The finance basics that experts and top professionals understand. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Finance. Includes how to: ? Analyse a business from its financial reports ? Understand a Profit and Loss account ? Make sense of accounting jargon ? Build a financially sound business plan ? Deal with revenue, profit and cashflow

Sophie Cornish and Holly Tucker are the founders of notonthehighstreet.com, an award-winning, multimillion-pound online marketplace selling thousands of innovative, stylish products. But eight short years ago Sophie and Holly were maxing out their credit cards, trying to secure loans and crossing fingers that their big idea would take off. Now they've written down all the lessons they had to learn the hard way, drawing not just on their experience but also that of the 5,000 independent businesses they work with. With startling honesty, they lay bare the truth about getting started while raising a young family at the same time. They believe that anyone should be able to achieve a great working life on their own terms. Here's how.?The vital essentials of a business plan to win you investment or map out your strategy are set out in an easy step-by-step guide.

Make the right decisions about your products and services by listening effectively to the people that matter – your customers About This Book ? Understand the core components, processes and technologies available for a VOC initiative ? Structure effective VOC programs and turn VOC into actionable product success ? A handy guide to help you identify the hidden needs of your customers and strengthen your relationship with them Who This Book Is For The book is for anyone who needs to get to know their customer, how they feel and what they think about a certain subject. If you are a stakeholder in any project responsible for customer relationships, this book will help you immensely. An awareness of VOC as a topic would be useful, although not essential. What You Will Learn ? Understand different unarticulated needs of your customers ? Deploy effective VOC in your organizations ? Identify and understand the different tools and processes to set up a successful VOC program ? Integrating your findings about your customers into successful products ? Effectively utilize VOC for a successful launch of your product In Detail This book is all about getting to know your customers – what they want and need, what they like and don’t like. Voice of the Customer is one of the most popular forms of market research combining both quantitative and qualitative methods. This book shows you how to engage with customers and understand their wants and needs, likes and dislikes – something which is becoming more in more important with the rise of an increasingly connected world. The book addresses the problem of understanding your customer and engaging with those customers. It also targets people who want to know how to do an effective VOC capture and analysis. As with any engagement/research based initiative, there is also a concern with the ROI. This book shows you how to overcome this problem as well. By the end of this book, you will have a thorough understanding of the relevant stages of a VOC project. It will show you how to devise an effective plan, direct the project to their objectives, and then show you how to collect the voice of the customer, with examples and templates for interviewing and surveying. Style and approach This book is a perfect blend of concepts and real-world use-cases which will help the businesses understand and therefore serve the customers better. Written in a very engaging manner, this book ensures you are able to grasp the theory and apply it in your business seamlessly.

The communication secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Communication. Includes how to: ? Use body language to build rapport with anyone ? Deal with clients and colleagues at all levels ? Get what you want in sales or negotiation ? Excel in meetings and presentations ? Master email and written communication

The time management secrets that experts and top professionals use. Get results fast with this quick, easy guide to the fundamentals of Time Management. Includes how to: ? Identify your biggest priorities and find time to achieve them ? Deal with the biggest hidden time-wasters ? Communicate effectively with colleagues and clients ? Cope with information overload ? Take control of your inbox and voicemail

Why are some products and ideas talked about more than others? Why do some articles make the most emailed list? Why do some YouTube videos go viral? Word-of-mouth. Whether through face-to-face conversations, emails from friends, or online product reviews, the information and opinions we get from others have a strong impact on our own behaviour. Indeed, word-of-mouth generates more than two times the sales of paid advertising and is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.It is between 8.5 and 30 times more effective than traditional media.But want to know the best thing about word-of-mouth? It's available to everyone.Whether you're a Fortune 500 company trying to increase sales, a corner restaurant trying to raise awareness, a non-profit trying to fight obesity, or a newbie politician running for city council, word-of-mouth can help you succeed. And you don't have to have millions of dollars to spend on an advertising budget. You just have to get people to talk.The challenge, though, is how to do that. This book will show you how.

A Godsend for anyone who’s ever suffered that dread of speaking in public!’ If, like almost everyone, you’re petrified of public speaking, the last thing you want is a lecture! And there lies the brilliance of this unique book’s genuinely innovative approach to the issue: Dee Clayton makes the process of overcoming those negative voices in your head (Your ‘Public Speaking Monkeys!’) and becoming an effective speaker lighthearted and fun! A Godsend for anyone who’s ever suffered that dread, Dee’s refreshingly simple yet amazingly effective multiawardwinning approach has already helped thousands to overcome their fears and become effective and confident public speakers. Significantly, the author’s keenly aware that for most of us, effective public speaking isn’t necessarily an end in itself but a means to other ends for example Dee has already helped company directors to persuade more successfully, doctors to win more funding, mediators to influence international decisions and all kinds of business people to fulfil their potential. What’s more, this is a genuinely practical guide! Unlike most ‘self help’ books on the topic (or any other), this one doesn’t just tell you what to do; in her chatty, good-humored style, Dee explains exactly how, sharing her own experiences and coaxing the reader through a programme that doesn’t just work it even makes public speaking enjoyable! Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeysworks so well because its easy, enjoyable style is underpinned by Dee’s solid, real-life experience of speaking publicly to tens of thousands of people first in her highly successful twenty-year marketing career (communicating for UK household brands such as Jacob’s Creek, Pizza Hut and Jammie Dodgers to name but a few) and now as a public speaking training specialist. Equally vitally, the book draws heavily upon the NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) techniques and insights in which Dee is a highly experienced Trainer and Master Practitioner. Taming your Public Speaking Monkeysis a rare find: a self-help book that really helps and best of all the results come to you quickly and stick with you for life!

There is something new in the financial planning world and it is explored to the point that the reader can exploit it in “Hindsight – The Foresight Saga.” Little has been written about the property market and its relationship with the equity markets or the coincidental relationship that that investment relationship has on bankers. This book is aimed at the private investor but also the professional investment manager because it highlights the mechanism that provides for an almost continuous steady flow of positive returns on invested capital and regular savings. The author is a well experienced, highly qualified strategic financial planner and the language used in the book is straightforward and down to earth. The classic marketis identified as a circa fifteen year cycle of at one point inversely correlated market movements that works in direct contrast to a later phase in the classic market TM where property and equity movements are highly correlated in a downward slide. The first having an extremely positive effect on banking and the second, a devastating effect that contributed to bank collapses similar to those in 1979, 1992 and 2008.

The most successful business book of the last decade, Reengineering the Corporation is the pioneering work on the most important topic in business today: achieving dramatic performance improvements. This book leads readers through the radical redesign of a company's processes, organization, and culture to achieve a quantum leap in performance. Michael Hammer and James Champy have updated and revised their milestone work for the New Economy they helped to create -- promising to help corporations save hundreds of millions of dollars more, raise their customer satisfaction still higher, and grow ever more nimble in the years to come.

In the fall of 1930, David Packard left his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, to enroll at Stanford University, where he befriended another freshman, Bill Hewlett. After graduation, Hewlett and Packard decided to throw their lots in together. They tossed a coin to decide whose name should go first on the notice of incorporation, then cast about in search of products to sell. Today, the one-car garage in Palo Alto that housed their first workshop is a California historic landmark: the birthplace of Silicon Valley. And Hewlett-Packard has produced thousands of innovative products for millions of customers throughout the world. Their little company employs 98,400 people and boasts constantly increasing sales that reached $25 billion in 1994. While there are many successful companies, there is only one Hewlett-Packard, because from the very beginning, Hewlett and Packard had a way of doing things that was contrary to the prevailing management strategies. In defining the objectives for their company, Packard and Hewlett wanted more than profits, revenue growth and a constant stream of new, happy customers. Hewlett-Packard success owes a great deal to many factors, including openness to change, an unrelenting will to win, the virtue of sustained hard work and a company-wide commitment to community involvement. As a result, HP now is universally acclaimed as the world most admired technology company; its wildly successful approach to business has been immortalized as The HP Way . In this book, David Packard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his life work and of the truly exceptional company that he and Bill Hewlett started in a garage 55 years ago.

In the two and a half years since the first edition appeared (April 2005), events have unfolded as predicted. Then the consensus among forecasters was that the boom in house prices would cool to an annual 2 or 3% rise over the following years. In fact, in keeping with the ‘winner’s curse’ phase of the cycle described by the author, prices rose by more than 10% per annum in Britain. Harrison’s first book, The Power in the Land, predicted the early 1990s recession. Boom Bust, warned that investing in property is not always a safe bet, because the housing market is subject to a sharp downturn at the end of a remarkably regular 18-year cycle. The crash of 2007/8 occurred exactly as predicted. His forecast was based on a careful study of the evidence from property markets in many countries over the last 200 years. Gordon Brown’s claim, last made in his 2007 Budget speech, that ‘we will never return to the old boom and bust’ has been proved false. The reason for the instability, Harrison explains, is not the housing market itself but the land market on which all buildings stand. Land is in fixed supply ‘ as Mark Twain noted: ‘They’re not making any more of it’. Therefore, as the demand for land for new homes and offices rises with population growth and economic expansion, market forces, which normally increase supply to reduce prices, have the reverse effect: prices rise. This encourages speculation, with banks lending more against escalating asset values and reinforcing the upward spiral. Under existing government policies, the only way land prices can be brought back to affordable levels is a slump, undermining the banking system and causing widespread unemployment and repossessions. This is exactly what happened in America with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. The run on Northern Rock showed the UK economy is not immune. The author reveals that the government’s monetary policy only has a marginal impact on land speculation, but as the Bank of England raises interest rates to curb house price inflation, the main victim is the first-time buyer and the productive economy, especially small businesses. The only way to neutralise the boom bust cycle in the housing market is through a reform of taxation, he claims. ‘This book is an important contribution to an overdue debate.’ Martin Ricketts, Chairman of the Academic Advisory Council of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Professor of Economic Organisation, University of Buckingham. Endorsing the thrust of Harrison’s argument, Prof. Ricketts goes on to acknowledge ‘that insufficient attention has been given by policymakers to the rent of land as socially the most efficient source of public revenue’, and that that will ‘have important practical consequences … for the stability of the economic system’. Economic stability is the objective of Gordon Brown and most governments around the world. Harrison explains how this may be achieved.

Strategy is about identifying why your business matters, not just analysing the competition. Cynthia Montgomery reveals how leaders can embrace the crucial role of The Strategist to really define and drive the objectives and advantages to power their companies forward. Cynthia Montgomery teaches the globally-renowned EOP (Entrepreneur, Owner, President) course at Harvard Business School, one of Harvard’s most oversubscribed executive courses. Participants are all seasoned executives, owners, CEOs, or COOs of privately held companies who pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend, with the goal of learning how to be more effective leaders and how to make their companies more successful. Montgomery’s course teaches them a totally new way to understand leadership, a way that fuses leadership with strategy. Her approach calls for a reset of current thinking about both. She shows that strategy is not just a tool for outwitting the competition – it is the most powerful means a leader has for shaping a firm itself. Montgomery takes the readers through the paces of her world-renowned course, teaching them how to develop the skills and sensibilities that living strategy and real leadership demand. No other book marries strategy and leadership in the same way – a way readers will find challenging, intriguing, and ultimately, inspiring.

Vibrant, game-changing CEO Lisa Messenger shares an insightful account of her rollercoaster ride as the creator and founder of the globally popular Collective Hub, the hip magazine of inspiration for disrupters and innovators of all stripes—with bold ideas on how you can stay on track and remain true to whatever your passion may be. Speaking to the new generation of innovators, game changers, and disrupters who want to succeed in a fast changing and often vexing world, Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing the Entrepreneur is a personal and honest chronicle of Lisa Messenger’s various business endeavors, including her shrewd launch of her innovative entrepreneurial magazine, Collective Hub. Exuding honesty and energy, Lisa blends these wonderfully insightful stories with important business lessons she has learned along the way, such as how she empowered herself in ways that helped her harness her creativity, disrupt the system, and be fearless in all of her endeavors. Inspiring as well as instructive, Messenger’s book offers up other big-think insights such as: -Invest in yourself -Know your “why” -Realize that failure is another word for experience -Break free of the traditional thinking around what a career should look like Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, corporate ladder-climber, or a seasoned business owner, Daring and Disruptive is a powerful and practical guide that can help you dig deep, stay on message, and stay true to your ideas in challenging times (so if you’re thrown to the wolves, you’ll have the strength to come out leading the pack).

With The E-Myth Contractor, Michael E. Gerber launches a series of books that apply the E-Myth to specific types of small businesses. The first is aimed at contractors.This book reveals a radical new mind-set that will free contractors from the tyranny of an unprofitable, unproductive routine. With specific tips on topics as crucial as planning, money and personnel management, The E-Myth Contractor teaches readers how to: Implement the ingenious turnkey system of management a means of creating a business prototype that reflects the business owner's unique set of talents and replicating and distributing them among employees and customers. Recognise and manage the four forms of money income, profit, flow and equity. Harness the power of change to expand the company. The book also provides help on a larger level, leading readers towards becoming business visionaries by relinquishing tactical work and embracing strategic work, by letting go to gain control. Once put into action, Gerber's revolutionary ideas promise not only to help contractors build successful businesses, but successful lives as well.

Whether we love our jobs or not, the amount of work on our plate has reached unsustainable levels. We start each workday anxious about how we will get it all done, and which important tasks will have to be sacrificed again so we can keep our heads above water. We often respond to our out-of-control to-do lists by focusing on being more efficient trying to get more done in less time.According to Josh Davis, Ph.D., we're going about it the wrong way. The answer is not to get more done faster, but rather to create the conditions for at least two awesome hours of peak productivity each day.Neuroscience and psychology research is revealing what those conditions are. Drawing on this research, Davis explains that our minds operate according to complex factors that, when leveraged the right way, can make us truly effective. Davis shows us five deceptively simple strategies to create the conditions for incredible productivity and to restore sanity and balance to our lives: Maximize the moments in our day when we are between tasks, intentionally choosing what to tackle next Schedule tasks based on their cognitive and emotional demands Learn how to direct attention Feed and move our bodies for short-term benefit Identify how our environment affects our focus and alertness We are capable of impressive feats of comprehension, motivation, and performance when our psychological and biological systems are functioning optimally. Two Awesome Hours will show us how to be our most productive every day.

The inside story of the power struggle that rocked Wall Street's most prestigious financial institution What began with a shot over the bow ended in a shocking coup d'etat. In less than four months a group of eight retired executives orchestrated a stunning revolt within Morgan Stanley, the venerable and until recently most successful financial services firm on Wall Street. Now acclaimed journalist and historian Patricia Beard brings together the entire behind-the-scenes story in Blue Blood and Mutiny, a real-life business thriller exposing the tale that shook high finance. In March 2005 the business world woke up to an unprecedented full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal calling for the removal of Morgan Stanley's CEO. It was paid for by a cohort of eight former Morgan Stanley executives, including an ex-chairman and an ex-president, who soon would be dubbed the "Eight Grumpy Old Men." Their target was CEO Philip Purcell, a midwesterner who had come to power following Morgan Stanley's 1997 merger with Dean Witter Discover, where Purcell had been chief executive. In his eight years as CEO, Purcell had presided over a 50 percent decline in stock price since its peak in 2000 and a series of high-profile government and civil lawsuits that had tarnished the company's once-sterling reputation. Just a few months after the Journal ad, Purcell would retire under pressure, and former president John Mack, who had been pushed out by Purcell, was appointed CEO. The "Eight Grumpy Old Men" won the battle.The revolt of the Eight is about more than the stock price, or any bottom-line metrics: it signals a clash of cultures and a battle for the soul of American business. Since its founding, Morgan Stanley has been an elite enterprise guided by J. P. Morgan Jr.'s motto "A First Class Business in a First Class Way." The House of Morgan stood for something larger than success with honor; its ethos was unique some would say sacred and the eight retired executives believed this ideal had been undermined during Purcell's reign.Opening the long-closed doors of a bastion of Wall Street that has maintained the strictest privacy until now, Blue Blood and Mutiny weaves the history of Morgan Stanley with the inside story of the fight for dominance between two competing business cultures one, the collegial meritocracy handed down from the days of J. P. Morgan, and the other, a cold, contemporary corporate model. Here is the season's must-read book for anyone who wants to understand the future of American business.

There's no doubt about it, today's workplace is an uncertain and treacherous territory. Newspaper headlines are proclaiming near record-high levels of unemployment, and, in these tough times, companies are making swift judgments about human capital. The bottom line: No job is safe. But there are tried and true ways to fight off sudden unemployment successfully, and the number one weapon in your arsenal is workplace expert and television and radio personality Stephen Viscusi's career manifesto, Bulletproof Your Job. Based on four simple strategies for dodging the layoff bullet and a long list of ways to implement these strategies, Bulletproof Your Job may save you from your worst enemy at work which just so happens to be you.Quite simply, observe these imperative rules:Be visible. Be easy. Be useful. Be ready. With plenty of distinct action items, dozens of anecdotal illustrations and examples, and lists and tips for adapting bulletproof strategies to your own situation, Bulletproof Your Job will show you how to leverage the black-and-white stuff your title, salary, and tenure with the gray stuff your relationship with coworkers, visibility in the workplace, and ability to make your boss look good to ward off the pink stuff the dreaded layoff notice. While you're at it, you'll be creating a long-term strategy for job security and career advancement that ensures you'll never feel this vulnerable again.

#131 The Case of the Two-Cent CandyYears ago, I wrote about a retail store in the Palo Alto environs a good one, which had a box of two-cent candies at the checkout. I subsequently remember that "little" parting gesture of the two-cent candy as a symbol of all that is Excellent at that store. Dozens of people who have attended seminars of mine from retailers to bankers to plumbing-supply-house owners have come up to remind me, sometimes 15 or 20 years later, of "the two-cent candy story," and to tell me how it had a sizable impact on how they did business, metaphorically and in fact.Well, the Two-Cent Candy Phenomenon has struck again with oomph and in the most unlikely of places.For years Singapore's "brand" has more or less been Southeast Asia's "place that works." Its legendary operational efficiency in all it does has attracted businesses of all sorts to set up shop there. But as "the rest" in the geographic neighborhood closed the efficiency gap, and China continued to rise-race-soar, Singapore decided a couple of years ago to "rebrand" itself as not only a place that works but also as an exciting, "with it" city. (I was a participant in an early rebranding conference that also featured the likes of the late Anita Roddick, Deepak Chopra, and Infosys founder and superman N. R. Narayana Murthy.)Singapore's fabled operating efficiency starts, as indeed it should, at ports of entry the airport being a prime example. From immigration to baggage claim to transportation downtown, the services are unmatched anywhere in the world for speed and efficiency.Saga . . . Immigration services in Thailand, three days before a trip to Singapore, were a pain. ("Memorable.") And entering Russia some months ago was hardly a walk in the park, either. To be sure, and especially after 9/11, entry to the United States has not been a process you'd mistake for arriving at Disneyland, nor marked by an attitude that shouted "Welcome, honored guest."Singapore immigration services, on the other hand:The entry form was a marvel of simplicity. The lines were short, very short, with more than adequate staffing.The process was simple and unobtrusive.And:The immigration officer could have easily gotten work at Starbucks; she was all smiles and courtesy.And:Yes!Yes!And . . . yes!There was a little candy jar at each Immigration portal!The "candy jar message" in a dozen ways:"Welcome to Singapore, Tom!! We are absolutely beside ourselves with delight that you have decided to come here!"Wow!Wow!Wow!Ask yourself . . . now:What is my (personal, department, project, restaurant, law firm) "Two-Cent Candy"?Does every part of the process of working with us/me include two-cent candies?Do we, as a group, "think two-cent candies"?Operationalizing: Make "two-centing it" part and parcel of "the way we do business around here." Don't go light on the so-called substance but do remember that . . . perception is reality . . . and perception is shaped by two-cent candies as much as by that so-called hard substance.Start: Have your staff collect "two-cent candy stories" for the next two weeks in their routine "life" transactions. Share those stories. Translate into "our world." And implement.Repeat regularly.Forever.(Recession or no recession you can afford two cents.)(In fact, it is a particularly Brilliant Idea for a recession you doubtless don't maximize Two-Cent Opportunities. And what opportunities they are.)

Who's really driving oil and gas pricesHow much oil is leftHow far will Big Oil go to get it, and at what cost to the environment, human rights, the economy, worker safety, public health, and democracy?Here, at last, are the answers we've been looking for and the inside story on Big Oil.In The Tyranny of Oil, Antonia Juhasz investigates the true state of the companies collectively known as "Big Oil," uncovering their unparalleled global financial power, their political dominance, and their increasingly destructive plans for the future. And she tells us what we can do about it.A tool for meaningful change that blends history, original investigative research and reporting, candid interviews with key insiders, and a unique focus on activism, The Tyranny of Oil is required reading for every concerned global citizen.

How to afford kids and teach them about moneyWe all want to raise smart children. But somewhere between the reading, writing, and arithmetic, one of life's most important lessons is too often overlooked: personal finances. As adults, we interact with money every day, whether by saving, investing, spending, or giving it, but we often forget that kids also face these same decisions from their own unique perspective as they mature. How do we teach today what kids really need to know tomorrow to thrive as financially savvy adultsIn Piggybanking, veteran Wall Street Journal personal-finance writer Jeff D. Opdyke provides a clear and effective plan to help parents raise children to be comfortable and confident managing the daily finances of life.But even before kids arrive, parents face a rash of financial decisions. Accordingly, Piggybanking also deals with the essential problems every struggling young family must face, including how to prepare your budget for a child's arrival, how to choose between single- and dual-income lifestyles, and how to plan for funding a college education.With Opdyke's valuable advice, and with his 15 Rules of Kids Money in hand, parents will be well equipped to create a sound financial foundation for their family and a successful financial life for their kids.