Management Books - Page 2

A Sense of Urgency

John P. Kotter

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Most organizational change initiatives fail spectacularly (at worst) or deliver lukewarm results (at best). In his international bestseller Leading Change, John Kotter revealed why change is so hard, and provided an actionable, eight-step process for implementing successful transformations. The book became the change bible for managers worldwide.

Now, in Urgency, Kotter shines the spotlight on the crucial first step in his framework: creating a sense of urgency by getting people to actually see and feel the need for change.

Why focus on urgency? Without it, any change effort is doomed. Kotter reveals the insidious nature of complacency in all its forms and guises.

In this exciting new book, Kotter explains:

How to go beyond "the business case" for change to overcome the fear and anger that can suppress urgency

Ways to ensure that your actions and behaviors -- not just your words -- communicate the need for change

How to keep fanning the flames of urgency even after your transformation effort has scored some early successes

Written in Kotter's signature no-nonsense style, this concise and authoritative guide helps you set the stage for leading a successful transformation in your company.

First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently

Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 262 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman expose the fallacies of standard management thinking in First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently. In seven chapters, the two consultants for the Gallup Organization debunk some dearly held notions about management, such as "treat people as you like to be treated"; "people are capable of almost anything"; and "a manager's role is diminishing in today's economy." "Great managers are revolutionaries," the authors write. "This book will take you inside the minds of these managers to explain why they have toppled conventional wisdom and reveal the new truths they have forged in its place."

The authors have culled their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup during the past 25 years. Quoting leaders such as basketball coach Phil Jackson, Buckingham and Coffman outline "four keys" to becoming an excellent manager: Finding the right fit for employees, focusing on strengths of employees, defining the right results, and selecting staff for talent--not just knowledge and skills. First, Break All the Rules offers specific techniques for helping people perform better on the job. For instance, the authors show ways to structure a trial period for a new worker and how to create a pay plan that rewards people for their expertise instead of how fast they climb the company ladder. "The point is to focus people toward performance," they write. "The manager is, and should be, totally responsible for this." Written in plain English and well organized, this book tells you exactly how to improve as a supervisor. --Dan Ring

When Markets Collide: Investment Strategies for the Age of Global Economic Change

Mohamed El-Erian

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Investing -> Introduction

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Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

"ONE OF THE SMARTEST INVESTORS ON THE PLANET."--MONEY MAGAZINE. .

�This book is an essential read for those who. wish to understand the modern world of investing.�.
�Alan Greenspan

. . .

Winner of the 2008 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award

When Markets Collide is a timely alert to the fundamental changes taking place in today's global economic and financial systems--and a call to action for investors who may fall victim to misinterpreting important signals. While some have tended to view asset class mispricings as mere �noise,� this compelling book shows why they are important signals of opportunities and risks that will shape the market for years to come. One of today's most respected names in finance, Mohamed El-Erian puts recent events in their proper context, giving you the tools that can help you interpret the markets, benefit from global economic change, and navigate the risks.

. .

The world economy is in the midst of a series of hand-offs. Global growth is now being heavily influenced by nations that previously had little or no systemic influence. Former debtor nations are building unforeseen wealth and, thus, enjoying unprecedented influence and facing unusual challenges. And new derivative products have changed the behavior of many market segments and players. Yet, despite all these changes, the system's infrastructure is yet to be upgraded to reflect the realities of today's and tomorrow's world. El-Erian investigates the underlying drivers of global change to shed light on how you should:

. .

. .
• Think about the new opportunities and risks.
• Construct an appropriately diversified and internationalized portfolio.
• Protect your portfolio against new sources of systemic risk.
• Best think about the impact of central banks and financial policies around the world

. .

Offering up predictions of future developments, El-Erian directs his focus to help you capitalize on the new financial landscape, while limiting exposure to new risk configurations.

. .

When Markets Collide is a unique collection of books for investors and policy makers around the world. In addition to providing a thorough analysis and clear perspective of recent events, it lays down a detailed map for navigating your way through an otherwise perplexing new economic landscape.

.

Who: The A Method for Hiring

Geoff Smart, Randy Street

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this landmark book, Geoff Smart and Randy Street provide a simple, practical, and effective solution to what The Economist calls “the single biggest problem in business today”: unsuccessful hiring. The average hiring mistake costs a company $1.5 million or more a year and countless wasted hours. This statistic becomes even more startling when you consider that the typical hiring success rate of managers is only 50 percent.

The silver lining is that “who” problems are easily preventable. Based on more than 1,300 hours of interviews with more than 20 billionaires and 300 CEOs, Who presents Smart and Street’s A Method for Hiring. Refined through the largest research study of its kind ever undertaken, the A Method stresses fundamental elements that anyone can implement–and it has a 90 percent success rate.

Whether you’re a member of a board of directors looking for a new CEO, the owner of a small business searching for the right people to make your company grow, or a parent in need of a new babysitter, it’s all about Who. Inside you’ll learn how to

• avoid common “voodoo hiring” methods
• define the outcomes you seek
• generate a flow of A Players to your team–by implementing the #1 tactic used by successful businesspeople
• ask the right interview questions to dramatically improve your ability to quickly distinguish an A Player from a B or C candidate
• attract the person you want to hire, by emphasizing the points the candidate cares about most

In business, you are who you hire. In Who, Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer simple, easy-to-follow steps that will put the right people in place for optimal success.

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

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Total reviews: 46 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.

When consumers you ve never met are rating your company s products in public forums with which you have no experience or influence, your company is vulnerable. In Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Inc. explain how to turn this threat into an opportunity.

Using tools and data straight from Forrester, you ll learn how to:



-Evaluate new social technologies as they emerge

-Determine how different groups of consumers are participating in social technology arenas

-Apply a four-step process for formulating your future strategy

-Build social technologies into your business including monitoring your brand value, talking with the groundswell through marketing and PR campaigns, and energizing your best customers to recruit their peers

Timely and insightful, this book is required reading for executives seeking to protect and strengthen their company s public image.

"Groundswell is jammed with big ideas, useful stories, and quotable stats. This is the new industrial revolution. Are you on board?"

-Seth Godin, author, Meatball Sundae

"This book will rock your world, if social technology hasn't rocked it already. It's a tsunami of unstoppable force. Amazon, Procter & Gamble, Facebook, Google, and Dell are profiting from the crest of the wave. Are you? Li and Bernoff are the apostles of the tsunami. This book will be your bible."

-Scott Cook, Founder and Chairman of the Executive Committee, Intuit

Groundswell provides practical advice on how to stay nimble and flexible in an ever-morphing digital world. Enabling your company to respond to change quickly especially when talking to and supporting your consumers is essential for business success.

-Cathie Black, President, Hearst Magazines

"The first phase of the Internet was about getting everyone connected. In this next phase, which changes the way we work, live, play, and learn, we re starting to realize the value of those connections as well as the new communications and experiences those interactions lead to the human network. Groundswell effectively documents this shift and underscores the opportunities available to all from this major market transition."

-John T. Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco

"Heed the Groundswell! It's critical reading and helped us master the new dynamics of social media."

-Christina Norman, President, MTV

"Groundswell is a comprehensive look at the tidal wave of change engulfing marketers. Nobody should attempt to engage the newly empowered and emboldened consumer without first hearing what Li and Bernoff have to say on the subject."

-Clark Kokich, CEO, Avenue A | Razorfish

"Social technologies and the groundswell impact every business and organization worldwide. Li and Bernoff have written an insightful book that takes a refreshing research-driven approach to helping businesses transform themselves and successfully navigate this new dynamic landscape."

-Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President, Edelman Digital, and columnist for Advertising Age

The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing

Jason Kelly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 229 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A great introduction to stocks 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This book was a great introduction to stocks. This book eliminated the intimation for understanding stocks. It's a great read too. It's a great first book.

If you're new to stock-market investing, start here 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

If you've ever taken a college-level math course, you know that many math teachers have an interest in keeping everything just a bit obscure. They're afraid that if they clarify everything and define their terms, you'll know as much as they do. Kelly clearly doesn't adhere to this philosophy. If you're a beginner to stock market investing, there's no better place to start than here. Even if you find that many seasoned investors don't agree with Kelly's trading strategies, it doesn't matter. What's important for a new investor is to just understand what's going on. When you hear trading-floor jargon, you want to be able to know what information is being conveyed. Otherwise, it will be of no use to you. Kelly's strategies, while debatable, apply the jargon to real life. And there's really no shortcut. Either you know the basics, or you don't. If you try to just "pick them up" along the way, you'll spend a lot of time on a learning curve--time which could be put to better use buying and selling stock. And, unless you're using monopoly money, learning curves can be terribly expensive. If you want to buy a stock intelligently, you're going to be buying a company. And if you do, you've got to do fundamental analysis. (Some people don't believe in the bars & graphs used in technical analysis.) And if later you want to get into more esoteric stuff like option trading, the basics have to be second nature. You can't waste time asking what terms like Return on Equity or Dividend Yield mean. If you master this book, you won't have to.

Internalize the definitions and rules offered in this book, and then get out there and do a few dry-run transactions. You can put together any number of mock portfolios on Yahoo Finance. And the Internet is full of resources for getting the information you'll need. (Kelly spends a lot of time discussing Value Line. Nowadays, there's no need to spend that kind of money for information that can be had at a fraction of the cost, or for free.) I use Investools, which makes available a ton of data.

Don't be put off by the small size of the book. It's dense with information, and all of it is useful, even essential. I'm looking forward to seeing a later edition, since some of the stuff in this book is already dated. But again, what it does it does very well--teaching you how to talk and think like an investor. What it doesn't do it doesn't even try to do. Kelly knows his readers' limitations. You should know yours.

Editorial Review:

A comprehensively updated edition of an essential guide to stock market investing

For over a decade, Jason Kelly has provided investors with the insider knowledge and time-tested strategies they need to maximize their investment programs. This thoroughly updated edition of The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing includes:
• Kelly’s Maximum Midcap Strategy, an innovative investment program that consistently outperforms the market
• Real-life examples of investment strategies that paid big dividends
• Tips from master investors like Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, and Bill Miller

An accessible, intelligent, and highly effective approach to investing, The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing is an invaluable resource for investors everywhere.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

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Total reviews: 168 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Strategy will always include opportunity and risk 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 3 people found this review helpful.

Strategy:

1. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. Companies need to go beyond competing. To seize new profit and growth opportunities, they also need to create blue oceans.

2. Put the clock forward 20 to 50 years and ask yourself how many unknown industries will exist. Surprisingly, many of the unknown industries will exist.

3. Value innovation is focusing on making competition irrelevant by creating a leap in value for your buyers and you company, thereby opening up new and uncontested market space.

4. Value innovation is neither cutting edge technology nor timing of the market. Value innovation occurs when companies align with utility, price, and cost positions. "If the companies fail to anchor innovation with value in this way, technology innovators and market pioneers often lay eggs that other companies hatch."

5. Blue ocean innovation seeks differentiation and low cost simulataneously. The goal is too drive costs down while simulataneously driving value up for buyers.

6. Utility alignment starts at the top. Production innovation may improve subsystem performance without impacting the company's overall strategy. The production costs savings do not realign the utility proposition of the company. The product cost saving reinforce strategic leadership validating the status quo. "Although innovations of this sort may help to secure and even lift a company's position in the existing market space, such a subsystem approach will rarely create a blue ocean of new market opportunity." Market opportunity results from changing the utility proposition.

7. Red ocean strategy assumes that an industrial structural condition are given and that firms are forced to compete within them, a structuralist or environmental determinism view. In contrast, value innovation is based on the view that market boundaries and industry structure are not given and can be reconstructed by actions and beliefs of industry players.

8. In red ocean, differentiation costs because fimrs compete with the same best practice rule. In recontructionist world, the strategic aim is to create new best-practice rules by breaking the existing value cost trade-off and thereby create a blue ocean.

9. Strategy will always include opportunity and risk.

New markets:

1. How to conceive a new market space: a. Look across alternative industries b. look across strategic groups within industries c. redefine the industry buyer group d. look across to complementary product and services e. rethink the functional-emotional orientation of the industry f. participate in shaping external trends over time.

2. Emotionally oriented industries offer many extras that add price without enhancing functionality. Stripping away these extras may create a fundamentally simpler, lower-priced, lower-cost business model that customer will welcome.

3. Products and services that have different forms but offer the same functionality are substitutes for each other. Alternatives include products and services that have different functions and form but serve the same purpose. Alternatives are broader than substitutes.

4. A strategic group is a group of companies within an industry that pursue a similar strategy. Strategic groups can be ranked in a rough hierarchy according to price and performance. Most companies focus on improving their competitive position within a strategic group. "The key to creating a blue ocean across existing strategic groups is to break out of this narrow tunnel vision by understanding which factors determine customer decisions to trade up or down from one group to another."

5. Individual companies in an industry often target different customer segments. An industry typically converges on a single buyer group. "Challenging an industry's conventional wisdom about which buyer group to target can lead to the discovery of new blue oceans."

6. Untapped value is often hidden in complementary products and services. The key is to define the total solution buyers seek when they choose a product or service. A simple way is to think about what happens before, during, and after your product is used.

7. All industries are subject to external trends that affect their businesses over time. Looking at these trends with the right perspective can show you how to create blue ocean opportunities. Most companies adapt incrementally or passively as events emerge. They pace their own actions to keep up with the development of the trend they are tracking. Key insights occur by discovering how trends will change value to the customer and impact the company's business model. Look for the value a market will deliver today to the value it will deliver tomorrow - "managers can actively shape their future and lay claim to a new blue ocean." The trends must be decisive to your business; they must be irreversible; and they must have a clear trajectory

Editorial Review:

Written by the business world's new gurus, "Blue Ocean Strategy" continues to challenge everything you thought you knew about competing in today's crowded market place. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, authors W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne argue that lasting success comes from creating 'blue oceans': untapped new market spaces ripe from growth. And the business world has caught on - companies around the world are skipping the bloody red oceans of rivals and creating their very own blue oceans. With over one million copies sold world wide, "Blue Ocean Strategy" is quickly reaching "must read" status among smart business readers. Have you caught the wave?

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 233 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Disciplines like strategy, leadership development, and innovation are the sexier aspects of being at the helm of a successful business; actually getting things done never seems quite as glamorous. But as Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan demonstrate in Execution, the ultimate difference between a company and its competitor is, in fact, the ability to execute.

Execution is "the missing link between aspirations and results," and as such, making it happen is the business leader's most important job. While failure in today's business environment is often attributed to other causes, Bossidy and Charan argue that the biggest obstacle to success is the absence of execution. They point out that without execution, breakthrough thinking on managing change breaks down, and they emphasize the fact that execution is a discipline to learn, not merely the tactical side of business. Supporting this with stories of the "execution difference" being won (EDS) and lost (Xerox and Lucent), the authors describe the building blocks--leaders with the right behaviors, a culture that rewards execution, and a reliable system for having the right people in the right jobs--that need to be in place to manage the three core business processes of people, strategy, and operations. Both Bossidy, CEO of Honeywell International, Inc., and Charan, advisor to corporate executives and author of such books as What the CEO Wants You to Know and Boards That Work, present experience-tested insight into how the smooth linking of these three processes can differentiate one company from the rest. Developing the discipline of execution isn't made out to be simple, nor is this book a quick, easy read. Bossidy and Charan do, however, offer good advice on a neglected topic, making Execution a smart business leader's guide to enacting success rather than permitting demise. --S. Ketchum

The One Minute Manager

Kenneth H. Blanchard, Spencer Johnson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 164 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

For more than twenty years, millions of managers in Fortune 500 companies and small businesses nationwide have followed The One Minute Manager's techniques, thus increasing their productivity, job satisfaction, and personal prosperity. These very real results were achieved through learning the management techniques that spell profitability for the organization and its employees.

The One Minute Manager is a concise, easily read story that reveals three very practical secrets: One Minute Goals, One Minute Praisings, and One Minute Reprimands.

The book also presents several studies in medicine and the behavioral sciences that clearly explain why these apparently simple methods work so well with so many people. By the book's end you will know how to apply them to your own situation and enjoy the benefits.

That's why The One Minute Manager has continued to appear on business bestseller lists for more than two decades, and has become an international sensation.

Robert's Rules Of Order Newly Revised In Brief (Roberts Rules of Order (in Brief))

Henry M. III Robert, William J. Evans, Daniel H. Honemann, Thomas J. Balch

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Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Good, but there are better summary versions of Robert's Rules 3 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This book was good as a way to get started in becoming familiar with Robert's Rules. However, a better introductory guide is Robert's Rules in Plain English. If you are new to Robert's Rules, my suggestion is get the Plain English book and read it cover to cover. It's short and will tell you 95% of what you'll probably need to know. If you need any further details, then you should move on to the full version of Robert's Rules. In my opinion, this book (...In Brief) is a little more dry and with lower quality examples than "Plain English."

Editorial Review:

Going to a meeting? Want to know how to take part? Learn quickly and easily! This short, simple book includes: Sample dialogues to get you confidently through motions, nominations, elections, votes, debates, amendments, and more Invaluable tips for keeping meetings orderly and on track A chapter answering the most frequently asked questions Not sure what to do at a meeting? Handy tables at the back of the book tell you just what to say Appointed to a committee? Elected an officer or board member? Chosen as a convention delegate? Chapters on each clearly explain your duties