Your business can take a lesson from the American military's fighter pilots. At Mach 2, the instrument panel of an F-15 is screaming out information, the horizon is a blur, the wingman is occupied, the jet is hanging on the edge -- and yet fighter pilots routinely handle the stress. It's not much different in today's unforgiving business world. One slipup and your company is bankrupt before your employees know what hit them.What works on the squadron level for F-15 pilots will also work for your marketing team, sales force, or research and development group. By analyzing the work environment and attacking its centers of gravity in parallel, you'll begin to utilize the Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle that will rapidly impact your business's future success. U.S. fighter squadrons have been using this program for nearly fifty years to reduce their mistake rate, cut casualties and equipment losses, and rack up an envious victory record. Now, with Flawless Execution, your business can too.

After years of TV and radio coverage, gallons of newsprint ink, and billions of scholarly opinions on the blogosphere, do we really understand the financial engineering that brought the global economy to the brink?The terms and acronyms that make up the language of economics are enough to cause the layman's head to start spinning: leverage, securitization, futures, options, MBS, CDS, CDO. Luckily, we have veteran journalist Paddy Hirsch senior producer at APM's Marketplace and acknowledged Whiteboard Guru to help us crack the code. In Man vs. Markets, he proves that it's not impossible to understand what's going on in the glass-and-steel canyons of Wall Street; that most international financial transactions aren't all that different from those taking place every day in stores, in car dealerships, even on the playgrounds of Main Street.BondsThey're basically loans. FuturesYou probably used one when you ordered your Thanksgiving turkey last year. OptionsEver bought a fully transferable, returnable airline ticketThat's pretty much the same thing.With a winning combination of acquired wisdom, common sense, market savvy, and an outrageous sense of humor, Hirsch clearly explains and defines the instruments that power our financial system and very nearly caused its demise. Clever, insightful, hugely educational, and always entertaining, Man vs. Markets translates the often confusing language of finance, enabling every one of us to truly comprehend what makes the markets tick.

Does a secure financial life seem to difficult to imagine let alone achieveDoes wealth strike you as an impossible dreamWhether you're living from paycheck to paycheck, or simply confused by the world of stocks, bonds, and brokers, it's never too late to change your situation. All you need is a little help.By spending just ten to fifteen minutes a day with this immensely helpful book, you'll discover that financial security is just steps away. Filled with the wisdom and advice of a seasoned expert, this year-old program for success shows you how to: change your attitude and change your life break out of debt and control your spending choose investments and make your money grow protect your gains and prepare for a comfortable retirement give your children or grandchildren a secure start in life and much more!

Want freedom from management, mediocrity and moronsEver wonder what the best bosses know that you don'tDo you want to have great employees, people who don't need to be managed and who make everyone around them work harder and raise the department to a higher standardThe Gifted Boss is management guru Dale Dauten's classic yet revolutionary guidebook on teaching managers how to spot and court talent and how to give great employees what they want and need. This is a comprehensive system full of valuable insight and lessons aimed at creating the best work environment for the best people. Throughout The Gifted Boss, Dale Dauten defines his different breed of leader as one who is able to shape a business environment and culture that is a magnet for self-motivated employees. Dauten's starting point is a powerful fact about hiring great employees: the best ones are almost never in the job market. His system also includes a discussion of "ideal turnover" and how the great managers employ "the secret skill" of "de-hiring" to gracefully move mediocre employees up or out. Throughout his discussions, Dauten incorporates priceless knowledge gained from an exhaustive search for America's best bosses. The wisdom he acquired was startling, and it pertained to every type of organization: "Different isn't always better, but better is always different." The Gifted Boss has already earned itself a cult following. Now, based on conversations with hundreds of readers, Dauten has revised his work by adding a quick-start guide to help his audience get fast results and a discussion guide to help executives share the book with their teams. Though new technology continues to bring new changes to communication in the workplace, The Gifted Boss still remains the essential guide to maneuvering the tricky world of managing the modern employee. It belongs on every businessperson's desk.

In this long-anticipated, groundbreaking guide to building a portfolio, acclaimed stock pickers and Internet pioneers David and Tom Gardner lay bare the simple philosophy that they have used to help millions of grateful individual investors outfox the professionals on Wall Street. The research, the stories, and the results that underpin this book stem from the revolutionary and wildly successful "Motley Fool Million Dollar Portfolio"" a one-of-a-kind Web experiment in which individual investors follow along as Motley Fool co-founder Tom Gardner invests and manages $1 million of The Motley Fool's own money. In page after page of sound, sensible investment advice, readers are offered a rare glimpse into the inner workings of The Motley Fool machine and offered a first-class education in building, growing, and defending an individual portfolio, one investment strategy at a time. From learning to think like an investor to finding a first stock, from dividend investing to blue-chip bargains to small-cap treasures, from international investing to community-based online tools that are revolutionizing stock selection and asset allocation, this book takes the reader through the essential strategies for building any portfolio no matter how small its start or how big its ambitions.

How dynamic businesses of every size can unleash innovation by inviting customers to codesign what they do and make. Reading line: The 8 Roles Customers Play in Trend Setting Companies The refrain is familiar for Patricia Seybold in her journeys as a top technology and management strategist: "I want our company to be acknowledged as the most admired and most customer valued in our industry and to be recognized as the company that has forever changed the way things are done." "How can we become the Google of banking?" "How can we be the eBay of software?" "I want to be the JetBlue of manufacturing." "How can we become the undisputed trend setter in our industry with a competitive bar no one can topple?" In Outside Innovation, bestselling author Seybold taps her close relationship with dozens of high innovation companies to reveal the untold strategy behind the trendsetters and the next HUGE leap forward in customer strategy. Seybold shows that companies that are dominating their category and staying ahead of the pack are collaborating at every level of their business with their customers.

Meet the men and women whose deeply personal philanthropy is dramatically changing the way we think about giving There are 8.6 million millionaires in the United States, and these numbers are set to rise in what will be the biggest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. As $41 trillion dollars (or over three times the national GDP) moves from the World War II generation to their baby- boomer children over the next couple of decades, it will become imperative that the beneficiaries of this wealth—even those not joining the ranks of the superrich—begin thinking about philanthropy, perhaps for the first time in their adult lives. Here they will find the personal journeys of the most successful givers of their generation. This new generation of wealth has already begun to change the face of philanthropy and to reshape the entire nonprofit sector. In Be the Change, bestselling author Lisa Endlich presents eleven compelling profiles of this twenty-first century generosity. Through candid, revealing, and often surprising interviews, readers will venture into the hearts and minds of the top names in philanthropy today—men and women who have chosen to use their immense riches and influence to meaningfully improve the lives of others in the most dramatic ways. These intimate conversations include in-depth interviews with: ?Melinda Gates, one of the driving forces behind the largest philanthropic organization the world has ever seen; ?Bob and Suzanne Wright, he's the former vice chairman of GE and longtime head of NBC Universal and their Autism Speaks has brought awareness of autism onto the national and international stage; ?Paul Tudor Jones, founder of Tudor Investments and the Robin Hood Foundation; ?Peter Bloom, founding chairman of the groundbreaking DonorsChoose.org. From Connie Duckworth, a former Goldman Sachs partner, who brings steady employment to Afghani women and education to them and their children, to Johann Olav Koss, an Olympic gold medalist who now strives to give children in the direst circumstances the chance to play, these philanthropists demonstrate that giving doesn't begin or end with a signed check. They grant Endlich exclusive access to the stories of how they learned from early failures and developed a personal, sustainable way of giving, and they also share the catalyzing moment when they saw a problem so heartbreaking they simply could not turn away. In doing so, these new philanthropists offer valuable lessons—ones that will inspire readers to start giving, keep giving, and become the change they want to see in the world.

The world has changed in the seventeen years since the controversial initial publication of Paul Hawken's Ecology of Commerce, a stirring treatise about the perceived antagonism between ecology and business. Yet Hawken's impassioned argument that business both causes the most egregious abuses of the environment and, crucially, holds the most potential for solving our sustainability problems is more relevant and resonant than ever.Containing updated and revised material for a new audience, The Ecology of Commerce presents a compelling vision of the restorative (rather than destructive) economy we must create, centered on eight imperatives: Reduce energy carbon emissions 80 percent by 2030 and total natural resource usage 80 percent by 2050. Provide secure, stable, and meaningful employment to people everywhere. Be self-organizing rather than regulated or morally mandated. Honor market principles. Restore habitats, ecosystems, and societies to their optimum. Rely on current income. Be fun and engaging, and strive for an aesthetic outcome.

Reengineering has captured the imagination of managers and shareholders alike, sending corporations on journeys of radical business redesign that have already begun to transfigure global industry. Yet aside from earning them improvements in their business performance, the shift into more-process-centered organizations is causing fundamental changes in the corporate world, changes that business leaders are only now beginning to understand. What will the revolutions final legacy beBeyond Reengineering addresses this question, exploring reengineering's effects on such areas as: Jobs: What does process-centering do to the nature of jobsWhat does a process-centered workplace feel likeManagers: What is the new role of the manager in a process-centered companyEducation: What skills are vital in the process-centered working world, and how can young or inexperienced workers prepareSociety: What are the implications of process-centering for employment and the economy as a wholeInvestment: What are the characteristics of a successful 21st-century corporationAn informed look at one of the most profound changes to ever sweep the corporate world, Beyond Reengineering is the business manual for the 21st century.

A groundbreaking book that sheds new light on the vital importance of teams as the fundamental unit of organization and competition in the global economy. Teams—we depend on them for both our professional success and our personal happiness. But isn't it odd how little scrutiny we give themThe teams that make up our lives are created mostly by luck, happenstance, or circumstance—but rarely by design. In trivial matters—say, a bowling team, the leadership of a neighborhood group, or a holiday party committee—success by serendipity is already risky enough. But when it comes to actions by fast-moving start-ups, major corporations, nonprofit institutions, and governments, leaving things to chance can be downright dangerous. Offering vivid reports of the latest scientific research, compelling case studies, and great storytelling, Team Genius shows managers and executives that the planning, design, and management of great teams no longer have to be a black art. It explores solutions to essential questions that could spell the difference between success and obsolescence. Do you know how to reorganize your subpar teams to turn them into top performersCan you identify which of the top-performing teams in your company are reaching the end of their life spanDo you have the courage to shut them downDo you know how to create a replacement team that will be just as effective—without losing time or damaging moraleAnd, most important, are your teams the right size for the jobThroughout, Rich Karlgaard and Michael S. Malone share insights and real-life examples gleaned from their careers as journalists, analysts, investors, and globetrotting entrepreneurs, meeting successful teams and team leaders to reveal some "new truths": The right team size is usually one fewer person than what managers think they need. The greatest question facing good teams is not how to succeed, but how to die. Good "chemistry" often makes for the least effective teams. Cognitive diversity yields the highest performance gains—but only if you understand what it is. How to find the "bliss point" in team intimacy—and become three times more productive. How to identify destructive team members before they do harm. Why small teams are 40 percent more likely to create a successful breakthrough than a solo genius is. Why groups of 7 (± 2), 150, and 1,500 are magic sizes for teams. Eye-opening, grounded, and essential, Team Genius is the next big idea to revolutionize business.

Dig deep and you will find the most compelling argument for working together: Happiness. In business there are always unique individual achievers, but pull down the veil and you'll often find someone alongside them. Michael Eisner does just that in Working Together. Using his own collaboration with Frank Wells at Disney as a launching point for examining other famously successful partnerships, Eisner offers us an intimate and deeply personal look at some of the most rewarding business partnerships, uncovering what makes them tick and offering unconventional wisdom and unexpected insights. In this essential book for businesspeople everywhere, Eisner shines a light on these startlingly long-lasting and enriching partnerships, weaving together ten separate narratives from investment gurus to entertainment impresarios, from fashion designers to big-box retailers into a larger story about the true nature of achievement in life and in business.Ten Stories, Ten Magical Partnerships:Michael D. Eisner and Frank Wells (Disney)Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger (Berkshire Hathaway)Bill and Melinda Gates (The Gates Foundation)Brian Grazer and Ron Howard (Imagine Entertainment)Valentino and Giancarlo Giammetti (Valentino)Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell (Studio 54)Arthur Blank and Bernie Marcus (The Home Depot)Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken (restaurateurs)Joe Torre and Don Zimmer (New York Yankees)John Angelo and Michael Gordon (finance) Collectively, the stories you're about to read form a blueprint for building partnerships that matter, that last, and that allow each of us to do our very best work.

Newly revised and updated, Leadership and the One Minute Manager teaches leaders the world-renowned method of developing self-reliance in those they manage: Situational Leadership II.In Leadership and the One Minute Manager, you'll learn why adapting leadership styles to team members based on their key goals and tasks is so important and why knowing when to delegate, support, or direct is critical. By consistently using Situational Leadership II's proven model and powerful techniques, leaders can develop and retain competent, motivated, confident employees. This remarkable, easy-to-follow book is a priceless guide to personalized leadership that elicits the best performance from your team and the best bottom line for any business.

Once Upon a Car is the brilliantly reported inside-the-boardrooms-and-factories story of Detroit's fight for survival, going beyond the headlines to chronicle how the country's Big Three auto companies General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler teetered on the brink of collapse during the 2008 financial crisis. In a tale that reads like a corporate thriller, Bill Vlasic, who has covered the auto industry for more than fifteen years, first for the Detroit News and now for the New York Times, takes readers into the executive offices, assembly plants, and union halls to introduce a cast of memorable characters, many of whom are speaking out for the first time, including the executives who struggled to save their companies but in the end had to seek a controversial, last-gasp rescue from the U.S. government.Vlasic goes behind the scenes to portray the men at the top during Detroit's last stand. Rick Wagoner, the CEO of General Motors, tried to turn around a dying company, only to be forced to resign as a condition of the government bailout. Bill Ford, great-grandson of the legendary Henry Ford, had the will to keep Ford alive but needed the guts to hire an unknown outsider, Alan Mulally, to transform the company before it crashed. At Chrysler, leadership was constantly changing as new owners tried in vain to fix the smallest of the beleaguered Big Three. And through it all, the president of the United Auto Workers union, Ron Gettelfinger, fought to save the jobs of the men and women who build American-made cars and trucks.This tale of an iconic industry in crisis is more than a big business drama and provides a rich, unvarnished portrait of how Detroit's decline affected tens of thousands of workers and dozens of communities nationwide. The story moves from the gleaming corporate skyscrapers and massive auto plants to the halls of the U.S. Congress and into the Oval Office, where President Obama and his aides wrestled with how to keep General Motors and Chrysler from going out of business. Vlasic shows why the bailout worked, and how Detroit can succeed under new leadership and build automobiles equal to any in the world. Once Upon a Car tells a uniquely American tale of success, failure, and redemption. It is an important and illuminating chapter in an astonishing story that is still unfolding. And no one is more qualified to write it than Bill Vlasic.

Do you feel you don't have enough time to manage your people?Do you avoid interacting with some employees because you hate the dreaded confrontations that often follow?Do you have some great employees you really cannot afford to lose?Do you secretly wish you could be more in control but don't know where to start?Managing people is harder and more high-pressure today than ever before. There's no room for downtime, waste, or inefficiency. You have to do more with less. And employees have become high maintenance. Not only are they more likely to disagree openly and push back, but they also won't work hard for vague promises of long-term rewards. They look to you their immediate boss to help them get what they need and want at work. How do you tackle this huge management challengeIf you are like most managers, you take a hands-off approach. You "empower" employees by leaving them alone, unless they really need you. After all, you don't want to "micromanage" them and don't have the time to hold every employee's hand. Of course, problems always come up and often snowball into bigger problems. In fact, you probably spend too much of your time solving problems and falling behind on your work . . . which leaves even less time for managing people . . . which opens the door for even more problems!In It's Okay to Be the Boss, Bruce Tulgan puts his finger on the biggest problem in corporate America an undermanagement epidemic affecting managers at all levels of the organization and in all industries and offers another way. His clear, step-by-step guide to becoming the strong manager employees need challenges bosses everywhere to spell out expectations, tell employees exactly what to do and how to do it, monitor and measure performance constantly, and correct failure quickly and reward success even more quickly. Now that's how you set employees up for success and help them earn what they need. Tulgan opens our eyes to the undisciplined workplace that is overwhelming managers and frustrating workers and invites bosses everywhere to accept the sacred responsibility of managing people. His message: It's okay to be the boss. Be a great one!

You.That's Right. YOU.You've got a problem.You've got a product that's not first in its class.It's not even second.You've got to find a way to market that product. What Are You Going To Do?You're going to read this book, that's what.Let's face it. There comes a time in the life of every business when a product or service does not sell up to expectations.Maybe your product is outmoded. Or hasn't been positioned correctly. Or is competing in a crowded market. Whatever the reason, Ice to the Eskimos is dedicated to helping you reclaim that lost ground. It's about taking a product or service and turning it into a winner. If you've got a product that is not the best in its field, then you will love Ice to the Eskimos. Take the principles Jon Spoelstra writes about and run hard with them you'll be amazed by the results.Written by the former president of the hapless New Jersey Nets, Jon Spoelstra is the man responsible for tripling that team's lagging revenues in just three years and increasing the season-ticket holders base by 250 percent. This guy knows what he's talking about. What everyone else had seen as a lost cause, Spoelstra saw as an outstanding opportunity to reawaken a tired and beaten product to achieve unprecedented profitability.Not just for sports marketers, this lively, entertaining book successfully makes the jump from sports to whatever your product may be. The techniques Spoelstra perfected while working for teams in the NHL and NBA from innovative packaging to image overhaul apply to any product in any company. The numerous winning examples are sure to make Ice to the Eskimos a must-read for anyone with a product or service to sell.Ice to the Eskimos is sure to be an instant marketing classic. It will show millions of readers how to market their product...sometimes even after they've given up hope. By using the powerful techniques in this book, you too can learn to achieve the impossible and market ice to the Eskimos.

A road-tested formula for improving your performance, from one of the business world's most successful and productive executives. Robert C. Pozen taught a full course load at Harvard Business School while serving as the full-time chairman of a global financial-services firm. He's written six books and hundreds of articles, raised a family with his wife of more than four decades, and served on many boards of local charities and public companies. Pozen is a prince of productivity, a man who has worked smarter and faster than almost everyone around him for more than forty years.In Extreme Productivity, Pozen reveals the secrets to workplace productivity and high performance. His book is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by an existing workload facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Extreme Productivity explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time. Pozen shows that in order to be truly productive, professionals must make a critical shift in their mind-set: from hours worked to results produced. He helps people at all stages of their careers read, write, and make presentations quicker and more effectively. He provides professionals with practical tips on how to efficiently use their time in the office while leading full and productive personal lives as well.

From Randi Zuckerberg, social media and technology expert and former marketing executive at Facebook, comes a welcome, essential guide to understanding social media and technology and how they influence and inform our lives online and off.Technology and social media have changed, enhanced, and complicated every facet of our lives from how we interact with our friends to how we elect presidents, from how we manage our careers to how we support important causes, from how we find love to how we raise our children.The technology revolution is not going away. We can't hide from it or pretend that it's not changing our lives in a thousand different ways. So how do we dealIn Dot Complicated, Randi Zuckerberg shows us. Through first hand accounts of her time at Facebook and beyond, where Zuckerberg witnessed this remarkable shift, she details the opportunities and obstacles, problems and solutions, to this new online reality. In the process, she establishes rules to bring some much-needed order and clarity to our connected, complicated, and constantly changing lives online.The Internet, social networks, and smartphones,Zuckerberg writes, have given us amazing new tools and ways of communicating, collaborating, and living with one another. We can use new technology to understand and solve some very old challenges that individuals and communities around the world have faced since long before Facebook, or anything like it, existed.Invaluable, timely, and engaging, Dot Complicated reveals how to make it through your life online in one piece from the etiquette of unfriending and the power of crowdsourcing to the perils of photo tags and the importance of teaching your kids how to be tech savvy.

Everything you thought you knew about saving, managing risk, and securing your financial future has changed. The world is very different in the wake of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Retirement accounts have been eviscerated, risk appetites diminished, and questions raised about age-old personal finance strategies such as "buy and hold" and the efficacy of relying heavily on stock mutual funds.In The Wall Street Journal Guide to the New Rules of Personal Finance, Dave Kansas offers guidelines for understanding the new regulations for finance firms, the rising importance of international investing, and the very different environment that now exists for home buyers. With valuable chapters on debt reduction, diversification, retirement planning, real estate, commodities, and other vital topics, this essential volume is designed to help the individual determine which tenets of an investing strategy remain sound and which deserve re-examination. It is the ultimate guide to profitably investing your money in a world that has fundamentally changed.

Money can Buy You HappinessIn Die Broke Stephen Pollan introduced a new radical new strategy for spending, saving, and investing money in today's financial market.In Live Rich, he now concentrates on the earning side--with the compelling observation that living rich has less to do with net worth and everything to do with freedom. You can live the life you want by adhering to the four tenets of the Live Rich philosophy: Make Money Too many of us have been fed the line that "work isn't necessarily about making money." Tell that to Visa next time they send you a bill. Don't Grow, Change Be ready to change your work paradigm on a moment's notice, to morph from career to career several times as conditions--and you--change. Take Charge In the twenty-first century, you must become proactive and start taking measured risks. Become a Mercenary Think for yourself as a free agent, responsible for your own security and always on the lookout for the next great job. Live Rich With Stephen Pollan's revolutionary workplace ideals, as well as a detailed action plan, you can apply this philosophy to every facet of your life and truly Live Rich.

In the 20th century humanity consumed products faster than ever, but this way of living is no longer sustainable. This new and important book shows how technological advances are driving forms of ‘collaborative consumption’ which will change forever the ways in which we interact both with businesses and with each other. The average lawn mower is used for four hours a year. The average power drill is used for only twenty minutes in its entire lifespan. The average car is unused for 22 hours a day, and even when it is being used there are normally three empty seats. Surely there must be a way to get the benefit out of things like mowers, drills and even cars, without having to carry the huge up-front costs of ownership? There is indeed. Collaborative consumption is not just a buzzword, it is a new win-win way of life. This insightful and thought-provoking new book by Rachel Rogers and Roo Botsman is an important and fast-moving survey of the dramatic changes we are seeing in the way we consume products. Many of us are familiar with freecycle, eBay, couchsurfing and Zipcar. But these are just the beginning of a new phenomenon. Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers have interviewed business leaders and opinion formers around the world to draw together the many strands of Collaborative Consumption into a coherent and challenging argument to show that the way we did business and consumerism in the 20th century is not the way we will do it in the 21st century.

The bestselling follow-up to Humble Pie, now in paperback. When he was struggling to get his first restaurant in the black, Gordon Ramsay never imagined he'd be famous for a TV show about how to run profitable eateries, or that he'd be head of a business empire. But he is and he did. Here's how. "In the beginning there was nothing. Not a sausage - penniless, broke, fucking nothing - and although, at a certain age, that didn’t matter hugely, there came a time when hand-me-downs, cast-offs and football boots of odd sizes all pointed to a problem that seemed to have afflicted me, my mum, my sisters, Ronnie and the whole lot of us. It was as though we had been dealt the ‘all-time dysfunctional’ poker hand. I wish I could say that, from this point on, the penny dropped and I decided to do something about it, but it wasn’t like that. It would take years before the lessons of life, business and money began to click into place - before, as they say, I had a pot to piss in. This is the story of how those lessons were learned." This is Gordon Ramsay at his raw, rugged best. PLAYING WITH FIRE is the amazing story of Gordon’s journey from sous-chef to superstar. In his no-holds-barred style, Gordon shares his passion for risk and adventure and his hard-won success secrets.