“The rules of success are told in such a captivating way that I could not put this book down. Those seven rules guide salespeople – novices and veterans – to create a solid sales foundation.” - Lee B. Salz - Bestselling Author of Hire Right, Higher Profits

    Service Design is a bit of a buzzword these days and has gained a lot of interest from various fields. This book, assembled to describe and illustrate the emerging field of service design, was brought together using exactly the same co-creative and user-centred approaches you can read and learn about inside. The boundaries between products and services are blurring and it is time for a different way of thinking: this is service design thinking.A set of 23 international authors and even more online contributors from the global service design community invested their knwoledge, experience and passion together to create this book. It introduces service design thinking in a manner accessible to beginners and students, it broadens the knowledge and can act as a resource for experienced design professionals.

     It isn't enough to just do your job anymore. In order to thrive in today's marketplace, all of us-even the accountants-have to be ready to generate brilliant ideas on demand. Business creativity expert Todd Henry explains how to establish effective practices that unleash your creative potential. Born out of his consultancy and his popular podcast, Henry has created a practical method for discovering your personal creative rhythm. He focuses on five key elements: *Focus: Begin with your end goal in mind. *Relationships: Build stimulating relationships and ideas will follow. *Energy: Manage it as your most valuable resource. *Stimuli: Structure the right "inputs" to maximize creative output. *Hours: Focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. This is a guide for staying inspired and experiencing greater creative productivity than you ever imagined possible.

    Everyone wants them, whether to sell more products, spread good ideas, or win more funding. In our busy digital world, the way to results is influencing people on the web. But how?An ad campaign won't cut it. A Twitter account doesn't guarantee it. Manipulative tricks will backfire. Instead, you need quality, compelling web content that attracts people and engages them for the long haul.Clout explains the key principles of influence and how to apply them to web content. Along the way, those principles come to life with lots of practical examples. With this book, you'll: Discover why a technology feature, marketing campaign, SEO effort, or redesign aren't enough to influence online. Understand the business value of compelling web content. Learn 8 principles for influence from the art of rhetoric and the science of psychology. Find out what context is and why it's so important to influence. Jump start your planning for content over time with patterns and diagrams. Learn the basics of evaluation to determine whether your web content is making a difference.

    A necessary addition to your reading." --David Maister, author of Managing the Professional Service Firm"Professional Services Marketing will certainly become the bible of the field in short order! Without a doubt, the most useful compendium of marketing insight for the practicing professional services firm executive...BRAVO!" --Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College, and coauthor of The Service Profit Chain"It's no longer sufficient to be a good 'expert for hire'--you need a brand and a powerful marketing engine behind you. Professional Services Marketing is a gold mine of research based strategies, best practices, and specific techniques that will help you consistently win in the client marketplace and outshine your competition. It's thoughtful, funny, and filled with the how-to so often missing in business books." --Andrew Sobel, coauthor of Clients for Life"Schultz and Doerr offer tactics and information in an easy-to-read, concise, and enjoyable format. Professional Services Marketing should be a required resource in every professional marketer's tool box!" --R. Granville Loar, Executive Director, Association for Accounting Marketing"This book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in professional services. It is especially timely in our current challenging economic conditions, and the ideas and guidance are relevant for the better times to come as well." --Josh Lee, Partner, Monitor Group"Smart. Practical. Comprehensive. This is the one book that won't collect dust on my shelf." --Kevin McMurdo, Chief Marketing Officer, Perkins Coie"Professional Services Marketing is the first book to directly address the challenges of the professional services marketer. This book is filled with practical wisdom and research on best practices and processes specifically for this industry. A must-read for anyone in a professional services firm!" --Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing, BearingPoint

     Written for anyone trying to figure out how to make the most of their lives, Born to Build seeks to inspire entrepreneurs and ambitious, self-motivated people to build something that will change the world. A builder’s venture could be a small business that grows into a mammoth enterprise, a thriving new division in an existing company, a nonprofit, a social enterprise, a church, a school — anything that creates economic growth and makes a lasting impact on society. Born to Build is written by Gallup Chairman and CEO Jim Clifton and Sangeeta Badal, Ph.D., Principal Scientist for Gallup’s Entrepreneurship and Job Creation initiative, and is grounded in years of research. This book goes beyond the conventional economics-based business training and instead offers a uniquely psychological approach to venture building. It gives readers the tools and techniques they need to understand who they are, what motivates them and what they can build — and how. By following the practical steps in Born to Build, readers will have the tools to build a sustainable and profitable venture of any size from scratch. Central to the book is a code that allows readers to take Gallup’s Builder Profile 10 (BP10) assessment, which identifies their innate talents and motivations and shows them how to make the most of their talents to build a successful enterprise.

    Christensen says outstanding companies can do everything right and still lose their market leadership -- or worse, disappear completely. And he not only proves what he says, he tells others how to avoid a similar fate.Focusing on "disruptive technology" -- the Honda Super Cub, Intel's 8088 processor, or the hydraulic excavator, for example -- Christensen shows why most companies miss "the next great wave." Whether in electronics or retailing, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know when to abandon traditional business practices. Using the lessons of successes and failures from leading companies, "The Innovator's Dilemma" presents a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.

    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

    Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries – including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare -- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization. They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between “Buddhism” versus “Catholicism” -- whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people -- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back. Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge. It is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.

    If you want to succeed in life or business, this book is a must.

    But too often, even the most innovative organization quickly becomes a "giant hairball"--a tangled, impenetrable mass of rules, traditions, and systems, all based on what worked in the past--that exercises an inexorable pull into mediocrity. Gordon McKenzie worked at Hallmark Cards for thirty years, many of which he spent inspiring his colleagues to slip the bonds of Corporate Normalcy and rise to orbit--to a mode of dreaming, daring and doing above and beyond the rubber-stamp confines of the administrative mind-set. In his deeply funny book, exuberantly illustrated in full color, he shares the story of his own professional evolution, together with lessons on awakening and fostering creative genius.Originally self-published and already a business "cult classic", this personally empowering and entertaining look at the intersection between human creativity and the bottom line is now widely available to bookstores. It will be a must-read for any manager looking for new ways to invigorate employees, and any professional who wants to achieve his or her best, most self-expressive, most creative and fulfilling work.

    Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.   As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:   • Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. • Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.

    How many likes? How many purchases? How many email subscribers?But as entrepreneurs, we have to remember that there are people behind all that data. People who are looking to us to be a leader, to give advice, and to care. They are looking for trustworthy tools and resources, and for someone to help them to achieve their goals. In this dog-eat-dog world, these are the people who are looking for someone who they can trust, and who they know have their best interests in mind.These are the people, if you connect with them in the right way, who will become Superfans.Followers may "like" an Instagram post. Customers may buy a product. But "Superfans" will be your biggest supporters. They will promote you and your products because they know you have made a difference in their lives. They will tell their friends. They will send you encouraging emails. They will connect with you and your other fans.Whether you're a shy YouTuber just starting out, or the leader of a Fortune 500 company, your superfans are out there waiting for you to connect with them. You just need to create that journey, to pave the yellow-brick road that will guide them surely and steadily to superfandom.You don't need to change the entire world to build a successful business; you just need to change someone's world.People don't become superfans the moment they find you. They become superfans because of the magical moments you create for them over time.This book will help you do just that.

    Across all industries, somewhere between 20%-70% of newly acquired customers will stop doing business with a company with the first 100 days of being a new customer because they feel neglected in the early stages of customer onboarding.In Never Lose a Customer Again, Coleman offers a philosophy and methodology for dramatically increasing customer retention and as a result, the bottom line. He identifies eight distinct emotional phases customers go through in the 100 days following a purchase. From an impulse buy at Starbucks to the thoughtful purchase of a first house, all customers have the potential to experience the eight phases of the customer journey. If you can understand and anticipate the customers' emotions, you can apply a myriad of tools and techniques -- in-person, email, phone, mail, video, and presents -- to cement a long and valuable relationship.Coleman's system is presented through research and case studies showing how best-in-class companies create remarkable customer experiences at each step in the customer lifecycle.In the Acclimate stage, customers need you to hold their hand and over-explain how to use your product or service. They're often too embarrassed to admit they're confused. Take a cue from Canadian software company PolicyMedical and their challenge of getting non-technical users to undergo a complex installation and implementation process. They turned a series of project spreadsheets and installation manuals into a beautiful puzzle customers could assemble after completing each milestone.In the Adopt stage, customers should be welcomed to the highest tier of tribal membership with both public and private recognitions. For instance, Sephora's VIB Rogue member welcome gift provides a metallic membership card (private recognition) and a members-only shade of lipstick (for public display).In the final stage, Advocate, loyal customers and raving fans are primed to provide powerful referrals. That's how elite entrepreneurial event MastermindTalks continues to sell-out their conference year after year - with zero dollars spent on marketing. By surprising their loyal fans with amazing referral bonuses (an all-expenses paid safari?!) they guarantee their community will keep providing perfect referrals.Drawing on nearly two decades of consulting and keynoting, Coleman provides strategies and systems to increase customer loyalty. Applicable to companies in any industry and of any size (whether measured in employee count, revenue, or total number of customers), implementing his methods regularly leads to an increase in profits of 25-100%.Working with well-known clients like Hyatt Hotels, Zappos, and NASA, as well as mom-and-pop shops and solo entrepreneurs around the world, Coleman's customer retention system has produced incredible results in dozens of industries.His approach to creating remarkable customer experiences requires minimal financial investment and will be fun for owners, employees, and teams to implement. This book is required reading for business owners, CEOs, and managers - as well as sales and marketing teams, account managers, and customer service representatives looking for easy to implement action steps that result in lasting change, increased profits, and lifelong customer retention.

    It has long been a business article of faith that great companies, by definition, constantly focus on maximizing their revenues year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a growing number of undeniably great compabnies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside fourteen of these remarkable comapnies that have chosen to march to their own drummer. He shows the leaders of these small giants recognized the full range of choices they had about the type of company they could create and made the choice to pursue greateness by placing other goals ahead of getting as big as possible as fast as possible. And he shows how we can all benefit by questioning the conventional definitions of business success."