Business

Brief Summary How happy would you be if you had all the money in the world? The universal lament about money is that there is never enough. We spend endless hours obsessing over our budgets and investments, trying to figure out ways to stretch every dollar. We try to follow the advice of money gurus and financial planners, then kick ourselves whenever we spend too much or save too little. For all of the stress and effort we put into every choice, why are most of us unhappy about our finances? According to Laura Vanderkam, the key is to change your perspective. Instead of looking at money as a scarce resource, consider it a tool that you can use creatively to build a better life for yourself and the people you care about. For instance, the average couple spends $5,000 on engagement and wedding rings, making these pricey purchases largely because everyone else does. But what if you decided to spend $300 on rings and apply the rest to future date nights, weekend getaways, and thinking-of-you bouquets over the next ten years? In he long run, what would bring more joy to your marriage? Likewise, will owning a home with a pristine lawn and a two-car garage—the American Dream—really make you more satisfied? Or are you saving up for this investment just because financial planners tell you it’s worth it? Vanderkam shows how each of us can figure out better ways to use what we have to build the lives we want. Drawing on the latest happiness research as well as the stories of dozens of real people, Vanderkam offers a contrarian approach that forces us to examine our own beliefs, goals, and values. Among her advice: Laugh at the Joneses: It’s human nature to compare yourself to those around you, but you can create lifestyle hat rings you personal satisfaction without copying your neighbors. Give yourself the best weekend ever: Studies show that experiences often bring more pleasure than material goods. With a little planning and creativity, you can give yourself a memorable getaway without leaving town or going broke. Embrace the selfish joy of giving: Giving back not only helps you build karma, it also helps you build a community—which is much more fulfilling than a tax deduction. All the Money in the World is a practical and inspiring guide that shows how money can buy happiness—if we spend it wisely. ISBN:9781591844570 Author:Laura Vanderkam

Brief Summary That gratifying new car smell is actually a manufactured "new car" aroma. The sound of Kellogg's cornflakes crunching in our mouths is created in sound labs. Singapore Airlines has patented the smell in its cabins. Branding has reached a new frontier. In the future brands will have to appeal to the neglected senses: touch, taste, and smell. Branding expert Martin Lindstrom shows for the first time how it can be done. Drawing on the most extensive worldwide study ever conducted of the sensory perceptions of consumers, he shows how a two-sense product can become a five-sense phenomenon. This groundbreaking book provides innovative branding tools for evaluating where a brand is on the sensory scale, analyzing its sensory potential and giving it a clear pathway to optimize its sensory appeal. Companies like Cadillac, Apple, Mercedes-Benz, Nokia, Louis Vuitton, Nestle and Disney have all recently adopted a sensory approach, and have seen their brands sizzle under this new direction. Anyone who wants a competitive edge can't afford to neglect this book. It's guaranteed to optimize the value of any marketer's budget in the most visionary way. ISBN:9780743267847 Author:Martin Lindstrom

Brief Summary Robust methods to identify new growth opportunities YOUR SHAREHOLDERS DEMAND growth; your company needs growth; and your career can suffer or soar because of how you drive growth—or don’t. While executives often talk about their great growth plans, very few of these plans actually deliver real gains in growth and profitability. How do some companies manage to beat the odds and bust through the obstacles that make explosive growth so elusive? In this hands-on guide, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan identify powerful strategic moves they call "MarketBusters”—approaches that dramatically reconfigure profit streams in an industry, upend conventional competition, and ultimately deliver blockbuster growth. Based on insights from an extensive three-year study, McGrath and MacMillan describe forty proven marketbusting moves and outline five overall strategies companies have used to drive new growth: • Change the customer’s total experience: Make it simpler, faster, or more beneficial for customers to buy from you • Reconfigure your products and services: Transform your offerings to make them clearly superior to competitors’ • Redefine your business and associated key metrics: Change how you do business or how your customers do business in ways that dramatically boost performance • Anticipate or exploit industry shifts: Capitalize on changes before competitors do • Create a new market space: Trigger the emergence of a new market Every marketbusting move is illustrated in practice through vivid company examples—including cautionary tales that alert you to potential pitfalls you may encounter. Action-oriented tools and checklists provide concrete guidance in finding opportunities across your own business platform, executing your chosen move successfully, and exploiting new opportunities to maximize their bottomline impact. The book also provides guidelines for avoiding common implementation challenges and for developing the organizational alignment needed to smooth execution. New opportunities for explosive growth are waiting to be unleashed. MarketBusters is the field guide you need to develop a reliable, robust approach to fueling continuous, profitable growth. ISBN:9781422171790 Author:Ian C MacMillan and Rita Gunther McGrath

Brief Summary The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating, Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset (Wall Street Journal Book). From Enron and WorldCom to the Catholic Church and Major League Baseball, reputation crises have never been more widespread. Now Ronald J. Alsop, a veteran Wall Street Journal authority on branding and reputation management, explains the dangers -- and gives organizations the eighteen crucial laws to follow in developing and protecting their reputations. Consider this example of a simple decision made by a low-ranking employee: When rescue workers at the site of the World Trade Center disaster sought bottled water from a nearby Starbucks outlet, they complained that an employee charged them for it. In a matter of hours, the Internet had picked up the story and Starbucks' carefully cultivated worldwide reputation was quickly besmirched. This is just one instance among many of how the business world, ever more global and competitive, has become increasingly difficult to navigate. Studies have demonstrated the powerful impact of reputation on profits and stock prices, and yet less than half of all companies have a formal system for measuring reputation. Clearly, companies in every industry -- from Dow Chemical to Disney to DaimlerChrystler -- have much more to learn. It is still the rare company that realizes the full value of its reputation: how corporate reputation can enhance business in good times, become a protective halo in turbulent times, and be destroyed in an instant by people at the lowest or highest levels of the corporate ladder. Mr. Alsop provides eighteen thoroughly documented lessons based on years of experience covering every aspect of corporate reputation, with a clear distillation of the complex principles at the heart of a reputation. He explains: • How to protect your reputation when the inevitable crisis hits • How to cope with the many hazards in cyberspace • How to create a reputation for vision and industry leadership • How to establish a culture of ethical behavior • How to measure and monitor your ever-changing public image • How to make employees your reputation champions • How to decide when it's time to change your name The result is a book that is important not only for business executives, consultants, and advertising, public relations, and marketing professionals but also for anyone eager to learn more about the companies they work for, buy from, and invest in. ISBN:9780743236706 Author:Ronald J. Alsop

Brief Summary In The Leadership Engine, Noel Tichy showed how great companies strive to create leaders at all levels of the organization, and how those leaders actively develop future generations of leaders. In this new book, he takes the theme further, showing how great companies and their leaders develop their business knowledge into teachable points of view spend a great portion of their time giving their learnings to others, sharing best practices, and how they in turn learn and receive business ideas/knowledge from the employees they are teaching. Calling this exchange a virtuous teaching cycle, Professor Tichy shows how business builders from Jack Welch at GE to Joe Liemandt at Trilogy create organizations that foster this knowledge exchange and how their efforts result in smarter, more agile companies, and winning results. Some of these ideas were showcased in Tichy′s recent Harvard Business Review article entitled, Ordinary Boot Camp." Using examples from GE, Ford, Dell, Southwest Airlines and many others, Tichy presents and analyzes these principles in action and shows how managers can begin to transform their own businesses into teaching organizations and, consequently, better-performing companies. ISBN:9780066620572 Author:Noel M Tichy

Brief Summary Your First Year in Network Marketing: Overcome Your Fears, Experience Success, and Achieve Your Dreams How to Keep the Dream Alive! Network marketing is one of the fastest-growing career opportunities in the United States. Millions of people just like you have abandoned dead-end jobs for the chance to achieve the dream of growing their own businesses. What many of them find, however, is that the first year in network marketing is often the most challenging—and, for some, the most discouraging. Here, Mark Yarnell and Rene Reid Yarnell, two of the industry's mostrespected and successful professionals, offer you strategies on how to overcome those first-year obstacles and position yourself for lifelong success. The Yarnells provide you with a wealth of savvy advice on everything you need to know to succeed in network marketing, such as proven systems for recruiting, training, growing and supporting your downline, and much more. In an easy, step-by-step approach, you will learn how to: • Deal with rejection • Recruit and train • Avoid overmanaging your downline • Remain focused • Stay enthusiastic • Avoid unrealistic expectations • Conduct those in-home meetings • Ease out of another profession • You owe it to yourself to read this inspiring book! "This will be the Bible of Network Marketing." ISBN:9780761512196 Author:Mark Yarnell and Rene Reid Yarnell

Brief Summary Borrowing Brilliance: The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others In a book poised to become the bible of innovation, a renowned creativity expert reveals the key to the creative process borrowing.? As a former aerospace scientist, Fortune 500 executive, chief innovation officer of two major companies, inventor and software entrepreneur, David Murray has made a living by coming up with new and innovative ideas. In "Borrowing Brilliance" he explains the origins and evolution of a business idea by showing readers how new ideas are merely the combinations of existing ideas. Since brilliance is actually borrowed, it's easily within reach. It's really a matter of knowing where to borrow the materials and how to put them together that determines creative ability. Murray presents a simple Six-Step process that anyone can use to build business innovation: • Step One: "Defining"?Define the problem you?re trying to solve. • Step Two: "Borrowing"?Borrow ideas from places with a similar problem. • Step Three: "Combining"?Connect and combine these borrowed ideas. • Step Four: "Incubating"?Allow the combinations to incubate into a solution. • Step Five: "Judging"?Identify the strength and weakness of the solution. • Step Six: "Enhancing"?Eliminate the weak points while enhancing the strong ones. Each chapter features real-life examples of brilliant borrowers, including profiles of Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the Google guys), Bill Gates, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and other creative thinkers. Murray used these methods to re-create his own career and he shows how you can harness them to find your own creative solutions. First you copy, then you create. And the further from your own company you look, the more creative the solution. In the new bible of business innovation, renowned creativity expert David Kord Murray reveals the key to the creative process: borrowing. There is no such thing as a truly original idea. Great thinkers throughout history have understood this and used it to their advantage. Bill Gates ? borrowed brilliance? to create Microsoft, Steve Jobs ?borrowed? to create the Mac, and long before that Sir Isaac Newton used similar thinking techniques to arrive at his theory of gravity. "Borrowing Brilliance" is challenges our notions of intellectual property and authorship, explores the evolution of a creative idea, and takes us step-by-step through Murray's own unique thought process, which combines analytical and non-traditional thinking techniques. Murray's six step ?borrowing? process is one that anyone can master to build business innovation. Murray combines practical lessons with stories from his own career, as well as the careers of brilliant borrowers past and present. Most people believe creativity is a gift, that it can?t be taught, that it's innate in your thinking process and either you have it or you don?t. But Murray lifts the veil off the creative process, bringing it from the shadows of the subconscious mind into the conscious world. Creativity is not the result of divine intervention; it is something that can be learned and it is easily within reach. ISBN:9781592404780 Author:David Kord Murray

Brief Summary The inspiration for the film that won the 2004 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, The Corporation contends that the corporation is created by law to function much like a psychopathic personality, whose destructive behavior, if unchecked, leads to scandal and ruin. Over the last 150 years the corporation has risen from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution. Eminent Canadian law professor and legal theorist Joel Bakan contends that today's corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies. In this revolutionary assessment of the history, character, and globalization of the modern business corporation, Bakan backs his premise with the following observations: -The corporation’s legally defined mandate is to pursue relentlessly and without exception its own economic self-interest, regardless of the harmful consequences it might cause to others. -The corporation’s unbridled self-interest victimizes individuals, society, and, when it goes awry, even shareholders and can cause corporations to self-destruct, as recent Wall Street scandals reveal. -Governments have freed the corporation, despite its flawed character, from legal constraints through deregulation and granted it ever greater authority over society through privatization. But Bakan believes change is possible and he outlines a far-reaching program of achievable reforms through legal regulation and democratic control. Featuring in-depth interviews with such wide-ranging figures as Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman, business guru Peter Drucker, and cultural critic Noam Chomsky, The Corporation is an extraordinary work that will educate and enlighten students, CEOs, whistle-blowers, power brokers, pawns, pundits, and politicians alike. ISBN:9780743247467 Author:Joel Bakan