Business & Management | Management & Leadership
Business & Investing | Small Business & Entrepreneurship Business & Investing

Have you ever set your sights on the top of a mountain and then started your ascent by heading straight through the trees and up the sheer cliffs? Or driven in your car to the other side of town—as the crow flies? Of course not! Because you instinctively know that, just as a river has to wend its way around obstacles, the best route is never actually a straight line! In The Zigzag Principle, Rich Christiansen applies a foundational law of nature to business management, entrepreneurship, goal-setting, and life in general as he explores why zigzagging toward our intended outcomes is more effective than trying to bulldoze our way through whatever stands between us and our objectives. Christiansen helps you get started, make your way over the big hill to initial profitability, and minimize risks along the way. As the head of well-established corporations and as the brains behind numerous start-ups, Christiansen has been through it all, and he’s charted all the zigs and zags that you’ll encounter.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:

“Entrepreneurs, you need not fear failure anymore! With The Zigzag Principle, in hand, you will have all the tools you need to increase your probability of success the instant you apply the concepts in this book.” —Rick Sapio, founder and CEO of Mutual Capital Alliance, Inc, Dallas, Texas

“This thoughtful and inspired book will guide creative and energized business men and women to accomplish their loftiest dreams and restore America’s prosperity once again.” —Alan E. Hall, entrepreneur, angel investor, venture capitalist, cofounder of Mercato Partners

”The Zigzag Principle, is the new way of doing business. It will increase your chances of success by 90 percent and eliminate so much of the stress that business owners face.” —Garrett Gunderson, New York Timesbestselling author of Killing Sacred Cows.

”The Zigzag Principle, has revolutionized the way I run my business. It works, it measures, it performs. Every business should know and implement this principle!” —Curtis Blair, co-founder and general manager, Froghair

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rich Christiansen spent the first half of his career as an executive, running the PC division of Mitsubishi Electronics, working at Novell, and becoming general manager of About.com. Today, he is in high demand as a mentor and small business consultant. Christiansen is co-author of Bootstrap Busiiness: A Step-by-Step Survival Guide.

CATEGORIES AND SUBJECTS:

• Business & Investing | Motivational
• Business & Investing | Leadership
• Creative Ability in Business
• Entrepreneurship
• Success in business
• Storytelling

Today everyone--whether they know it or not--is in the emotional transportation business.  More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move partners, shareholders, customers, and employees to action. Simply put, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it.   Tell to Win tells you how to do both.

Historically, stories have always been igniters of action, moving people to do things.  But only recently has it become clear that purposeful stories – those created with a specific mission in mind – are absolutely essential in persuading others to support a vision, dream or cause.

Peter Guber, whose executive and entrepreneurial accomplishments have made him a success in multiple industries, has long relied on purposeful story telling to motivate, win over, shape, engage and sell.  Indeed, what began as knack for telling stories as an entertainment industry executive has, through years of perspiration and inspiration, evolved into a set of principles that anyone can use to achieve their goals.
            
In Tell to Win, Guber shows how to move beyond soulless Power Point slides, facts, and figures to create purposeful stories that can serve as powerful calls to action.

You will learn to:

* Capture your audience’s attention first, fast and foremost
* Motivate your listeners by demonstrating authenticity
* Build your tell around “what’s in it for them”
* Change passive listeners into active participants
* Use “state-of-the-heart” technology online and offline to make sure audience commitment remains strong

To validate the power of telling purposeful stories, Guber includes in his book a remarkably diverse number of “voices.”  These master tellers include YouTube founder Chad Hurley, NBA champion Pat Riley, clothing designer Normal Kamali, “Mission to Mars” scientist Gentry Lee, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank, former South African president Nelson Mandela, magician David Copperfield, film director Steven Spielberg, novelist Nora Roberts, rock legend Gene Simmons, and physician and author Deepak Chopra.

After listening to this extraordinary mix of voices, you will know how to craft, deliver and own a story that is truly compelling--one capable of turning others into viral advocates for your goal. 

More than 100 pages of new, cutting-edge content.

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan–there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint.

This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches:
•How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week
•How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want
•How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs
•How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist
•How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent “mini-retirements”

The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek includes:
•More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point
•Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal
•How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times
•The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either

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 DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The 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 superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The 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 great? After 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 different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over 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. T...

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, service, and human dignity -- principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.

Business & Investing | Project Management

Business & Investing | Management, General

Textbooks | Business & Finance

Professional & Technical | Business Management

A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (Pmbok Guide) Fourth Edition  continues the tradition of excellence in project management with a standard that is even easier to understand and implement, with:

• improved consistency and greater clarification
• standard language incorporated throughout the document to aid reader understanding.
• new data flow diagrams that clarify inputs and outputs for each process
• greater attention placed on how Knowledge Areas integrate in the context of Initiating, Planning, Executing, Monitoring & Controlling, and Closing process groups
• two new processes: Identify Stakeholders and Collect Requirements. 

In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to:

€ Apply the "do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it" rule to get your in-box to empty
€ Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations
€ Plan projects as well as get them unstuck
€ Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed
€ Feel fine about what you're not doing

From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down.

This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems.

Business & Investing | Investing
Business & Investing | Personal Finance

What if there were a way to cut through all the financial mumbo-jumbo? Wouldn’t it be great if someone could really explain to us—in plain and simple English—the basics we must know about investing in order to insure our financial freedom? At last, there’s good news. A book that is jargon-free and written for all investors—experienced, beginner, and everyone in between. The Investment Answer distills the process into just 5 decisions—5 straightforward choices that can lead to safe and sound ways to manage your money. When Wall Street veteran Gordon Murray told his good friend and financial advisor, Dan Goldie, that he had only 6 months to live, Dan responded, “Do you want to write that book you’ve always wanted to do?” The result is this eminently valuable primer which can be read and understood in one sitting, and has advice that benefits you, not Wall Street and the rest of the traditional financial services industry.

The Investment Answer  asks readers to make 5 basic but key decisions to stack the investment odds in their favor. The advice is simple, easy-to-follow, and effective, and can lead to a more profitable portfolio for every investor. Specifically:

1.     Should I invest on my own or seek help from an investment professional?

2.     How should I allocate my investments among stocks, bonds, and cash?

3.     Which specific asset classes within these broad categories should I include in my portfolio?

4.     Should I take an actively managed approach to investing, or follow a passive alternative?

5.     When should I sell assets and when should I buy more?

In a world of fast-talking traders who believe that they can game the system and a market characterized by instability, this extraordinary and timely book offers guidance every investor should have.

This is by far the best thing I've ever read about negotiation. It is equally relevant for the individual who would like to keep his friends, property, and income and the statesman who would like to keep the peace. --John Kenneth Galbraith.

In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, "There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books."

In his most recent New York Times bestselling book, The Great Depression Ahead, Harry S. Dent, Jr., predicted that the stimulus plan created in response to the first crisis would hit demographic and debt saturation headwinds and ultimately fail. In 2010, the stimulus plan had started to fail, and it was already stalling by the first quarter of 2011. The Great Crash Ahead outlines why the next crash and crisis is inevitable, and just around the corner—coming between 2012 and 2014.

With incisive critical analysis and historical examples, this book lays bare the traditional assumptions of economics. Dent shows that the government doesn’t drive our economy, consumers and businesses do; that the Fed does not create most of the money in our economy, the private banking system does; and that the largest generation in history is now saving for or moving into retirement, meaning slowing growth. This is the new normal! Our banking system borrowed to lend for the first time in history with unprecedented leverage and debt levels of $42 trillion, way beyond the massive government debt. But the government’s promises and unfunded liabilities take the cake, at an estimated $66 trillion and growing!

These massive debts will have to be restructured in a time of slowing spending, and this means a deflationary crisis, which is very different from the inflationary crisis of the 1970s and requires very different personal, investment, and business strategies. Dent and Johnson outline these strategies in very practical detail. In the coming years, the greatest surprise will be that the U.S. dollar becomes the safe haven and appreciates just when everyone is calling for it to crash, while the gold and silver bubbles burst along with the stock and commodity bubbles. And real estate will see another round of declines just when everyone thought it could go no lower. The Great Crash Ahead is about making smart, cautious investments—avoiding the sort of high-risk, high-profit investment schemes that sank the world economy.

The road to recovery will be filled with challenges and will require massive change, such as debt restructuring, plans for greater employment, the restructuring of social welfare programs such as social security and health care, budget cuts, and higher taxes—in short, a revision of the kind of lifestyle that characterized the “Roaring 2000s.” The good news is this process will eliminate tens of trillions of dollars of debt and can make way for growth again as the echo boom generation ascends. Or we can continue on our present course and end up like the Japanese, with no growth and high debt two decades later.

• Business & Investing | Business Life | Inpirational
• Business & Investing | Small Business & Entrepreneurship | Entrepreneurship
• Business & Investing | Management & Leadership | Management
• Business & Investing | Management & Leadership | Leadership in Business
• Zappos; Success in Business; Great Customer Service

In his first book, Tony Hsieh--the hip, iconoclastic, and widely-admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer--explains how he created a corporate culture with a commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success. He details many of the unique practices at Zappos, such as their philosophy of allocating marketing money into the customer experience, the importance of Zappos's Core Values ("Deliver WOW through Service"), and the reason why Zappos's number one priority is company culture and his belief that once you get the culture right, everything else - great customer service, long-term branding - will happen on its own. Finally, Delivering Happiness explains how Zappos employees actually apply the Core Values to improving their lives outside of work, proving that creating happiness and record results go hand-in-hand.

In 2008, Howard Schultz, the president and chairman of Starbucks, made the unprecedented decision to return as the CEO eight years after he stepped down from daily oversight of the company and became chairman. Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul. In Onward, he shares the remarkable story of his return and the company's ongoing transformation under his leadership, revealing how, during one of the most tumultuous economic times in history, Starbucks again achieved profitability and sustainability without sacrificing humanity. Offering readers a snapshot of a moment in history that left no company unscathed, the book zooms in to show, in riveting detail, how one company struggled and recreated itself in the midst of it all. The fastpaced narrative is driven by day-to-day tension as conflicts arise and lets readers into Schultz's psyche as he comes to terms with his limitations and evolving leadership style. Onward is a compelling, candid narrative documenting the maturing of a brand as well as a businessman. Onward represents Schultz's central leadership philosophy: It's not just about winning, but the right way to win. Ultimately, he gives readers what he strives to deliver every day—a sense of hope that, no matter how tough times get, the future can be just as or more successful than the past, whatever one defines success to be.

In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business -- from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed -- and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.