In 2000, Starbuck's founder and CEO Schultz (Pour Your Heart into It) stepped down from daily oversight of the company and assumed the role of chairman. Eight years later, in the midst of the recession and a period of decline unprecedented in the company's recent history, Schultz-feeling that the soul of his brand was at risk-returned to the CEO post. In this personal, suspenseful, and surprisingly open account, Schultz traces his own journey to help Starbucks reclaim its original customer-centric values and mission while aggressively innovating and embracing the changing landscape of technology. From the famous leaked memo that exposed his criticisms of Starbucks to new product strategies and rollouts, Schultz bares all about the painful yet often exhilarating steps he had to take to turn the company around. Peppered with stories from his childhood in tough Canarsie, N.Y., neighborhoods, his sequel to the founding of Starbucks is grittier, more gripping, and dramatic, and his voice is winning and authentic. This is a must-read for anyone interested in leadership, management, or the quest to connect a brand with the consumer.
Apple's former chief evangelist leads businessfolk down the path to enchantment. The entrepreneur's entrepreneur is back with his 10th book, this time tackling the tricky art of influence and persuasion. Kawasaki (Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging and Outmarketing Your Competition, 2011, etc.) transforms the otherwise exhausted and overwrought tropes of how to win friends and influence people with a complete makeover here, whether he's talking about wardrobe choice or tips for effective swearing.
The author, a modern-day Dale Carnegie, offers explanations on how to wield the most influence in the digital age: Push Technologies like presentations, e-mails and Twitter are discussed as active means of enchanting others, while Pull Technologies like Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn passively draw them in. The author's suggestions for achieving likeability and trustworthiness, as well as overcoming resistance, are thoroughly explained and can easily translate from the workplace to the real world.
Kawasaki makes good use of subheads and bullet points, rendering information in a searchable format. He ends each chapter with an anecdote that illuminates the effectiveness of his techniques—while it's not original, it's effective. The author's trademark light and airy style is on display, but it's his humor and empathy that makes the heavy use of BusinessSpeak and buzzwords more easily palatable. Informative, concise guide from one of America's most influential and, yes, enchanting entrepreneurs.
The authors, management consultants and partners of JeffersonLarsonSmith, offer a fascinating look at corporate tribes—groups of 20–150 people within a company that come together on their own rather than through management decisions—and how executives can use tribes to maximize productivity and profit. Drawing upon research from a 10-year study of more than 24,000 people in two dozen organizations, they argue that tribes have the greatest influence in determining how much and what quality work gets done. The authors identify the five stages of employee tribal development—Life sucks, My life sucks, I'm great and you're not, We're great and Life is great—and offer advice on how to manage these groups. They also share insights from the health care, philanthropic, engineering, biotechnology and other industries and include key points lists for each chapter. Particularly useful is the Tribal Leader's Cheat Sheet, which helps determine and assess success indicators. Well written and enlightening, this book will be of interest to business professionals at all levels.
The contradictions of the Internet search behemoth are teased apart in this engaging, slightly starry-eyed business history. Wired magazine writer Levy (Hackers) insightfully recaps Google's groundbreaking search engine and fabulously profitable online ad–brokering business, and elucidates the cutting-edge research and hard-nosed cost-efficiencies underlying them. He also regales readers with the "Googley" corporate culture of hip techno-capitalism: the elitist focus on braininess, the campus game rooms, the countercultural rectitude of billionaire founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (which can read more like puerile arrogance as they roller-blade into meetings with business-suited squares). Levy's narrative updates a familiar portrait of the company, with breathless accounts of recent innovations. He offers a smart analysis of the tensions between Google's "Don't Be Evil'" slogan and its censorship of its Chinese Web site and the privacy implications of its drive to sponge up all information—but he accepts Google's blinkered conception of e-ethics and its demands for huge tax breaks with too much complacency.
If you're stuck at the starting line, you don't need more time or permission. You don’t need to wait for a boss’s okay or to be told to push the button; you just need to poke.
Poke the Box is a manifesto by bestselling author Seth Godin that just might make you uncomfortable. It’s a call to action about the initiative you’re taking-– in your job or in your life. Godin knows that one of our scarcest resources is the spark of initiative in most organizations (and most careers)-– the person with the guts to say, “I want to start stuff.”
Poke the Box just may be the kick in the pants you need to shake up your life.
Top 10 Investing Books of 2011
Top 10 Investing Books of 2011
A 5-part process that will transform your organization — or your career — into a non-stop creativity juggernaut
We live in an era when business cycles are measured in months, not years. The only way to sustain long term innovation and growth is through creativity-at all levels of an organization. Disciplined Dreaming shows you how to create profitable new ideas, empower all your employees to be creative, and sustain your competitive advantage over the long term. Linkner distills his years of experience in business and jazz — as well as hundreds of interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, and artists — into a 5-step process that will make creativity easy for you and your organization. The methodology is simple, backed by proven results.
· Empowers individuals, teams, and organizations to meet creative challenges posed by the marketplace
· Turns the mystery of creativity into a simple-to-use process
· Shows how creativity can be used for everything from innovative, game-shifting breakthroughs to incremental advances and daily improvements to business processes
· Offers dozens of practical exercises, thought-starters, workouts to grow "creative muscles," and case studies
Disciplined Dreaming shows even the stuffiest corporate bureaucracies how to cultivate creativity in order to become more competitive in today's shifting marketplace.
A social media expert with global experience with many of the world’s biggest brands —including Nike, Toyota and Motorola—Simon Mainwaring offers a visionary new practice in which brands leverage social media to earn consumer goodwill, loyalty and profit, while creating a third pillar of sustainable social change through conscious contributions from customer purchases. These innovative private sector partnerships answer perhaps the most pressing issue facing business and thought leaders today: how to practice capitalism in a way that satisfies the need for both profit and a healthy, sustainable planet. Mainwaring provides case studies from companies such as P&G, Walmart, Starbucks, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Nike, Whole Foods, Patagonia, and Nestlé as well as a bold plan for how corporations need to rethink their strategies.
The Thank You Economy is much more than saying "thank you.” The Thank You Economy represents a much bigger movement. This book could easily have been called The Humanization of Business or Manners Marketing.
I feel that we're living through the biggest culture shift of our time. The internet, itself, is 17-years-old. It's just hitting the social part of its life. It's just like growing up. As you get to 13, 14 and 15, you want to go out and go to parties. That's what's happening right now! The internet is growing up.
What happens when we live in this word of mouth world where we're tweeting out "I love Company X's orange juice"? We're sharing thoughts that we never would have picked up the phone and called somebody about in the past. What happens when brands can be humanized? In The Thank You Economy, I tackle the issue of the ROI of social media and provide case studies. I think we wrote a much, much stronger book than I did with Crush It. When I say we, I mean the people in the social graph--the people that are living it.
There is enormous ROI in social media. It's like my famous saying though, "What's the ROI of your mother?" The data isn't as black and white like it has been in the past. I firmly believe that the brands that have a soul and a heart and understand how to scale this will win.
This is a comprehensive book from a guy that has lived in the social space for the last 6 years like I have. I live and breathe my community and I've been able to consult with big brands for the past two years on how to leverage this world of caring. This is the perfect book, not only for entrepreneurs who might have an employee or two, but also for brand managers and CMOs at bigger companies.
What does it mean to be truly wealthy? As a longtime financial writer and nationally acclaimed investment advisor, Alexander Green understands the importance of money. But in this insightful and inspiring new book, he looks beyond traditional measures of wealth to explore how a rich life is one of significance, not just financial success. As Green observes, money creates wealth, but so do character, conscience, attitude, and wisdom. Only by incorporating each of these elements into your day-to-day existence can you experience what the ancients called "the good life."
A generous, wide-ranging inquiry into what matters most, Beyond Wealth is a road map to a rich life, to what the author calls "True Wealth." The book contains more than sixty-five commentaries on topics ranging from love, health, leisure, honor, courage, trust, philosophy, history, science, and spirituality. And the author's perspective on each subject is broadened and deepened by liberal quotations from Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emerson, Gandhi, Einstein, Tolstoy, and other great minds. Beyond Wealth is full of practical wisdom. Yet it is also a book of contemplations, promoting both greater understanding and deep reflection. Each piece can be read alone and is characterized by brevity, wit, and a liveliness of mind that recalls the best of Montaigne and Swift.
Combining personal anecdotes with provocative insights and timeless truths, Beyond Wealth is a fascinating exploration of the unique intersection between money, personal fulfillment, and successful living.
In Endgame: The End of the Debt Supercycle and How It Changes Everything, Mauldin and Tepper pull no punches and get directly the point. ...Endgame is a veritable trip around the world, as Mauldin lays out the uncomfortable choices facing nearly every major country. While Mauldin’s analysis of the American debt problem is sobering, his comments on Europe are downright frightening…Given the noise dominating the newswires, it is refreshing to find clear, coherent thinking. Our compliments to Messrs. Mauldin and Tepper on a job well done.”
—Charles Sizemore, HS Dent Research Analyst and Editor of the Sizemore Investment Letter
These were the Top 10 Investing Books of 2011, please check out my other lists for more great reads.
These were the Top 10 Investing Books of 2011, please check out my other lists for more great reads.
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