How does your company define creativityOr doescreativity define your companyIn this remarkable book, Jerry Hirshberg, founder and president of Nissan Design International (NDI), distills his experience as leader of the world's hotbed of automotive innovation and reveals his strategy for designing an organization around creativity.In The Creative Priority Hirshberg weaves together enlightening real-world anecdotes with the story of NDI's genesis to illustrate eleven interlocking strategies that came to define NDI's creative priority. Richly illustrated with NDI's elegant designs and sketched, The Creative Priority is at once a compelling narrative, a rich store of hands-on experience, and a grab bag of breakthrough insights that can help your business perform its most vital function.

In 1991, Michael B. O'Higgins, one of the nation's top money managers, turned the investment world upside down with an ingenious strategy, showing how all investors--from those with only $5,000 to invest to millionaires--could beat the pros 95% of the time by putting 100% of their equity investment into the high-yield, low-risk "dog" stocks of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. His formula spawned a veritable industry, including websites, mutual funds, and $20 billion worth of investments, elevating the theory to legendary status.Reflecting on the greatest bull market of our time, this must-have investment guide has been revised and updated for a new economy. With current company and stock profiles, as well as new charts, statistics, graphs, and figures, Beating the Dow is the smart investment that you--and your portfolio--can't afford to miss.

As the host of Fox News Channel's Your World with Neil Cavuto and Cavuto on Business, Neil Cavuto reports on today's most influential business leaders and newsmakers. His great talent is to get beneath the issues, connecting people to the events that define them and changing the way that Americans think about their money. Ending each show with a provocative, insightful commentary, Cavuto stirs people to see the world in a new light, calling on them to think beyond the stories at hand and challenging people to reevaluate the world that they live in.In Your Money or Your Life, Cavuto compiles the best of these commentaries in one volume, creating a collection that is at once witty, thought-provoking, and inspiring. Covering a variety of topics from remembering life before 9/11, to providing tips for empty nesters Cavuto presents a wry yet evocative look at our world, one that speaks to the heart of the American condition. Spanning one of the most tumultuous decades in memory from the wild and chaotic Clinton years through the sobering challenges of the War on Terror Cavuto's words offer a window into our America at its best and its worst.

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.

Filled with the kind of contagious energy and upbeat attitude that has made Frank Pacetta one of America's most popular motivational speakers, this unique book is for anyone who wants a difference in the workplace. Whatever the occupation, organization, or industry, here are tried and tested solutions, techniques, rules and tactics that get the job done right. Whether you're a manager fed up with your worker's ho-hum attitude or an individual who can't seem to live up to your potential no matter how hard you try, this book will give you ideas that can put into immediate action -- a no-fail formula for ending the whining and instilling in yourself and your employees a winning spirit.

In a perfect corporate world, intellect, hard work, and professionalism would be recognized and rewarded regardless of the color of your skin. Kenneth Arroyo Roldan is here to tell you that nobody works in a perfect corporate world. Stellar performance alone will not determine corporate advancement—minorities need to learn and follow the rules of corporate politics. As one African American employee who started as a systems analyst at Xerox observed, "The reality was that despite your ability, if you weren't playing politics correctly, you would be derailed." In Minority Rules, Roldan gives a dose of tough love to minorities in corporate America while educating their majority counterparts. As the CEO of the top U.S. head-hunting firm specializing in placing minorities in fast track jobs, Roldan watched as minority superstars hired at Fortune 500 companies bailed out, disappointed and rejected after only a few years. The problem, Roldan says, is that minorities are not adequately prepared psychologically or culturally for corporate careers. In a six-step plan, he explains how to surmount the obstacles, play corporate hardball, and succeed as a minority in the workplace. Corporate culture is unforgiving to minorities, but it is possible to rise to the top with Roldan as your guide. With refreshing candor, Roldan prepares minorities both psychologically and culturally for corporate careers. Forget about using affirmative action and discrimination lawsuits to level the playing field. The only way to win is to know the landscape and master the rules of the game—from finding the right mentor to learning the art of networking to focusing on self-reliance, patience, and most of all, performance. Roldan shows minorities how to climb to the top jobs—and keep them.

An entertaining, must-have guide to the indicators most investors aren't following but should be!To make the best possible investment decisions, savvy investors know that they should pay close attention to economic indicators. But while most are looking at conventional barometers like unemployment rates and housing starts, the smartest investors are following the often ignored, sometimes curious, but always interesting indicators that offer a true sense of where the economy is and where it's going. They provide the vital information needed to beat the market. In The Wall Street Journal Guide to the 50 Economic Indicators That Really Matter, Simon Constable and Robert E. Wright offer investors powerful new tools to guide them through the markets. Whether it's the VIX index (which tracks the level of anxiety among investors) or the Vixen index (which tracks the number of attractive waitresses in your hometown), this essential guide includes in-depth analyses of 50 valuable economic indicators, as well as what to watch for, what to do when movement happens, and the risk level involved in taking action. This must-have guide entertains and enlightens while offering essential advice on navigating the global economic climate.

Ken Blanchard's phenomenal bestsellers, such as The One Minute Manager and Raving Fans, have made him a globally recognized business legend. Millions look to Blanchard for innovative approaches to management, leadership, customer service, and much more. Now, he has joined with noted business author Steve Gottry to explore one of the most common and insidious problems plaguing the workplace procrastination.The On-Time, On-Target Manager is the story of Bob, a typical middle manager who puts things off to the last minute. As a result, he misses deadlines because his lack of focus causes him to accomplish meaningless tasks before getting to the important things. Like many professionals, Bob rationalizes, justifies, and tries to explain. Luckily, Bob is sent to his company's CEO which stands for "Chief Effectiveness Officer" who helps him deal with the three negative side effects of procrastination: lateness, poor work quality, and stress to himself and others. Bob learns how to transform himself from a crisis-prone Last-Minute manager into a productive On-Time, On-Target manager.With this engaging parable, Blanchard and Gottry offer practical strategies any professional can put into practice to improve his or her performance.

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.

Going against conventional wisdom, Absolute Value reveals what really influences customers today and offers a new framework the Influence Mix for thinking about consumer decision making, which should help managers develop more effective marketing strategies.How people buy things has changed profoundly yet the fundamental thinking about consumer decision making and marketing has not. Most marketers still believe that they can shape consumers' perceptions and drive their behaviors. In this provocative book, Stanford professor Itamar Simonson and best-selling author Emanuel Rosen show why current mantras about branding and loyalty are losing their relevance. When consumers base their decisions on reviews from other users, easily accessed expert opinions, price comparison apps, and other emerging technologies, everything changes. Contrary to what we frequently hear, consumers will (on average) make better choices and act more rationally. Absolute Value answers the pressing question of what influences customers in this new age. Simonson and Rosen identify the old-school marketing concepts that need to change and explain how a company should design its communication strategy, market research program, and segmentation strategy in the new environment. Filled with deep analysis, case studies, and cutting-edge research, this forward-looking book provides an entirely new way of thinking about marketing.

Bestselling author Ken Blanchard brings you the tie-in guide to accompany his TrustWorks! training program. Ken Blanchard is famous for his ability to make the seemingly complex simple. In Trust Works! he brings his talent to bear on the complicated and timely issue of trust. The book begins with an allegory - in this case, it's the story of a dog and a cat with major trust issues. Their fighting, backbiting, and sabotaging soon affects the whole household - including the humans. It quickly becomes clear that unless the ongoing conflicts can be resolved, all of the pets will be without a home. Through the counsel of a wise old parrot, the animals learn the Abcds of trust, becoming aware of the unconscious behaviours that had been eroding their relationships and begin to change their actions. In the end, the results have a positive effect that reaches far beyond the dog and cats' relationship. Applying lessons presented in the fable to real life situations, Blanchard explores his Abcd trust model to address issues like poor morale, miscommunication in relationships, poor customer service issues, and dysfunctional leadership. Trust is an evergreen topic but is particularly relevant today, as protests in cities throughout the world underscore a growing distrust of corporations and institutions. Now more than ever, people need trust-building skills and a common language for learning the behaviours that build - or erode - trust. Trust Works! is the first book to create a common, easy-to-learn language for talking about trust in a way that can bring peace and co-operation where once there was dissension.

7 simple steps to effective meetings that will change the way you work People spend up to 60 percent of their working day in meetings, but all too often they leave feeling overwhelmed and confused. Sound familiar? Meetings that involve the wrong people or are badly organised are a waste of everyone's time, so whether you need to learn from scratch or re-evaluate your techniques, this is the book for you. Follow our 7 simple steps to more productive, efficient and successful meetings. With expert advice on everything from using informal meetings to your advantage to dealing with technical hitches during conference calls, this book contains everything you need to transform the way you spend your working day.

Aspirational business book based on interviews with over 75 leading American CEOs. What does it take to succeed in business and to inspire others? Adam Bryant of The New York Times sat down with more than seventy-five CEOs and asked them how they do their jobs and the most important lessons they learned as they rose through the ranks. The Corner Office draws together lessons, memorable stories, and eye-opening insights from chief executives like Steven Ballmer (Microsoft), Carol Bartz (Yahoo), Jeffrey Katzenberg (DreamWorks), and Alan Mulally (Ford), as Bryant reveals the keys to success in the business world, including the five qualities CEOs value most in their employees, and shows how executives at the top of their game get the most out of others. For aspiring executives, of any age, The Corner Office offers perspectives that will help anyone who seeks to be a more effective leader and employee, and a path to future success.

Why do some projects deliver under budget and ahead of schedule, while others cost more and take longer than expectedMore important, which products work better: the quick and thrifty or the slow and expensive?In a story-filled blend of quirky pop culture and practical engineering insight, Dan Ward's F.I.R.E. answers those questions and more. Ward's extensive research and firsthand experience show how the world's top technologists consistently deliver best-in-class results on shoestring budgets and cannonball schedules, and using skeleton crews.This remarkable book will make you laugh, make you think, and equip you to leverage the power of constraints. Discover the secrets of F.I.R.E. and learn how to:Build strategies for speed that enhance accountability and ensure your products are well aligned with the market's needs.Design your organizations, products, and processes with thrift in mind, solving problems with intellectual capital, not financial capital.Unleash the power of small budgets and small teams, using short schedules, short meetings, and short documents.Streamline your designs and cut through unnecessary, unproductive layers of bureaucracy.But this is not just a book about how to win. With unflinching candor, Ward shows how the F.I.R.E. method, even when followed wisely and well, can result in a flop. Taking a deep look at several negative outcomes, he shows how to make failures optimal rather than epic.F.I.R.E. provides strategic concepts for leaders, decision-making principles for managers, and practical tools for people working on anything from spacecraft and fighter jets to websites and children's toys. Technology professionals and curious amateurs alike will come away with a deeper understanding of effective product design. Plus, there's a funny story about a dishwasher that just may change the way you buy major appliances.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNAHow can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatnessThe Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiorityAnd if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to greatThe Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How greatAfter the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was differentWhy did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only goodOver five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

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.

Are You Considering Early Retirement?Do You Know Someone Who Is Considering This Momentous DecisionWith Retire EarlyMake the SMART Choices, Steven Silbiger, CPA, offers a short guide to the big issues of retirement planning packed on every page with detailed, step-by-step advice. Choosing when to retire is one of the most important and overlooked decisions we will make about our lives. Silbiger, author of The Ten-Day MBA, has written the first guide that untangles the complicated issues surrounding early retirement, based on careful research about the money pitfalls retirees and near-retirees face. He delivers an understandable roadmap that demystifies the confusion about Social Security benefits, and clarifies the choices for anyone considering when and how to retire.Are you thinking about getting the early Social Security checkIt can be tempting, but for many this can be a foolhardy decision. For others, it makes perfect sense. Making the smart choice about when to retire can make a $100,000 difference for an individual and $200,000 for a couple. Silbiger guides readers through the key variables that affect the decision to elect early Social Security retirement benefits: What are your early benefits and penaltiesHow's your healthAre you marriedAre you planning on working while retiredWhat are your cash needs during retirementBy getting a grip on how to manage our investments, cash flow, and real estate, Silbiger shows how we can put thousands of dollars more into our pockets every year. He addresses vital questions about money and retirement that include: Tapping your nest egg for retirement how to make ends meetWhich retirement investments are for youAre you prepared to fend off scam artistsThrough it all, you'll meet everyday people who have faced the early retirement question and learned how to make the smart choices. Silbiger provides the tools, worksheets, and assessments to avoid costly mistakes, take charge of your financial future, and choose the path to a secure, happy retirement.

Do you exude confidence and credibilityCan you command a roomSylvia Ann Hewlett, one of the world's most influential business thinkers, cracks the code of Executive Presence (EP) for men and women intent on winning the next plum assignment and doing something extraordinary with their lives.You might have the qualifications to be considered for your dream job, but you won't get far unless you can signal that you're "leadership material" and that you "have what it takes." Professionals are judged on presence as well as on performance. Using a wealth of hard data including a new nationwide survey and dozens of focus groups Hewlett reveals EP to be a dynamic mix of three things: how you act (gravitas), how you speak (communication), and how you look (appearance). She also draws on in-depth interviews with a wide selection of admired leaders to reveal how they embody and deploy key elements of EP.This book is immensely practical. Hewlett teases out tactics that can help you raise your game and close the gap between merit and success. She offers the unvarnished advice you won't get from supportive friends and tackles head-on such touchy subjects as too-tight clothing and too-shrill voices. She shows how the standards for EP vary for men, women, multicultural, and LGBT employees, and she shares how to get meaningful feedback from politically correct bosses intent on avoiding the real issues.The good news is that EP is eminently teachable. You can learn how to "show teeth" while remaining likable, and you can teach yourself how to dress appropriately while staying true to yourself. You don't have to be born with the voice of James Earl Jones or the looks of Angelina Jolie to hurdle the EP bar. With hard facts and vivid examples, Hewlett shows you how to ace EP and fully realize your unique potential no matter who you are, no matter where you work.

In this penetrating work of investigative and historical journalism, Eamon Javers explores the dangerous and combustible power spies hold over international business.Today's global economy has a dark underbelly: the world of corporate espionage. Using cutting-edge technology, age-old techniques of deceit and manipulation, and sheer talent, spies act as the hidden puppeteers of globalized businesses. They control markets, determine prices, influence corporate decisions, and manage the flow of data and information of some of the world's biggest corporations. In his gripping and alarming book, Eamon Javers takes the reader inside this hidden global industry. Readers meet the spies who conduct surveillance operations, satellite analysts who peer down on corporate targets from the skies, veteran CIA officers who work for hedge funds, and even a Soviet military intelligence officer who now sells his services to American companies.This industry has tentacles in almost every industry in almost every corner of the globe. Intelligence companies and the spies they employ are setting up fake Web sites to elicit information, trailing individuals and mirroring travel itiner-aries, Dumpster-diving in household and corporate trash, using ultrasophisticated satellite surveillance to spy on facilities, acting as impostors to take jobs within companies or to gain access to corporations, concocting elaborate schemes of fraud and deceit, and hacking e-mail and secure computer networks. The work of this industry can be ingenious, but it also raises crucial moral and legal questions in a world where global conflicts are as likely to be corporation versus corporation as they are to be nation versus nation.This globalized industry is not a recent phenomenon, but rather a continuation of a fascinating history. The story begins with Allan Pinkerton, the nation's first true "private eye," and extends through the annals of a rich history that includes tycoons and playboys, presidents and FBI operatives, CEOs and accountants, Cold War veterans and military personnel. Built on exclusive reporting and unprecedented access, this book features accounts of Howard Hughes's private CIA, the extensive spying that took place in a battle between two global food companies, and interviews with some of the world's top corporate surveillance experts.