Excellent Employment: Hiring the Best People to Help your Business Grow
The Business on a Shoestring series helps small business owners grow their business imaginatively, effectively and without spending a fortune. Aimed at entrepreneurs with plenty of vision and commitment but not a lot of cash, each book is packed with ideas that really work, real-life examples, step-by-step advice and sources of further information.
Recruiting the right people to help your company flourish and grow can be a real headache for small business owners. The process can be expensive and time-consuming, but this book will guide you through the minefield of hiring others by offering practical advice on key issues such as: defining the job properly; drawing up a job description; advertising in the right places; drawing up a shortlist; interview dos and don'ts; inducting new employees.
Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
As one of today & rsquo;s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world.
Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog & mdash;ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years.
A sample:
& bull; Bon Jovi And The Pirates & bull; Christmas Card Spam & bull; Clinging To Your Job Title? & bull; How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah & rsquo;s Show? & bull; The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas & bull; The Seduction of & ldquo;Good Enough & rdquo; & bull; What Happens When It's All on Tape? & bull; Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert?
Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: & ldquo;I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don & rsquo;t work for you. But I & rsquo;m certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you & rsquo;ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I & rsquo;m betting that once inspired, you & rsquo;ll actually make something happen
Driving Honda - Inside The World's Most Innovative Car Company
For decades there have been two iconic Japanese auto companies. One has been endlessly studied and written about. The other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood. Until now.
Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into the world & rsquo;s fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer, as well as one of the most beloved, most profitable, and most consistently innovative multinational corporations. What drives the company that keeps creating and improving award-winning and bestselling models like the Civic, Accord, Odyssey, CR-V, and Pilot?
According to Jeffrey Rothfeder, what truly distinguishes Honda from its competitors, especially archrival Toyota, is a deep commitment to a set of unorthodox management tenets. The Honda Way, as insiders call it, is notable for decentralization over corporate control, simplicity over complexity, experimentation over Six Sigma & ndash;driven efficiency, and unyielding cynicism toward the status quo and whatever is assumed to be the truth. Honda believes in freely borrowing from the past as a bridge to & ldquo;innovative discontinuity & rdquo; in the present. And those are just a few of the ideas that the company & rsquo;s colorful founder, Soichiro Honda, embedded in the DNA of his start-up sixty-five years ago.
As the first journalist allowed behind Honda & rsquo;s infamously private doors, Rothfeder interviewed dozens of executives, engineers, and frontline employees about its management practices and global strategy. He shows how the company has developed and maintained its unmatched culture of innovation, resilience, and flexibility & mdash;and how it exported that culture to other countries that are strikingly different from Japan, establishing locally controlled operations in each region where it lays down roots.
For instance, Rothfeder reports on life at a Honda factory in the tiny town of Lincoln, Alabama, and what happened when American workers were trained to follow the Honda Way, as a self-sufficient outpost of the global company. Could they master Honda & rsquo;s three core principles:
Embrace Paradox: Honda encourages respectful disagreement and debate between opposing viewpoints, on matters large and small. New ideas often emerge from conflict.Real Place, Real Part, Real Knowledge: Honda teaches people to argue using facts, not assumptions. One must go to the factory floor, the showroom, the parking lot, the driver & rsquo;s seat, or the truck bed & mdash;whatever it takes & mdash;to get the facts and make a decision that can be supported with data.Respect Individualism: Honda often hires people with unusual backgrounds and independent streaks. It promotes those who question the status quo and who would probably struggle in organizations that focus on rigid rules and systems.
Rothfeder shows how the Alabama plant became a new model for manufacturing in America. It can turn out several different types of cars on any given day and up to 300,000 vehicles and engines a year. Its flexible model enables unparalleled responsiveness to market changes and recovery from mistakes.
As Soichiro Honda himself liked to say, & ldquo;Success can be achieved only through repeated failure and introspection. In fact, success represents one percent of your work, which results only from the ninety-nine percent that is called failure. & rdquo;
How to build lasting connections through meaningful communication Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships. This book provides the tools to understand others' unique communication style as well as your own. Get detailed advice on how to adjust to diverse communication styles, develop a unifying language for the organization, and better match motivational techniques to team members. Through storytelling and experiential exercises, author Dave Mitchell helps you gain insight into your own unique interaction style and teaches you how to communicate, motivate, sell, and service more successfully no matter the personality types involved. Offers insight into the behavior cues and questions to ask to better understand someone's interactive preferences Explains how to enhance your sales efforts by better targeting your brand message to the client's style so that your products/services resonate with them more Examines strategies for creating a high performing work environment and achieve greater customer service excellence Contains conflict resolution strategies, including how to effectively work out differences within a team, between work units, with customers, and even in your personal life Armed with the ability to interpret the behavior of the people around you, you will achieve greater levels of success at work and at home while also learning how to better handle the difficult situations involving people in your life.
The 27 Challenges Managers Face: Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems
For more than 20 years, management expert Bruce Tulgan has been asking, "What are the most difficult challenges you face when it comes to managing people?" Regardless of industry or job title, managers cite the same core issues - 27 recurring challenges: the superstar whom the manager is afraid of losing, the slacker whom the manager cannot figure out how to motivate, the one with an attitude problem, and the two who cannot get along, to name just a few. It turns out that when things are going wrong in a management relationship, the common denominator is almost always unstructured, low substance, hit-or-miss communication. The real problem is that most managers are "managing on autopilot" without even realizing it - until something goes wrong. And if you are managing on autopilot, then something almost always does.
The 27 Challenges Managers Face shows exactly how to break the vicious cycle and gain control of management relationships. No matter what the issue, Tulgan shows that the fundamentals are all you need. The very best managers hold ongoing one-on-one conversations that make expectations clear, track performance, offer feedback, and hold people accountable. For every workplace problem - even the most awkward and difficult - The 27 Challenges Managers Face shows how to tailor conversations to solve situations familiar to every manager. Tulgan offers clear approaches for turning around bad attitudes, reducing friction and conflict, improving low performers, retaining top performers, and even addressing your own personal burnout.
The 27 Challenges Managers Face is an indispensable resource for managers at all levels, one anyone managing anyone will want to keep on hand. One challenge at a time, you'll see how the most effective managers use the fundamentals of management to proactively resolve (nearly) any problem a manager could face.
Business Finance Basics: Learn What You Need in 2 Hours
(A Crash Course for Entrepreneurs)
Between 40 and 70 percent of start-up businesses fail in their first four years, mostly because of money problems. Even growth can kill you! Unlike many other business finance books, this one shows you how to recognize if you need outside help-- getting funding, planning cash flow, growing a business, controlling costs, avoiding pitfalls, running day-to-day finances, using accountants and software tools, and more. But it also sets you up to successfully do the things you can do yourself.Each of the books in the Crash Course for Entrepreneurs series offers a high-level overview of the critical things you need to know and do if you want to survive and thrive in our super-competitive world. Of course, there's much more to learn about each topic, but what you'll read here will give you the framework for learning the rest.Between them, Marc A. Price, Michael F. O'Keefe, and Scott L. Girard, Jr. have successfully started 17 companies in a wide variety of fields. Scott was formerly executive vice president of Pinpoint Holdings Group, Inc. Mike founded O'Keefe Motor Sports in 2004 and grew it into the largest database of aftermarket automotive components in the world. Marc has launched seven companies of his own and collaborated with the Federal government, U.S. military, and major nonprofits and corporations.
No matter what your title or place on the organization chart, you have the potential to be a leader & mdash;or more precisely, the potential to exercise leadership in the moments that matter most. Leadership is not a job title or position, but rather an action. In certain moments and situations, anyone can rise to the occasion to act as a leader & mdash;gaining respect, confidence, and ultimately greater success in the organization. But how can you recognize these moments where leadership is required, and then know what to do? Step Up explains six critical "leadership moments" & mdash;everyday instances when you have a choice to shine or let opportunity pass you by. Based on their own research and extensive client work, Evans and Foster identify six regularly occurring moments and help you understand how to act wisely and decisively when those moments arise, showing how to: Get Angry, Not Stupid Avoid Terminal Politeness Decide Already Act When You are the Problem Leverage Pessimism Reverse Momentum Anyone can take advantage of opportunities to act as a leader when the time is right & mdash;and reap the rewards. Step Up is a guide to exercising leadership when it matters most, boosting your personal impact and effectiveness, and making a real difference.
The Foreword by renowned marketing guru Philip Kotler sets the stage for a comprehensive review of the latest strategies for building, leveraging, and rejuvenating brands. Destined to become a marketing classic, Kellogg on Branding includes chapters written by respected Kellogg marketing professors and managers of successful companies. It includes: The latest thinking on key branding concepts, including brand positioning and designStrategies for launching new brands, leveraging existing brands, and managing a brand portfolioTechniques for building a brand-centered organizationInsights from senior managers who have fought branding battles and wonThis is the first book on branding from the faculty of the Kellogg School, the respected resource for dynamic marketing information for today's ever-changing and challenging environment. Kellogg is the brand that executives and marketing managers trust for definitive information on proven approaches for solving marketing dilemmas and seizing marketing opportunities.
Business firms around the world are experimenting with new organizational designs, changing their formal architectures, their routines and processes, and their corporate cultures as they seek to improve their current performance and their growth prospects. In the process they are changing the scope of their business operations, redrawing their organization charts, redefining the allocation of decision-making authority and responsibility, revamping the mechanisms for motivating and rewarding people, reconsidering which activities to conduct in-house and which to out-source, redesigning their information systems, and seeking to alter the shared beliefs, values and norms that their people hold. In this book, John Roberts argues that there are predictable, necessary relationships among these changes that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner. The Modern Firm develops powerful conceptual frameworks for analyzing the interrelations between organizational design features, competitive strategy and the business environment. Written in a non-technical language, the book is nevertheless based on rigorous modeling and draws on numerous examples from eighteenth century fur trading companies to such modern firms such as BP and Nokia. Finally the book explores why these developments are happening now, pointing to the increase in global competition and changes in technology. Written by one of the world's leading economists and experts that will improve performance and growth. The organizations that are successful will establish patterns of fit among the elements of their organizational designs, their competitive strategies and the external environment in which they operate and will go about this in a holistic manner.
How to Prosper in Hard Times: Blueprints for Abundance by the Greatest Motivational Teachers
The tried-and-true prosperity wisdom of these beloved writers, teachers, and thinkers has been relied upon by generations of Americans seeking guidance in hard economic times? and now, for the first time, it is collected in a single, compact paperback volume. Cherished for decades, these timeless writings from self-help and inspirational masters, including Napoleon Hill, Florence Scovel Shinn, James Allen, and Russell Conwell, have touched the lives of literally millions of people, giving them the insight and knowledge to take care of their families and themselves in difficult times. How to Prosper in Hard Times is an easy- to-use, one-of-a- kind volume, combining inspirational advice on attracting prosperity, dealing with hardship, and keeping a positive attitude no matter what. A necessary handbook for our era, How to Prosper in Hard Times is filled with time-tested wisdom that resonates as strongly and as truly today as when it was first written. Featuring:-Prayer for Prosperity by Florence Scovel Shinn -How to Attract Money by Joseph Murphy-Permanent Success is Built on Hardship and Temporary Failure by Napoleon Hill-Seven Remedies for a Lean Purse by George S. Clason-After Failure, What? by Orson Swett Marden-Light on Life?s Difficulties by James Allen-What You Can Do With Your Will Power by Russell H. Conwell-The Optimist?s Creed by Christian Larsen-A full About the Authors section, featuring capsule biographies and bibliographic and historical information
Alastair Campbell knows all about winning. As Tony Blair & rsquo;s chief spokesman and strategist he helped guide the Labour Party to victory in three successive general elections, and he & rsquo;s fascinated by what it takes to win.How do sports stars excel, entrepreneurs thrive, or individuals achieve their ambition? Is their ability to win innate? Or is the winning mindset something we can all develop? Drawing on the wisdom of an astonishing array of talented people & ndash; from elite athletes to top managers, from rulers of countries to rulers of global business empires & ndash; Alastair Campbell uses his forensic skills, as well as his own experience of politics and sport, to get to the heart of success. He examines how winners tick. He considers how they build great teams. He analyses how they deal with unexpected setbacks and new challenges. He judges what the very different worlds of politics, business and sport can learn from one another. And he sets out a blueprint for winning that we can all follow.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.
The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
& ldquo;Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, & rdquo; comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people. & rdquo;
Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
