Business Problem Solving

Serial entrepreneur, business growth expert, and brand ambassador Scott Duffy weaves together stories from his own journey and those of superstar entrepreneurs along with sage advice to help listeners identify their own "aha!" moments and turn them into unique growth opportunities to help them break through and level up their entrepreneurship game.

A high-performing company culture can translate into happy employees, a productive and engaging work environment, and fluid communications. To help you define and create a culture that works in today's competitive world, Entrepreneur's community of small-business owners and entrepreneurs share their battle-tested strategies, hard-won advice, and secrets behind what works and what doesn't.

Big Data Revolution is a guide to improving performance, making better decisions, and transforming business through the effective use of big data. Listeners are guided through tried-and-true methodologies for getting more out of data and using it to the utmost advantage. This audiobook describes the major trends emerging in the field, the pitfalls and triumphs being experienced, and the many considerations surrounding big data, all while guiding listeners toward better decision-making from the perspective of a data scientist.

From profiles and interviews with the world's leading venture capitalists and high-profile coaches of business founders, A Dozen Lessons distills a set of bedrock methods for approaching business questions and creating value. The veteran business writer Tren Griffin takes the listener through the investment philosophies of VC luminaries such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital to draw out a set of guiding principles that successful businesses follow.

Information is power. It drives commerce, protects nations, and forms the backbone of systems that range from health care to high finance. Yet despite the avalanche of data available in today's information age, neither institutions nor individuals get the information they truly need to make well-informed decisions. Faulty information and sub-optimal decision-making create an imbalance of power that is exaggerated as governments and corporations amass enormous databases on each of us.

Should your company pursue global expansion or mine local opportunities? Take risks to grow dramatically or protect your current stability? Seek to maximize sales or the bottom line? We're so often faced with apparent paradoxes: continuity and change, conservatism and progressiveness, predictability and chaos. In business, inherent tensions are mistakenly viewed as problems to be resolved once the "correct" answer is found. But when we consider only one direction - either A or B - we only see part of the picture.

Meetings don't have to be a waste of time. When managed right, they are a powerful tool for solving problems, making decisions, exchanging ideas - and getting results fast. Based on years of experience in consulting for companies around the world, Brian Tracy has learned firsthand what works in meetings - and what doesn't. Now he reveals simple, proven ideas you can use to make meetings shorter, more effective, and more satisfying to everyone in attendance.

Today when the competition, technology, and the economy are evolving faster than ever before, organizations and the people like us who work in them need a proven approach to help us adapt - and succeed. The key, according to Paul B. Brown, is to think like an entrepreneur, no matter what your position or industry. What works for the most successful entrepreneurs will work for us, Brown argues, whether we want to stay employed working for someone else or are thinking of going off on our own.

You have a great idea. Now what? That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process. The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.

Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author was - at first. When the term "big data" first came on the scene, best-selling author Tom Davenport ( Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind. Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data means - and why everyone in business needs to know about it.

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

So how do you build a company that matters? Companies and people that matter have successfully become the obvious choices in the hearts and minds of their customers, their employees, and their communities. They elevate themselves by consistently finding ways to solve the most pressing needs their markets face. The result? They create more value year after year and build sustainable, differentiated organizations.

In this essential and timely book, behavioral scientists Sanders and Hume demonstrate the astonishing reach of our social networks, and why we need to reclaim their power to effect positive change in our professional and private lives. The rise of social media has sent our social instincts into overdrive, and the impact of our networks has never been greater. But what if we could reclaim the positive power that influences our decisions, to behave better and be happier?

While exposing the risks inherent in maintaining a nontransparent relationship with customers, Tactical Transparency provides a methodology that will help your organization create its unique plan to bring greater authenticity to your company and your brands. Drawn largely from interviews with leaders in companies that have achieved measurable success in this arena, authors Shel Holtz and John C. Havens provide step-by-step details on how executives and professional communicators can create a transparency strategy that will keep their organization competitive in the 21st century.

Companies today face a dilemma in marketing. The tried-and-true formulas to create sales and market share behind brands are becoming irrelevant and losing traction with consumers. In this book, Gerzema and LeBar offer credible evidence - drawn from a detailed analysis of a decade's worth of brand and financial data using Y&R's Brand Asset Valuator (BAV), the largest database of brands in the world - that business is riding on yet another bubble that is ready to burst - a brand bubble.

In this groundbreaking book, T.J. Waters has turned his experience collecting and analyzing competitive intelligence for the CIA into effective strategies for businesses wanting to stay on the leading edge of their industries. The book describes a practical process from planning (identifying competitive threats and determining the resources needed to counter them) through implementation (creating an organizational strategy) to execution (collecting key information and turning it into bottom-line results).

Proven techniques for resolving workplace conflicts. After years of seeing clients struggling and their businesses suffering with destructive conflicts, Diane Katz developed the Working Circle, a step-by-step process that helps everyone in business resolve conflict in a nonconfrontational, creative, collaborative way. Win at Work! provides you with a no-nonsense guide based on real-life examples of people at pivotal points in their careers. Filled with practical wisdom, it reveals how you can move around the roadblocks that, if left unattended, can stop you in your tracks.

Decision Making for Dummies is a candid resource that helps leaders understand the impact of their choices, not only on business, but also on their credibility and reputation. Designed for managers, business owners, and anyone else who makes tough decisions on a daily basis, this guide helps you figure out if the decisions you're making are the right ones.

The key to making better decisions is found in the capability of unity in diversity. By going beyond traditional patterns of relationships based on unity in uniformity and division in diversity, we discover how diversity can enrich our understanding and lead to better decisions. We can learn to work harmoniously with those who have a different profession, race, culture, or way of thinking. By taking advantage of diversity, we not only make better decisions but can also carry out more complex projects than what we could do with a group of people who all think the same.

The future may still be unpredictable, but nowadays, disasters are not. We live in a time of constant, consistent catastrophe, where things more often go wrong than they go right. So why do we still fumble when disaster hits? Why are we always one step behind? In The Devil Never Sleeps, Juliette Kayyem lays the groundwork for a new approach to dealing with disasters.