates make in case interviews (and how to avoid them) * The 3 specific things interviewers expect in the first 5 minutes of a case that often decide the outcome on the spot * An insider 's take on what interviewers really look for and why and how to give them what they want Praise for Victor Cheng and Case Interview Secrets With Victor 's help, I went from not knowing anything about consulting to securing offers from McKinsey and BCG. Mihnea Munteanu, University of Michigan I received six offers from McKinsey, BCG, Booz, Deloitte, A.T. Kearney, and Marakon. Everything Victor said was right Michael Yang, Northwestern University Despite having a liberal arts degree from a state school, I landed a dream job with L.E.K. Consulting. Thanks, Victor. Jackson Boyar, Indiana University Victor has put me in a very difficult position now I have to decide between offers from two of the top three consultancies Christopher Perez, The Wharton School In my first attempt to break into consulting, I failed every one of my interviews with McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Oliver Wyman, Monitor, Booz and probably a few others. On my second attempt two years later, I followed everything Victor Cheng suggested and took advantage of every resource he provided and received an offer from McKinsey Daniel Suo, Business Analyst (Offer Recipient), McKinsey, Stamford Without Victor 's help, I never would have gotten an offer from BCG. What he teaches really makes the difference between getting an offer and not. Puttipath Tasnavites, Boston Consulting Group, Thailand After following Victor 's guidance, I had a complete breakthrough in my case interview performance and got an offer from Monitor. Marine Serres, Monitor & Company As a PhD candidate in engineering, I had an academic background that left me completely unprepared for the case interview process. That 's when I found Victor Cheng and ended up getting my dream job. Thank you, Victor Zach Jacobson, McKinsey, New York About the Author As a former McKinsey consultant, r sum screener, and case interviewer, Victor Cheng mentors thousands of aspiring consultants via his articles and video tutorials at www.caseinterview.com. As a candidate, he passed 60 cases and received job offers from McKinsey, Bain, Monitor, LEK, AT Kearney, and Oliver Wyman. At McKinsey, he was rated in the top 10 percent of consultants worldwide in his cohort. Today he advises Inc. 500 CEOs.

Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to Help Entrepreneurs Launch Successful New Ventures


William Aulet - 2013
    Many believe that it cannot be taught, and those who are successful in starting a business are born with something others do not have. Innovation-based entrepreneurship can be broken down into discreet behaviors and processes that can be taught to the intelligent, hardworking, people using this book.Eric Ries and Steve Blank were wrong; the road to a successful start-up is not just four steps. "Innovation Driven"" Entrepreneurship "breaks it down into 24 steps which include: Market segmentationQuantify the value propositionDefine your coreMap the process to acquire a paying costumerTest key assumptionsDevelop a product plan, and more.

The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership


James C. Hunter - 1998
    A lively and engrossing tale about the timeless principles of effective leadership from a consultant and trainer in labor relations with over 20 years of experience.

Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger


Peter Bevelin - 2003
    His quest for wisdom originated partly from making mistakes himself and observing those of others but also from the philosophy of super-investor and Berkshire Hathaway Vice Chairman Charles Munger. A man whose simplicity and clarity of thought was unequal to anything Bevelin had seen. In addition to naturalist Charles Darwin and Munger, Bevelin cites an encyclopedic range of thinkers: from first-century BCE Roman poet Publius Terentius to Mark Twainfrom Albert Einstein to Richard Feynmanfrom 16th Century French essayist Michel de Montaigne to Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. In the book, he describes ideas and research findings from many different fields. This book is for those who love the constant search for knowledge. It is in the spirit of Charles Munger, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there." There are roads that lead to unhappiness. An understanding of how and why we can "die" should help us avoid them. We can't eliminate mistakes, but we can prevent those that can really hurt us. Using exemplars of clear thinking and attained wisdom, Bevelin focuses on how our thoughts are influenced, why we make misjudgments and tools to improve our thinking. Bevelin tackles such eternal questions as: Why do we behave like we do? What do we want out of life? What interferes with our goals? Read and study this wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom. It may change the way you think and act in business and in life.

Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation


Jay Samit - 2015
    It is no longer possible-or even desirable-to learn one set of job skills and to work your way up the ladder. At the same time, entrepreneurs with great ideas for new products or technologies that could change the world often struggle to capture the attention of venture capital firms and incubators; finding the funding necessary to launch a start-up can feel impossible. The business leaders of our future must anticipate change to create their own opportunities for personal satisfaction and professional success. In Disrupt You!, Jay Samit, a digital media expert who has launched, grown, and sold start-ups and Fortune 500 companies alike, describes the unique method he has used to invent new markets and expand established businesses.Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level to help anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity-without needing to raise funds from outside investors.Incorporating stories from his own experience and anecdotes from other innovators and disruptive businesses-including Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, YouTube, Circ du Soleil, Odor Eaters, Iams, Silly Putty, and many more-Samit shows how personal transformation can reap entrepreneurial and professional rewards.Disrupt You! offers clear and empowering advice for anyone looking to break through; for anyone with a big idea but with no idea how to apply it; and for anyone worried about being made irrelevant in an era of technological transformation. This engaging, perspective-shifting book demystifies the mechanics of disruption for individuals and businesses alike.

The Business Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained


Sam Atkinson - 2014
    From Adam Smith and Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, The Business Book is perfect for college students, would-be entrepreneurs, or anyone interested in how business works.The Business Book is the perfect primer to key theories of business and management, covering inspirational business ideas, business strategy and alternative business models. One hundred key quotations introduce you to the work of great commercial thinkers, leaders, and gurus from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs, and to topics spanning from start-ups to ethics.

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity


Kim Malone Scott - 2017
    While this advice may work for everyday life, it is, as Kim Scott has seen, a disaster when adopted by managers.Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google and then decamped to Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, the “radical candor” method.Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve.Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get (sh)it done, and understand why it matters.Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors


Michael E. Porter - 1980
    Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing. Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries


Safi Bahcall - 2019
    Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days


Jessica Livingston - 2001
    These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.

The Success Equation


Michael J. Mauboussin - 2012
    

Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't


Ram Charan - 2007
    . . The breakthrough book that links know-how--the skills of people who know what they are doing-- with the personal and psychological traits of the successful leader. How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business--the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before. For well over four decades, Ram Charan has been learning in the most visceral way the underlying reasons why leaders succeed and fail. As one of the most influential advisers to top management teams of leading companies around the world, he has had a front-row seat to observe the cause and effect of leadership practices and behaviors. Ram Charan's insight into the real content of leadership provides you with the eight fundamental skills needed for success in the twenty-first century: - Positioning (and, when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money- Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others- Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business- Judging people by getting to the truth of a person- Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts- Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve- Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals- Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business Know-How is the missing link of leadership. By showing how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a holistic and innovative portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century.

The Ten-Day MBA : A Step-By-Step Guide To Mastering The Skills Taught In America's Top Business Schools


Steven Silbiger - 1993
    Features chapters on finance, marketing, accounting, strategy, quantitative analysis, operations, economics, organisational behaviour, and ethics, all revised to reflect the contemporary corporate culture and economic climate.