Career Growth

There's a common strategy used by the fastest growing and most successful businesses of our time. These companies are building their entire customer experience around their digital products, delivering software that is simple, intuitive, and delightful, and that anticipates and exceeds the evolving needs of users. Product-led organizations make their products the vehicle for acquiring and retaining customers, driving growth, and influencing organizational priorities. They represent the future of business in a digital-first world.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Great startups don't waste time on small stuff. If you study the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried. But most needed years of experimentation to find their growth levers. This book aims to shortcut that process. Generic tactics like paid ads, SEO and referral programs will only get you so far. Growth levers are things like the professional photographs that made tens of thousands of customers trust AirBnb when they otherwise wouldn’t—a crucial move that unlocked explosive growth.

Today, brands have become even more important than the products they represent: Their stories travel with lightning speed through social media and the Internet and across countries and diverse cultures. A brand must be elastic enough to allow for reasonable category and product-line extensions, flexible enough to change with dynamic market conditions, consistent enough so that consumers who travel physically or virtually won’t be confused, and focused enough to provide clear differentiation from the competition.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external.

In an audiobook that challenges everything you thought you knew, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne assert that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed, not by battling their rivals for market share in the bloody "red ocean" of a shrinking profit pool, but by creating "blue oceans" of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

In his international bestseller, The Happiness Advantage, Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor described why happiness is the precursor to greater success. Before Happiness is about what comes before both. Because before we can be happy or successful, we need to first develop the ability to see that positive change is possible. Only once we learn to see the world through a more positive lens can we summon all our motivation, emotion, and intelligence to achieve our personal and professional goals.

The challenges facing today's sales executives and their organizations continue to grow, but so do the expectations that they will find ways to overcome them and drive consistent sales growth. There are no simple solutions to this situation, but in this thoroughly updated second edition of Sales Growth, experts from McKinsey & Company build on their practical blueprint for achieving this goal and explore what world-class sales executives are doing right now to find growth and capture it - as well as how they are creating the capabilities to keep growing in the future.

Fears can keep us from reaching for our dreams and desires. But, we have a God much bigger than our fears - one who promises us a more abundant life. We just need to trust. The key to indie business success is in your faith, God's promises, and who God made you to be. Mix in a few unique business development success principles, and you have all you need for finding more business, more faith, and more of the life you desire. Unselling isn't just about "not selling"; it's about so much more. Here, you'll learn what an unselling life looks like and how to achieve it for yourself.

Gravity affects every aspect of our physical being, but there’s a psychological force just as powerful - yet almost nobody has heard of it. It’s responsible for bringing groups of people together and pulling them apart, making certain goals attractive to some and not to others, and fueling cycles of anxiety and conflict. In Wanting, Luke Burgis draws on the work of French polymath René Girard to bring this hidden force to light and reveals how it shapes our lives and societies.

Do you feel too overwhelmed to enjoy life, unable to sort out the demands on your time? Are you doing your best work as a leader yet not making an impact? Have you ever felt stuck, powerless to change your environment? In The Emotionally Healthy Leader, best-selling author Peter Scazzero shows leaders how to develop a deep, inner life with Christ, examining its profound implications for surviving stress, planning and decision-making, building teams, creating healthy culture, influencing others, and much more.

There are 15 million businesses in the United States, and 13 million of them don't utilize a planning process. Yet having a planning process is the most reliable predictor of whether a business will grow. The One Hour Plan for Growth provides a proven system for any business to create a clear and compelling business growth plan that fits on a single sheet of paper in about one hour. This book is a quick listen, and you and your people stay energized and focused on your top priorities.

Growth is a fundamental human need. It is at the root of everything that gives us a feeling of accomplishment, satisfaction, meaning, and progress. Yet many people find their growth stalled at some point. In The Laws of Lifetime Growth, Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura offer 10 simple laws that everyone can use to keep a fresh, innovative perspective on their lives and the world around them.

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are both concerned. Their concern is that the rich are getting richer, but America is getting poorer. The entitlement mentality is epidemic, creating people who expect their country, employer, or family to take care of them. And like the polar ice caps, the middle class is disappearing. America is becoming a two-class society, and soon you will be either rich or poor. Trump and Kiyosaki want you to be rich.

The Road to Excellence identifies the common blind spots that can take any business off track. The book gives you six powerful leadership strategies that, when followed, make it easier for you to find the answer to the critical question: What, exactly, stands between my company and organizational excellence - and what do I do about it?

For years, companies have rewarded their most effective engineers with management positions. But treating management as the default path for an engineer with leadership ability doesn't serve the industry well—or the engineer. The staff engineer's path allows engineers to contribute at a high level as role models, driving big projects, determining technical strategy, and raising everyone's skills. This in-depth book shows you how to understand your role, manage your time, master strategic thinking, and set the standard for technical work.

The training to become a fighter pilot is among the most competitive and difficult in the world with less than one-in-a-thousand succeeding. Pushing a cutting-edge jet to its limits at over 1,000 mph means that every split-second decision can have catastrophic consequences. This extreme environment has forged a group of warriors who for the last 50 years have been considered at the apex of decision-making theory and practice. In The Art of Clear Thinking Hasard Lee distills what he’s learned during his career flying some of the Air Force’s most advanced aircraft.

Real estate titan, best-selling author, and TV impresario Donald J. Trump reveals the secrets of his success. Over the years, everyone has urged Trump to write on this subject, but it wasn't until NBC and executive producer Mark Burnett asked him to star in The Apprentice that he realized just how hungry people are to learn how great personal wealth is created and first-class businesses are run.

In You’ve Already Changed Your Life, Jade Chang posits that humans are infinitely adaptable, that the seeds of personal transformation are sown when we least expect it, and that identifying your own small (but profound!) shifts will help you retell the story of your life.