Business

Brief Summary The Data Driven Leader: A Powerful Approach to Delivering Measurable Business Impact through People Analytics. Data is your most valuable leadership asset—here's how to use it The Data Driven Leader presents a clear, accessible guide to solving important leadership challenges through human resources-focused and other data analytics. This engaging book shows you how to transform the HR function and overall organizational effectiveness by using data to make decisions grounded in facts vs. opinions, identify root causes behind your company’s thorniest problems and move toward a winning, future-focused business strategy. Realistic and actionable, this book tells the story of a successful sales executive who, after leading an analytics-driven turnaround (in Data Driven, this book’s predecessor), faces a new turnaround challenge as chief human resources officer. Each chapter features insightful commentary and practical notes on the points the story raises, guiding you to put HR analytics into action in your organization. HR and other leaders cannot afford to overlook the power and competitive advantages of data-driven decision-making and strategies. This book reflects the growing trend of CEOs choosing analytics-minded business leaders to head HR, at a time when workplaces everywhere face game-changing forces including automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. It is urgent that human resources leaders embrace analytics, not only to remain professionally relevant but also to help their organizations successfully navigate this digital transformation. HR professionals can and must: • Understand essential data science principles and corporate analytics models • Identify and execute effective data analytics initiatives • Boost HR and company productivity and performance with metrics that matter • Shape an analytics-centric culture that generates data driven leaders Most organizations capture and report data, but data is useless without analysis that leads to action. The Data Driven Leader shows you how to use this tremendous asset to lead your organization higher. ISBN:9781119382201 Author:Jenny Dearborn and David Swanson

Brief Summary Willy Loman, the central figure in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, occupies a position to which few characters in literature ascend. Willy serves as a point of reference in contexts outside of literature—invoked to describe anyone who is crushed by the immense forces of American capitalism. This habit suggests a certainty about the play’s meaning that often forms around a widely acknowledged masterpiece despite its multitude of ambiguities. Death of a Salesman vividly portrays the destructive power of certain American tendencies, such as equating wealth with virtue and possessions with self-worth. But the extent of the play’s ambition can quickly obscure the fact that it is also a story about one family and its individual members, culminating in the father’s suicide. What brings Willy Loman to this point cannot be reduced to the malignant influence of the society in which he lives, although an economic system determined by abstract principles rather than human needs is in part responsible for Willy’s fate. As he says to Howard, his boss, "a man is not a piece of fruit!” (pp. 61-62), but to Howard and the world he represents, the bottom line always comes first. Willy’s history with the Wagner Company and Howard’s father cannot keep Howard from firing Willy. All Howard can say to Willy is "business is business” (p. 60). Believing that his family will benefit more from his life insurance policy than from his continuing to live, Willy seems to accept the implication underlying Howard’s statement—that the value of a person can be quantified according to actual wealth or earning potential. As he says to Charley, "you end up worth more dead than alive” To argue, however, that Willy kills himself primarily because he realizes the true nature of his world neglects the all-consuming power of his illusions, which retain their hold on him to the end. He is seduced by an American dream that is corrupted; he spends his life working to pay for a house, a car, and a refrigerator, without suspecting that it’s a game he cannot win. Even though Willy finally seems to understand the absurdity of owning something only when it is no longer of any use to him, he maintains his belief in the worth and worthiness of being well liked, as if the game were about something more than numbers. But what makes Death of a Salesman more than an indictment of a system and gives Willy a truly tragic dimension is the intimation that Willy suffers not just from the inhumanity of free enterprise, but also from his inability to reconcile the hopes he had for his life with the one he has actually lived. ISBN:09780141182742 Author:Arthur Miller

Brief Summary Nearly everyone has thought about starting up their own business at one time or another. Working for other people is no longer the only option that we have these days. But what does it really take to become an entrepreneur? Combining genuinely practical advice with an easily digestible format, Rob Yeung guides you through the things you need to know in order to set up on your own. You don't have to do something entirely new, you could just do it better, and Rob shows you how to get motivated, make a business plan and sell your product. ISBN:9780462099279 Author:Rob Yeung