Business Book Talk

The Safe Investor
How to Make Your Money Grow in a Volatile Global Economy
by Tim McCarthy
We have an affable and very informative chat about the world of investing. Tim gives me some amazing advice about what to look for and how to manage portfolios and time. If you have invested or have an investment manager helping you with your investments then I would highly recommend this book. We cover emerging markets and global opportunities that North Americans are missing out on. We chat about the real meaning of the words used in the industry like, Long Term Investing, Greed and Investment Fear. So join us in an eye opening discussion that will help you maximize your portfolio’s potential and mitigate a lot of the risk. Tim is also providing new content and links at the books support website. http://timmccarthy.com/

The Chocolate Conversation
Lead Bittersweet Change, Transform Your Business
by Rose Fass
The single factor that determines success or failure in big business today is conversation. Great leaders use public and private conversation to send a clear message, cultivate a common worldview, set high standards and reachable goals, and uncover concerns that can undermine an organization.
So what conversation are you, as a leader, having with your team? Experienced change consultant Rose Fass explains how too often we think we’re having the same conversation about “dark chocolate,” only to be referring to three different things: milk, white, or bittersweet varieties.
She shows us how to first establish common ground that leads to an effective discourse for addressing relevance, growth, and scaling: the three most important issues she sees in business today. In a light-hearted and humorous way, she shows how leaders can avoid a meltdown and instead drive transformation through the way they communicate in a language that all stakeholders can understand.

Spark
How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success
by Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, Sean Lynch
Leadership isn’t about a job title, it’s about action and behavior. In SPARK, entrepreneurs, business consultants and military Veterans Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, and Sean Lynch show how anyone can become an extraordinary leader by embracing seven key behaviors.
Many people believe that leaders are the rare few at the upper echelons of a business or other enterprise. But the truth is leaders can be found at any level of an organization. These are the Sparks – the doers, thinkers, innovators, and key influencers who are catalysts for personal and organizational change. Sparks aren’t defined by the place they hold on an organizational chart. They are defined by their actions, commitment, and will.
SPARK’s insights were hard-earned by its authors, Angie Morgan (Marine Corps), Courtney Lynch (Marine Corps), and Sean Lynch (Air Force), who today are sought-after consultants and keynote speakers, through their firm Lead Star, due to the relevant, engaging way they help individuals re-imagine themselves as leaders so they can reach their true potential.
Not only does SPARK provide you with the encouragement and motivation to be a leader, it also offers online resources that will further support your leadership development. With SPARK as a blueprint, anyone can become a catalyst for change, and any organization can identify and develop Sparks.

The Reid Method
A Blueprint for Achieving Sales Mastery
by Everold Reid
Success in sales is tougher than ever to achieve. There is more competition and customers have more choice, information, and advanced technology available to them than ever. Sometimes it seems that they know more about your product or service and the competition than most salespeople!
Do you ever feel that you can’t keep pace? Would you like a step-by-step blueprint to teach you the secrets that the sales pros jealously guard? Learn how to master sales in weeks – instead of trial and error over the years.
No matter what industry you sell in, whether automotive, financial, technology, healthcare, real estate or b2b – the products may be different, but the needs and buying habits of your customers always come first!
By using this blueprint for achieving sales mastery, you make the difference in when a sale closes, or whether a prospect converts to a long term valued client. These techniques are proven, but require a commitment to continuous improvement as a sales professional.
Learn from the author’s twenty-five years of experience in automotive retail sales, advertising and real estate marketing. The Reid Method offers salespeople from rookies to top performers (and everyone in between) valuable tips & techniques to improve how they manage the sales process to get results faster.

All Dreams on Deck
Charting the Course for Your Life and Work
by Jeremy Cage
Set sail for the adventure of your life and work!
As Katie Couric, journalist, author and Yahoo Global News Anchor attests, “Jeremy Cage has written a great book that everyone who thinks about how to better balance work-life issues would benefit from reading….he’s also shown us how to better navigate life’s personal and professional challenges.”
All Dreams on Deck will help you articulate your most important dreams in work and life and will then give you a practical approach for realizing those dreams. Through engaging, real-life examples, you will be inspired to live life to your full potential.
Author Jeremy Cage, President of the Cage Group, begins with the premise that there is no such thing as work-life balance. There is only life balance,of which work is an important part. With this as the foundation, he will guide you through a simple and actionable approach to determining the most important components of your life,the Grab Bags in your LifeBoat,then chart the course to making all the dreams in that LifeBoat a reality.
Jeremy, who has lived and worked in nine countries, has used this approach to help thousands of executives, managers, and their teams unleash their potential. He has also realized his own dreams by taking a sixteen-month sabbatical to sail around the world with his family before returning to the US to launch several exciting new companies. So rather than theoretical mumbo jumbo, Jeremy presents compelling, real-life examples of how to dream specifically, get highly intentional about those dreams, plan and prepare well then summon the courage to set sail.

Fix It
Getting Accountability Right
by Roger Connors, Tom Smith, Craig Hickman, Tracy Skousen, Marcus Nicolls
The hugely popular bestselling authors of The Oz Principle take readers to the next level of experiencing the results of personal and team accountability by revealing the sixteen accountability traits that lie at the heart of success for individuals and organizations. They also provide practical advice on how to “fix it” and get back on track for turning in the kinds of results that make careers and transform organizations.
Since it was originally published in 1994, The Oz Principle has become the worldwide bible on accountability. Now Roger Connors and Tom Smith, along with field practitioners Craig Hickman, Tracy Skousen, and Marcus Nicolls, add another important plank in The Oz Principle series.
In Fix It, the authors present the startling results of their Workplace Accountability Study—conducted over three years, involving more than forty thousand participants from organizations across the globe: the most comprehensive study on workplace accountability ever conducted.
When accountability is not working on the job, in the team or the organization as a whole, everyone is left asking how to fix it. Using never-before-published research and firsthand stories and practices from more than one hundred respected global executives, Fix It provides a practical and definitive guide that will become the troubleshooting handbook of choice, designed to assist the reader in knowing exactly how to fix it and get real results.

The Analytical Marketer
How to Transform Your Marketing Organization
by Adele Sweetwood
Analytics are driving big changes, not only in what marketing departments do but in how they are organized, staffed, led, and run. Leaders are grappling with issues that range from building an analytically driven marketing organization and determining the kinds of structure and talent that are needed to leading interactions with IT, finance, and sales and creating a unified view of the customer.
The Analytical Marketer provides critical insight into the changing marketing organization—digital, agile, and analytical—and the tools for reinventing it.
Written by the head of global marketing for SAS, The Analytical Marketer is based on the author’s firsthand experience of transforming a marketing organization from “art” to “art and science.” Challenged and inspired by their company’s own analytics products, the SAS marketing team was forced to rethink itself in order to take advantage of the new capabilities that those tools offer the modern marketer.
Key marketers and managers at SAS tell their stories alongside the author’s candid lessons learned as she led the marketing organization’s transformation. With additional examples from other leading companies, this book is a practical guide and set of best practices for creating a new marketing culture that thrives on and adds value through data and analytics.

Managing Online Reputation
How to Protect Your Company on Social Media
Charlie Pownall
Managing Online Reputation is a comprehensive look at online reputation management. Drawing on recent examples of organizations managing their online reputations effectively and ineffectively, it provides a practical and visual tool-kit of processes and techniques to help limit and respond effectively to negative situations on social media.
Learn why you need to be prepared for an ugly situation id todays unbelievably cruel and swift social media attacks. Prepare your organization for dealing with day-to-day situations and build a strategy for long term brand and reputation management and safekeeping.

Good Authority
How to Become the Leader Your Team Is Waiting For
by Jonathan Raymond
Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are one thing, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life.
Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens, and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need to get beyond the patterns that hold us back.
In this provocative and timely new book, Jonathan brings together what he has learned over a twenty-year journey as an executive, entrepreneur, team leader and leadership trainer.
Combining his experience as the CEO and CBO of EMyth where he led the transformation of a global coaching brand with the lessons learned along his own personal growth journey, Jonathan walks us through a step-by-step approach that integrates the leading edges of both. You’ll discover a way to lead your team that is both profoundly human and results-oriented at the same time.
Whether you re a CEO or business owner, executive, team leader, consultant, or coach, Good Authority will give you new ideas and inspiration you can put into practice. Most importantly, it will give you permission to be more of who you are at work than you ever thought possible.

The Employee Experience
How to Attract Talent, Retain Top Performers, and Drive Results
by Tracy Maylett, Matthew Wride
Want a profit-enhancing Customer Experience? Start with the Employee Experience. The Employee Experience helps organizations attract and retain top talent, and reveals the secrets for building a deeply engaged workforce. With insights into the dynamics of trust and mutual expectations, this book proves that before you can deliver a transcendent customer experience (CX), you must first build a superlative employee experience (EX).
It’s not about perks.
It’s not about creating a worker’s utopia, and it doesn’t mean that work must be easy; employees are responsible for managing expectations and meeting the organization’s requirements. But by establishing a clear set of expectations and promises collectively known as “the Contract” and upholding it consistently, employers can build the essential trust that leads to powerful employee engagement.
Turn employee engagement into an exceptional customer experience, profit, and growth Creating a transformative employee experience is not about stock options or foosball in the break room. It’s about respecting the role your people play in representing your brand and building your business.
When you give talented people the space to achieve and thrive, they’ll give your customers an experience your competitors can’t duplicate. The Employee Experience shows you where extraordinary companies start and how to build one.
Get this book on Amazon today

We had Tracy on the show before and I think you will enjoy this interview as well.
Check out the MAGIC interview here

The New Alpha
Join the Rising Movement of Influencers and Changemakers Who are Redefining Leadership
by Danielle Harlan
If you want to make an impact in your work, your life, and the world at large it’s time to scrap the traditional thinking about leadership. The game is changing. Power is shifting. And a brave new movement of leaders are redefining success, rewriting the rules, and revolutionizing leadership for the modern world.
Meet the New Alphas:
Their definition of success goes beyond personal achievement.
They also want to be a force for good in the world.
They use their power and influence to improve the lives of others.
They spark ideas, generate excitement, and make things happen.
If this sounds like the kind of leader you’d like to be, then this book is the roadmap you’ve been waiting for. The New Alpha offers a complete, holistic, interactive program that is designed to help you find meaning and fulfillment in your life while increasing your competency as a leader. It provides a step-by-step, developmental framework for setting goals, building relationships, and using your power and influence to incite positive change. It s data-driven, customizable, and refreshingly candid about what it takes to be an exceptional leader in a rapidly changing global economy.
This step-by-step guide to leadership includes:

* Self-assessments that will help you to customize the program to meet your personal needs
* Short and long term planning templates, including sample daily plans
* A personalized tracking system, including weekly check-in templates, that will allow you to monitor and increase your progress over time
* Advice for dealing with difficult people and for reaching out to potential mentors and sponsors who will support and encourage you along the way
* Tips, tricks, and tools for being an engaging, inspiring, and supportive leader who also gets results
* Other essential resources that that will help you to be exceptional and maximize your impact

The SPEED of TRUST
The One Thing That Changes Everything
by Stephen M.R. Covey
Stephen M.R. Covey shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients and, employees—is essential to a successful organization.
With nearly 750,000 copies in print, this instant classic shows that establishing trust is “the one thing that changes everything” (Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of Now, Discover Your Strengths) in both business and life.
Trust, says Stephen M.R. Covey, is the very basis of the new global economy, and he shows how trust—and the speed at which it is established with clients, employees, and constituents—is the essential ingredient for any high–performance, successful organization.
For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship—from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction—and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time–killing, bureaucratic check–and–balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

5% More
Making Small Changes to Achieve Extraordinary Results
by Michael Alden
We talk about how small changes lead to big results that stick.It’s a painless route to change, with results that can last a lifetime. Whether you want to boost your health, wealth, or wisdom, this book reveals a key technique that makes it stick. You may already know that breaking big goals into small chunks makes them easier to achieve, but the trick is in making those chunks large enough to be productive, yet small enough to be sustainable. This book shows you how to bring your goals within reach with only five percent more effort. Five percent is almost unnoticeable in terms of effort—but it accrues quickly, with each step boosting the baseline. Increase sales, decrease your marathon time, boost your savings, or master a new skill. Just five percent more can get you where you want to be.
Small changes, small commitments, and small adjustments can lead to very big results. You can accomplish more than you ever thought possible in your business or in your life. This book walks you through the 5% More strategy to help you map your path to the future.
Accomplish big changes with very small steps
Make bigger leaps in progress each step of the way
Break big goals into manageable milestones
Find a change that you can stick to for the long-term
Mountain climbers don’t conquer Everest on their first time out—attempting to do so would be a tragic failure. No matter what your goal, no matter what your baseline, small, incremental steps set you up for success. 5% More gives you a concrete strategy for realizing your goals and making changes that last.

100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings
How to Get By Without Even Trying Paperback
by Sarah Cooper
Funny because it’s true. From the creator of the viral sensation “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” (5+ million views and hundreds of thousands of shares) comes the must-have book you never knew you needed, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings. In it, you will learn how to appear smart in less than half the time it takes to actually learn anything.
You know those subtle tricks your coworkers are all guilty of? The constant nodding, pretend concentration, useless rhetorical questions? These tricks make them seem like they know what they’re doing when in fact they have no clue. This behavior is so ingrained, so subtle, and so often mistaken for true intelligence that identifying it, calling it out, or compiling it into an exhaustive digest has never been attempted. Until now.
Complete with illustrated tips, examples, and scenarios, 100 Tricks gives you actionable ways to use words like “actionable,” in order to sound smart. Every type of meeting is covered, from general meetings where you stopped paying attention almost immediately, to one-on-one meetings you zoned out on, to impromptu meetings you were painfully subjected to at the last minute.
If you hadn’t noticed these behaviors before, you will see them now—from your colleagues, your managers, and soon yourself. Each trick is a mirror to the reality of what happens in meetings, told in the form of hilariously bad advice—advice that you might just want to take.
But probably not. But maybe.

Supervision Matters
100 Bite-Sized Ideas to Transform You and Your Team
by Rita Sever
I have a lovely chat with Rita and we cover a lot of ground. Her book does the same thing and with 50 chapters it also presents a this vast amount of information in an easy to access formate. So even if your not a manager person you will definitely get some great tips and tricks form this book.
Supervision is a critical function of leadership that is often overlooked, and yet the quality of supervision is often what makes or breaks a leader—and an organization. Supervision Matters is full of bite-size ideas for how to become a more effective supervisor, including advice on how to be clear about expectations, giving helpful feedback, manage yourself, and more. Each chapter is structured around how you approach a part of your work as a supervisor: how you talk, how you think about others, how you run meetings, how you lead, and more.
Whether you’re a front-line supervisor or a CEO, this book will help you sharpen your skills and improve morale by transforming your supervision skills into user-friendly tactics that work.

The 10% Entrepreneur
Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job
by Patrick J. McGinnis
Becoming a full-time entrepreneur can look glamorous from the outside. Who doesn’t want to chase their dreams, be their own boss, and do what they love? But the truth is that entrepreneurship is often a slog, with no regular hours, no job security, and very little pay.
What if there was a way to have the stability of a day job with the excitement of a startup? All of the benefits of entrepreneurship with none of the pitfalls? In The 10% Entrepreneur, Patrick McGinnis shows you how, by investing just 10% of your time and resources, you can become an entrepreneur without losing a steady paycheck.
McGinnis details a step-by-step plan that takes you from identifying your first entrepreneurial project to figuring out the smartest way to commit resources to it. He shows you how to select and engage in projects that will provide you with upside outside the office while making your better at your day job.
A successful 10% Entrepreneur himself, McGinnis explains the multiple paths you can follow to invest your cash, time, and expertise in a start-up—including as a founder, angel, adviser, or aficionado. Most importantly, you don’t have to have millions in disposable income to become a 10% Entrepreneur. When you put McGinnis’s 10% principles into action, you’ll quickly start racking up small wins, then watch as they snowball into your new (and far more entrepreneurial) life.

Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO
50 Indispensable Tips to Help You Stay Afloat, Bounce Back, and Get Ahead at Work
by Beverly E. Jones
Education plus experience once guaranteed a successful career, but no more! Now success depends on your ability to adapt. You must be agile, willing to adjust your professional expectations, and able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats.<
In Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO you will learn practical ways to handle vexing workplace challenges. Each chapter uses true stories to illustrate the answers to common questions, including:

* How to leave your old job smoothly and start your new one with confidence and flair.
* How to gracefully accept praise for your work.
* How to recover from stress, setbacks, or the upheaval of a major project.
* How to stay steady in the midst of endless change.

It’s not enough to know how to manage common work-life challenges; you must also deal with the uncommon ones. Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO gives you proven, easy, go-to techniques for handling even the biggest career surprises, one step at a time.

The Trusted Executive
Nine Leadership Habits that Inspire Results, Relationships and Reputation
by John Blakey and Paul Polman
The topic of trust has been a much discussed issue since the recent global financial crisis. However, the business world’s response has lagged behind, and trust in organizations and corporations remains low.
This book helps leaders create a trust-building strategy for a globalized, technology-enabled, diverse, and increasingly skeptical world. Through innovative coaching exercises, personal anecdotes, inspirational CEOs and well-researched business models, The Trusted Executive provides the tools leaders need to create a strategy for building trust in themselves and their companies.
Author John Blakey presents a three-pillared approach to trustworthy leadership based on ability, integrity, and benevolence. He explains how to develop and measure organizational trust, handle trust violations, and manage a constantly changing work environment and diverse workforce.

Everydata
The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day
by John H. Johnson
While everyone is talking about “big data,” the truth is that understanding the “little data”–the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on–is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day, but has no idea how to interpret it correctly.
EVERYDATA explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.
The book is filled with countless examples of people misconstruing data–with results that range from merely frustrating to catastrophic: The space shuttle Challenger exploded in part because the engineers were reviewing a limited sample set. Millions of women avoid caffeine during pregnancy because they interpret correlation as causation. Attorneys faced a $1 billion jury verdict because of outlier data.
Each chapter highlights one commonly misunderstood data concept, using both real-world and hypothetical examples from a wide range of topics, including business, politics, advertising, law, engineering, retail, parenting, and more.
You’ll find the answer to the question “Now what?” along with concrete ways you can use this information to immediately start making smarter decisions, today and every day.

Mobilized
An Insider’s Guide to the Business and Future of Connected Technology
by SC Moatti
SC Moatti, a Silicon Valley veteran who was an executive with Facebook, Trulia, and Nokia, gives businesses and professionals simple ways to thrive in this modern day “gold rush.” More than a book on technology, this is a book about human nature and what matters most to us.
She knows that Mobile has now become such an integral part of how we live that, for many people, losing a cell phone is like losing a limb. Everybody knows mobile is the future, and every business wants in, but what are the elements of mobile success?
She shows that because mobile products have become extensions of ourselves, we expect from them what we wish for ourselves: an attractive body, a meaningful life, and a growing repertoire of skills. She has created an all-encompassing formula that makes it easy for any business to develop a strategy for creating winning mobile products.
Her Body Rule dictates that mobile products must appeal to our sense of beauty—but beauty in a mobile world is both similar to and different from what it means offline. The Spirit Rule says mobile products must help us address our deepest personal needs. And the Mind Rule explains that businesses that want to succeed in mobile need to continually analyze the user experience so they can improve every iteration of their products.
Moatti includes case studies from mobile pioneers such as Facebook, Uber, Tinder, WhatsApp, and more. The market is full of how-to books for programming apps, but no works examine what is required for success in the mobile era. Until now.

Execution Excellence
Making Strategy Work Using the Balanced Scorecard
by Sanjiv Anand
Execution Excellence is the practitioner’s guide to real-world implementation. Designed by a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) thought leader with 30 years of experience and over 300 global implementations under his belt across a range of industry sectors, this guide gives you a hands-on framework for putting the BSC methodology into action.
Clear, concise, and easy to read, this book skips the theoretical exposition to get right to the point—how can companies use BSC to effectively deploy strategy and drive individual and enterprise performance? You’ll find the answers here. The discussion outlines the ways in which firms commonly fail in implementing BSC. These failures can be traced back to common design and implementation flaws: making the process too complicated and focusing on the BSC process rather than the outcome. The discussion will also cover design optimization across a range of key industry sectors. You’ll gain expert insight into avoiding these missteps and the practical tools and perspective you need to implement BSC correctly the first time.
While the Balanced Scorecard framework is widely accepted and praised, about half of firms that implement it fail to realize the full benefits. The fault lies not with the framework, but with the design, and more importantly—execution.
Developed in the early 1990s, the Balanced Scorecard framework has been recognized as one of the most seminal business ideas in the last 75 years. Thousands of companies around the world use BSC to create and maintain a performance-oriented enterprise, yet just as many try and fail. Execution Excellence shows you what you need to know and do to become a BSC success story.

Honesty Sells
How To Make More Money and Increase Business Profits
by Colleen Francis and Steven Gaffney
Looking for an edge in today’s tough selling market? Honesty Sells challenges you to abandon clichéd sales techniques that rely on manipulation and deceit. Instead, by being honest and open with clients, you will be rewarded with long-term, profitable relationships—at the expense of no one but your competition.
We have a fun and frank talk about sales and the many mistakes you can make. Colleen brings to play her many years of Sales experience and peppers the talk with an amazing amount of tips and advice for the seasoned and starter sales professional. We really get into the philosophy of sales and honesty middle show and Colleen’s passion comes through in some amazing stories that illustrate the books core values. She has some great insights and having her on the show again was a real treat.
Check out their previous interview here:
Colleen Francis – Understanding Long Term Sales Strategy

Equal Is Unfair
America’s Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook
We’ve all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we’re told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage.
But what if that narrative is wrong? What if the real threat to the American Dream isn’t rising income inequality―but an all-out war on success?
In Equal is Unfair, a timely and thought-provoking work, Don Watkins and Yaron Brook reveal that almost everything we’ve been taught about inequality is wrong.
You’ll discover:
• why successful CEOs make so much money―and deserve to
• how the minimum wage hurts the very people it claims to help
• why middle-class stagnation is a myth
• how the little-known history of Sweden reveals the dangers of forced equality
• the disturbing philosophy behind Obama’s economic agenda.
The critics of inequality are right about one thing: the American Dream is under attack. But instead of fighting to make America a place where anyone can achieve success, they are fighting to tear down those who already have. The real key to making America a freer, fairer, more prosperous nation is to protect and celebrate the pursuit of success―not pull down the high fliers in the name of equality.

SPECIAL ADDITION INTERVIEW – Part 2 of 2  
5 Amazing Books by Joseph Michelli

* The Starbucks Experience
* Leading the Starbucks Way
* The New Gold Standard
* Prescription for Excellence
* The Zappos Experience

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SUCCESS!
You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty-all at the same time.
The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world’s “most admired” companies, according to Fortune magazine. With unique access to Starbucks personnel and resources, Joseph Michelli discovered that the success of Starbucks is driven by the people who work there-the “partners”-and the special experience they create for each customer. Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to
Reach out to entire communities
Listen to individual workers and consumers
Seize growth opportunities in every market
Custom-design a truly satisfying experience that benefits everyone involved
Filled with real-life insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and solid step-by-step strategies, this fascinating book takes you deep inside one of the most talked-about companies in the world today.
For anyone who wants to learn from the best-and be the best-The Starbucks Experience is a rich, heady brew of unforgettable user-friendly ideas.
Don’t forget to listen to the Driven to Delight interview here!

SPECIAL ADDITION INTERVIEW – Part 1 of 2
5 Amazing Books by Joseph Michelli

* The Starbucks Experience
* Leading the Starbucks Way
* The New Gold Standard
* Prescription for Excellence
* The Zappos Experience

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SUCCESS!
You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty-all at the same time.
The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world’s “most admired” companies, according to Fortune magazine. With unique access to Starbucks personnel and resources, Joseph Michelli discovered that the success of Starbucks is driven by the people who work there-the “partners”-and the special experience they create for each customer. Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to
Reach out to entire communities
Listen to individual workers and consumers
Seize growth opportunities in every market
Custom-design a truly satisfying experience that benefits everyone involved
Filled with real-life insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and solid step-by-step strategies, this fascinating book takes you deep inside one of the most talked-about companies in the world today.
For anyone who wants to learn from the best-and be the best-The Starbucks Experience is a rich, heady brew of unforgettable user-friendly ideas.
Don’t forget to listen to the Driven to Delight interview here!

Stragility
Excelling at Strategic Changes
by Ellen R. Auster, Lisa Hillenbrand
Success in business demands an organization that is agile, innovative, and alert, capable of reinventing itself to handle whatever comes its way. Yet most attempts at transformational change fail, hamstrung by poor strategy, office politics, stakeholder resistance, and the pressures of constant transformation.
In Stragility, Ellen Auster and Lisa Hillenbrand provide a powerful, practical, action-oriented approach that equips leaders at all levels to navigate these challenges while building skills and capabilities for the next strategic change. Filled with great examples of leading edge companies, and jam-packed with concrete tips, action steps, and tools, Stragility offers indispensable advice on how to make continuous strategic changes, navigate the politics and emotions of change, and inspire and engage leaders and stakeholders.
Building on a field-tested framework the authors have applied in Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and social sector organizations, Stragility provides the tools for creating a thriving, high-energy organization that will excel at strategic change – again and again.

Connected Leadership
How to build a more agile, customer-driven business
by Simon Hayward
Connected Leadership provides a clear, practical guide for leaders of organizations who wish to create a more connected, agile and customer-oriented organization in a digitally connected, customer-driven 21st century business environment.
It lays out the key factors of the connected organization and the leadership behaviors that will allow these factors to become embedded and sustainable. It provides a range of case examples to demonstrate what this looks like in practice, complemented by a series of tools and techniques that leaders can use to diagnose their organization’s current position and plot a successful course to achieve these more connected ways of working.
It is, at heart, a real-world guide to changing your leadership style and approach to align an organization’s culture and values with those needed in a world where the prevailing models of command and control are so obviously failing.

MAGIC
Five Keys to Unlock the Power of Employee Engagement
by Tracy Maylett and Paul Warner
Employees and leaders intuitively know that when we find a place where we can throw our hearts, spirits, minds, and hands into our work, we are happier, healthier, and produce better results. Yet, most struggle to understand exactly why we engage in some environments, and don’t in others.
Magic introduces the five MAGIC keys of employee engagement—Meaning, Autonomy, Growth, Impact, and Connection—and shows how leaders can help employees achieve higher levels of engagement, as well as how employees can be more successful by taking ownership for their own MAGIC.
The Research
Based on over 14 million employee survey responses across 70 countries—the most extensive employee engagement survey database of its kind—Magic combines principles of psychology and motivation with solid business concepts. Written by internationally recognized experts in leadership and employee engagement, Dr. Tracy Maylett and Dr. Paul Warner, Magic provides actionable advice that will reduce employee attrition, encourage initiative, drive growth and profit, and increase personal engagement in one’s work.
Engaging Content
In this book, leaders and employees will find real-world case studies, exercises, assessments, thought-provoking questions, and suggestions that increase engagement on the individual, manager, and organizational levels.

Content Inc.
How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Joe Pulizzi
The NEW Rulebook for Entrepreneurial Success What’s the surest way to startup failure? Follow old, outdated rules. In Content Inc., one of today’s most sought-after content-marketing strategists reveals a new model for entrepreneurial success. Simply put, it’s about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience.
Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It’s a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds. The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective.
It’s a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine’s list of fastest growing private companies for three years straight. It’s also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you’ll be able to sell pretty much anything you want. Today’s markets are more dynamic and customers are more fickle than ever before. Why would you put all your eggs in one basket before securing a loyal customer base? Content Inc. shows you how to get customers first and develop products later. It’s the best way to build a solid, long-lasting business positioned for today’s content-driven world.
This is the simple but profoundly successful entrepreneurial approach of one of today’s most creative business minds. A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked to code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business.
Connect these six pieces like a puzzle, and before you know it, you’ll be running your own profitable, scalable business. Pulizzi walks you step by step through the process, based on his own success (and failures) and real-world multi-million dollar examples from multiple industries and countries. Whether you’re seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. provides everything you need to reverse-engineer the traditional entrepreneurial model for better, more sustainable success.
Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, professional speaker, and podcaster. He is the founder of several startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014. CMI produces Content Marketing World, the world’s largest content marketing event, and publishes the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. Pulizzi’s book Epic Content Marketing was named one of Fortune magazine’s Five Must Read Business Books of the Year.

Nonstop Sales Boom
Powerful Strategies to Drive Consistent Growth Year After Year
by Colleen Francis
In this interview I talk with a sales professional that rally knows his business. We have a fun time chatting and reminiscing, but in the end what comes through is that sales is a profession and should be approached on that level.
Do your company’s sales results lurch between highs and lows–with the end of each quarter reduced to a mad scramble to meet quota? For many sales organizations, the pattern is commonplace and unshakeable. Nonstop Sales Boom explains how to break this unhealthy cycle and achieve strong, steady results every quarter, from every member of the team. The secret is to broaden the focus from merely closing deals to actively nurturing the four critical stages of client engagement.
When companies concentrate on only one or two of these areas, their results become erratic. With the field-tested strategies in Nonstop Sales Boom, readers will learn how to systematically attract a regular flow of prospects and move them smoothly through the pipeline. Packed with enlightening examples of sales disasters and standouts, this practical guide brings balance to the selling process, reliability to revenues, and booming sales all year long.

It’s My Pleasure
The Impact of Extraordinary Talent and a Compelling Culture
by Dee Ann Turner
I have a charming conversation with the wonderfully accented Dee Ann who’s commitment to the people and the business she helps run comes through in this heartfelt interview.
Businesses are built by growing relationships with customers. Culture is created by the stories those relationships tell. Two of the most important differentiators of a business are its talent and its culture. Talent energized by a compelling culture will drive organizational success and provide innovative growth opportunities for both the business and the individual.
Based on her more than thirty years at Chick-fil-A, most of which have been spent as Vice President, Corporate Talent, Dee Ann Turner shares how Chick-fil-A has built a devoted talent and fan base that spans generations. It’s My Pleasure tells powerful stories and provides practical applications on how to develop extraordinary talent able to build and stimulate a company’s culture.

Contagious Culture
Show Up, Set the Tone, and Intentionally Create an Organization that Thrives
by Anese Cavanaugh
You are about to enter a new era of leadership. With more competition, more connectedness, and more opportunities than ever before, this exciting new era demands a workplace culture that is collaborative, productive, energized, and contagious. A culture that encourages extraordinary growth and innovation. A culture that starts with you showing up, setting the tone, and lighting the fire
This is Contagious Culture, a game-changing guide to transforming corporate culture from within, developed by the award-winning creator of The IEP Method to strengthen your Intentional Energetic Presence. This is more than a leadership book this is your future calling.
Award-winning organizational advisor Anese Cavanaugh reveals the secrets of IEP Intentional Energetic Presence for transforming your workplace and your life.
The key to any company s success lies in its culture. This game-changing guide shows you how to shape and revitalize this culture by setting the tone, engaging the team, and creating a dynamic working environment that encourages growth, productivity, and innovation. It all starts with you
Contagious Culture is so much more than a leadership guide. It s a complete cultural mind-shift that s not only exciting for you and your team it s absolutely, positively contagious.
Anese Cavanaugh is an award-winning speaker, advisor, teacher, and thinking partner to some of today s most innovative organizations and business leaders. In addition to creating and teaching the IEP Method(R), she writes a regular Showing Up column on Inc.com and contributes to other publications that include The Huffington Post and CEO.com.”

The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels Hardcover
by Alex Epstein
For decades, environmentalists have told us that using fossil fuels is a self-destructive addiction that will destroy our planet. Yet at the same time, by every measure of human well-being, from life expectancy to clean water to climate safety, life has been getting better and better.
The explanation, energy expert Alex Epstein argues in The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, is that we usually hear only one side of the story. We’re taught to think only of the negatives of fossil fuels, their risks and side effects, but not their positives—their unique ability to provide cheap, reliable energy for a world of seven billion people. And the moral significance of cheap, reliable energy, Epstein argues, is woefully underrated. Energy is our ability to improve every single aspect of life, whether economic or environmental.
If we look at the big picture of fossil fuels compared with the alternatives, the overall impact of using fossil fuels is to make the world a far better place. We are morally obligated to use more fossil fuels for the sake of our economy and our environment. Drawing on original insights and cutting-edge research, Epstein argues that most of what we hear about fossil fuels is a myth.

Think to Win
Unleashing the Power of Strategic Thinking
by Paul Butler, John F. Manfredi, Peter Klein
The proven plan for making strategic thinking part of any organization s DNA to drive sustainable growth
In today s ultra-competitive business world, the difference between success and failure lies in the ability to get every employee to think and behave like a strategist.
“Think to Win” helps business leaders expand strategic thinking out of the purview of the elite few and into the company culture as whole. It offers a simple, proven approach to analyzing and solving old or new challenges and provides a common language anyone at any level in the organization can understand.”

The Purpose Is Profit
The Truth about Starting and Building Your Own Business
by Ed “Skip” McLaughlin, Wyn Lydecker and Paul McLaughlin
In this Business book interview I have a great chat with Ed and we meander through a fascinating series of topics that relate to this informative and insightful book. If you’re tired of working for others, dealing with office politics or eager for control and more money this books for you. When he left his high-level corporate position to start not one but two new businesses, his colleague’s reaction was disbelief:
People told me I was crazy. “You are going to fail!”
One of his businesses did fail, but the other thrived. Ed bootstrapped it into an Inc. 500 company and later sold it to a Fortune 100 company. Now, you can learn from his experience–what to do and what not to do–to create your own successful startup. The Purpose Is Profit eliminates the mystery of becoming an entrepreneur.
You will learn:
Why distinctive competence trumps passion
Where and when to get funding without losing control
How to build an entrepreneurial brand that lasts
Why profit should be factored into every business decision
How ethical behavior breeds trust and unlocks profit
As a bonus, The Purpose Is Profit includes two manuals that you will find extremely useful if your in business:
The Startup Roadmap details the 21 steps you should take to build a profitable business.
The Startup Funding Guide delivers the tools you need to fund your business.

It’s Already Inside
Nurturing Your Innate Leadership for Business and Life Success
by Robert S. Murray
Robert Murray knows the answer for you is “Yes.” You simply have to discover and cultivate those talents you’ve always had. Whether you want to be CEO of a large corporation, lead a sales team, inspire your organization, or just be a better person, “It’s Already Inside” can show you, in practical ways with real-life examples, how to tap into your innate leadership skills to get the job done, encourage those around you to succeed, and to bring fulfillment and purpose to your life.
Packed with personal stories and real-life examples, with tips from rock star Billy Idol, and lessons from Grizzly Bears and Mount Kilimanjaro, NASA and teenagers, “It’s Already Inside” will take you on a leadership journey that will inspire you to continue the journey for the rest of your life.

The Marketing Revolution in Politics
What Recent U.S. Presidential Campaigns Can Teach Us About Effective Marketing
by Bruce I. Newman
In 2008, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign used an innovative combination of social media, big data, and micro-targeting to win the White House. In 2012, the campaign did it again, further honing those marketing tools and demonstrating that political marketing is on the cutting edge when it comes to effective branding, advertising, and relationship-building.
The challenges facing a presidential campaign may be unique to the political arena, but the creative solutions are not. The Marketing Revolution in Politics shows how recent US presidential campaigns have adopted the latest marketing techniques and how organizations in the for-profit and non-profit sectors can benefit from their example. Distilling the marketing practices of successful political campaigns down into seven key lessons, Bruce I. Newman shows how organizations of any size can apply the same innovative, creative, and cost-effective marketing tactics as today’s presidential hopefuls.
A compelling study of marketing in the make-or-break world of American politics, this book should be a must-read for managers, students of marketing and political marketing, and anyone interested in learning more about how presidential campaigns operate.

Simple Sabotage
A Modern Field Manual for Detecting and Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace
by Robert M. Galford, Bob Frisch, Cary Greene
Inspired by the Simple Sabotage Field Manual released by the Office of Strategic Services in 1944 to train European resistors, this is the essential handbook to help stamp out unintentional sabotage in any working group, from major corporations to volunteer PTA committees.
In 1944, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the predecessor of today’s CIA—issued the Simple Sabotage Field Manual that detailed sabotage techniques designed to demoralize the enemy. One section focused on eight incredibly subtle—and devastatingly destructive—tactics for sabotaging the decision-making processes of organizations. While the manual was written decades ago, these sabotage tactics thrive undetected in organizations today:
Everyone has been faced with someone who has used these tactics, even when they have meant well. Filled with proven strategies and techniques, this brief, clever book outlines the counter-sabotage measures to detect and reduce the impact of these eight classic sabotage tactics to improve productivity, spur creativity, and engender better collegial relationships.

Be Bad First
Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future
by Erika Andersen
We are operating in a world defined by constant connection, rapid change, and abundant choices. News that once took months, even years, to spread now reaches across the globe in seconds. Advances in medicine and science are pushing boundaries with gene therapy and stem cell transplants. And decisions about where and how to work and live are nearly endless.
As new knowledge—and the possibilities that arise from that knowledge—propels us forward, leadership readiness expert and renowned author Erika Andersen suggests that success in today’s world requires the ability to acquire new knowledge and skills quickly and continuously—in spite of our mixed feelings about being a novice.
In this book Erika explores how we can become masters of mastery; proficient in the kind of high-payoff learning that’s needed today. With assessments and exercises at the close of every chapter, she encourages readers to embrace being bad on the way to being great—to be novices over and over again as we seek to learn and acquire the new skills that will allow us to thrive in this fast-changing world.

Peril of Thyself
by Mark Mozeson
After 30 years of clawing his way to the top, Fred Fallon is within reach of becoming CEO of global professional services giant -Spectrum. To become the anointed successor to Arthur Hegland, Fallon must agree to support a divestiture he believes will threaten his success. Will he compromise to achieve his dream orwill he find some way to have it all on his terms? What consequences lie ahead with each alternative?
As a young star in the management consulting world with great ambition, Mitch Howard is selected by an investor group to start a firm called Velos. He assembles a great team that offers him the best chance of success. He finds over time that while he enjoys the privileges of leadership, the ambitions and aspirations of others forces him into situations where he cannot keep promises to his people and he loses their trust. As he becomes vulnerable in the eyes of his recalcitrant team and his investors he needs to take action to keep the business on the right path. Can he navigate a path to success or will his leadership dream slip away? These are two stories, intertwined and also parallel in the way the personal attributes of an organization’s leader seals an organization’s fate.

Driven to Delight
Delivering World-Class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz Way
by Joseph Michelli
Filled with exclusive front-seat insights from Mercedes-Benz employees, eye-opening testimonials from passionate Mercedes-Benz fans, and solid nuts-and-bolts advice for creating your own consumer-aligned road map, Driven to Delight will help you retool your strategies, reignite your customers, and refuel your team for the long haul.
This is the story of how an organization became Driven to Delight. It reveals the action plan Mercedes-Benz USA used to catapult the company to first place rankings in national customer satisfaction studies while at the same time growing sales and profits. With unprecedented access to company personnel, customer experience expert Joseph Michelli charts the journey the company took and identifies the all-important keys to driving delight in any customer-based organization. You ll learn how to:
These proven techniques are part of the Mercedes-Benz USA Driven to Delight culture which sets a new gold standard in customer service, employee engagement, and peak performance. You ll find step-by-step strategies that can be customized to fit your business model and customer needs. You ll discover invaluable tools like Vision Mapping, Customer Journey Wheels, Customer-Centric Strategy and Resource Planning Processes –plus 20 Key Questions you can use to diagnose your progress and steer your company in the right direction.
Along the way, you’ll get a rare first-hand comprehensive view of a world-class company in action. You ll see how a best or nothing organization became customer obsessed, mile after mile, year after year. Most importantly, you ll learn how to ramp up your own customer experience, rev up your customer commitment, and take your customers on a journey that s bound to delight–the Mercedes-Benz way.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship
A Growth Model for Europe Beyond the Crisis
by Daria Tataj
To increase productivity and create value, businesses and companies need to innovate. But how is innovation created? And how can entire regions, countries, and continents innovate in a fast changing world where the old economies have broken down?
Dr. Tataj proposes a replicable model for innovation based on a concept of an entrepreneurship-driven Knowledge Triangle: a coordinated network of research institutes, universities and businesses. Analyzing networking innovation models in Europe, the United States, and China, Innovation and Entrepreneurship is the first comprehensive attempt to explain a new model of collaborative networks designed to boost growth in Europe.

If You Really Want to Change the World
A Guide to Creating, Building, and Sustaining Breakthrough Ventures
by Henry Kressel, Norman Winarsky
Silicon Valley’s latest trend for creating new ventures is based on trial and error: test market needs with new product concepts and a minimum amount of capital, expect that the product may not meet the market need, so fail fast and try another product with the hope that a product-market fit will eventually emerge. But this fail fast, step-and-pivot philosophy is like taking a random walk in the forest without a compass. If You Really Want to Change the World is about helping entrepreneurs find true north.
Henry Kressel and Norman Winarsky—technologists, inventors, and investors with stellar track records—provide a guide for those who wish to create a market-leading company that will have a real impact: a disciplined and staged approach they have used to launch, invest in, and develop scores of highly successful companies.
If You Really Want to Change the World leads entrepreneurs through the critical stages of venture development, from concept to acquisition or public offering to maintaining a rich culture of innovation in the company. It is a guide by innovators for innovators, with approaches that are practical and timeless.

RE:THiNK
11 surprising things you should do now to win retail customers in the digital age
by Jennie Gilbert, James Kane Jr.
Independent retailers of durable goods like appliances, furniture, mattresses and home electronics don’t have time or money to waste trying to adopt the latest broader retail fads. You need practical, actionable advice that is grounded in the way retail consumers shop for the products you sell right now.
That’s the purpose of this book: to answer these questions clearly and efficiently, focusing on 11 tactics anyone in durable goods retail can implement to beat your competition, no matter how big or small they might be.
This insight is the result of direct consumer feedback collected through proprietary research conducted with consumers across the country. What we learned was shocking to us, and we promise it will absolutely challenge some fundamental assumptions you make about your own business.

Driven by Difference
How Great Companies Fuel Innovation Through Diversity
by David Livermore
Today’s workforce is more diverse than ever before. But despite new perspectives and talents, the promise of increased innovation rarely materializes.
Why are so few businesses seeing results? Studies show that diverse teams are more creative than homogenous ones, but only when they are managed effectively. The secret is to minimize conflict while maximizing the informational diversity found in varied values and experiences. To do this, both leaders and team members need a high level of cultural intelligence.
Drawing on success stories from Google, Alibaba, Novartis, and other groundbreaking companies, Driven by Difference identifies the management practices necessary to guide multicultural teams to innovation. Cultural differences can lead to gridlock, or they can catalyze innovation and growth. This research-based plan turns diversity’s potential into economic reality.

Collective Disruption
How Corporations & Startups Can Co-Create Transformative New Businesses
by Michael Docherty
Too often, disruption is a bad word something you don’t see coming. It doesn’t have to be that way. This book is about changing that paradigm and learning to embrace disruption through collaboration. Whether you’re an executive trying to drive growth in a change-resistant organization or an entrepreneur with a big idea and looking for corporate partnerships, this book is for you.
Collective Disruption provides a road map and framework for co-creating new businesses. Many startups excel at using speed and agility to incubate breakthrough ideas, but lack access to brands and distribution for scale. Large companies and startups can help each other. They can collaborate earlier and more deeply in creating and scaling transformative innovation and new business opportunities.
Collective Disruption makes the case for corporations and startups to partner in new ways to co-create new businesses.
Docherty has lived in both of these worlds and draws on decades of experience as well as interviews and case studies from scores of leading companies and successful startups applying these principles today.

Operational Empowerment
Collaborate, Innovate, and Engage to Beat the Competition
by Shawn Casemore
In today’s competitive global environment, it takes more than the pursuit of operational excellence for a business to succeed. If you want to maximize your potential, improve your productivity, and increase your profits you need to engage the people who offer the best ideas, sharpest insights, and smartest solutions available. In other words, you need to empower your employees.
This practical guide from an experienced leader in Operational Management fuses traditional operational tactics with the popular growing field of employee empowerment. This unique, integrated approach has proven to be the best method for surviving in the toughest of markets―and beating the competition at their own game.
Instead of looking for inspiration in other businesses’ best practices, author Shawn Casemore urges you to seek ideas and solutions internally―by engaging your own employees and challenging them to consistently introduce improvements that make their jobs easier, and your organization more productive.
You’ll learn how to implement a structured approach to performance and productivity that disrupts the silo mentality, drives innovation, encourages collaboration, and empowers employees―to reach even higher levels of operational excellence. Along the way, you’ll find illuminating case studies of the world’s most empowering employers, from Black & Decker and PepsiCo to McDonald’s and Amazon. And you’ll discover proven strategies to turn simple human connections into company-wide initiatives that will inspire every employee to be the best they can possibly be.

Millennials Who Manage
How to Overcome Workplace Perceptions and Become a Great Leader
by Chip Espinoza, Joel Schwarzbart
Millennials will be our next great generation of leaders. Today, however, as they move into management, they face difficult practical challenges. Millennials Who Manage is a complete, research-based guide to overcoming those challenges, delivering outstanding performance, and getting recognized for it.
Reflecting their extensive enterprise consulting and research experience, the authors show how to transition more smoothly into management. You will gain insight into earning the respect of peers and “elders” that you are now leading, as well as your manager. You will discover you can achieve success your way, without compromising who you are or becoming someone you are not.
You’ll learn management skills that arguably come naturally to Millennials. Prepare to explore what really motivates Boomers and Xers whose formative experiences were different from yours and how to guide them beyond today’s unhelpful stereotypes about Millennials. You’ll also master the specific management and leadership competencies you need most right now—whether you’re moving into frontline management or the CEO’s office!

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy
How to Choose and Execute the Right Approach
by Martin Reeves, Knut Haanaes, Janmejaya Sinha
Executives are bombarded with bestselling ideas and best practices for achieving competitive advantage, but many of these ideas and practices contradict each other. Should you aim to be big or fast? Should you create a blue ocean, be adaptive, play to win—or forget about a sustainable competitive advantage altogether? In a business environment that is changing faster and becoming more uncertain and complex almost by the day, it’s never been more important—or more difficult—to choose the right approach to strategy.
In this book, The Boston Consulting Group’s Martin Reeves, Knut Haanæs, and Janmejaya Sinha offer a proven method to determine the strategy approach that is best for your company. They start by helping you assess your business environment—how unpredictable it is, how much power you have to change it, and how harsh it is—a critical component of getting strategy right.
They show how existing strategy approaches sort into five categories—Be Big, Be Fast, Be First, Be the Orchestrator, or simply Be Viable—depending on the extent of predictability, malleability, and harshness. In-depth explanations of each of these approaches will provide critical insight to help you match your approach to strategy to your environment, determine when and how to execute each one, and avoid a potentially fatal mismatch.

Mastering the New Media Landscape
Embrace the Micromedia Mindset
by Barbara Cave Henricks, Rusty Shelton
The giant brands that once dominated the media landscape—Oprah, the New York Times, NPR, CNN—have seen their monopoly on public attention smashed by the Internet and now find themselves competing with individuals and brands in a sea of micromedia: websites, social media, blogs, podcasts, and more.
Ace publicists and marketers Barbara Cave Henricks and Rusty Shelton show that to navigate through this modern terrain, you need to think more like a media executive than a marketer. The key lies in mastering three crucial categories of media—earned, owned, and rented—and knowing how to integrate each for maximum success. By using this proven strategy, you can create a positive feedback loop that will generate massive momentum and grow a large, loyal audience for your message.

Driving Demand
Transforming B2B Marketing to Meet the Needs of the Modern Buyer
by Carlos Hidalgo
The way that buyers buy products and services has been changing for years. Customers are more informed, aware of their choices and smarter about purchasing decisions. Companies that want to survive in this buyer-led digital age have to become much more customer focused or they will wither away.
Author Carlos Hidalgo understands how companies need to change their marketing and sales functions to provide customers with information, service and relationship to make a smart purchasing choice.
This is a guidebook for companies that want to transform, but are perplexed by how to change. It is not enough to simply speak about ‘change management’ in an organization. Change management has to begin with a process that is first fully planned providing the details of how people, process, content, technology, and KPIs will be aligned throughout the organization to ensure a common demand generation approach that is federated across the organization.
In this book, Hidalgo provides a prescriptive road-map that organizations can follow to ensure that the changes that are made become part of the DNA of their organization. This ensures that true transformation occurs—doing things differently instead of just doing different things.

Serial Winner
5 Actions to Create Your Cycle of Success
by Larry Weidel
How Anyone Can Win Again and Again. We all know people who seem to move from success to success, with barely a pause or dip in between. They’re always excited about the next big project or goal. When trouble comes, they land on their feet. They are role models and opinion makers who lead rewarding lives. In a world full of people who almost win, these are the few who do it repeatedly and consistently.
Larry Weidel has benefited tremendously from the mentorship of some of these serial winners. Through inspiring and funny stories and no-nonsense advice, Larry exposes the myths and facts about successful people and shares essential insights into achieving whatever you want in life. Whether you’re just starting a venture or looking to get out of a longstanding rut, Serial Winner shows you the steps for creating a regular pattern of success.
A USA Today Bestseller
Inc. Magazine Top 100 Business Book and Top 10 Leadership book of 2015
Axiom Business Book Gold Award Winner

Myths and Mortals
Family Business Leadership and Succession Planning Hardcover
by Andrew Keyt
Myths & Mortals, Family Business Leadership and Succession Planning provides insights and strategies for successors of family businesses.  Successors often find themselves in the shadow of their parents making it difficult to establish credibility in the family business and tap into their own strengths. The stress of emulating a parent begins to clash with who they are and who they want to be as a leader.
Written by internationally known business strategist and succession planning expert Andrew Keyt, this guide shows you how to establish credibility, take your place at the head of the table, and run your business your way. In groundbreaking research, Keyt interviewed more than 25 successors of family business legends including Massimo Ferragamo, Bill Wrigley Jr., Christie Hefner, and John Tyson to find out how they overcame the challenges successors commonly face.The analysis from that study formed the basis for the strategies presented here—to help you win the loyalty of those stuck in the old way of doing business, and still focused on their former leader’s vision. You’ll learn how to take charge without sacrificing your own leadership style, and how to get everyone on board with your vision for the business.
Growing up in the shadow of legendary family business leaders creates a unique challenge for successors to the leadership position. You cannot remove the emotional power of family dynamics from the business, but you can change how you choose to react to it. To be successful, you need to create a sense of identity and credibility, and step out of the shadows of your forbears. This guide provides strategies for doing just that, so you can take the reins and be the effective leader your business needs.
Credibility is elemental to business leadership, but establishing that credibility is the successor’s biggest challenge. Myths & Mortals, Family Business Leadership and Succession Planning helps you plan around the obstacles and avoid common missteps so you can lead more effectively right out of the gate.

First, Fast, Fearless
How to Lead Like a Navy SEAL
by Brian “Iron Ed” Hiner
Beyond extreme physical and combat achievements, SEALs are known for mental toughness, bias for action, decisiveness, creative thinking, adaptability, and perseverance―all under extreme stress. They get things done through, by, and with others. SEALs have a unique way of approaching every challenge and opportunity that enables them to do what others can’t―or simply won’t.
Competing in the global economy isn’t unlike guerrilla warfare. Your competitors come at you from unexpected places with surprising force, and the marketplace is constantly shifting. As a leader, what do you do to empower your business and your people not only to survive but to thrive―and win?
First, Fast, Fearless is a practical guide for the business leader who wants to learn from the best of the best how to build and lead effective teams in conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and constant change.
You may not be facing jihadists in the mountains of Afghanistan and the streets of Iraq like Hiner did. But just as his SEALs depended on him to lead them on successful missions and safe passage home, your people are counting on you to empower them, defeat the competition, and forge paths to greater success.

RESULTS
The Future Of Pharmaceutical And Healthcare Marketing
by Scott Weintraub, R.J. Lewis, Roger Zan, Brad Sitler
Disruption creates opportunity for those who embrace change. New winners and losers will emerge. This book will help you and your companies thrive in the age of disruption and navigate a changing environment. The informational and technological revolutions have forever changed the practice of medicine.
We analyze data in a flash and marketers deliver it with pinpoint accuracy at just the right moment. When patients put their trust in our brands and place their lives in our hands, marketers have to quickly analyze the data accessible to us so we can deliver the right information at the right time, all while navigating the complexities of industry regulations.
Timely messaging through the patient journey provides marketers today with an unprecedented opportunity. We must capitalize on this opportunity in order to stay relevant and profitable in the changing landscape. Results shows you the biggest trends happening now so you can be heard above the noise, deliver meaningful value, and build real brand loyalty to drive your pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing far into the future.
This book is essential reading for developers, manufacturers, and marketers of pharmaceutical and healthcare companies as well as the agencies, partners, publishers, suppliers and other service providers that support them in their marketing efforts. Authors RJ Lewis, Scott Weintraub, Brad Sitler, Joanne McHugh, and Roger Zan each share key insights into the growing trends in healthcare that you need to understand in order to better market your products.

Beyond Fair Trade Coffee
How One Small Coffee Company Helped Transform a Hillside Village in Thailand
by Mark Pendergrast
“What does compassionate capitalism look like? Mark Pendergrast shows us in this enlightening story of tribal life, opium, missionaries, market trends, a Thai antiques dealer, a mining entrepreneur and coffee.” Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal
The Akha hill tribe of Thailand has a long, tumultuous history. Politics, economics, violence, prejudice, and deforestation consistently worked against the Akha’s desire to move away from their dependency on opium production and create a stable future for their children. That all changed in 2006 when prominent businessman John Darch met entrepreneur Wicha Promyong. Their meeting resulted in the establishment of an equal partnership business venture that goes beyond Fair Trade: the Doi Chaang Coffee Company.
Beyond Fair Trade tells the story of the growth of this unique partnership, its successes and challenges, and the people behind it.

Power Through Partnership
How Women Lead Better Together Paperback
by Betsy Polk and Maggie Ellis Chotas
Drawing from their own twelve-year partnership and from interviews with 125 women business partners across the world, Betsy Polk and Maggie Chotas have learned something powerful: when women work together, they discover a level of support, balance, confidence, and accountability and a freedom to be themselves that is rarely found in other work relationships.
Heroic male partnerships are a staple business success story, but female partnerships rarely receive the same kind of attention. Power Through Partnership is a call for women to recognize and build on the inherent strengths that make them uniquely able to create successful trust-based professional relationships. Polk and Chotas demolish the myths that keep women from collaborating and then offer readers advice for handling potential challenges-like finding the best partner, dealing with conflict, facing fears, taking risks, and knowing when to let go of a partnership.
Featuring lessons learned from women partners in all kinds of industries, this book shows that when women collaborate-combining complementary skills, pushing ego aside, and supporting each other-they can work as full equals to achieve something that’s exponentially greater than the achievements of the two working alone.

Authentic leadership
Discover and live your essential mission
by Bas Blekkingh
You are a successful leader, you have a lot of responsibility, and for years you have loved your work, but something seems to be missing. Some of the fulfillment you used to feel in your job, even in your life, seems to have ebbed away. Something is blocking you and you can’t get a grip on the reason.
You’re looking for growth but you seem to be stuck in a holding pattern. This book looks at all these questions and gives the reader the tools and direction to get more satisfaction in your job and life.
Based on the field-tested seven layer model, where each layer brings you closer to your purpose, you will discover answers to some of the essential questions of work and life:

* What do you want to achieve in life?
* What are your values?
* What do you stand for?
* What is your mission and how do you make it happen in real life?

The exercises in Authentic leadership will help you to be a leader who inspires those around you while becoming happier and more fulfilled yourself. Authentic leadership is a sometimes challenging book that will inspire you to create an environment where achievement and fulfillment positively reinforce each other, whether you are a manager, coach, consultant, professional or teacher.

Monster Loyalty
How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics
by Jackie Huba
Famous for her avant-garde outfits, over-the-top per­formances, and addictive dance beats, Lady Gaga is one of the most successful pop musicians of all time. But behind her showmanship lies another achievement: her wildly successful strategy for attracting and keeping insanely loyal fans.
She’s one of the most popular social media voices in the world with more than 33 million Twitter followers and 55 million Facebook fans. And she got there by methodically building a grassroots base of what she calls her “Little Monsters”—passionate fans who look to her not just for music but also for joy, inspiration, and a sense of community. Love her or hate her, you can’t ignore Lady Gaga. And while not all businesses want to stand out the way she does, any business can win big by creating monster loyalty.

Small Business Owner’s Guide To Local Lead Generation
Proven Strategies & Tips To Grow Your Business!
by Kevin Jordan
with Ray L. Perry, Justin Sturges, Phil Singleton, Mark Z. Fortune as contributing authors
There is no way the small business owners can out-spend big brands in their markets. However in the local marketing arena, it’s another story, one with a positive ending for any small business.
With the right strategies and tactics, it’s easy to attract and engage more ideal customers right in your backyard – and as a locally owned business, these are the only leads you really care about, anyway. People prefer doing business with folks they know, like, and trust and they love being able to support local businesses in their own communities. “If you build it, they will come” only works in the movies. You need a simple, surefire way to market your small business, and one that won’t break the bank or distract you from your primary role in your business.
If your business is struggling to get the phone ringing and door swinging, the ideas in this book can help you experience a complete turnaround. Read, learn, and take action. You’re about to get proven marketing solutions for small businesses from a group of Duct Tape Marketers known for helping their local business clients experience exponential growth.

Humans Are Underrated
What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will
by Geoff Colvin
It’s easy to imagine a nightmare scenario in which computers simply take over most of the tasks that people now get paid to do. While we’ll still need high-level decision makers and computer developers, those tasks won’t keep most working-age people employed or allow their living standard to rise. The unavoidable question—will millions of people lose out, unable to best the machine?—is increasingly dominating business, education, economics, and policy.
The bestselling author of Talent Is Overrated explains how the skills the economy values are changing in historic ways. The abilities that will prove most essential to our success are no longer the technical, classroom-taught left-brain skills that economic advances have demanded from workers in the past. Instead, our greatest advantage lies in what we humans are most powerfully driven to do for and with one another, arising from our deepest, most essentially human abilities—empathy, creativity, social sensitivity, storytelling, humor, building relationships, and expressing ourselves with greater power than logic can ever achieve. This is how we create durable value that is not easily replicated by technology—because we’re hardwired to want it from humans.
As technology advances, we shouldn’t focus on beating computers at what they do—we’ll lose that contest. Instead, we must develop our most essential human abilities and teach our kids to value not just technology but also the richness of interpersonal experience. They will be the most valuable people in our world because of it. Colvin proves that to a far greater degree than most of us ever imagined, we already have what it takes to be great.

Seven Disciplines of A Leader
How to Help Your People, Team and Organization Achieve Maximum Effectiveness
by Jeff Wolf
This is a comprehensive book for building better leaders. In this interview, Jeff shares the secrets of great leadership to help others align professional development and exemplify these traits themselves. Each of the Disciplines is valuable on its own, but together they add up to more than a sum of their parts, and work synergistically to propel leaders to higher and higher effectiveness and companies to better and better business. From initiative, to planning, to community service, readers will gain deep insight into what separates the good from the great, and how organizations can nurture these qualities in their employees with leadership potential.
A good leader gets results, but a great leader inspires every single member of the team to reach their utmost potential every single time. A great leader makes everyone shine, and provides the vision, the tools, and the support people need to do their very best work. This book describes how it’s done, and how greatness can be learned.

* Discover the traits that make leaders great
* Align leadership development training to maximize potential
* Foster the right attitudes and behaviors for better outcomes
* Build a culture of sustainable success that permeates the organization

Individual achievement is great, but fostering a culture of achievement sends business into the future on an upward trajectory. It’s more than just a single inspired employee; it’s about recognizing the signs of potential leadership and nurturing them to fruition throughout the organization. Seven Disciplines of A Leader is the field guide to great leadership.

The Simplicity Cycle
A Field Guide to Making Things Better Without Making Them Worse
by Dan Ward
The award-winning engineer, Air Force lieutenant colonel, and author of F.I.R.E offers a road map for designing winning new products, services, and business models, and shows how to avoid complexity-related pitfalls in the process. With a foreword by design guru Don Norman.
Humans make things every day, whether it’s composing an e-mail, cooking a meal, or constructing the Mars Rover. While complexity is often necessary in the development process, unnecessary complexity adds complications.The Simplicity Cycleprovides the secret to striking the proper balance. Dan Ward shines a light on how complexity affects the things we make for good or ill, taking us on a journey through the process of making things, with a particular focus on identifying and avoiding complexity-related pitfalls.
The standard development process involves increasing complexity to improve the outcome, Ward explains. The problem comes when the complexity starts getting in the way-but often we don’t know where that point is until we pass it. He suggests a number of techniques for identifying the problem and fixing it, including how to overcome several types of wrongheaded thinking-such as the idea that complexity and quality are the same. In clear, compelling language, and using his trademark mix of examples from research, personal experience, and pop culture, Ward offers a universal concept, visually described with a single, evolving diagram.

Transforming Business with Program Management
Integrating Strategy, People, Process, Technology, Structure, and Measurement
by Satish P. Subramanian
Organizations need to constantly innovate and improve products and services to maintain a strong competitive position in the market place. The vehicle used by organizations for such constant reinvention is a business transformation program. This book illustrates a tested program management roadmap along with the supporting comprehensive frameworks to successfully execute business transformation programs, formulated strategies, and strategic initiatives. It outlines the steps to successfully transform any business and deliver tangible business outcomes.
This book discusses the ten mandatory steps needed to lead complex, business transformation programs to success. It showcases program management best practices and lessons learned though real-world case studies spanning different industry sectors and functional domains. Transforming Business with Program Management will equip executives, general managers, and program managers with the core skills necessary to effectively plan and implement business transformation strategies that drive sweeping business change and innovation.

How To Write An Inspired Creative Brief
by Howard Ibach
In my 35 years in the advertising industry I have seen a lot of creative briefs but this is the first time I have had the pleasure of sitting down with someone and acutely hashing it out. I find out fresh insights into the document and also chat about why business people have to understand the importance and power that a great creative brief can bring to a project?
This book is a short and graphic textbook that provides a detailed explanation of how to write a communications objectives document called the “creative brief.” We discover why this document is the first step in the creative process used by advertising agencies, in-house creative departments and marketing services companies.