Business

What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture. Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them—yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want? To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture. Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.  

Brief Summary What Got You Here Won't Get You There in Sales: How Successful Salespeople Take it to the Next Level. One of the most influential business coaches of our time, Marshall Goldsmith helps businesspeople pinpoint career-harming behaviors, understand why they engage in them and, most importantly?stop. His book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There wasn’t just a runaway bestseller, it has helped untold numbers dramatically improve their careers and personal lives. Now, Goldsmith teams up with leading sales thought leaders Don Brown and Bill Hawkins to help you break the habits that specifically damage sales relationships. This dream team’s combined clients have increased their sales from 5 to 30 percent?and their gross profit up to 50 percent! In short, their approach works. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in Sales! provides simple-to-use tools for maintaining and leveraging quality personal connections by doing something much easier than learning new behaviors: simply stopping old ones. When dealing with your customers, do you: • Needlessly verbalize and execute every possible step in the sales process? • Repeatedly initiate communication for no apparent purpose? • Attempt to verbally "one up” your customer in conversation? The authors name 16 bad habits in all, and they provide proven techniques for reversing their negative effects by putting them to rest for good. There is no profession that depends more on good relationships than sales. And there’s no one more qualified to coach you to create and nurture productive sales relationships than these three authors. You do have the power to change. Let Goldsmith, Brown, and Hawkins help you kick your bad habits to improve relationships, increase sales, and enjoy a more fulfilling, enriching career. ISBN:9780071773942 Author:Bill Hawkins and Marshall Goldsmith

Brief Summary With the stock market breaking records almost daily, leaving longtime market analysts shaking their heads and revising their forecasts, a study of the concept of risk seems quite timely. Peter Bernstein has written a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, beginning with early gamblers in ancient Greece, continuing through the 17th-century French mathematicians Pascal and Fermat and up to modern chaos theory. Along the way he demonstrates that understanding risk underlies everything from game theory to bridge-building to winemaking. ISBN:9780471295631 Author:Peter L Bernstein