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Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition
Jay Abraham
4.3
Jay Abraham, a trusted advisor to many top corporations,brings together more than two hundred brilliant business-career ideas in this, his first major book. Abraham reveals numerous new profit and personal advancement opportunities "hidden in plain sight" in and around every business organization today. He also demonstrates how all of us can maximize our careers and our incomes by applying fresh ways of looking at our many options in the vast new opportunity society that's around us.
This personal and practical career book is destined to become a new business classic--an idea-fille guide to multiply everyone's growth potential in the prosperous new century ahead.
A handsome, commemorative edition of Peter F. Drucker’s timeless classic work on leadership and management, with a foreword by Jim Collins.
What makes an effective executive?
For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country’s business and management philosophers" (Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management—the executive.
The measure of the executive, 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 mastered:
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 across the annals of business and government, Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
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Recommended by Drew Houston, Ev Williams, Guy Kawasaki, and 15 others.
Drew Houston
CEO/Dropbox
I think one of the most valuable concepts from this book is measuring your time. [source]
Here is a publishing event: the new Mises Institute edition of the classic book that has taught many millions sound economic thinking. It is a hardbound volume, priced very low thanks to special benefactors, and now available in quantity discounts for distribution to your friends, family, and anyone you meet who needs to understand what economics implies for the society, government, and civilization.
Henry Hazlitt wrote this book following his stint at the New York Times as an editorialist. His hope was to reduce the whole teaching of economics to a few principles and explain them in ways that people would never forget. It worked. He relied on some stories by Bastiat and his own impeccable capacity for logical thinking and crystal-clear prose.
He was writing under the influence of Mises himself, of course, but he brought his own special gifts to the project. As just one example, this is the book that made the idea of the "broken window fallacy" so famous.
What thrills us in particular about this new edition is that it is beautiful, it is hardcover, and it is newly typeset for modern readers. It has a full index. It includes a wonderful foreword by Walter Block. It's the right size, shape, and feel – perfect for making this book central to all educational efforts of the future.
This is the book to send to reporters, politicians, pastors, political activists, teachers, or anyone else who needs to know.
Professor Block explains that it was this book that turned him on to economics as a science. He believes that it is probably the most important economics book ever written in the sense that it offers the greatest hope to educating everyone about the meaning of the science.
Written for the non-academic, it has served as the major antidote to fallacies in the popular press, and has appeared in dozens of languages and printings. It's still the quickest way to learn how to think like an economist. And this is why it has been used in the best classrooms more than sixty years.
Many writers have since attempted to beat this book as an introduction, but have never succeeded. Hazlitt's book remains the best. Even if you own this book already, or have several past editions, you will want to have this book as your own as a wonderful testament to its place in the world of ideas.
In putting this edition together, we chose to work from Hazlitt's own first edition because it contains the core of what is crucial here without later updates that only date the book. As with Mises and Human Action, the author's first instincts were the best ones.
Contents:
• Part One: The Lesson • Part Two: The Lesson Applied o The Broken Window o The Blessings of Destruction o Public Works Mean Taxes o Taxes Discourage Production o Credit Diverts Production o The Curse of Machinery o Spread-the-Work Schemes o Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats o The Fetish of Full Employment o Who's "Protected" by Tariffs? o The Drive for Exports o "Parity" Prices o Saving the X Industry o How the Price System Works o "Stabilizing" Commodities o Government Price-Fixing o Minimum Wage Laws o Do Unions Really Raise Wages? o "Enough to Buy Back the Product" o The Function of Profits o The Mirage of Inflation o The Assault on Savings o The Lesson Restated
If you read this book and "Basic Economics" you'll know more than all or your classmates combined about the basic workings of free markets and economics. [source]
Chris Nichols
@fishin_me @IslesFGC @AsSeenOnTv55 @IlhanMN The best economic book written. [source]
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Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.
Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company 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 other companies?"
What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked?
By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.
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 twenty-first century and beyond.
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Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Drew Huston, Ev Williams, and 13 others.
recommends this book because it shows how to create a long lasting company. [source]
Tim O'Reilly
Founder/O'Reilly Media
Built to Last, by James Collins and Jerry Porras. The idea here is that great companies aren't afraid to have strong values. In fact, their cult-like values are what make them stand out from the norm. [source]
Alden Mills
Built to Last focused my daydreaming mind into what it takes to build truly great companies. [source]
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The Feldman method: The words and working philosophy of the world's greatest insurance salesman
Andrew H. Thomson
4.5
Ben Feldman perfected a series of techniques for selling life insurance that earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the most outstanding salesman in history. Drawing on these foolproof techniques, this book offers a step-by-step action plan leading to sales success. You will be able to follow and absorb the working philosophy, the approaches, the closes, presentations and power phrases that made Ben Feldman the greatest insurance salesman in the world.
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness and greatly improve the quality of our lives.
While re-reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s wonderful book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I came across this passage on working crossword puzzles. I think he could just as well be talking about making blackout poems: "There is much to be said in favor of this popular pastime, which in its best form resembles the ancient riddle contests. It is inexpensive and portable, its challenges can be finely graduated so that both novices and experts can enjoy it, and its solution produces a sense of pleasing order that gives one a satisfying feeling of accomplishment. It provides opportunities to experience a mild state of flow to many people who are stranded in airport lounges, who travel on commuter trains, or who are simply whiling away Sunday mornings." [source]
Tom Chatfield
The notion of flow is the idea that there is a state that is characterised by complete immersion in an activity, by a constant response to stimuli, and a perfect match between your ability and the challenge in front of you. [source]
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Faust (illustrated)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
4.0
Goethe’s Faust reworks the late medieval myth of a brilliant scholar so disillusioned he resolves to make a contract with Mephistopheles. The devil will do all he asks on Earth and seeks to grant him a moment in life so glorious that he will wish it to last forever. But if Faust does bid the moment stay, he falls to Mephisto and must serve him after death. In this first part of Goethe’s great work, the embittered thinker and Mephistopheles enter into their agreement, and soon Faust is living a rejuvenated life and winning the love of the beautiful Gretchen. But in this compelling tragedy of arrogance, unfulfilled desire, and self-delusion, Faust heads inexorably toward an infernal destruction.
The best translation of Faust available, this volume provides the original German text and its English counterpart on facing pages. Walter Kaufmann's translation conveys the poetic beauty and rhythm as well as the complex depth of Goethe's language. Includes Part One and selections from Part Two.
This revised edition of Peter Senge’s bestselling classic, The Fifth Discipline, is based on fifteen years of experience in putting the book’s ideas into practice. As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices.
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 updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future.
Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will:
• Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them • Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity • Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets • Teach you to see the forest and the trees • End the struggle between work and personal time
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Recommended by Brian Tracy, Jana Eggers, Josh Brewer, and 2 others.
Jana Eggers
My entrepreneurial and leadership inspiration came from a long line of amazing women in my family that always acted independently and gave me the fire and confidence to chose my path, and some fantastic and inspiring men who always expected me to do more. What I love about 5th Discipline is that it focuses on learning, specifically teaching and inspiring your organization to be a learning org. It is more critical than now than ever before that we be able to learn from customers and the current context of our business for adapting to new challenges. One of my favorite parts of the book is how it teaches teams to work across boundaries -- systems thinking. I've found this builds amazingly cohesive and respectful teams. So this is a business book, but it is really about organizations and how to get them learning and working together for a common purpose. [source]
Josh Brewer
After working at many startups and now running my own company, the one difference I have observed between good and great companies (and products) is how oriented the org is toward learning, The more people in an organization learn, the more value they create for the whole company. [source]
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Creating Wealth: Retire in Ten Years Using Allen's Seven Principles
Robert G. Allen
4.2
Popular speaker, multimillionaire, and author of the all-time bestselling real-estate book Nothing Down, Robert G. Allen knows how to bring you financial success. With his seminars sweeping the nation, Allen is at the cutting edge of strategic wealth creation now more than ever. And in this completely revised edition of his classic bestseller Creating Wealth Allen gives you the basic principles that you need to stop thinking poor and start growing rich.
Moving beyond just real estate, Allen goes straight to the core of people's inner motivations and beliefs about money to give you all the fundamentals of wealth creation. By developing a wealthy mind-set, anyone can take off into financial self-reliance -- and Allen shows you how. He explains the ways in which most of us have been programmed to think that only saving is good and debt and risk are bad, so that in our efforts to gain security, we cheat ourselves out of getting rich. The key to changing that mind-set is Allen's unique integration of real estate with other wealth-generating investments.
In his trademark, easy-to-understand style Allen spells out all his practical applications and shows you how to:
Take advantage of recent tax laws Use leverage to multiply holdings while minimizing risks Benefit from high-yield discount mortgages Acquire long-term profits in gold and silver coins Set up corporations and trusts to protect assets Find the highest rate of return with the greatest liquidity
As Robert Allen has proved in his own life -- becoming a multimillionaire well before he was thirty-five -- it doesn't matter how much or how little money you have when you start as long as you understand the right principles -- timeless principles that can make you a fortune.
The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage
B. Joseph Pine II, James H. Gilmore
4.1
You are what you charge for. And if you're competing solely on the basis of price, then you've been commoditized, offering little or no true differentiation. What would your customers really value? Better yet, for what would they pay a premium? Experiences. The curtain is about to rise, say Pine & Gilmore, on the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which every business is a stage, and companies must design memorable events for which they charge admission.
The breakthrough book for a time-pressed generation. Major features in USA Today, The Washington Post, Boston Herald, Chicago Tribune, and 75 other newspapers, plus Executive Female, USAir, Office Systems, Leaders, and Men's Health. Explains why the information age is not here yet; for now, most people are drowning in the over-information age. If you face too much paper, too much to read, or simply too much to do, this book will change your life.
Consultative Selling: The Hanan Formula for High-Margin Sales at High Levels the Hanan Formula for High-Margin Sales at High Levels
Mack Hanan
4.3
Do you sell products or services? It doesn't matter: What you're really selling is customer profit. You help your customers and clients make profitable business decisions, and you are both rewarded with the fruits of a long-term business relationship. For 40 years, Mack Hanan's Consultative Selling has empowered countless sales professionals to reap maximum success, and the Eighth Edition is here to take them--and you--to the next level, with brand new sections on: Creating a two-tiered sales model to separate consultative sales from commodity sales - Building and using consultative databases for value propositions and proof of performance - Studying your customers' cash flows to win proposals - Using consultative selling strategies on the Web - Coping with--and reversing--the inevitable "no" Consultative Selling is packed with new partnering strategies, cost/benefit analysis templates, detailed monetized value proposition models, outcome-based branding approaches, and powerful consulting tactics that will make your customers' competition--and your own rivals--irrelevant.
Competing in the Third Wave: The Ten Key Management Issues of the Information Age
Jeremy Hope, Tony Hope
3.9
Hope and Hope argue that the "third wave economy" will be one driven by technology, globalization, and deregulation, and that the key to success in this economy will be the ability of organizations to manage knowledge and intellectual assets effectively. Competing in the Third Wave covers ten topics ranging from strategy formulation and business organization to cost management and business philosophy. Surveying and synthesizing new and classic management literature (especially useful for those with an incomplete management education), the authors discuss how each function in an organization must learn to tie its actions to overarching strategic needs and support each other's efforts. A Library Journal Best Business Book of the Year. "Lucid, logical, and compelling."-Upside "The writing is efficient and precise... serves as a valuable source for investigating those management topics most under discussion today."-Industry Week "Cuts through the hype and data clutter to present the key issues facing managers."-The Futurist "A very insightful book for managers trying to gain a competitive edge in their industries."-Academy of Management Executive "A well written book that will be valued by many managers."-National Productivity Review
Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood
Marsha Sinetar
4.1
Discover how to tune in to your inner world and your unique talents; evaluate and build your self-esteem, banish your out-moded network of "shoulds" and liberate yourself from an unfulfilling job with this step-by-step guide to finding work that satisfies your passions.
Creating Your Future: Personal Strategic Planning for Professionals
George L Morrisey
4.1
A practical guide to help professional (within organization and/or independent contractors) use strategic planning for their own professional success and satisfying personal life. Worksheets, checklists, and charts help clarify personal values, financial concerns, career growth objectives, and business interests.
Customer Intimacy: Pick Your Partners, Shape Your Culture, Win Together
Fred Wiersema
3.5
One in three of today's market-leading companies are making use of the practices which bestselling author Fred Wiersema calls 'customer intimacy'. Customer-intimate companies earn their customers' confidence and make use of it to find new ways to further productivity. Suppliers and customers learn to operate as it they were two different aspects of the same organisation, jointly pursuing mutual success. In this book, Wiersema uses a large number of examples from some of the best-known and most successful customer-intimate companies to demonstrate how companies can thrive in today's fiercely competitive environment.
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