Business Teachers
21 Ideas for Managers: Practical Wisdom for Managing Your Company and Yourself
Celebrated the world over for his gentle wit and keen insight into human behavior, Charles Handy is widely regarded as one of today’s best social and business philosophers. This latest collection of Handy’s work groups twenty-one of the revered BBC commentator’s best essays on why organizations and the people in them behave the way they do. Beginning with “A World of Differences,” which voices Handy’s fresh take on diversity in the workplace, each essay is a bite-sized bit of humor and wisdom that sheds new light on what motivates people on the job. As useful as they are incisive, these twenty-one ideas should be heard by anyone seeking fresh perspectives on how better to manage themselves and others.
The New Alchemists: How Visionary People Make Something Out of Nothing
The world needs new ideas, new products, new kinds of associations and institutions, new initiatives, art and designs. But these new things seldom come from established organizations. They come from individuals — Charles Handy calls them the New Alchemists, and he has talked to a range of extraordinary people — from Trevor Baylis and Richard Branson to Jane Tewson and Terence Conran — to hear from them the secret to turning basic ideas into creative gold. Elizabeth Handy has used her new style of composite portraits to highlight aspects of all the different alchemists in their particular environments.
The Elephant and the Flea: Reflections of a Reluctant Capitalist
The Elephant and the Flea is both a poignant personal memoir and a deep reflection on the past and future of world capitalism, with all its possibilities and pitfalls. In a tone that is at once learned, genial, witty, and wise, Handy takes us on his life’s journey, looking back to his childhood and education and how they prepared (or, rather, did not prepare) him for a career in business, the changing nature of organizational life within the context of the old economy and the new, the great variety of capitalism around the world, and through it all, his struggle to find meaning and fulfillment in work. Handy uses the quirky, powerful metaphor of the elephant and the flea to describe vividly and critique the great shift from the prevalence of behemoth, slow-moving, bureaucratic organizations that provided a lifetime of security and not much freedom or room for creativity, to a world in which we are much more independent and flea-like, flitting from job to job, latching onto elephants when we need to, but mostly flying solo and without a net.
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies and studied each in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day – as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: “What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the comparison companies and what were the common practices these enduringly great companies followed throughout their history?” Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, “Built to Last” provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don’t
In his new book, Collins has chosen to research an entirely new line of inquiry. Is transformation really possible? Are there mediocre companies that have turned themselves around and achieved sustained excellence after a decade of more of ordinary performance? And what is it about these companies that can explain their success? For nearly five years, Collins and his research team undertook a massive study of every company that has made the Fortune 500 since the advent of that listing in 1965—over 1400 companies in all. The result of that research was astounding—only 11 companies had successfully turned a mediocre enterprise into a true long term champion. The surprising secrets of how they did it—and how any company can—are brilliantly unlocked in this visionary new work.
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins’ research emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover – in some cases, coming back even stronger – “even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.” Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company
This work provides entrepreneurs with building blocks to help their companies sustain high performance, play a leadership role in their industries, and remain successful for generations. Readers will discover the five key elements involved in guiding a company to lasting success, a blueprint for managing a thriving company, and plenty of real-world examples.
Managing for the Future: The 1990s and Beyond
Drucker brings clear-sighted analysis and practical inspiration to an interesting array of subjects: the end of the era of the blue-collar worker; the ultimate bankruptcy of economic pump priming by the federal government; the myths about the Japanese economic juggernaut; the lessons that nonprofit enterprises can teach big business; the changing attitudes of middle managers as the doctrine of company loyalty gives way to the demand for rewarding achievement; and many more.
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
The measure of the executive, Peter F. Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results. Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned: Managing time; Choosing what to contribute to the organization; Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect; Setting the right priorities; Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making. Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
Managing for Results: Economic Tasks and Risk-Taking Decisions
The effective business, Peter Drucker observes, focuses on opportunities rather than problems. How this focus is achieved in order to make the organization prosper and grow is the subject of this companion to his classic work, “The Practice of Management.” “Managing for Results” shows what the executive decision maker must do to move his enterprise forward. Drucker again employs his particular genius for breaking through conventional outlooks and opening up new perspectives for profits and growth.
Managing in a Time of Great Change
’It is not so very difficult to predict the future. It is only pointless...what is always far more important are fundamental changes that happened though no one predicted them or could possible have predicted them.’ (quote taken from this book) It is these unpredictable and irreversible changes from the past, and their effect on the role of the executive which Peter Drucker examines in his latest book. The management of change is a subject which has been, undoubtedly, the principal preoccupation of management thinkers in the 1990s. Peter Drucker, the guru’s guru, brings together a group of his own original essays and interviews on this vitally important topic. As ever, he provides invaluable food for thought for all executives and students of business and management.
The Art of War
The ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu is universally recognized as the greatest military strategist in history, a master of warfare interpretation. This condensed version of his influential classic imparts the knowledge and skills to overcome every adversary in war, at the office, or in everyday life.
The Future of Leadership: Today’s Top Leadership Thinkers Speak to Tomorrow’s Leaders
A stellar cast of the world’s foremost leadership gurus comes together in one place to offer their thoughts on leadership in the new economy. Edited by renowned leadership expert Warren Bennis, the book addresses issues that Bennis identifies as the ones that “keep CEOs up at night", including why we tolerate bad leaders, why leadership is everyone’s business, and how ethics will play into new leadership. With contributions from Charles Handy, Tom Peters, Barry Posner, Jim Kouzes, and Warren Bennis-as well as from such young entrepreneurs as Michael Klein and Tara Church-no other book includes the caliber of authors and the range of thinking found in The Future of Leadership.
On Becoming a Leader
Deemed “the dean of leadership gurus” by “Forbes” magazine, Warren Bennis has for years persuasively argued that leaders are not born – they are made. Delving into the qualities that define leadership, the people who exemplify it, and the strategies that anyone can apply to achieve it, his classic work “On Becoming a Leader” has served as a source of essential insight for countless readers. In a world increasingly defined by turbulence and uncertainty, the call to leadership is more urgent than ever.
Technological Forecasting
Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History
Friedman makes clear once and for all that no one is immune from monetary economics-that is, from the effects of its theory and its practices. He demonstrates through historical events the mischief that can result from misunderstanding the monetary system.
Harvard Business Review on Measuring Corporate Performance
The works collected in Harvard Business Review on Measuring Corporate Performance – including the three groundbreaking articles on the balanced scorecard by Kaplan and Norton – offer managers practical guidance for measuring their intangible assets (customer relationships, internal business processes, and employee learning) and aligning corporate strategy accordingly.
Hiring & Firing: Straight Talk from the World’s Top Business Leaders
Deciding who to hire is a perennial challenge for every executive. Will the person be a good fit? Will they perform up to expectations? How can you predict just who will succeed? And, if they do not, when do you decide it’s time for them to move on? This collection of fourteen first-hand accounts gives you insight into how some of the world’s top-business leaders tackled both the uncertainty of hiring and the difficult task of letting someone go.
Management Decisions for Production Operations
Xenophon's Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War
In 1906, a stilted English translation of Xenophon of Athens' story about Cyrus the Great's military campaigns was published. Now, a century later, a much more accessible edition of one of history's most extraordinary and successful leaders is emerging. Among his many achievements, this great leader of wisdom and virtue founded and extended the Persian Empire; conquered Babylon; freed 40,000 Jews from captivity; wrote mankind's first human rights charter; and ruled over those he had conquered with respect and benevolence. According to historian Will Durant, Cyrus the Great's military enemies knew that he was lenient, and they did not fight him with that desperate courage which men show when their only choice is "to kill or die." As a result the Iranians regarded him as "The Father," the Babylonians as "The Liberator," the Greeks as the "Law-Giver," and the Jews as the "Anointed of the Lord."
Business Management Tools
Recently Added
What Matters Now: How to Win in a World of Relentless Change, Ferocious Competition, and Unstoppable Innovation
This is not a book about doing better. It's not a manual for people who want to tinker at the margins. Instead, it's an impassioned plea to reinvent management as we know it—to rethink the fundamental assumptions we have about capitalism, organizational life, and the meaning of work.
Recently Added
The Future of Management
In "The Future of Management", Gary Hamel argues that organizations need management innovation now more than ever. Why? The management paradigm of the last century - centred on control and efficiency - no longer suffices in a world where adaptability and creativity drive business success. To thrive in the future, companies must reinvent management. Hamel explains how to turn your company into a serial management innovator.
The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment
Drawing from over 20 case studies – including Mobil, CIGNA, and AT&T Canada – the authors illustrate how pioneering companies have created an entirely new performance management framework – one that puts strategy at the center of critical management processes and systems.
The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals. Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives in industries such as banking, oil, insurance, and retailing are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories – financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth – to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives.
The Ownership Quotient: Putting the Service Profit Chain to Work for Unbeatable Competitive Advantage
Heskett, Sasser, and Wheeler extend the service-profit chain to include customer and employee “owners.” The lifetime value of a customer-owner is equivalent to that of a hundred merely typical customers. That makes the value of employees who promote customer-ownership priceless. Citing companies as diverse as Harrah’s Entertainment, ING Direct, Build-a-Bear Workshop, and Wegmans Food Markets, this book shows you how to: Identify your customer-owners; Delight them by consistently exceeding their expectations in ways they truly value; Foster an ownership culture throughout your company; Measure and grow your “ownership quotient” among customers and employees.
Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step: Maximizing Performance and Maintaining Results
Sharing his extensive experience in developing Balanced Scorecards for Fortune 500, public sector, and not-for-profit organizations, Paul Niven takes you through the complete Balanced Scorecard journey—from creating powerful new performance measures that drive the execution of your strategy, to the tools necessary to make the Scorecard the cornerstone of your management processes. Whether you are a CEO, CFO, CIO, a vice president, a division or department manager, or a business consultant, Balanced Scorecard Step-by-Step allows you to efficiently execute your organization’s strategy and successfully compete in today’s business environment.
Flight of the Buffalo: Soaring to Excellence, Learning to Let Employees Lead
Flight of the Buffalo presents a management program that encourages employee leadership – which the authors believe today’s companies must have more of if they are to survive the coming decades.
The EVA Challenge: Implementing Value-Added Change in an Organization
This detailed “how-to” guide represents the second phase in the “EVA Revolution,” showing executives around the world how to customize and implement EVA at their companies. Here, EVA converts learn how to work some “EVA magic” through company-specific initiatives and case study examples. Coverage includes completely new materials on “real options,” leveraged stock options, and other concepts critical to corporations in both new and old economy industry sectors.
Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies
Most organizations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton argue that the responsibility for this critical alignment lies with corporate headquarters. In this book, the authors apply their revolutionary Balanced Scorecard management system to corporate-level strategy, revealing how highly successful enterprises achieve powerful synergies by explicitly defining corporate headquarters’ role in setting, coordinating, and overseeing organizational strategy.
Balanced Scorecard Diagnostics: Maintaining Maximum Performance
Presenting the next step for balanced scorecard implementation, Balanced Scorecard Diagnostics provides a step-by-step methodology for analyzing the effectiveness of a company’s balanced scorecard and the tools to reevaluate balanced scorecard measures to drive maximum performance. CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, vice presidents, department managers, and business consultants will find all the essential tools for analyzing a balanced scorecard methodology to determine if it’s running at maximum performance and for seamlessly implementing changes into the scorecard.
EVA and Value-Based Management: A Practical Guide to Implementation
Economic Value Added (EVA) and Value Based Management (VBM) are today’s hottest management buzzwords. But written information has often been biased and clouded by the authors’ hidden agendas. EVA and Value-Based Management is the first book to unflinchingly discuss the pros and cons of EVA and VBM. Covering both implementation and conceptual issues, with a strong emphasis on performance measurement, value drivers, and management compensation, it allows readers to come to their own informed conclusions.
Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations
The extraordinary breakthrough management program – heralded by GE, Motorola, and AlliedSignal – that is sweeping corporate America with its unprecedented ability to achieve superior financial results. Six Sigma is the most powerful breakthrough management tool ever devised, promising increased market share, cost reductions, and dramatic improvements in bottom-line profitability for companies of any size. The darling of Wall Street, it has become the mantra of Fortune 500 boardrooms around the world because it works.
Now, Discover Your Strengths
Based on a Gallup study of over two million people who have excelled in their careers, “Now, Discover Your Strengths” uses a revolutionary program to help readers discover their distinct talents and strengths. The product of a 25 year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human talents, the StrengthsFinder program introduces 34 talents or “themes” and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success.
Go Put Your Strengths to Work: 6 Powerful Steps to Achieve Outstanding Performance
Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work – in fact, only 17 percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss.
First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently
The greatest managers in the world seem to have little in common. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They do not hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They do not believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They do not try to help people overcome their weaknesses. They consistently disregard the golden rule. And, yes, they even play favorites. This amazing book explains why.
A Sense of Urgency
In his international bestseller “Leading Change,” Kotter provided an action plan for implementing successful transformations. Now, he shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change.
The Richest Man Who Ever Lived: King Solomon's Secrets to Success, Wealth, and Happiness
In The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, Scott reveals Solomon’s key for winning every race, explains how to resolve conflicts and turn enemies into allies, and discloses the five qualities essential to becoming a valued and admired person at work and in your personal life. Scott illustrates each of Solomon’s insights and strategies with anecdotes about his personal successes and failures, as well as those of such extraordinary people as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg.
The Service Profit Chain
In this pathbreaking book, world-renowned Harvard Business School service firm experts James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr. and Leonard A. Schlesinger reveal that leading companies stay on top by managing the service profit chain. Based on five years of painstaking research, the authors show how managers at American Express, Southwest Airlines, and other well-known companies employ a quantifiable set of relationships that directly links profit and growth to not only customer loyalty and satisfaction, but to employee loyalty, satisfaction, and productivity.
Provocative Authors
The Next Decade: Where We've Been...and Where We're Going
In The Next Decade, George Friedman offers readers a provocative and endlessly fascinating prognosis for the immediate future. Using Machiavelli’s The Prince as a model, Friedman focuses on the world’s leaders—particularly the American president—and with his trusted geopolitical insight analyzes the complex chess game they will all have to play. The book also asks how to be a good president in a decade of extraordinary challenge, and puts the world’s leaders under a microscope to explain how they will arrive at the decisions they will make—and the consequences these actions will have for us all.
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
The "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Genome" and "The Red Queen" offers a provocative case for an economics of hope, arguing that the benefits of commerce, technology, innovation, and change—cultural evolution—will inevitably increase human prosperity.
The Greening of America
“If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today...I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means.” – from the new Preface by Charles A. Reich.
Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation from Stifling People and Strangling Profits
Although it was first published more than thirty-five years ago, Up the Organization continues to top the lists of best business books by groups as diverse as the American Management Association, Strategy + Business (Booz Allen Hamilton), and The Wharton Center for Leadership and Change Management. 1-800-CEO-READ ranks Townsend’s bestseller first among eighty books that “every manager must read.” This commemorative edition offers a new generation the benefit of Robert Townsend’s timeless wisdom as well as reflections on his work and life by those who knew and worked with him. This groundbreaking book continues to remind us not to get mired in all those sacred organizational routines that stifle people and strangle both profits and profitability. He shows a way to humanize business and a way to have fun while making it all work better than it ever worked before.
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Taleb delivers a groundbreaking look at the role played by the unexpected in life and history, and a fascinating examination of why we know less than we think we do – and what to do about it. Examines the role of the unexpected, discussing why improbable events are not anticipated or understood properly, and how humans rationalize the black swan phenomenon to make it appear less random.
Re-Inventing the Corporation: Transforming Your Job and Your Company for the New Information Society
Re-Inventing the Corporation shows how to evaluate your present company in terms of the future. It gives you two major premises: first, that our time is characterized by a rare confluence of new values and economic necessity, which the authors claim are the two forces required for social change, and second, that the “new information society” is turning toward a “whole new emphasis on human resources", expressed in new ways of viewing and treating people in organizations. It provides the questions, answers guidelines and examples which will enable you to transform your job and your company for the new information society.
Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives
The result of ten years of careful research. Areas covered include the future economy, business, government, technology, and changes in our social system.
The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Two renowned investment advisors bring to light both currents of disaster and the potential for prosperity and renewal in the face of radical changes in human history as we move into the next century.
The Fourth Turning
Strauss and Howe will change the way you see the world – and your place in it. In The Fourth Turning, they apply their generational theories to the cycles of history and locate America in the middle of an unraveling period, on the brink of a crisis. How you prepare for this crisis – the Fourth Turning – is intimately connected to the mood and attitude of your particular generation. Whatever your stage of life, The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for America’s next rendezvous with destiny.
When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change
When Markets Collide is a timely alert to the fundamental changes taking place in today’s global economic and financial systems – and a call to action for investors who may fall victim to misinterpreting important signals. While some have tended to view asset class mispricings as mere “noise,” this compelling book shows why they are important signals of opportunities and risks that will shape the market for years to come. One of today’s most respected names in finance, Mohamed El-Erian puts recent events in their proper context, giving you the tools that can help you interpret the markets, benefit from global economic change, and navigate the risks.
Liberation Management
In the new economy, hierarchical business structures are being consigned to the shredder and replaced with flexible, fast-responding, ad hoc groups of brainworkers. Tom Peters, author of the bestselling IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE is once again ahead of the curve, and now demonstrates that the key to success in business future is total engagement, dynamism, speed, and independence.
In Search of Dignity
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization
In “The Fifth Discipline,” Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations – ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire.
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
We are living in the most reckless financial environment in recent history. Arcane credit derivative bets are now well into the tens of trillions. According to Charles R. Morris, the astronomical leverage at investment banks and their hedge fund and private equity clients virtually guarantees massive disruption in global markets. The crash, when it comes, will have no firebreaks. A quarter century of free-market zealotry that extolled asset stripping, abusive lending, and hedge fund secrecy will come crashing down with it. “The Trillion Dollar Meltdown” explains how we got here, and what is about to happen.
Common Purpose: How Great Leaders Get Organizations to Achieve the Extraordinary
From one of the most respected names in business and leadership, a rare look at the specifics of how great leaders achieve “common purpose” and success within their organizations. What is common purpose? It is that rare, almost-palpable experience that happens when a leader coalesces a group, team or community into a creative, dynamic, brave and nearly invincible “we.” It happens the moment the organization’s values, tools, objectives and hopes are internalized in a way that enables people to work tirelessly toward a goal. Common purpose is rarely achieved. But Kurtzman has observed that when a leader is able to bring it about, the results are outsized, measurable and inspiring.
The Art of Asking: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers
Discover the core questions that every manager needs to master...how to avoid the mistakes business questioners make most often...ten simple rules for asking every question more effectively. Learn how to ask tough questions and take control of tough situations...use questions to promote innovation, drive change, identify hidden problems, and get failing projects back on track.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
“Crucial” conversations are interpersonal exchanges at work or at home that we dread having but know we cannot avoid. How do you say what needs to be said while avoiding an argument with a boss, child, or relationship partner? Crucial Conversations offers readers a proven seven-point strategy for achieving their goals in all those emotionally, psychologically, or legally charged situations that can arise in their professional and personal lives.
The Invisible Employee: Using Carrots to See the Hidden Potential in Everyone
A business fable packed with hard-won wisdom, The Invisible Employee follows a group of people who live and work together on a mysterious island. Managers learn how to combat one of the most common negative attitudes in business: that smart employees keep their heads down and never do more than is asked. In today’s competitive environment, all of us are looking for the next big product, the next big capability or solution. But great managers are finding that recognizing people leads to a more engaged workforce and a more successful business. The Invisible Employee shows you how to bring out the hidden potential in your team and your business.
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future.
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
Michael E. Porter’s Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity – like all great breakthroughs – Porter’s analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies – lowest cost, differentiation, and focus – which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning.
The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up
The Levity Effect uses serious science to reveal the remarkable power of humor and fun in business. Science proves it?fun is good for business! Based on ten years of extensive research, the authors argue against business tradition to reveal the powerful bottom-line benefits of leading with levity. With interviews, exercises, and case studies, the book reveals how humor in the workplace will help you communicate messages, build camaraderie, and encourage creativity for a better workplace and bigger profits.
The Myth of Excellence: Why Great Companies Never Try to Be the Best at Everything
In this business bestseller the authors make a compelling case for the wisdom of focusing energy and resources on more targeted goals. By choosing the attribute on which to dominate, differentiate, or be at industry par, they provide a new way to be relevant to customers without breaking the bank.
The Extreme Future: The Top Trends That Will Reshape the World in the Next 20 Years
An advisor to three presidents spanning over thirty years, Dr. James Canton identifies probable outcomes and future trends in business, technology, environment, terrorism, population, and medicine to help companies and individuals prepare for the coming complex and volatile global changes, including: How climate change and energy trends will reshape the planet; How astounding medicine trends will enhance peopleas lives; How the rise of China will bring on a new global power struggle. In the tradition of “Future Shock, Megatrends,” and “The Tipping Point, Extreme Future” is the essential forecasting handbook for navigating the twenty-first century.
The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management
Author Art Kleiner explores the nature of effective leadership in times of change and defines its importance to the corporation of the future. He describes a heretic as a visionary who creates change in large-scale companies, balancing the contrary truths they can’t deny against their loyalty to their organizations. “The Age of Heretics” reveals how managers can get stuck in counterproductive ways of doing things and shows why it takes a heretical point of view to get past the deadlock and move forward.
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century
In his thought-provoking book, George Friedman, founder of STRATFOR – the preeminent private intelligence and forecasting firm – focuses on what he knows best, the future. Positing that civilization is at the dawn of a new era, he offers a lucid, highly readable forecast of the changes we can expect around the world during the twenty-first century all based on his own thorough analysis and research. For example, The U.S.-Jihadist war will be replaced by a new cold war with Russia; China’s role as a world power will diminish; Mexico will become an important force on the geopolitical stage; and new technologies and cultural trends will radically alter the way we live (and fight wars). Riveting reading from first to last, “The Next 100 Years” is a fascinating exploration of what the future holds for all of us.
The Intelligence Edge: How to Profit in the Information Age
The Intelligence Edge provides you with tools honed by the world’s premier intelligence-gathering professionals. The authors show how to use techniques perfected by such organizations as the CIA on how to find and collect, prioritize, and analyze data. They present a comprehensive system of information management that will teach you how to identify and target different sources of information, from the library to the internet to company gossip. Then, once you have collected the information you need, you will be shown how to use it—what to store, what to discard, what to turn to your advantage. By following these steps, you can learn to compete and prosper in today’s knowledge-based business environment.
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
In this brilliant book, an award-winning “New York Times” columnist explains how the flattening – i.e., connectedness – of the world happened at the dawn of the 21st century, what it means to the global economy, and how governments and societies must adapt.
Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise
In Effectuation, Saras Sarasvathy explores the theory and techniques of non-predictive control for creating new firms, markets and economic opportunities. Using empirical and theoretical work done in collaboration with Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, the author employs methods from cognitive science and behavioral economics to develop the notion of entrepreneurial expertise and effectuation.
The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration
In The Constitution of Society he outlines the distinctive position he has evolved during that period and offers a full statement of a major new perspective in social thought, a synthesis and elaboration of ideas touched on in previous works but described here for the first time in an integrated and comprehensive form. A particular feature is Giddens's concern to connect abstract problems of theory to an interpretation of the nature of empirical method in the social sciences. In presenting his own ideas, Giddens mounts a critical attack on some of the more orthodox sociological views.
The Consequences of Modernity
New Rules of Sociological Method: A Positive Critique of Interpretative Sociologies
Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis
The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing: Dialog, Debate, And Directions
The Sciences of the Artificial
Understanding the Process of Economic Change
Greenspan’s Bubbles: The Age of Ignorance at the Federal Reserve
Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis
The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World
Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts
The End of Influence: What Happens When Other Countries Have the Money
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism
Business Leaders
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Working with bestselling author and renowned consultant Ram Charan, Bossidy shows how to make the leap from a vision of a big idea to actually delivering bottom-line results. And he does this within the real-time context of Honeywell, a company challenged by the failed merger with GE and a downturn in the airline business following the events of September 11. Bossidy and Charan show that good execution is the ability to effectively deal with sudden changes in the business environment by making crucial linkages between people, strategy, and the operating plan.
Jack: Straight from the Gut
In this remarkable autobiography-a classic business book and runaway New York Times bestseller now updated with a new afterword by the author-Jack Welch takes us on the rough-and-tumble ride that has been his remarkable life. From his working-class childhood to his early days in G.E. Plastics to his life at the top of the world’s most successful company, Welch tells his intensely personal story with his well-known fire and candor. And although it chronicles billion-dollar deals and high-stakes corporate standoffs, Jack is ultimately a story about people-from a man who based his career on demanding only the best from others and from himself.
Customers For Life: How To Turn That One-Time Buyer Into a Lifetime Customer
Drawing on his incredible success in transforming his Dallas Cadillac dealership into the second largest in America, Carl Sewell revealed the secret of getting customers to return again and again in the original Customers for Life. A lively, down-to-earth narrative, it set the standard for customer service excellence and became a perennial bestseller. Building on that solid foundation, this expanded edition features five completely new chapters, as well as significant additions to the original material, based on the lessons Sewell has learned over the last ten years.
Moments of Truth: New Strategies For Today’s Customer-Driven Economy
The book traces the author’s spectacular turnaround successes with three major corporations and spells out his trendsetting approach on meeting the demands of today’s service economy.
Power Ambition Glory: The Stunning Parallels between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today...and the Lessons You Can Learn
Based on an extraordinary collaboration between Steve Forbes, chairman, CEO, and editor in chief of Forbes Media, and classics professor John Prevas, Power Ambition Glory provides intriguing comparisons between six great leaders of the ancient world and contemporary business leaders.
How Capitalism Will Save Us: Why Free People and Free Markets Are the Best Answer in Today’s Economy
How Capitalism Will Save Us transcends labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” by showing how the economy really works. When free people in free markets have energy to solve problems and meet the needs and wants of others, they turn scarcity into abundance and develop the innovations that are the foremost drivers of economic growth. The freedom of democratic capitalism is, for example, what enabled Henry Ford to take a plaything of the rich—the car—and transform it into something affordable to working people.
Henry Ford’s Lean Vision: Enduring Principles from the First Ford Motor Plant
Henry Ford’s Lean Vision is a hands-on reference that provides the reader with proven principles and methods that can be applied in any business or service enterprise. It covers all aspects of building and running a successful enterprise, including Ford’s principles for human relationships and the management of physical resources.
Topical Authors
Recently Added
Great Leaders Grow: Becoming a Leader for Life
Successful leaders don’t rest on their laurels. Leadership must be a living process, not a title on a business card, and life means growth. As Ken Blanchard and Mark Miller write in the introduction, “the path to increased influence, impact, and leadership effectiveness is paved with personal growth.… Our capacity to grow determines our capacity to lead. It’s really that simple.” Great Leaders Grow shows leaders and aspiring leaders precisely which areas to focus on so they can remain effective throughout their lives.
Recently Added
The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business
There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides.
Silos, Politics and Turf Wars: A Leadership Fable About Destroying the Barriers That Turn Colleagues Into Competitors
A bestselling management expert’s fifth book offers solutions to a key leadership issue: the impact of turf wars and political infighting on organizational effectiveness, written in the form of a realistic but fictional story.
The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable
Highly sought-after management consultant Patrick Lencioni deftly tells the tale of a young CEO who, facing his first annual board review, knows he is failing, but doesn’t know why. Refreshingly original and utterly compelling, this razor-sharp novelette plus self-assessment serves as a timeless and potent reminder that success as a leader can come down to practicing a few simple behaviors – behaviors that are painfully difficult for each of us to master. Any executive can learn how to recognize the mistakes that leaders can make and how to avoid them.
Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business
Best-selling author Lencioni’s latest business fable takes on meetings – why people hate them, why they shouldn’t, and how to make them great. Through fictional narrative, modeling, and practical suggestions, Lencioni shows how to turn meetings from painful and tedious to productive, compelling, and even energizing.
The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive: A Leadership Fable
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
The Three Signs of a Miserable Job: A Fable for Managers (And Their Employees)
The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family: A Leadership Fable About Restoring Sanity To The Most Important Organization In Your Life
Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding The Three Fears That Sabotage Client Loyalty
The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting out of the Box
The Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
Get Out of Your Own Way: The 5 Keys to Surpassing Everyone’s Expectations
Break through your self-imposed limitations by learning how your own brain can be your biggest obstacle—or your greatest ally. You’d expect your brain to be an always-reliable ally in your quest for a successful, satisfying life, but surprisingly the opposite is usually true. That’s because your brain is pretty much the same model your ancestors were using thousands of years ago when mere survival was everyone’s primary goal. It tells you now what it told them then: Play it safe. Avoid risk. Evade confrontation. Don’t venture outside the territory you already know. And never break the habits that have gotten you this far. Once you know what really drives you, you can switch off the counterproductive parts of your brain, engage the helpful parts, and set out on the path to accomplishing what everyone else thinks you can’t.
The Other 90%: How to Unlock Your Vast Untapped Potential for Leadership and Life
For centuries, it has been assumed that there are vast limits to human capacity. Now, although a host of scientific discoveries prove this wrong, a mindset of limits persists, blocking us from our greatest possibilities and leaving us feeling bombarded by stress, change, and uncertainty. No matter how hard we work, no matter how much we give, we’re still not getting what we hoped for. There is another way. The most exciting breakthroughs will not come from advances in technology but from a deeper realization of what it means to be most human and alive. Many of the choices that can dramatically change our lives are simple and practical – yet few people know what these choices are or how to apply them in work and life. The Other 90% is your guide to new territory and new challenges.
The Simple Truths of Service: Inspired By Johnny the Bagger
Gung Ho! Turn On the People in Any Organization
Unleashing Excellence: The Complete Guide to Ultimate Customer Service
From Mind to Market: Reinventing the Retail Supply Chain
Best Practices: Motivating Employees: Bringing Out the Best in Your People
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Outliers: The Story of Success
The Halo Effect...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers
The Halo Effect is a landmark book that replaces mistaken thinking with a sharper understanding of what drives company performance. It’s a guide for the thinking manager, a way to detect errors in business research and to reach a clearer understanding of what drives success and failure. For managers who want to separate fact from fiction in the world of business, The Halo Effect is a much-needed antidote to the conventional thinking that clutters business bookshelves.
Deliberate Success: Realize Your Vision With Purpose, Passion, and Performance
The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action
The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company
Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing
Total Customer Service: The Ultimate Weapon
Yes, You Can: 1,200 Inspiring Ideas For Work, Home, And Happiness
The Power of Intention
The Myth of Market Share: Why Market Share is the Fool's Gold of Business
The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?
The Customer-Driven Company: Moving from Talk to Action
How to Sell at Margins Higher Than Your Competitors: Winning Every Sale at Full Price, Rate, or Fee
Best Practices: Time Management: Set Priorities to Get the Right Things Done
Flipping the Switch... : Unleash the Power of Personal Accountability Using the QBQ!
Asking the right kind of question is only the first step to becoming fullyengaged at work and in life. In his bestselling book QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, John G. Miller revealed how personal accountability helps to create opportunity, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals by eliminating blame, complaining, and procrastination. The result? Stronger organizations, more dynamic teams, and healthier relationships. Now Miller takes readers to the next level to show how they can use the power of the QBQ! and personal accountability every day.
False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World
QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability at Work and in Life
Outstanding! 47 Ways to Make Your Organization Exceptional
Smart Is Not Enough!: The South Pole Strategy and Other Powerful Talent Management Secrets
"Smart Is Not Enough" explains the core issue of 21st century business. Forget technology - Forget outsourcing TALENT is the #1 challenge in your organization. Whether you're a CEO or an entry level college grad; whether you manage a staff or not, this book is for you. It can help in career planning, in developing your management strategy, or just help you understand the playing field in business today. Author Alan Guarino explains the full gamut of cutting-edge talent management, from how to find it, develop it, deploy it and lead it, to his South Pole Theory of "hidden talent" talent as a solution for the shortage of critical talent in the business world of the 21st Century.
General Reading
Recently Added
Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping
Revolutionary retail guru Paco Underhill is back with a completely revised edition of his classic, witty bestselling book on our ever-evolving consumer culture -- full of fresh observations and important lessons from the cutting edge of retail, which is taking place in the world's emerging markets.
Recently Added
The Nibble Theory and the Kernel of Power: A Book About Leadership, Self-Empowerment, and Personal Growth
Like a snowflake or a fingerprint, we are all one of a kind and have a special contribution to make. The late Kaleel Jamison, one of the first women to enter the field of management consulting, experienced what she described as "nibbles," little bites that life takes out of you--really attacks on your self confidence. Her longtime best selling book, The Nibble Theory, is a process for dealing with the world that moves the reader toward personal power and growth arising out of the unique values and strengths of each person.
Yellow Steel: The Story of the Earthmoving Equipment Industry
Extensively illustrated and packed with detailed information on both manufacturers and machines, Yellow Steel knits together the diverse stories of the many companies that created the earthmoving equipment industry – how they began, expanded, retooled, merged, succeeded, and sometimes failed. Their history, a step-by-step linking of need and invention, provides the foundation for virtually all modern transportation, construction, commerce, and industry.
Alexander Botts Earthworm Tractors
Introducing Alexander Botts, salesman of Earthworm Tractors, who is, according to his own modest estimate, a natural born salesman, an artist, and one of the best natural talkers in the organization. When sent to sell a tractor to an English lord, he reveals himself as a man of culture and innate refinement who realizes that a cutaway and all the etceteras are necessities when dealing with the titled nobility. Although in general he tries to cultivate a polite and ingratiating manner, Botts on a collecting job is a hard-boiled bozo, in a very softhearted way. Whether it means diving into a well for a drowned cat, promoting a beauty contest, or riding into a swamp, Alexander Botts always makes his sale, and even if you’re not interested in a tractor, you’re sure to be interested in and delighted by Botts.
The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale
The Prime Solution shows sellers how to turn value fulfillment into a core competency, because they’ve helped customers understand and achieve the full value of the products and services they’ve purchased. The power of this model rests in closing the “value gap"—that frustrating division often created by sellers who have either been unable or unwilling to fulfill the promises they’ve made about their products, and by customers who are unwilling or unable to comprehend the total value received. Author Jeff Thull describes a disciplined, “all-hands” approach that involves all the teams in an organization connected to the customer—R&D, marketing, sales, and service. This practical, whole solutions approach has been used with astonishing success by small to midsized companies as well as major corporations worldwide.
Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity
In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work “Building Strong Brands”, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity. Building on case studies of world-class brands such as Dell, Disney, Microsoft, Sony, Dove, Intel, CitiGroup, and PowerBar, Aaker demonstrates how powerful, cohesive brand strategies have enabled managers to revitalize brands, support business growth, and create discipline in confused, bloated portfolios of master brands, subbrands, endorser brands, co-brands, and brand extensions.
Service Success! Lessons From a Leader on How to Turn Around a Service Business
Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy
The 21 Most Powerful Minutes in a Leader's Day: Revitalize Your Spirit and Empower Your Leadership
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You
Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar... : Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes
Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable
The Big Moo: Stop Trying to Be Perfect and Start Being Remarkable
Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
The Legend of the Monk and the Merchant: Principles for Successful Living
Chasing the Rabbit: How Market Leaders Outdistance the Competition and How Great Companies Can Catch Up and Win
Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness
Little Red Book of Sales Answers: 99.5 Real World Answers That Make Sense, Make Sales, and Make Money
Workplace 2000: The Revolution Reshaping American Business
Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results
Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
Selling by Phone: How to Reach and Sell to Customers
Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service
The Product Managers Handbook
It's Not the Big That Eat the Small...It's the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business
Every Second Counts
A Logic of Expressive Choice
The Social Media Management Handbook: Everything You Need To Know To Get Social Media Working In Your Business
Every organization wants to implement social media, but it is difficult to create processes and mange employees to make this happen. Most social media books focus on strategies for communicating with customers, but they fail to address the internal process that takes place within a business before those strategies can be implemented. This book is geared toward helping you manage every step of the process required to use social media for business.