Book picks similar to
Climbing the Charts: What Radio Airplay Tells Us about the Diffusion of Innovation by Gabriel Rossman
music
social-dynamics-and-evolution
marketing
social-networks
Great Demo!: How to Create and Execute Stunning Software Demonstrations
Peter E. Cohan - 2003
It draws upon the experiences of thousands of demonstrations, both delivered and received from vendors and customers. The distinctive "Do the Last Thing First" concept generates a "Wow!" response from customers. The Great Demo! method is presented simply and clearly, and is elaborated more fully in each successive chapter, providing a rich toolkit for software sales teams. Real-life anecdotes, examples, and axioms offer humorous and effective punctuation. Updated with new best practices, tips and techniques, this second edition now includes a complete chapter on remote demonstrations--an area of increased activity and unique challenges. An additional chapter on managing evaluations (for fun and profit) extends the utility of the book to those in sales and management. Great Demo! is a terrific read on an airplane or between customer visits. It offers a straightforward process for creating and delivering highly compelling software demonstrations, excellent advice, tips, and the occasional epiphany.
New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
James Bridle - 2018
Underlying this trend is a single idea: the belief that our existence is understandable through computation, and more data is enough to help us build a better world. In actual fact, we are lost in a sea of information, increasingly divided by fundamentalism, simplistic narratives, conspiracy theories, and post-factual politics. Meanwhile, those in power use our lack of understanding to further their own interests. Despite the accessibility of information, we’re living in a new Dark Age. From rogue financial systems to shopping algorithms, from artificial intelligence to state secrecy, we no longer understand how our world is governed or presented to us. The media is filled with unverifiable speculation, much of it generated by anonymous software, while companies dominate their employees through surveillance and the threat of automation. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle excavates the limits of technology and how it aids our understanding of the world. Surveying the history of art, technology, and information systems, he explores the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
Business the Bill Gates Way: 10 Secrets of the World's Richest Business Leader
Des Dearlove - 1998
The book reveals the secrets, deals, schemes and dreams of these, the world's fiercest business competitors.
Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott - 1998
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry?In this wide-ranging and original book, James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not—and cannot—be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge. The author builds a persuasive case against "development theory" and imperialistic state planning that disregards the values, desires, and objections of its subjects. He identifies and discusses four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society by the state; a "high-modernist ideology" that places confidence in the ability of science to improve every aspect of human life; a willingness to use authoritarian state power to effect large- scale interventions; and a prostrate civil society that cannot effectively resist such plans.
Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age is Revolutionizing Life, Business, and Society
Jeff Jarvis - 2011
More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. New tools let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge, friendships, locations, and lives.Yet change brings fear, and many people--nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy--despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds. But not Jeff Jarvis.In this shibboleth-destroying book, "Public Parts "argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg's invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.Based on extensive interviews, "Public Parts "introduces us to the men and women building a new industry based on sharing. Some of them have become household names--Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Eric Schmidt, and Twitter's Evan Williams. Others may soon be recognized as the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our future. Jarvis explores the promising ways in which the internet and publicness allow us to collaborate, think, ways--how we manufacture and market, buy and sell, organize and govern, teach and learn. He also examines the necessity as well as the limits of privacy in an effort to understand and thus protect it. This new and open era has already profoundly disrupted economies, industries, laws, ethics, childhood, and many other facets of our daily lives. But the change has just begun. The shape of the future is not assured. The amazing new tools of publicness can be used to good ends and bad. The choices--and the responsibilities--lie with us. Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the internet--what one technologist calls "the eighth continent"--requires as much protection as the physical space we share, the air we breathe, and the rights we afford one another. It is a space of the public, for the public, and by the public. It needs protection and respect from all of us. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East, "If people around the world are going to come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us." Jeff Jarvis has that vision and will be that guide.
The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI
Carlos Gil - 2019
Businesses across the world are having to face up to how they remain relevant in the choppy waters of the digital ocean. In an era where a YouTube star gets more daily impressions than Nike, Coca-Cola and Walmart combined, traditional marketing as we know it is dead.
The End of Marketing
revolutionizes the way brands, agencies and marketers should approach marketing. From how Donald Trump won the American presidency using social media and why Kim Kardashian is one of the world's biggest online brands, through to the impact of bots and automation, this book will teach you about new features and emerging platforms that will engage customers and employees. Discover bold content ideas, hear from some of the world's largest brands and content creators and find out how to build smarter paid-strategies, guaranteed to help you dominate your markets.
The End of Marketing
explains that no matter how easy it is to reach potential customers, the key relationship between brand and consumer still needs the human touch. Learn how to put 'social' back into social media and claim brand relevancy in a world where algorithms dominate, organic reach is dwindling and consumers don't want to be sold to, they want to be engaged.
Leading Change: The Argument For Values-Based Leadership
James O'Toole - 1995
. .Mr. O'Toole puts soul and values squarely back into a vital topic, leadership."--Tom Peters The New York Times Book Review"A deeply philosophical and eminently practical study of leadership as change."--James MacGregor BurnsPulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, and author of LeadershipCurrent management philosophy advocates an outmoded Machiavellian approach to running organizations: Leaders are told in countless books that they can only accomplish their goals by being tough, manipulative, dictatorial, or paternalistic as the situation requires.In Leading Change, noted management theorist James O'Toole proposes a provocative new vision of leadership in the business world--a vision of leadership rooted in moral values and a consistent display of respect for all followers. As O'Toole brilliantly demonstrates, values-based leadership is not only fair and just, it is also highly effective in today's complex organizations.When leaders truly believe that their prime goal is the welfare of their followers, they get results. The finest leaders--from political giants like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln to contemporary CEOs like Max De Pree and James Houghton--have always shared leadership with their followers. They create organizations that encourage change and self-reevaluation; they foster an atmosphere of open-mindedness and fresh thinking, in which assumptions can be challenged and goals reassessed. Grounded in the ideas of moral philosophy, Leading Change powerfully transcends the standard how-to management primer to define a challenging new approach to leadership. As O'Toole so persuasively argues, growth and change are possible, indeed necessary, and they will be effected by individuals who have the stature and the courage to lead morally. This important book, at once thought-provoking and totally practical, is bound to take its place as one of the landmark business volumes of our times."Jim O'Toole has written the essential work for organizations to survive and thrive in today's changing world. His intellectually penetrating thinking shows us how the sometimes conflicting problems we wrestle with--often in piecemeal fashion--fit together to form a complete picture, even as the picture itself continues to change. His message is so critical to the very existence of every organization that any leader who fails to heed his advice condemns his or her company to mediocrity and/or early death. It's that basic."--Warren Bennis Professor and founding chairman of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California Author of An Invented Life and Why Leaders Can't Lead
Advertising for People Who Don't Like Advertising
KesselsKramer - 2012
Yet, it makes adverts. It has worked with global brands to produce fashion collections and promoted a town with a mass wedding. It creates advertising with more human, truthful communications. The company's name is KesselsKramer. Advertising for People Who Don't Like Advertising is partly a creative handbook and partly an attempt to make the world a very slightly better place. It is intended for anyone who has ever hated a web banner or zapped an ad break.
Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change
Edmund S. Phelps - 2013
Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but flourishing--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges. These values fueled the grassroots dynamism that was necessary for widespread, indigenous innovation. Most innovation wasn't driven by a few isolated visionaries like Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; rather, it was driven by millions of people empowered to think of, develop, and market innumerable new products and processes, and improvements to existing ones. Mass flourishing--a combination of material well-being and the good life in a broader sense--was created by this mass innovation.Yet indigenous innovation and flourishing weakened decades ago. In America, evidence indicates that innovation and job satisfaction have decreased since the late 1960s, while postwar Europe has never recaptured its former dynamism. The reason, Phelps argues, is that the modern values underlying the modern economy are under threat by a resurgence of traditional, corporatist values that put the community and state over the individual. The ultimate fate of modern values is now the most pressing question for the West: will Western nations recommit themselves to modernity, grassroots dynamism, indigenous innovation, and widespread personal fulfillment, or will we go on with a narrowed innovation that limits flourishing to a few?A book of immense practical and intellectual importance, Mass Flourishing is essential reading for anyone who cares about the sources of prosperity and the future of the West.
The Village Effect: Why Face-to-Face Contact Is Good for Our Health, Happiness, Learning, and Longevity
Susan Pinker - 2013
From birth to death, human beings are hard-wired to connect to other human beings. Social networks matter: tight bonds of friendship and love heal us, help us to learn and remember, extend our lives and make us happy. But not just any social networks: we need the real, face-to-face, in-the-flesh encounters that tie human families, groups of friends and communities together. Marrying the findings of the new field of social neuroscience together with gripping human stories, Susan Pinker explores the impact of face-to-face contact from cradle to grave, from city to Sardinian mountain village, classroom to workplace, from love to marriage to divorce. Her results are enlightening and enlivening, and they challenge our assumptions. Most of us have left the literal village behind, and don't want to give up our new technologies and go back there. But, as Pinker writes so compellingly, we need close social bonds and uninterrupted face-time with our friends and families in order to thrive--even to survive. Creating our own "village effect" can make us happier. It can also save our lives.
Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
John Markoff - 2015
Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff argues that we must decide to design ourselves into our future, or risk being excluded from it altogether.In the past decade, Google introduced us to driverless cars; Apple debuted Siri, a personal assistant that we keep in our pockets; and an Internet of Things connected the smaller tasks of everyday life to the farthest reaches of the Web. Robots have become an integral part of society on the battlefield and the road; in business, education, and health care. Cheap sensors and powerful computers will ensure that in the coming years, these robots will act on their own. This new era offers the promise of immensely powerful machines, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, when the intelligent machine was born. Will we control these systems, or will they control us?In Machines of Loving Grace, John Markoff offers a sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. In recent years, the pace of technological change has accelerated dramatically, posing an ethical quandary. If humans delegate decisions to machines, who will be responsible for the consequences? As Markoff chronicles the history of automation, from the birth of the artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation communities in the 1950s and 1960s, to the modern-day brain trusts at Google and Apple in Silicon Valley, and on to the expanding robotics economy around Boston, he traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental problem and urges them to carefully consider the consequences of their work. We are on the brink of the next stage of the computer revolution, Markoff argues, and robots will profoundly transform modern life. Yet it remains for us to determine whether this new world will be a utopia. Moreover, it is now incumbent upon the designers of these robots to draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine.After nearly forty years covering the tech industry, Markoff offers an unmatched perspective on the most drastic technology-driven societal shifts since the introduction of the Internet. Machines of Loving Grace draws on an extensive array of research and interviews to present an eye-opening history of one of the most pressing questions of our time, and urges us to remember that we still have the opportunity to design ourselves into the future—before it's too late.
Ice to the Eskimos: How to Market a Product Nobody Wants
Jon Spoelstra - 1997
YOU.You've got a problem.You've got a product that's not first in its class.It's not even second.You've got to find a way to market that product.What Are You Going To Do?You're going to read this book, that's what.Let's face it. There comes a time in the life of every business when a product or service does not sell up to expectations.Maybe your product is outmoded. Or hasn't been positioned correctly. Or is competing in a crowded market. Whatever the reason, Ice to the Eskimos is dedicated to helping you reclaim that lost ground. It's about taking a product or service and turning it into a winner. If you've got a product that is not the best in its field, then you will love Ice to the Eskimos. Take the principles Jon Spoelstra writes about and run hard with them—you'll be amazed by the results.Written by the former president of the hapless New Jersey Nets, Jon Spoelstra is the man responsible for tripling that team's lagging revenues in just three years and increasing the season-ticket holders base by 250 percent. This guy knows what he's talking about. What everyone else had seen as a lost cause, Spoelstra saw as an outstanding opportunity to reawaken a tired and beaten product to achieve unprecedented profitability.Not just for sports marketers, this lively, entertaining book successfully makes the jump from sports to whatever your product may be. The techniques Spoelstra perfected while working for teams in the NHL and NBA—from innovative packaging to image overhaul—apply to any product in any company. The numerous winning examples are sure to make Ice to the Eskimos a must-read for anyone with a product or service to sell.Ice to the Eskimos is sure to be an instant marketing classic. It will show millions of readers how to market their product...sometimes even after they've given up hope. By using the powerful techniques in this book, you too can learn to achieve the impossible and market ice to the Eskimos.
Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
Geoffrey Miller - 2009
In "Spent" Geoffrey Miller applies this revolutionary science's principles to a new domain: the sensual wonderland of marketing and status seeking that we call American consumer culture. Starting with the basic notion that the goods and services we buy unconsciously advertise our biological potential as mates and friends, Miller examines the hidden factors that dictate our choices in everything from lipstick to cars, from the magazines we read to the music we listen to. With humor and insight, Miller analyzes an array of product choices and deciphers what our decisions say about ourselves, giving us access to a new way of understanding-and improving-our behaviors. Like "Freakonomics" or "The Tipping Point, Spent" is a bold and revelatory book that illuminates the unseen logic behind the chaos of consumerism and suggests new ways we can become happier consumers and more responsible citizens.
The Decoded Company: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers
Leerom Segal - 2014
Google amazes us by generating answers before we've even finished asking a question. These companies know who we are and what we want.The key to their magic is Big Data. Personalizing the consumer experience with the collection and analysis of consumer data is widely recognized as one of the biggest business opportunities of the 21st century. But there is a flip side to this that has largely been missed. What if we were able to use data about employees to personalize and customize their experience - to increase their engagement, help them learn faster on the job, and figure out which teams they should be on?In this book, Leerom and his colleagues outline the six principles they've used to decode work and unlock the maximum potential of their talent, and share success stories from other organizations that have embraced this approach. The Decoded Company is an actionable blueprint for any company that wants the best from its people, and isn't afraid of radical approaches to get it.Leerom Segal is the president and CEO of Klick and has been named "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the Business Development Bank of Canada, won the "Young Entrepreneur of the Year" award from Ernst and Young, and was named to Profit Magazine's Hall of Fame as the youngest CEO ever to lead a nonprofit company.Aaron Goldstein is the co-founder of Klick and is a Senior Certified Project Manager Professional.Jay Goldman was Head of Marketing at Rypple, a venture-backed startup acquired by Salesforce in 2012 and now known as Work.com. He is the author of the O'Reilly Facebook Cookbook, and he has been published in the Harvard Business Review.Rahaf Harfoush is the author of several books including Yes We Did. She was a contributor to the best-selling Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital.
Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain
Jeff Stibel - 2013
Robots are delivering cups of coffee and some of humanity’s greatest works are created by crowds. We are in the midst of a networking revolution—set to transform the way we access the world’s information and the way we connect with one another. Studying biological systems is perhaps the best way to understand such networks, and nature has a lesson for us if we care to listen: bigger is rarely better in the long run. The deadliest creature is the mosquito, not the lion. It is the quality of a network that is important for survival, not the size, and all networks—the human brain, Facebook, Google, even the internet itself—eventually reach a breakpoint and collapse. That’s the bad news. The good news is that reaching a breakpoint can be a step forward, allowing a network to substitute quality for quantity. In Breakpoint, brain scientist and entrepreneur Jeff Stibel takes readers to the intersection of the brain, biology, and technology. He shows how exceptional companies are using their understanding of the internet’s brain-like powers to create a competitive advantage by building more effective websites, utilizing cloud computing, engaging social media, monetizing effectively, and leveraging a collective consciousness. Indeed, the result of these technologies is a more tightly connected world with capabilities far beyond the sum of our individual minds. Breakpoint offers a fresh and exciting perspective about the future of technology and its effects on all of us.