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Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor
Brief Summary
Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It.
What are venture capitalists saying about your startup behind closed doors? And what can you do to influence that conversation?
If Silicon Valley is the greatest wealth-generating machine in the world, Sand Hill Road is its humming engine. That's where you'll find the biggest names in venture capital, including famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-VC Scott Kupor serves as managing partner.
Whether you're trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. In Secrets of Sand Hill Road, Kupor explains exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest, and how entrepreneurs can get the best possible deal and make the most of their relationships with VCs. Kupor explains, for instance:
- Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category.
- Why the skill you need most when raising venture capital is the ability to tell a compelling story.
- How to handle a "down round," when startups have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in the previous round.
- What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of the business.
- Why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sell.
Filled with Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide every entrepreneur needs to turn their startup into the next unicorn.
ISBN:9780593083581
Author:Scott Kupor
Snap Selling by Jill Konrath
Brief Summary
SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today's Frazzled Customers.
Selling is tougher than ever before. Potential customers are under extreme pressure to do more with less money, less time, and fewer resources, and they're wary of anyone who tries to get them to buy or change anything. Under such extreme conditions, yesterday's sales strategies no longer work.
No matter how great your offering, you face the daunting task of making yourself appear credible, relevant, and valuable. Now, internationally recognized sales strategist Jill Konrath shows how to overcome these obstacles to get more appointments, speed up decisions, and win sales with these short-fused, frazzled customers.
Drawing on her years of selling experience, as well as the stories of other successful sellers, she offers four SNAP Rules:
1. Keep it "Simple": When you make things easy and clear for your customers, they'll change from the status quo.
2. Be "iNvaluable": You have to stand out by being the person your customers can't live without.
3. Always "Align": To be relevant, make sure you're in synch with your customers' objectives, issues, and needs.
4. Raise "Priorities": To maintain momentum, keep the most important decisions at the forefront of their mind.
"SNAP Selling" is an easy-to-read, easy-to-use guide for any seller in today's increasingly frenzied environment.
ISBN:9781591843306
Author:Jill Konrath
Range by David Epstein
Brief Summary
What's the most effective path to success in any domain? It's not what you think.
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world's top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
David Epstein examined the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, forecasters and scientists. He discovered that in most fields--especially those that are complex and unpredictable--generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.
Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on one. They're also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see.
Provocative, rigorous, and engrossing, Range makes a compelling case for actively cultivating inefficiency. Failing a test is the best way to learn. Frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers. The most impactful inventors cross domains rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area. As experts silo themselves further while computers master more of the skills once reserved for highly focused humans, people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives will increasingly thrive.
Little Red Book of Selling 12.5 Princ...
Sales Bible The Ultimate Sales Resource
Brief Summary
Global sales authority Jeffrey Gitomer's bestselling classic, The Sales Bible, has been updated and appended in this new edition, offering you the ultimate sales methods and strategies that really work ? every day, in real-world selling situations.
With over 200,000 copies of the previous editions sold, The Sales Bible was listed as one of "The Ten Books Every Salesperson Should Own and Read" by the Dale Carnegie Sales Advantage Program.
Jeffrey Gitomer's column, "Sales Moves," and blog, "SalesBlog.com" are read by more than four million people every week. His customers include Coca-Cola, BMW, Kimpton Hotels, Hilton, Wells Fargo Bank, IBM, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Hewlett Packard, and hundreds of others.
The Sales Bible is your personal, trusted, authoritative resource to reach your sales potential and shine like a star. Accept no substitutes. Here are a few highlights:
• The 10.5 Commandments of Selling
• Generate leads and close sales in any market environment
• Find 25 proven ways to set hard-to-get appointments
• Use top-down selling to fill your sales pipeline with prospects who are ready to buy now
• Ask the right questions to make more sales in half the time
• How to use the top social media platforms to create inbound leads and prove value.
The Sales Bible has helped tens of thousands of salespeople all over the world reach their potential and close the deal ? and it can help you. So what are you waiting for?
ISBN:9781118985816
Author:Jeffrey Gitomer
The Mafia Manager A Guide to the Corp...
Brief Summary
A leading figure from one of the world's first and best organized conglomerates here reveals management techniques we can all use. Witty, fun, and surprisingly useful, this is a must for the aspiring corporate Machiavelli.
Unlike other management guides, The Mafia Manager shuns theoretical verbiage and instead presents the pragmatism and guiding philosophy of the leadership that founded and captained "The Silent Empire" through its centuries of expansion and success.
And rather than being seen as the twisted workings of the so-called "criminal" mind, these plans of action and gems of counsel are presented for what they indeed are - the reflection of a penetrating understanding of the dynamics of human nature. The Mafia Manager promises the most unique and practical guidebook on management ever. No reader will look at the workplace in quite the same way.
ISBN:9780312155742
Author:V
I Am My Brand by Kubi Springer
Brief Summary
I Am My Brand: How to Build Your Brand Without Apology
Dynamic female brand builder Kubi Springer offers essential advice on how to develop and attain personal brand success.
Kubi Springer has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world including Nike, L'Oreal, Blackberry, MTV, Justin Timberlake, Rolls Royce Motor Cars and Aston Martin. In I Am My Brand, she lays out a toolkit for personal brand success. Featuring dynamic female brand builders from around the world, the book is a woven tapestry of personal brand advice with storytelling and support that offers a practical guide for female entrepreneurs, freelancers and executives.
Kubi explores the tools used by different women, from across cultures, to build their personal brand, as well as the challenges they faced and their paths to overcoming them. Focused on the skills needed to succeed, their stories--coupled with the author's expertise--will support readers on their own journey to brand success.
The book is written in a down-to-earth style, with light entertainment and real life anecdotes, providing insights into how to create, package and grow your personal brand. I Am My Brand is a testament to the power of being a woman and illustrates what it takes to build a powerful female brand in today's male dominated business world.
"
ISBN:9781635579963
Author:Kubi Springer
Inside Coca Cola by Neville Isdell an...
Brief Summary
Inside Coca-Cola: A CEO's Life Story of Building the World's Most Popular Brand.
The first book by a Coca-Cola CEO tells the remarkable story of the company's revival.
Neville Isdell was a key player at Coca-Cola for more than 30 years, retiring in 2009 as CEO after regilding the tarnished brand image of the world's leading soft-drink company. This first book by a Coca-Cola CEO tells an extraordinary personal and professional world-wide story, ranging from Northern Ireland to South Africa to Australia, the Philippines, Russia, Germany, India, South Africa and Turkey.
Isdell helped put out huge public relations fires (India and Turkey), opened markets(Russia, Eastern Europe, Philippines and Africa), championed Muhtar Kent, the current Turkish-American CEO, all while living the ideal of corporate responsibility.
Isdell's, and Coke's, story is newsy without being gossipy; principled without being preachy. "Inside Coca-Cola" is filled with stories and lessons appealing to anybody who has ever taken "the pause that refreshes." It's also a readable and important look at how companies can market and govern themselves more-ethically and to great success.
ISBN:9780312617950
Author:Neville Isdell and David Beasley
The Four by Scott Galloway
Brief Summary
The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google are the four most influential companies on the planet. 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 companies 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 challenge 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.
ISBN:9780735213678
Author:Scott Galloway
Gemba Kaizen by Masaaki Imai
Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense Approach to a Continuous Improvement Strategy
Written by Masaaki Imai, pioneer of modern business operational excellence and founder of the Kaizen Institute, Gemba Kaizen, Second Edition is an in-depth revision of this renowned, bestselling work.
The book reveals how to implement cost-effective, incremental improvements in your most critical business processes. Global case studies from a wide range of industries demonstrate how gemba kaizen has been successfully used to:
• Maximize capacity and reduce inventory at Unga Limited, one of Kenya's largest flour-milling operations
• Change the IT culture at Achmea, a large European insurance firm
• Exceed customer expectations at Walt Disney World in the United States
• Improve quality at Inoue Hospital in Japan
• Transform retail processes at Sonae MC, Portugal's largest employer
• Practice daily kaizen at Tork Ledervin, a weaving plant in Brazil
• Stamp out muda at Sunclipse, an industrial packaging distributor in the United States
• Manage quality improvement by total workforce involvement at Xuji Group Corporation, an electrical manufacturer in China
• Implement gemba kaizen at many other companies worldwide
To thrive in today's competitive global economy, organizations need to operate more effectively and profitably than ever before. Developing problem solvers, increasing productivity, improving quality, and reducing waste are essential success factors. Proven strategies for achieving these goals are included in this pioneering guide.
This comprehensive resource offers detailed coverage of important gemba kaizen topics, including:'
• Quality, cost, and delivery in the gemba
• The five steps of workplace organization
• Identifying and eliminating muda--any non-value-adding activity
• Visual management
• Supervisors' roles in the lean workplace
• Gemba managers' roles and accountability in sustaining high performance
• Just-in-time and total flow management
• The CEO’s role in leading a kaizen culture
The methods presented in Gemba Kaizen, Second Edition reveal that when management focuses on implementing kaizen (incremental, continuous improvement) in the gemba (the worksite) unique opportunities can be discovered for increasing the success and profitability of any organization.
Profit over People by Noam Chomsky
Brief Summary
Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
In "Profit Over People," Noam Chomsky takes on neoliberalism: the pro-corporate system of economic and political policies presently waging a form of class war worldwide. By examining the contradictions between the democratic and market principles proclaimed by those in power and those actually practiced, Chomsky critiques the tyranny of the few that restricts the public arena and enacts policies that vastly increase private wealth, often with complete disregard for social and ecological consequences.
Combining detailed historical examples and uncompromising criticism, Chomsky offers a profound sense of hope that social activism can reclaim people's rights as citizens rather than as consumers, redefining democracy as a global movement, not a global market.
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ISBN:9781888363821
Author:Noam Chomsky
Creating Competitive Advantage by Jay...
Brief Summary
Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors
Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor?
Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider – if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages (and trumpeting them to the marketplace) is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition.
The five fatal flaws of most companies:
• They don’t have a competitive advantage but think they do
• They have a competitive advantage but don’t know what it is—so they lower prices instead
• They know what their competitive advantage is but neglect to tell clients about it
• They mistake "strengths” for competitive advantages
• They don’t concentrate on competitive advantages when making strategic and operational decisions
The good news is that you can overcome these costly mistakes – by identifying your competitive advantages and creating new ones. Consultant, public speaker, and competitive advantage expert Jaynie Smith will show you how scores of small and large companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages. When advising a CEO frustrated by his salespeople’s inability to close deals, Smith discovered that his company stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time – an achievement no one else in his industry could claim. By touting this and other competitive advantages to customers, closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues.
Jack Welch has said, "If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” This straight-to-the-point book is filled with insightful stories and specific steps on how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and get the message out about them.
ISBN:9780385517096
Author:Jaynie L Smith
Political Risk by Condoleezza Rice an...
Brief Summary
Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity
The world is changing fast. Political risk-the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business-is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets.
Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. The very institutions and laws that were supposed to reduce business uncertainty and risk are often having the opposite effect. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.
POLITICAL RISK investigates and analyzes this evolving landscape, what businesses can do to navigate it, and what all of us can learn about how to better understand and grapple with these rapidly changing global political dynamics. Drawing on lessons from the successes and failures of companies across multiple industries as well as examples from aircraft carrier operations, NASA missions, and other unusual places, POLITICAL RISK offers a first-of-its-kind framework that can be deployed in any organization, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Organizations that take a serious, systematic approach to political risk management are likely to be surprised less often and recover better. Companies that don't get these basics right are more likely to get blindsided.
ISBN:9781455542369
Author:Condoleezza Rice and Amy B Zegart
Dubai The Vulnerability of Success by...
Brief Summary
Dubai is a remarkable success story. From its origins as a small fishing and pearling community, the emirate has steadily grown in strength to become the premier trading center of the Arabian Gulf. It is also the locus of an exciting and innovative architectural revolution.
Despite the lack of democratization and genuine civil society, Dubai is now a booming metropolis of more than two million people, most of whom are expatriates enjoying the benefits of the city's increasingly diversified economy. After providing a detailed history, Christopher Davidson explains Dubai's current prosperity by presenting an in-depth study of its post-oil development strategies and how they were implemented against a backdrop of near complete political stability.
Davidson addresses future problems that may surface as the need for sustained foreign direct investment encourages far-reaching socioeconomic reforms, many of which may affect the legitimacy of the traditional monarchy.
ISBN:9781850658887
Author:Christopher Davidson
The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek
Do you know how to play the game you're in?
In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified.
In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.
The more I started to understand the difference between finite and infinite games, the more I began to see infinite games all around us. I started to see that many of the struggles that organizations face exist simply because their leaders were playing with a finite mindset in an infinite game. These organizations tend to lag behind in innovation, discretionary effort, morale and ultimately performance.
The leaders who embrace an infinite mindset, in stark contrast, build stronger, more innovative, more inspiring organizations. Their people trust each other and their leaders. They have the resilience to thrive in an ever-changing world, while their competitors fall by the wayside. Ultimately, they are the ones who lead the rest of us into the future.
Any worthwhile undertaking starts with Why - the purpose, cause or belief that inspires us to do what we do and inspires others to join us. Good leaders know how to build Circles of Safety that promote trust and cooperation throughout their organizations. But that's not enough to help us chart a course through the unpredictable, often chaotic landscape of today's marketplace.
I now believe that the ability to adopt an infinite mindset is a prerequisite for any leader who aspires to leave their organization in better shape than they found it.
"
ISBN:9780735213500
Author:Simon Sinek
Leaders Strategies for Taking Charge ...
Brief Summary
In this illuminating study of corporate America's most critical issue—leadership—world-renowned leadership guru Warren Bennis and his co-author Burt Nanus reveal the four key principles every manager should know: Attention Through Vision, Meaning Through Communication, Trust Through Positioning, and The Deployment of Self.
In this age of "process", with downsizing and restructuring affecting many workplaces, companies have fallen trap to lack of communication and distrust, and vision and leadership are needed more than ever before. The wisdom and insight in Leaders addresses this need.
It is an indispensable source of guidance all readers will appreciate, whether they're running a small department or in charge of an entire corporation.
ISBN:9780060559540
Author:Warren Bennis and Burton Nanus
Turn the Ship Around by L David Marquet
Brief Summary
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders.
"Leadership should mean giving control rather than taking control and creating leaders rather than forging followers." David Marquet, an experienced Navy officer, was used to giving orders. As newly appointed captain of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, he was responsible for more than a hundred sailors, deep in the sea. In this high-stress environment, where there is no margin for error, it was crucial his men did their job and did it well.
But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance, and the worst retention in the fleet. Marquet acted like any other captain until, one day, he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. When he asked why the order wasn't challenged, the answer was "Because you told me to." Marquet realized he was leading in a culture of followers, and they were all in danger unless they fundamentally changed the way they did things. That's when Marquet took matters into his own hands and pushed for leadership at every level.
Turn the Ship Around! is the true story of how the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet by challenging the U.S. Navy's traditional leader-follower approach. Struggling against his own instincts to take control, he instead achieved the vastly more powerful model of giving control. Before long, each member of Marquet's crew became a leader and assumed responsibility for everything he did, from clerical tasks to crucial combat decisions. The crew became fully engaged, contributing their full intellectual capacity every day, and the Santa Fe started winning awards and promoting a highly disproportionate number of officers to submarine command.
No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's radical guidelines to turn your own ship around. The payoff: a workplace where everyone around you is taking responsibility for their actions, where people are healthier and happier, where everyone is a leader.
Author:L David Marquet
Succeeding When You are Supposed to F...
Brief Summary
Succeeding When You're Supposed to Fail: The 6 Enduring Principles of High Achievement
IN COUNTLESS STUDIES, PSYCHOLOGISTS HAVE DISCOVERED A SURPRISING FACT:
For decades they assumed that people who face adversity—a difficult childhood, career turbulence, sudden bouts of bad luck—will succumb to their circumstances. Yet over and over again they found a significant percentage are able to overcome their life circumstances and achieve spectacular success.
How it is that individuals who are not "supposed” to succeed manage to overcome the odds? Are there certain traits that such people have in common? Can the rest of us learn from their success and apply it to our own lives?
In Succeeding When You’re Supposed to Fail, Rom Brafman, psychologist and coauthor of the bestselling book Sway, set out to answer these questions. In a riveting narrative that interweaves compelling stories from education, the military, and business and a wide range of groundbreaking new research, Brafman identifies the six hidden drivers behind unlikely success. Among them:
•The critical importance of the Limelight Effect—our ability to redirect the focus of our lives to the result of our own efforts, as opposed to external forces
•The value of a satellite in our lives—the remarkable way in which a consistent ally who accepts us unconditionally while still challenging us to be our best can make a huge difference
•The power of temperament—people who are able to tunnel through life’s obstacles have a surprisingly mild disposition; they don’t allow the bumps in the road to unsettle them
By understanding and incorporating these strategies in our own lives, Brafman argues, we can all be better prepared to overcome the inevitable obstacles we face, from setbacks at work to challenges in our personal lives.
ISBN:9780307887689
Author:Rom Brafman
Clear Leadership by Gervase R Bushe
Brief Summary
Clear Leadership: Sustaining Real Collaboration and Partnership at Work.
Expanding on the fresh concepts that made the first edition of 'Clear Leadership' such a success, Bushe brings up-to-date the tools and techniques needed to build sustaining partnerships and make today's collaborative organizations work.
ISBN:9780891062271
Author:Gervase R Bushe
Making Futures by Sangu Delle
Making Futures: Young Entrepreneurs in a Dynamic Africa.
Making Futures brings together 18 young entrepreneurs from 14 countries doing incredible work across the continent. Their stories are both inspirational and aspirational; providing a template for readers who might be interested in embarking on their own entrepreneurial journey, and allowing others to see the incredible energy and work that is happening across the continent.
There’s the story of David Sengeh, who has worked on combatting malaria and lack of energy in Sierra Leone before turning to custom-made prosthetics, to Farida Bedwei, co-founder of the largest microfinance banking software platform in Ghana.
These are entrepreneurs who are helping to reconfigure the narrative about Africa by simply making things for the masses of their population. They represent what is possible and what can be scaled up in different African contexts, despite the dysfunctionality witnessed across the continent. With such diversity of stories, readers have access to potential business ideas, while learning a little about the history of that country and what it takes to build a business in an emerging economy.
These men and women have done it and are doing it!
This collection equips readers with intimate knowledge about the markets and growth across the region, and how young creative entrepreneurs are identifying problems as opportunities and seeding growth in a continent that has been long overlooked, but is poised for explosive growth and opportunity, enabled by technology.
