Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel - 2014
In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.
Business Adventures
John Brooks - 1969
What do the $350 million Ford Motor Company disaster known as the Edsel, the fast and incredible rise of Xerox, and the unbelievable scandals at General Electric and Texas Gulf Sulphur have in common? Each is an example of how an iconic company was defined by a particular moment of fame or notoriety. These notable and fascinating accounts are as relevant today to understanding the intricacies of corporate life as they were when the events happened.Stories about Wall Street are infused with drama and adventure and reveal the machinations and volatile nature of the world of finance. John Brooks’s insightful reportage is so full of personality and critical detail that whether he is looking at the astounding market crash of 1962, the collapse of a well-known brokerage firm, or the bold attempt by American bankers to save the British pound, one gets the sense that history really does repeat itself.
Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School
Philip Delves Broughton - 2005
Twenty percent of the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies are HBS graduates, as are many of our savviest entrepreneurs (e.g., Michael Bloomberg) and canniest felons (e.g., Jeffrey Skilling). The top investment banks and brokerage houses routinely send their brightest young stars to HBS to groom them for future power. To these people and many others, a Harvard MBA is a golden ticket to the Olympian heights of American business.In 2004, Philip Delves Broughton abandoned a post as Paris bureau chief of the London Daily Telegraph to join nine hundred other would-be tycoons on HBS's plush campus. Over the next two years, he and his classmates would be inundated with the best--and the rest--of American business culture that HBS epitomizes. The core of the school's curriculum is the "case": an analysis of a real business situation from which the students must, with a professor's guidance, tease lessons. Delves Broughton studied more than five hundred cases and recounts the most revelatory ones here. He also learns the surprising pleasures of accounting, the allure of beta, the ingenious chicanery of leveraging, and innumerable other hidden workings of the business world, all of which he limns with a wry clarity reminiscent of Liar's Poker. He also exposes the less savory trappings of b-school culture, from the 'booze luge' to the pandemic obsession with PowerPoint to the specter of depression that stalks too many overburdened students. With acute and often uproarious candor, he assesses the school's success at teaching the traits it extols as most important in business: leadership, decisiveness, ethical behavior, work/life balance.Published during the one hundredth anniversary of Harvard Business School, Ahead of the Curve offers a richly detailed and revealing you-are-there account of the institution that has, for good or ill, made American business what it is today.
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.
Property Management for Dummies
Robert S. Griswold - 2001
But Property Management For Dummies will help you maintain your sense of humor - and your sanity - as you deal with these challenges and more. You may become an unintentional property owner - someone who inherited a house from a relative and didn't want it to sit idle, or someone who transferred to a job in another city and decided to rent your home rather than sell it - or you may have entered the world of property ownership intentionally. Either way, real estate offers one of the best opportunities to develop a steady stream of residual income.Property Management For Dummies is organized by specific topic areas, so you can easily and quickly scan a topic that interests you, or you can troubleshoot the source of your latest major headache. You'll discover how toEvaluate your skills and personality to see whether you have what it takes to be a landlord Keep your units occupied with paying tenants who don't destroy your property Move in your new tenants and move them out - and everything in between Assemble the right team of professionals to help you, from employees to contractors Insure your property and understand the taxes that go with it Look for additional sources of income beyond rent, including the opportunities and pitfalls of lease options While many of life's lessons can be uncovered by trial and error, property management shouldn't be one of them - the mistakes are too costly and the legal ramifications too severe. In this book, you'll find proven strategies to make rental property ownership and management not only profitable but pleasant as well.
Federal Resume Guidebook: Strategies for Writing a Winning Federal Resume
Kathryn K. Troutman - 1997
This book shows you writing methods to get best qualified, referred to a supervisor, interviewed, and hired! Effectively include KSAs in your resume with accomplishments. Maximize readability with the Outline Format federal resume. Analyze vacancy announcements for keywords. Master the Assessment Questionnaire. Format your USAJOBS federal resume for readability. Includes dozens of sample federal resumes in the Outline Format with KSAs!
When the Penny Drops: Learning What's Not Taught
R. Gopalakrishnan - 2011
For centuries, we have learned what's not taught through our own experiences and the stories of others. Even today, only 3 per cent of leadership development occurs due to classroom training and coursework. In fact, for most managers, the penny drops only when we are at the end of our careers. R. Gopalakrishnan, author of the best-selling The Case of the Bonsai Manager, has many stories to tell. With forty-three years corporate experience across countries, each story recounted here has taught him a valuable lesson in some intuitive way. Each one is narrated here for you to allow you to reflect and learn for yourself how to improve and develop. Using the framework of the Tata Management Training Centre (TMTC) and the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), Gopalakrishnan explores: The three worlds of the manager—the inner world, the world of relationships and the world of getting things done. *The importance of emotional quotient (EQ) to progress as well as intelligence to get ahead in your career. *The deadly personal qualities of bonsai-trapped leaders. *The deadly traps for organizations. When the Penny Drops: Learning What's Not Taught encourages you to reflect on yourself. It will help you learn by identifying the success mantras embedded in you and releasing the lessons that might be entrapped within yourself.
The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations
The Arbinger Institute - 2019
This book points out the many ways, some quite subtle and deceptive, that this mindset invites tension and conflict. But incredible things happen when people switch to an outward mindset. They intuitively understand what coworkers, colleagues, family, and friends need to be successful and happy. Their organizations thrive, and astonishingly, by focusing on others they become happier and more successful themselves! This new mindset brings about deep and far-reaching changes. The Outward Mindset presents compelling true stories to illustrate the gaps that individuals and organizations typically experience between their actual inward mindsets and their needed outward mindsets. And it provides simple yet profound guidance and tools to help bridge this mindset gap. This new edition includes a new preface, updated case studies, and new material covering Arbinger's latest research on mindsets. In the long run, changing negative behavior without changing one's mindset doesn't last—the old behaviors always reassert themselves. But changing the mindset that causes the behavior changes everything.
Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success
Brad Stulberg - 2017
Whether someone is trying to qualify for the Olympics, break ground in mathematical theory or craft an artistic masterpiece, many of the practices that lead to great success are the same. In Peak Performance, Brad Stulberg, a former McKinsey and Company consultant and journalist who covers health and the science of human performance, and Steve Magness, a performance scientist and coach of Olympic athletes, team up to demystify these practices and demonstrate how everyone can achieve their best.The first book of its kind, Peak Performance combines the inspiring stories of top performers across a range of capabilities - from athletic, to intellectual, to artistic - with the latest scientific insights into the cognitive and neurochemical factors that drive performance in all domains. In doing so, Peak Performance uncovers new linkages that hold promise as performance enhancers but have been overlooked in our traditionally-siloed ways of thinking. The result is a life-changing book in which readers will learn how to enhance their performance by a myriad of ways including: optimally alternating between periods of intense work and rest; developing and harnessing the power of a self-transcending purpose; and priming the body and mind for enhanced productivity.In revealing the science of great performance and the stories of great performers across a wide range of capabilities, Peak Performance uncovers the secrets of success, and coaches readers on how to use them. If you want to take your game to the next level, whatever "your game" may be, Peak Performance will teach you how.
Sam Walton: Made In America
Sam Walton - 1992
And it's a story about believing in your idea even when maybe some other folks don't, and about sticking to your guns." It's the story of how Walton parlayed a single dime store in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king of the late twentieth century, he never lost the common touch. Here Walton tells his extraordinary story in his own inimitable words. Genuinely modest, but always sure of his ambitions and achievements, Walton shares his thinking in a candid, straight-from-the-shoulder style."Here is an extraordinary success story about a man whose empire was built not with smoke and mirrors, but with good old-fashioned elbow grease."
Trade the Trader: Know Your Competition and Find Your Edge for Profitable Trading
Quint Tatro - 2010
You're trading against other traders who care about only one thing: taking your money. That's the #1 hard reality of trading - and most traders either don't know it, or don't act as if they do. In this book, top trader and hedge fund manager Quint Tatro shows how to win consistently in the "zero sum" game of trading, where there's a loser for every winner. You'll learn how to reflect your trading competition in every facet of trading and investing: choosing companies to invest in, knowing when to jump in and out of the market, and mastering the psychology and gamesmanship of trading. Coverage includes: Understanding the "other side of the trade": the thousands of pros you're trading against. Finding a technical edge with technical analysis you can exploit over and over again. Understanding sentiment and overcoming the human emotions and biases that cost you dearly. Utilizing the most essential strategies of fundamental analysis. Playing positions and probabilities, not P+Ls. Recognizing and capturing huge opportunities in down markets.
What the Most Successful People Do at Work: A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career
Laura Vanderkam - 2013
The third mini-ebook by the acclaimed author of What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast reveals how a few simple changes can make you more productive and fulfilled in your career.In her bestselling mini-ebook What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, Laura Vanderkam showed us how to take advantage of our often ignored morning hours to achieve our dreams.Then in the sequel, What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, she revealed why the key to a better week is a better weekend.Now, in the third mini-ebook of this trilogy, What the Most Successful People Do at Work, Vanderkam shows us how to ignite our careers by taking control of our work days.
The Amazon Millionaire: A New Breed of Entrepreneur
Robert T. Kiyosaki - 2015
Old School Entrepreneur Meets New School.
TOP 101 Growth Hacks: The best growth hacking ideas that you can put into practice right away
Aladdin Happy - 2015
First growth hacks I was compressing into a short form and keeping in a private document. And then the crazy idea hit my head — establish an e-mail subscription service, that sends every day one short growth hack. This is how growthhackingidea.com was born. After 3 weeks there were 1700 subscribers ($0 marketing cost). I was reading, choosing tasty growth hacks, I eager to test and implement. After 3 months there were 17 000 subscribers ($0 marketing cost). People from companies like Microsoft, Salesforce, TechStars, Hubspot, Coca-Cola, Indiegogo, Disney, 500 startups, LinkedIn, Adobe became our subscribers. After reaching this milestone I decided to put the best collected growth hacks into a book + add a portion of exclusive growth hacks, never released on GrowthHackingIdea.com. This book consists of two parts: 1. Introduction, how GrowthHackingIdea.com started (+ bonus growth hacks) 2. A list of TOP 101 growth hacks. Divided into AARRR+ sections: Before Product-Market Fit, Hustling, Copywriting, Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, Referral: Before product/market fit #1. Hack your mindset with CEO of Pinterest #2. How to get your first customers #3. Are you sure about your product/market fit? Hustling #4. Leveraging dead competitors #5. Get emails of followers of your competitors #6. Tinder`s early days growth hack #7. Become an alternative to your competitors #8. The TechCrunch journalists` emails #9. Find journalists for your startup instantly #10. Pre-heat the journalists #11. Hack the Press #12. Hack Product Hunt #13. How a $2B company gained its initial users Copyrighting #14. A copy that converts #15. 9 cold emailing rules #16. 7 engaging storytelling formulas #17. 7 perfect headline formulas #18. The magic of headlines #19. Hack persuasive copywriting #20. Copywriting tip to quadruple conversions #21. Replace one word to get 90% more clicks Acquisition #22. Parasite SEO (white hat) #23. A real keyword strategy #24. Hidden early stage growth hack of Airbnb #25. Turn LinkedIn contacts into a list of emails #26. I hardly forced myself to share this hack #27. 200K users a month from long tail phrases #28. Boost conversions of your Tweets #29. How to collect emails on Twitter #30. Hack Twitter #31. Creating Pinterest pins that drive results #32. Best growth hack by Laxman Papineni #33. Which ads perform best for your competitors? #34. Piggybacking tweak to earn a ROI #35. Hack ideas for the 2nd largest search engine #36. Hack Facebook ads #37. 5 SEO hacks for the 2nd largest search engine #38. Disrupt the cost of YouTube video marketing Activation #39. Easy to understand tutorials via email #40. Boost your email opt-in rate by 22% #41. Little trick increased conversions by 26% #42. Evernote’s onboarding framework #43. Increase email opt-ins by 70% in 5 minutes #44. Quiz your audience #45. Drawbacks & competition increase conversions #46. Negative social proof for persuasion #47. 10-second trick #48. How I doubled my app downloads #49. How typography affects conversions #50. Save your bounced visitors #51. Turn invisibles into leads #52.
Fish!: Omnibus
Stephen C. Lundin - 2006
This is a powerful collection of bestselling books that will help you love the work you do - even if you can't always do work that you love.