The Art of Business Wars: Battle-Tested Lessons for Leaders and Entrepreneurs from History's Greatest Rivalries


David Brown - 2021
    Using Chinese military genius Sun Tzu’s strategies as a guide, Brown examines why some companies triumph while others crumble.Business is a fight for survival. In business as in war, leaders match their wills in pursuit of opposing outcomes, they devise strategies, and marshal resources for victory. Success can turn on the smallest of details; a single tactical blunder can topple an empire. Ultimately, one side triumphs—and victory is all that matters.David Brown, host of the hit podcast Business Wars, masterfully frames some of the biggest business rivalries in history using revered Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s insights and pragmatic advice. Each rivalry he examines tells a story of combined wits, strategies, and resources. Brown chronicles the rise of companies as they vanquish rivals, formulate innovative plans, and adapt to keep up with shifting societal needs. The goal? Stay ahead of the competition and emerge victorious as an industry titan.By compiling powerful insights uncovered over hundreds of episodes and more than a year of in-depth research, Brown has developed a formula for business intrigue that uses popular history as a hook to lure readers in. The stories in The Art of Business Wars are fascinating, but the lessons we draw from them—about determination, ingenuity, patience, grit, subtlety, and other traits that contribute to a victorious enterprise—are invaluable, whether you're a software-slinging freelancer or the CEO of a multinational manufacturer.

Principles of Product Management: How to Land a PM Job and Launch Your Product Career


Peter Yang - 2019
    The book has three parts: Principles: Part one covers the leadership principles that PMs use to lead their team to overcome adversity. When your product fails to gain traction, when your team falls apart, or when your manager gives you tough feedback—these are all opportunities to learn principles that will help you succeed. Product development: Part two covers how PMs at Facebook, Amazon, and other top companies build products. We'll walk through the end-to-end product development process— from understanding the customer problem to identifying the right product to build to executing with your team to bring the product to market. Getting the job: Part three covers how you can land a PM job and reach the interview stage at the right company. We'll prep you for the three most common types of PM interviews— product sense, execution, and behavioral—with detailed frameworks and examples for each. Hear directly from product leaders at Airbnb, Amazon, Google, and more on: How to overcome challenging situations from a VP of Product at Amazon. How to build a great product roadmap from product leaders at LinkedIn and Airbnb. How Google, Airbnb, and other top companies evaluate PM candidates from leaders at those companies. How PMs can grow their career from a Director at Instagram and Twitter. Table of Contents1. PrinciplesTake OwnershipPrioritize and ExecuteStart with WhyFind the TruthBe Radically TransparentBe Honest with Yourself2. Product DevelopmentProduct Development LoopUnderstanding the Customer ProblemSelecting a Goal MetricMission, Vision, and StrategyBuilding a Product RoadmapDefining Product RequirementsGreat Project ManagementEffective CommunicationMaking Good Decisions3. Getting the JobPreparing for the TransitionMaking the TransitionFinding the Right CompanyAcing your PM InterviewsProduct Sense InterviewExecution InterviewBehavioral InterviewYour First 30 Days4. Product Leader Interviews

Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Getting Things Done


David Allen - 2003
    Now "the personal productivity guru" (Fast Company) shows readers how to increase their ability to work better, not harder every day. Based on Allen's highly popular e-newsletter, Ready for Anything offers readers 52 ways to immediately clear your head for creativity, focus your attention, create structures that work, and take action to get things moving. With wit, inspiration, and know-how, Allen shows readers how to make things happen with less effort and stress, and lots more energy, creativity, and effectiveness. Ready for Anything is the perfect book for anyone wanting to work and live at his or her very best.

Leading Teams: Setting the Stage for Great Performances


J. Richard Hackman - 2002
    Leading Teams is not about subscribing to a specific formula or leadership style, says Hackman. Rather, it is about applying a concise set of guiding principles to each unique group situation—and doing so in the leader's own idiosyncratic way. Based on extensive research and using compelling examples ranging from orchestras to airline cockpit crews, Leading Teams identifies five essential conditions—a stable team, a clear and engaging direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and the availability of competent coaching—that greatly enhance the likelihood of team success. The book offers a practical framework that leaders can use to muster personal skills and organizational resources to create and sustain the five key conditions and shows how those conditions can launch a team onto a trajectory of increasing effectiveness. Authoritative and astutely realistic, Leading Teams offers a new and provocative way of thinking about and leading work teams in any organizational setting.

The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures: Simple Rules to Unleash A Culture of Innovation


Henri Lipmanowicz - 2014
    So do professors, facilitators and all changemakers. The challenge is how. Liberating Structures are novel, practical and no-nonsense methods to help you accomplish this goal with groups of any size.Prepare to be surprised by how simple and easy they are for anyone to use. This book shows you how with detailed descriptions for putting them into practice plus tips on how to get started and traps to avoid. It takes the design and facilitation methods experts use and puts them within reach of anyone in any organization or initiative, from the frontline to the C-suite.Part One: The Hidden Structure of Engagement will ground you with the conceptual framework and vocabulary of Liberating Structures. It contrasts Liberating Structures with conventional methods and shows the benefits of using them to transform the way people collaborate, learn, and discover solutions together.Part Two: Getting Started and Beyond offers guidelines for experimenting in a wide range of applications from small group interactions to system-wide initiatives: meetings, projects, problem solving, change initiatives, product launches, strategy development, etc.Part Three: Stories from the Field illustrates the endless possibilities Liberating Structures offer with stories from users around the world, in all types of organizations –– from healthcare to academic to military to global business enterprises, from judicial and legislative environments to R&D.Part Four: The Field Guide for Including, Engaging, and Unleashing Everyone describes how to use each of the 33 Liberating Structures with step-by-step explanations of what to do and what to expect.Discover today what Liberating Structures can do for you, without expensive investments, complicated training, or difficult restructuring. Liberate everyone’s contributions –– all it takes is the determination to experiment.

Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even If You Hate Marketing and Selling


Michael Port - 2006
    It gives you simple, yet effective techniques for creating relentless demand and endless leads. It includes more than 200 proven marketing strategies for attracting new clients, earning more referrals, and building profitable, long-lasting professional relationships. If you want to take your service business to the next level, start here and "Book Yourself Solid.

The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Buy and Live as They Do


Clotaire Rapaille - 2006
    His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world. Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of Codes as we grow up within our culture. These Codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the Codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do. Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest-lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us. In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes. Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

The One-Page Project Manager: Communicate and Manage Any Project with a Single Sheet of Paper


Clark A. Campbell - 2006
    This practical guide will save time and effort, helping you identify the vital parts of a project and communicate those parts and duties to other team members.

The Nature of Software Development


Ron Jeffries - 2015
    

How to Be Useful: A Beginner's Guide to Not Hating Work


Megan Hustad - 2008
    You've landed the job. Now you want to make a good impression, express yourself, excel. Unsure of how to proceed? Aspire to a class greater than the one you were born to? Time to put aside your objections to blatant cries for help. In "How to Be Useful", Megan Hustad dismantles the myths of getting ahead and helps you navigate the choppy waters of office life. Drawing on the experiences of twenty- and thirtysomethings (herself included) as well as fictional strivers from "The House of Mirth", "The Apprentice", and everywhere in between, she shows us where things tend to go wrong in our pursuit of the great american dream. Then she culls the best advice from a century's worth of success literature (the books you'd be too embarrassed to read yourself) to show how work and even the idea of professional climbing can be artfully reimagined. The result is both surprising and provocative. There's Andrew Carnegie on why just being yourself on the job is a terrible idea; Emily Post on the importance of asking questions; Napoleon Hill on why its okay to use people (and how to do it properly); Helen Gurley Brown on thriving in the midst of corporate dysfunction; and Stephen Covey on why you shouldn't always stand up for yourself. Proving once and for all that working hard and being smart arent nearly enough to get ahead these days, Hustad provides dozens of solutions for corporate indignities that have stood the test of time. Humorous yet wise, ironic yet indispensable, "How to Be Useful" overturns everything you thought you knew about moving up in the world.

The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us


Paul Tough - 2019
    Drawing on new research, the book reveals how the landscape of higher education has shifted in recent decades and exposes the hidden truths of how the system works and whom it works for. And it introduces us to the people who really make higher education go: admissions directors trying to balance the class and balance the budget, College Board officials scrambling to defend the SAT in the face of mounting evidence that it favors the wealthy, researchers working to unlock the mysteries of the college-student brain, and educators trying to transform potential dropouts into successful graduates. With insight, humor, and passion, Paul Tough takes readers on a journey from Ivy League seminar rooms to community college welding shops, from giant public flagship universities to tiny experimental storefront colleges. Whether you are facing your own decision about college or simply care about the American promise of social mobility, The Years That Matter Most will change the way you think—not just about higher education, but about the nation itself.

SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together


Christine Comaford - 2013
    And most teams are fully capable of doing so. The problem: we consistently say and do things that spark unconscious fears and keep our people stuck in their Critter State. This primitive fight, flight, or freeze mode distills all decision mak­ing to one question: What will keep me safest?  Lying low, sucking up, procrastinating, and doing a good enough job may keep employees breathing, but it doesn’t make for vital organizations. Leaders have to get their people unstuck and fully engaged, replacing their old, limiting mental patterns with new patterns that foster optimal performance. New York Times bestselling author and applied neuroscience expert Christine Comaford knows what it takes to move people from the Critter State into the Smart State, where they have full access to their own creativity, innovation, higher consciousness, and emotional engagement. When an entire culture maintains that state, it becomes what she calls a SmartTribe. Focused. Accountable. Collaborative. Imbued with the energy and passion to solve problems and do what needs doing, again and again and again. Comaford brings to this book more than thirty years of company-building experience, combined with her expertise in behavioral modification and organizational development. She has helped hun­dreds of leaders navigate rapid growth, maximize performance, resolve internal conflicts, and execute turnarounds with the full support of their people. Now she shares potent yet easy-to-learn neuro­science techniques that will help you do the same. You’ll learn how to move your team forward and reach your next revenue inflection point using the five key Accelerators of the Smart State—focus, clar­ity, accountability, influence, and sustainability. You’ll get better at anticipating and moving through your own stuck spots and those of your people. Using her proven system, Comaford’s clients have already created hundreds of millions of dollars in new value. They’ve seen their revenues and profits increase by up to 210% annually; individuals become up to 50% more productive and 100% more account­able; marketing demand generation grow by up to 237%; new products and services created up to 48% faster; and sales close up to 50% faster. They spot changes in their markets more quickly, then pounce on them to create the future they want. Ultimately, SmartTribes will help you and your team achieve optimal performance and engagement—brilliance—and leave competitors in the dust.

Machine Learning: A Visual Starter Course For Beginner's


Oliver Theobald - 2017
     If you have ever found yourself lost halfway through other introductory materials on this topic, this is the book for you. If you don't understand set terminology such as vectors, hyperplanes, and centroids, then this is also the book for you. This starter course isn't a picture story book but does include many visual examples that break algorithms down into a digestible and practical format. As a starter course, this book connects the dots and offers the crash course I wish I had when I first started. The kind of guide I wish had before I started taking on introductory courses that presume you’re two days away from an advanced mathematics exam. That’s why this introductory course doesn’t go further on the subject than other introductory books, but rather, goes a step back. A half-step back in order to help everyone make his or her first strides in machine learning and is an ideal study companion for the visual learner. In this step-by-step guide you will learn: - How to download free datasets - What tools and software packages you need - Data scrubbing techniques, including one-hot encoding, binning and dealing with missing data - Preparing data for analysis, including k-fold Validation - Regression analysis to create trend lines - Clustering, including k-means and k-nearest Neighbors - Naive Bayes Classifier to predict new classes - Anomaly detection and SVM algorithms to combat anomalies and outliers - The basics of Neural Networks - Bias/Variance to improve your machine learning model - Decision Trees to decode classification Please feel welcome to join this starter course by buying a copy, or sending a free sample to your preferred device.

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)


Project Management Institute - 1995
    This internationally recognized standard provides the essential tools to practice project management and deliver organizational results.

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers


Geoffrey A. Moore - 2006
    Crossing the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. This edition provides new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most exciting marketplace.