Business Leadership Management

How did salesforce.com grow from a start-up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman, and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change.

Each year, sales professionals leave billions of dollars on the table because they are out gunned, out maneuvered, and out played by savvy buyers, who have been schooled in the art and science of negotiation. Because today's buyers have more power than ever before - more information, more at stake, and more control over the buying process-they almost always enter sales negotiations in a much stronger position than the salespeople on the other side of the table. The results are sadly predictable: Salespeople and their companies end up on the losing end of the deal.

Renowned business author David Magee fuses both the interesting history and philosophy of one of America's most well-known companies in this entertaining aid for business management. While other American businesses are crumbling under low-cost foreign competition, John Deere Company thrives by maintaining such ideas as building the best product, being open to change and innovation, listening rather than leading, and keeping virtuous business practices.

Whether you are moving up, moving on, or just starting out, America's top career coach, Robin Ryan, offers proven, easy-to-learn techniques for mastering the job interview and landing the job of your dreams. This brief, compact book, newly updated in 2008, is packed with useful tips such as: how to establish a career identity or personal brand in the opening minutes of an interview using the 60 Second Sell¿, answers to more than 100 of the toughest interview questions.

Each of us has but one life to live on this earth. What we do with it is our choice. Are we drifting through it as spectators, reacting to our circumstances when necessary and wondering just how we got to this point anyway? Or are we directing it, maximizing the joy and potential of every day, living with a purpose or mission in mind? Too many of us are doing the former - and our lives are slipping away one day at a time. But what if we treated life like the gift that it is? What if we lived each day as though it was part of a bigger picture, a plan?

Like Miller's previous books, this one follows the life, learning, and influence of Debbie Bruster. Here she finds herself mentoring Blake Brown, the son of her former mentor. Rather than answer Blake's questions about leadership directly, Debbie introduces him to other leaders, each of whom shares a unique perspective on what really makes a leader successful. As Blake puts the pieces together, he discovers his problem is not one of skills but of character - that leadership is more about the heart of the leader than the head or hands.

Brian Tracy reveals how you can apply the secrets and strategies used by the highest paid people in every business to maximize your own strengths, make yourself more valuable, and become virtually indispensable to your company. The strategies and ideas in this audio book will help you excel in every aspect of your job.

From technology to business, two (or more) heads often prove to be better than one - but only if those heads are cognitively diverse. Diverse perspectives are a powerful tool for maximizing productivity and enhancing collective performance. Now, in The Hidden Factor: Why Thinking Differently Is Your Greatest Asset, you can learn the strategies that make you a more diverse thinker and position you to break down institutional silos and build robust, effective teams.

We've all seen it before: the ambitious leader who enjoys great success and then, inexplicably, crashes and burns. Perhaps this leader has been you. Leaders can't sustain effectiveness if they can't sustain themselves. Resonant Leadership offers inspiration, dozens of exercises, and other tools to help listeners become and remain successful leaders in their work and in their lives.

In The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital, the pioneers of the industry share the investing and management wisdom they have gained by investing in and transforming their portfolio companies. Based on original interviews conducted by the authors, this book is filled with colorful stories on the subjects that most matter to the high-level investor, such as selecting and working with management, pioneering new markets, adding value through operational improvements, applying private equity principles to non-profits, and much more.

In this book, psychotherapist and business coach Lynn Grodzki acts as your personal business coach and shows you how to build an ideal private practice - one that is both highly profitable and personally satisfying. Today, being a talented professional is not enough to ensure the success of your private practice; you also need to be an enthusiastic, talented businessperson. Grodzki's business strategies are effective and immediately useful for a wide range of private practitioners....

Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates.

In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test"....

You have the ability, right now, to accomplish more than you ever have before. In this powerful, practical program, Brian Tracy shows you how to plot your course to greater success and achievement. Life, Tracy says, is a journey. And as with any other journey, you have to do more than just think happy thoughts about where you want to go. You need clear goals, plans, and schedules to get from wherever you are today to wherever you want to be in the future.

What is great leadership? What separates the merely competent leaders from those rare individuals who leave a lasting impression on everyone around them? As one of the world's most in-demand CEO coaches and top leadership gurus, John Mattone has worked with some of our brightest business minds - Apple's Steve Jobs, Pepsi's Roger Enrico, and Nielsen's Armando Uriegas - and he's identified the key qualities that, together, make up the mindset of great leadership.

When it comes to how to succeed as an entrepreneur, we are besotted with advice. According to best-selling author Alan Weiss, success is a combination of opportunism, very disciplined work, luck, timing, and ignoring most advice. In other words, it means striking out on your own original path to success. In Million Dollar Maverick, he explains that entrepreneurs don't take advice; they create value and then monetize it. They do what they love and are great at and find a way to sell it to people.

There's a bold decision in your life you've been waiting to make, and every day passing by is a reminder of what hasn't happened. Conveniently tucked in a box labeled "someday", the fear of the unknown has taken a grip on your life and put your dreams on hold. Until now. Whether your leap is quitting the soul-sucking job and starting your own business, taking a bold chance on love or finally going all in on your dreams, The Leap of Your Life is the ticket to get you there - all while having the time of your life....

In The Small Big, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice describe how, in today's information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences. In the last few years, more research-from fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and behavioral economics-has helped to uncover an even greater understanding of how influence, persuasion, and behavior change happens.

In this new book, Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo argue that current approaches to leadership fail to produce positive outcomes for either businesses or the communities they serve. Employee disengagement and customer fickleness remain high, resulting in a lack of creativity and collaboration at all levels of entrepreneurial activity. Investor demand for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) continues to be poorly integrated into profit strategies.

How to Stop Yourself Before You Make Another Costly Decision - No one intentionally makes bad decisions. Yet we make them all the time. In fact, some of the worst disasters in recent history - the collapse of major investment banks, the global financial meltdown - were the result of seemingly reasonable decisions made by a lot of smart people. How does this happen? Michael J. Mauboussin argues that the correct process for deciding well - especially when the stakes are high - conflicts with how our minds naturally work.