Career Strategy

As a veteran of six successful Kickstarter campaigns (and counting) and the proprietor of the Kickstarter Lessons blog, Jamey Stegmaier knows something about crowdfunding. In this audiobook, he goes beyond the nuts and bolts of how it works to a deeper level - crowdfunding not just as a cool way to raise money but as a better way to build and run a business.

Companies are fighting the wrong battle. The consensus has been to learn the best practices from Big Tech and imitate them. But new paths for growth aren't created by imitation; they're forged by radical differentiation. In Smart Rivals, Harvard Business School professor Feng Zhu and former Bloomberg journalist Bonnie Cao show business leaders how to create new competitive advantages by offering product features and benefits that tech giants and other competitors cannot match.

It's no secret that culture is the key to attracting and engaging top talent and seizing the competitive edge. But the vast majority of culture efforts fail as quickly as they started. Why? Because leaders are missing the big picture. They're creating and communicating values but failing to ensure the values are tied to the purpose and the strategy of the company while also being integrated into processes, operations, and behaviors.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

It's no secret that steering a business has become dramatically more complex and uncertain in our modern era. Constant exploration of new territory by teams is the name of the game. Yet most companies are stuck with yesterday's approach to problem solving. Having reached the highest levels of the Fortune 500, digital disrupter Atif Rafiq has written Decision Sprint to pull the curtain back on the hidden management systems within your organization that impact how people think, collaborate, and make decisions.

For many organizations, the word strategy conjures up endless ideas, concepts, and tools - while the intent is correct, the awful reality is most companies do not have a simple, common definition of strategy or a simple approach to make the big decisions. Too many PowerPoints, not enough one pagers that can be put into practice. The lack of a common approach to strategy frustrates executives, creates conflict where there is none, fast-tracks dubious alternatives, lengthens decision-making, and hampers the quality of the decisions that finally emerge.

Most organizations have the same weakness. There is a gap between their careful plans and what happens at the point where the sales force meets the customer. In his 25 years combating profit-killers for Fortune 500 companies, Gregg Crawford has seen this again and again. Companies have almost everything they need to succeed. All that's missing is one final connection: the last link.

As we are constantly on our electronic devices, we have come to distrust curated media and traditional PR. Stephen Denny and Paul Leinberger have found that people now want to make their own decisions based on raw footage, real-time updates, and unfiltered livestreams. How, then, do marketing executives and others gain consumer trust? These Fortune 500 consultants present the answer in Unfiltered Marketing.

In business, and in life, everything is changing fast, apart from how we behave. Our ways of thinking and making decisions have changed little since we lived in agricultural and industrial societies, but the problems we now need to solve are entirely different. It requires a revolution in thinking and behavior to meet the challenges that now face us and to avoid disaster we need to totally rethink the model. Part business biography, part business blueprint, Total Rethink explains how this can be done.

The paradigms of big business have changed. Incumbents of the old guard find themselves superseded by digitally-charged, data-fueled organizations that leverage platform-based business models. How can pre-digital businesses survive? They're loaded with resources, brand power, and embedded networks, they just need a new playbook. Chasing Digital is that playbook. Outlining a clear and detailed framework, this book is designed to help leaders redesign their organization from the bottom up by leveraging their strengths to create a new competitive advantage in the digital economy.

Attitude can make or break you and the people you lead. Good attitudes on a team do not guarantee its success, but bad attitudes guarantee its ruin. So says New York Times best-selling author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell in this highly practical primer, Attitude 101.

Unequaled is the client service professional's guide to getting ahead and achieving professional goals. You're smart and hardworking, but guess what - so is everyone else. So how do you stand out? You need to distinguish yourself in order to get ahead, but simply being good at your job is not enough. Moving up is about soft skills, networking, client connections, emotional intelligence, and your personal reputation. This audiobook is a frank and candid guide to what it really takes to succeed in the field.

Only 10% to 25% of organizations get it right when it comes to achieving the expected results from their strategic planning. This means 75% to 90% of them are leaving results on the table and wasting their time on things that don't matter. Almost a decade ago, a major steel manufacturer approached Sean Ryan and his team to help them think through how to better convert strategy to results. This was the catalyst for the seven gears that translate strategy to results found in Strategy-Execution-Results (SXR).

In today's corporate world, 87 percent of companies fail to successfully execute the strategy they set for any given year. In this book, CEO mentor and coach Dan Prosser tells you how to make your company one of the other 13 percent. In the process, he explains that the true challenge of building a great company - one that consistently executes its strategy - is understanding the real nature of human interaction and the key to success: connectedness.

Leaders all around the world at organizations of any size and type will benefit by shedding their obsolete notions about strategy and becoming more resilient. Bringing Strategy Back rises to the challenge and presents a new prescriptive model. It introduces four "strategic shock absorbers" that enable leaders to build resilient organizations that can withstand even the most unexpected global turbulence.

There's another, better way to drive durable, effective change in your organization, and it’s been proven effective by global IT and business consulting leader Infosys. The Live Enterprise operating model provides a clear path to transform large complex businesses into agile, digital ecosystems that evolve with changing market needs and scale to any size.

The authors of The Phoenix Encounter Method don't advise safety. In fact, their method of leadership thinking requires you to imagine burning your business to the ground - throwing yourself into a firestorm change - and turning the upheaval to your organization's advantage. It can then rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes, stronger and more powerful than ever.

In Game Changer, Jean-Manuel Izaret and Arnab Sinha simplify and clarify pricing strategy by integrating its many frameworks and concepts into seven distinct pricing games, each with its own proven tools, rules, forces, and structures. To help you pick the right game and play it well, Izaret and Sinha have developed the Strategic Pricing Hexagon, a tool refined through years of testing, iteration, and adaptation. The Hexagon is your portal to a business world where stronger growth and better financial performance come from a set of strategic pricing decisions.

Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval have moved to the top of the advertising industry by following a simple but powerful philosophy: it pays to be nice. While so many companies encourage a dog-eat-dog mentality, The Kaplan Thaler Group has succeeded through chocolate and flowers.

This book is for first-time startup founders in the B2B space. Maybe you’re a software engineer, product manager, salesperson, doctor, or lawyer building your first startup. My bet is that although you’re an expert at your technical skill, you yourself recognize that there’s a lot to learn when it comes to building a product, marketing it to a specific audience and overall running a company.