Book picks similar to
Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul by Howard Schultz
business
non-fiction
biography
leadership
Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
Jocko Willink - 2015
you teach guys and gals about leadership and you've helped not only military guys but families." - Megyn Kelly"You show in the book how to motivate... thanks for writing the book Extreme Ownership." Bill O'Reilly"[Jocko] is the co-author of an incredible new book - which I've been loving. Trust me. Buy it." - Tim Ferriss"This is a life-learning lesson for everyone... the book is awesome." - Sean HannitySent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership—at every level—is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails.Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields.Now, detailing the mind-set and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult missions in combat, Extreme Ownership shows how to apply them to any team, family or organization. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, explaining what they are, why they are important, and how to implement them in any leadership environment.A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
Verne Harnish - 2014
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture. This book is written so everyone -- from frontline employees to senior executives -- can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. There's no reason to do it alone, yet many top leaders feel like they are the ones dragging the rest of the organization up the S-curve of growth. The goal of this book is to help you turn what feels like an anchor into wind at your back -- creating a company where the team is engaged; the customers are doing your marketing; and everyone is making money. To accomplish this, Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully -- many to $1 billion and beyond. Running a business is ultimately about freedom. Scaling Up shows business leaders how to get their organizations moving in sync to create something significant and enjoy the ride.
Fanatical Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide to Opening Sales Conversations and Filling the Pipeline by Leveraging Social Selling, Telephone, Email, Text, and Cold Calling
Jeb Blount - 2015
By ignoring the muscle of prospecting, many otherwise competent salespeople and sales organizations consistently underperform.Step by step, Jeb Blount outlines his innovative approach to prospecting that works for real people, in the real world, with real prospects.Learn how to keep the pipeline full of qualified opportunities and avoid debilitating sales slumps by leveraging a balanced prospecting methodology across multiple prospecting channels.This book reveals the secrets, techniques, and tips of top earners. You'll learn:Why the 30-Day Rule is critical for keeping the pipeline full Why understanding the Law of Replacement is the key to avoiding sales slumps How to leverage the Law of Familiarity to reduce prospecting friction and avoid rejection The 5 C's of Social Selling and how to use them to get prospects to call you How to use the simple 5 Step Telephone Framework to get more appointments fast How to double call backs with a powerful voice mail technique How to leverage the powerful 4 Step Email Prospecting Framework to create emails that compel prospects to respond How to get text working for you with the 7 Step Text Message Prospecting Framework And there is so much more! Fanatical Prospecting is filled with the high-powered strategies, techniques, and tools you need to fill your pipeline with high quality opportunities.In the most comprehensive book ever written about sales prospecting, Jeb Blount reveals the real secret to improving sales productivity and growing your income fast. You'll gain the power to blow through resistance and objections, gain more appointments, start more sales conversations, and close more sales.Break free from the fear and frustration that is holding you and your team back from effective and consistent prospecting. It's time to get off the feast or famine sales roller-coaster for good!
The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Gretchen Rubin - 2009
“The days are long, but the years are short,” she realized. “Time is passing, and I’m not focusing enough on the things that really matter.” In that moment, she decided to dedicate a year to her happiness project.In this lively and compelling account, Rubin chronicles her adventures during the twelve months she spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific research, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier. Among other things, she found that novelty and challenge are powerful sources of happiness; that money can help buy happiness, when spent wisely; that outer order contributes to inner calm; and that the very smallest of changes can make the biggest difference.
The Wolf of Wall Street
Jordan Belfort - 2007
By night he spent it as fast as he could, on drugs, sex, and international globe-trotting. From the binge that sank a 170-foot motor yacht and ran up a $700,000 hotel tab, to the wife and kids waiting at home, and the fast-talking, hard-partying young stockbrokers who called him king and did his bidding, here, in his own inimitable words, is the story of the ill-fated genius they called . . .THE WOLF OF WALL STREETIn the 1990s Jordan Belfort, former kingpin of the notorious investment firm Stratton Oakmont, became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock-chopper who led his merry mob on a wild ride out of the canyons of Wall Street and into a massive office on Long Island. Now, in this astounding and hilarious tell-all autobiography, Belfort narrates a story of greed, power, and excess that no one could invent.Reputedly the prototype for the film Boiler Room, Stratton Oakmont turned microcap investing into a wickedly lucrative game as Belfort’s hyped-up, coked-out brokers browbeat clients into stock buys that were guaranteed to earn obscene profits—for the house. But an insatiable appetite for debauchery, questionable tactics, and a fateful partnership with a breakout shoe designer named Steve Madden would land Belfort on both sides of the law and into a harrowing darkness all his own.From the stormy relationship Belfort shared with his model-wife as they ran a madcap household that included two young children, a full-time staff of twenty-two, a pair of bodyguards, and hidden cameras everywhere—even as the SEC and FBI zeroed in on them—to the unbridled hedonism of his office life, here is the extraordinary story of an ordinary guy who went from hustling Italian ices at sixteen to making hundreds of millions. Until it all came crashing down . . .
Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business
John E. Mackey - 2012
cofounder Raj Sisodia argue for the inherent good of both business and capitalism. Featuring some of today’s best-known companies, they illustrate how these two forces can—and do—work most powerfully to create value for all stakeholders: including customers, employees, suppliers, investors, society, and the environment.These "�Conscious Capitalism" companies include Whole Foods Market, Southwest Airlines, Costco, Google, Patagonia, The Container Store, UPS, and dozens of others. We know them; we buy their products or use their services. Now it’s time to better understand how these organizations use four specific tenets—higher purpose, stakeholder integration, conscious leadership, and conscious culture and management—to build strong businesses and help advance capitalism further toward realizing its highest potential.As leaders of the Conscious Capitalism movement, Mackey and Sisodia argue that aspiring leaders and business builders need to continue on this path of transformation—for the good of both business and society as a whole.At once a bold defense and reimagining of capitalism and a blueprint for a new system for doing business grounded in a more evolved ethical consciousness, this book provides a new lens for individuals and companies looking to build a more cooperative, humane, and positive future.
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
Peter F. Drucker - 1966
Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done." This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned: Managing time Choosing what to contribute to the organization Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect Setting the right priorities Knitting all of them together with effective decision-makingRanging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
Chip Heath - 2006
Meanwhile, people with important ideas--entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists--struggle to make them "stick."In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds--from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony--draw their power from the same six traits.Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It's a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas--and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal
Ben Mezrich - 2009
They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women.Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard. Mark, with less of an interest in what the campus alpha males thought of him, happened to be a computer genius of the first order.Which he used to find a more direct route to social stardom: one lonely night, Mark hacked into the university's computer system, creating a ratable database of all the female students on campus–and subsequently crashing the university's servers and nearly getting himself kicked out of school. In that moment, in his Harvard dorm room, the framework for Facebook was born.What followed–a real-life adventure filled with slick venture capitalists, stunning women, and six-foot-five-inch identical-twin Olympic rowers–makes for one of the most entertaining and compelling books of the year. Before long, Eduardo’s and Mark’s different ideas about Facebook created in their relationship faint cracks, which soon spiraled into out-and-out warfare. The collegiate exuberance that marked their collaboration fell prey to the adult world of lawyers and money. The great irony is that while Facebook succeeded by bringing people together, its very success tore two best friends apart.The Accidental Billionaires is a compulsively readable story of innocence lost–and of the unusual creation of a company that has revolutionized the way hundreds of millions of people relate to one another.Ben Mezrich, a Harvard graduate, has published ten books, including the New York Times bestseller Bringing Down the House. He is a columnist for Boston Common and a contributor for Flush magazine. Ben lives in Boston with his wife, Tonya.
Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers
Gabriel Weinberg - 2014
What failed startups don't have are enough customers.Founders and employees fail to spend time thinking about (and working on) traction in the same way they work on building a product. This shortsighted approach has startups trying random tactics - some ads, a blog post or two - in an unstructured way that's guaranteed to fail. This book changes that. Traction Book provides startup founders and employees with the framework successful companies have used to get traction. It allows you to think about which marketing channels make sense for you, given your industry and company stage. This framework has been used by founders like Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Alexis Ohanian (Reddit), Paul English (Kayak.com), and Alex Pachikov (Evernote) to build some of the biggest companies and organizations in the world. We interviewed each of the above founders - along with 35+ others - and pulled out the repeatable tactics and strategies they used to get traction. We then cover every possible marketing channel you can use to get traction, and show you which channels will be your key to growth. This book shows you how to grow at a time when getting traction is more important than ever. Below are the channels we cover in the book:Viral Marketing Public Relations (PR) Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Engineering as Marketing Target Market Blogs Business Development (BD) Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community BuildingThis book draws on interviews with the following individuals: Jimmy Wales, Co-founder of Wikipedia Alexis Ohanian, Co-founder of reddit Eric Ries, Author of The Lean Startup Rand Fishkin, Founder of SEOmoz Noah Kagan, Founder of AppSumo Patrick McKenzie, CEO of Bingo Card Creator Sam Yagan, Co-founder of OkCupid Andrew Chen, Investor at 500 Startups Justin Kan, Founder of Justin.tv Mark Cramer, CEO of SurfCanyon Colin Nederkoorn, CEO of Customer.io Jason Cohen, Founder of WP Engine Chris Fralic, Partner at First Round Paul English, CEO of Kayak.com Rob Walling, Founder of MicroConf Brian Riley, Co-founder of SlidePad Steve Welch, Co-founder of DreamIt Jason Kincaid, Blogger at TechCrunch Nikhil Sethi, Founder of Adaptly Rick Perreault, CEO of Unbounce Alex Pachikov, Co-founder of Evernote David Skok, Partner at Matrix Ashish Kundra, CEO of myZamana David Hauser, Founder of Grasshopper Matt Monahan, CEO of Inflection Jeff Atwood, Co-founder of Discourse Dan Martell, CEO of Clarity.fm Chris McCann, Founder of StartupDigest Ryan Holiday, Exec at American Apparel Todd Vollmer, Enterprise Sales Veteran Sandi MacPherson, Founder of Quibb Andrew Warner, Founder of Mixergy Sean Murphy, Founder of SKMurphy Satish Dharmaraj, Partner at Redpoint Garry Tan, Partner at Y Combinator Steve Barsh, CEO of Packlate Michael Bodekaer, Co-founder of Smart Launch Zack Linford, Founder of Optimozo
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie - 1920
Contains an active table of contents for easy navigation.
The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
Scott Galloway - 2017
Just about everyone thinks they know how they got there. Just about everyone is wrong. For all that's been written about the Four over the last two decades, no one has captured their power and staggering success as insightfully as Scott Galloway.Instead of buying the myths these compa-nies broadcast, Galloway asks fundamental questions. How did the Four infiltrate our lives so completely that they're almost impossible to avoid (or boycott)? Why does the stock market forgive them for sins that would destroy other firms? And as they race to become the world's first trillion-dollar company, can anyone chal-lenge them?In the same irreverent style that has made him one of the world's most celebrated business professors, Galloway deconstructs the strategies of the Four that lurk beneath their shiny veneers. He shows how they manipulate the fundamental emotional needs that have driven us since our ancestors lived in caves, at a speed and scope others can't match. And he reveals how you can apply the lessons of their ascent to your own business or career.Whether you want to compete with them, do business with them, or simply live in the world they dominate, you need to understand the Four.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd
Allan Dib - 2016
Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: • How to get new customers, clients, or patients and how make more profit from existing ones. • Why “big business” style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. • How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. • A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. • How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. • How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. • How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.
The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World's Greatest Manufacturer
Jeffrey K. Liker - 2003
Less inventory. The highest quality cars with the fewest defects of any competing manufacturer. In factories around the globe, Toyota consistently raises the bar for manufacturing, product development, and process excellence. The result is an amazing business success story: steadily taking market share from price-cutting competitors, earning far more profit than any other automaker, and winning the praise of business leaders worldwide.The Toyota Way reveals the management principles behind Toyota's worldwide reputation for quality and reliability. Dr. Jeffrey Liker, a renowned authority on Toyota's Lean methods, explains how you can adopt these principles--known as the "Toyota Production System" or "Lean Production"--to improve the speed of your business processes, improve product and service quality, and cut costs, no matter what your industry.Drawing on his extensive research on Toyota, Dr. Liker shares his insights into the foundational principles at work in the Toyota culture. He explains how the Toyota Production System evolved as a new paradigm of manufacturing excellence, transforming businesses across industries. You'll learn how Toyota fosters employee involvement at all levels, discover the difference between traditional process improvement and Toyota's Lean improvement, and learn why companies often think they are Lean--but aren't.
Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry
Jacquie McNish - 2015
Today that number is one percent. What went so wrong? Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway. With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in Ontario. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an abrasive Harvard Business school grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket email device that became the tool of choice for presidents and CEOs. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world's fastest growing company internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google's entry in to mobile phones. Expertly told by acclaimed journalists, Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.