Our Library

A list of awesome books and learning resources, handpicked and curated by our mentors.

The 20 most recommended books

EMPOWERED - Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products
Marty Cagan

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enables their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products. As legendary Silicon Valley coach--and coach to the founders of several of today’s leading tech companies--Bill Campbell said, “Leadership is about recognizing that there's a greatness in everyone, and your job is to create an environment where that greatness can emerge.” The goal of EMPOWERED is to provide you, as a leader of product management, product design, or engineering, with everything you’ll need to create just such an environment. As partners at The Silicon Valley Product Group, Marty Cagan and Chris Jones have long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to the bestseller INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to truly leverage the potential of their people to innovate: product leadership. The book covers: what it means to be an empowered product team, and how this is different from the “feature teams” used by most companies to build technology products recruiting and coaching the members of product teams, first to competence, and then to reach their potential creating an inspiring product vision along with an insights-driven product strategy translating that strategy into action by empowering teams with specific objectives—problems to solve—rather than features to build redefining the relationship of the product teams to the rest of the company detailing the changes necessary to effectively and successfully transform your organization to truly empowered product teams EMPOWERED puts decades of lessons learned from the best leaders of the top technology companies in your hand as a guide. It shows you how to become the leader your team and company needs to not only survive but thrive.

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The Lean Startup - How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries

Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that's being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It's about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it's too late. Now is the time to think Lean.

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Team Topologies - Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

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Atomic Habits - An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones
James Clear

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 4 million copies sold! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: • make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); • overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; • design your environment to make success easier; • get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.

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The Manager's Path - A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change
Camille Fournier

Managing people is difficult wherever you work. But in the tech industry, where management is also a technical discipline, the learning curve can be brutal--especially when there are few tools, texts, and frameworks to help you. In this practical guide, author Camille Fournier (tech lead turned CTO) takes you through each stage in the journey from engineer to technical manager. From mentoring interns to working with senior staff, you'll get actionable advice for approaching various obstacles in your path. This book is ideal whether you're a new manager, a mentor, or a more experienced leader looking for fresh advice. Pick up this book and learn how to become a better manager and leader in your organization. Begin by exploring what you expect from a manager Understand what it takes to be a good mentor, and a good tech lead Learn how to manage individual members while remaining focused on the entire team Understand how to manage yourself and avoid common pitfalls that challenge many leaders Manage multiple teams and learn how to manage managers Learn how to build and bootstrap a unifying culture in teams

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The Phoenix Project - A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

***Over a half-million sold! And available now, the Wall Street Journal Bestselling sequel The Unicorn Project*** “Every person involved in a failed IT project should be forced to read this book.”—TIM O'REILLY, Founder & CEO of O'Reilly Media “The Phoenix Project is a must read for business and IT executives who are struggling with the growing complexity of IT.”—JIM WHITEHURST, President and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook. Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again. “This book is a gripping read that captures brilliantly the dilemmas that face companies which depend on IT, and offers real-world solutions.”—JEZ HUMBLE, Co-author of Continuous Delivery, Lean Enterprise, Accelerate, and The DevOps Handbook

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INSPIRED - How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Marty Cagan

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

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Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman

The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions 'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast, intuitive thinking, and slow, rational thinking. This book reveals how our minds are tripped up by error and prejudice (even when we think we are being logical), and gives you practical techniques for slower, smarter thinking. It will enable to you make better decisions at work, at home, and in everything you do.

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The Five Dysfunctions of a Team - A Leadership Fable
Patrick M. Lencioni

A leadership fable that is as compelling and enthralling as it is realistic, relevant, and practical In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as captivating and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

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Radical Candor - How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean
Kim Scott

Featuring a new preface, afterword and Radically Candid Performance Review Bonus Chapter, the fully revised & updated edition of Radical Candor is packed with even more guidance to help you improve your relationships at work. 'Reading Radical Candor will help you build, lead, and inspire teams to do the best work of their lives.' – Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In. If you don't have anything nice to say then don't say anything at all . . . right? While this advice may work for home life, as Kim Scott has seen first hand, it is a disaster when adopted by managers in the work place. Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google before moving to Apple where she developed a class on optimal management. Radical Candor draws directly on her experiences at these cutting edge companies to reveal a new approach to effective management that delivers huge success by inspiring teams to work better together by embracing fierce conversations. Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism – delivered to produce better results and help your employees develop their skills and increase success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Drawing on years of first-hand experience, and distilled clearly to give practical advice to the reader, Radical Candor shows you how to be successful while retaining your integrity and humanity. Radical Candor is the perfect handbook for those who are looking to find meaning in their job and create an environment where people love both their work and their colleagues, and are motivated to strive to ever greater success.

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The Culture Map - Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business
Erin Meyer

An international business expert helps you understand and navigate cultural differences in this insightful and practical guide, perfect for both your work and personal life. Americans precede anything negative with three nice comments; French, Dutch, Israelis, and Germans get straight to the point; Latin Americans and Asians are steeped in hierarchy; Scandinavians think the best boss is just one of the crowd. It's no surprise that when they try and talk to each other, chaos breaks out. In The Culture Map, INSEAD professor Erin Meyer is your guide through this subtle, sometimes treacherous terrain in which people from starkly different backgrounds are expected to work harmoniously together. She provides a field-tested model for decoding how cultural differences impact international business, and combines a smart analytical framework with practical, actionable advice.

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Accelerate
Gene Kim, Forsgren, Jez Humble

Accelerate your organization to win in the marketplace. How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we've been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn't matter―that it can't provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research to include data collected from the State of DevOps reports conducted with Puppet, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance―and what drives it―using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance. This book is ideal for management at every level.

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The Making of a Manager - What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Julie Zhuo

No idea what you're doing? No problem. Good managers are made, not born. Top tech executive Julie Zhuo remembers the moment when she was asked to lead a team. She felt like she’d won the golden ticket, until reality came crashing in. She was just 25 and had barely any experience being managed, let alone managing others. Her co-workers became her employees overnight, and she faced a series of anxiety-inducing firsts, including agonising over whether to hire an interviewee; seeking the respect of reports who were cleverer than her; and having to fire someone she liked. Like most first-time managers, she wasn’t given any formal training, and had no resources to turn to for help. It took her years to find her way, but now she’s offering you the short-cut to success. This is the book she wishes she had on day one. Here, she offers practical, accessible advice like: · Don’t hide thorny problems from your own manager; you’re better off seeking help quickly and honestly · Before you fire someone for failure to collaborate, figure out if the problem is temperamental or just a lack of training or coaching · Don’t offer critical feedback in a ‘compliment sandwich’ – there’s a better way! Whether you're new to the job, a veteran leader, or looking to be promoted, this is the handbook you need to be the kind of manager you've always wanted.

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The Design of Everyday Things - Revised and Expanded Edition
Don Norman

Design doesn't have to complicated, which is why this guide to human-centered design shows that usability is just as important as aesthetics. Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization. The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time. The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.

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Measure What Matters - How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs
John Doerr

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

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Think Again - The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
Adam Grant

Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller Listed as a Times Self-Help Book of the Year Discover the critical art of rethinking: how questioning your opinions can position you for excellence at work and wisdom in life Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, the most crucial skill may be the ability to rethink and unlearn. Recent global and political changes have forced many of us to re-evaluate our opinions and decisions. Yet we often still favour the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt, and prefer opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. Intelligence is no cure, and can even be a curse. The brighter we are, the blinder we can become to our own limitations. Adam Grant - Wharton's top-rated professor and #1 bestselling author - offers bold ideas and rigorous evidence to show how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, encourage others to rethink topics as wide-ranging as abortion and climate change, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, and how a vaccine whisperer convinces anti-vaxxers to immunize their children. Think Again is an invitation to let go of stale opinions and prize mental flexibility, humility, and curiosity over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what you don't know is wisdom.

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Never Split the Difference - Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
Chris Voss, Tahl Raz

A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home. After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles—counterintuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life. Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

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Start With Why - How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action
Simon Sinek

Simon Sinek's recent video on 'The Millennial Question' went viral with over 150 million views. Start with Why is a global bestseller and the TED Talk based on it is the third most watched of all time. Why are some people and organisations more inventive, pioneering and successful than others? And why are they able to repeat their success again and again? In business, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters WHY you do it. Start with Why analyses leaders like Martin Luther King Jr and Steve Jobs and discovers that they all think in the same way - they all started with why. Simon Sinek explains the framework needed for businesses to move past knowing what they do to how they do it, and then to ask the more important question-WHY? Why do we do what we do? Why do we exist? Learning to ask these questions can unlock the secret to inspirational business. Sinek explains what it truly takes to lead and inspire and how anyone can learn how to do it.

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No Rules Rules - Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention
Reed Hastings, Erin Meyer

*** Shortlisted for the 2020 Financial Times & McKinsey Business Book of the Year *** It's time to do things differently. Trust your team. Be radically honest. And never, ever try to please your boss. These are some of the ground rules if you work at Netflix. They are part of a unique cultural experiment that explains how the company has transformed itself at lightning speed from a DVD mail order service into a streaming superpower - with 190 million fervent subscribers and a market capitalisation that rivals the likes of Disney. Finally Reed Hastings, Netflix Chairman and CEO, is sharing the secrets that have revolutionised the entertainment and tech industries. With INSEAD business school professor Erin Meyer, he will explore his leadership philosophy - which begins by rejecting the accepted beliefs under which most companies operate - and how it plays out in practice at Netflix. From unlimited holidays to abolishing approvals, Netflix offers a fundamentally different way to run any organisation, one far more in tune with an ever-changing fast-paced world. For anyone interested in creativity, productivity and innovation, the Netflix culture is something close to a holy grail. This book will make it, and its creator, fully accessible for the first time.

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Sprint - How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER “Sprint offers a transformative formula for testing ideas that works whether you’re at a startup or a large organization. Within five days, you’ll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. A must read for entrepreneurs of all stripes.” —Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies. Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more. A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

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Book recommendations for Leadership & Management

multipliers
Liz Wiseman

A revised and updated edition of the acclaimed Wall Street Journal bestseller that explores why some leaders drain capability and intelligence from their teams while others amplify it to produce better results. We’ve all had experience with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drains intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always needs to be the smartest person in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, light bulbs go off over people’s heads; ideas flow and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now when leaders are expected to do more with less. In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman explores these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation. In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman has identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use—even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real-world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. This revered classic has been updated with new examples of Multipliers, as well as two new chapters one on accidental Diminishers, and one on how to deal with Diminishers. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

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The 8th habit: from effectiveness to greatness
Stephen R. Covey

In the more than twenty-five years since its publication, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has become an international phenomenon with more than twenty-five million copies sold. Tens of millions of people in business, government, and schools have dramatically improved their lives and organizations by applying the principles of Stephen R. Covey’s classic book. The world, however, is a vastly changed place. Being effective as individuals and organizations is no longer merely an option—it’s a requirement for survival. But in order to thrive, innovate, excel, and lead in what Covey calls the “New Knowledge Worker Age,” we must build on and move beyond effectiveness. In this era of human history, our call is for greatness—holistic fulfillment, passionate execution, and significant contribution. Accessing the higher levels of human genius in today’s new reality requires a change in thinking: a new mindset and a new skill-set—in short, a new habit. The crucial challenge of our world today is this: to find our voice and inspire others to find theirs. It is what Covey calls the 8th Habit. The 8th Habit is the answer to the soul’s yearning for greatness, the organization’s imperative for significance and superior results, and humanity’s search for its “voice.” Covey’s books have transformed the way we think about ourselves, our purpose in life, our organizations, and about humankind. Just as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People helped us focus on effectiveness, The 8th Habit shows us the way to greatness.

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The halo effect
Phil Rosenzweig

With two new chapters and a new preface, the award-winning book The Halo Effect continues to unmask the delusions found in the corporate world and provides a sharp understanding of what drives business success and failure. Too many of today’s most prominent management gurus make steel-clad guarantees based on claims of irrefutable research, promising to reveal the secrets of why one company fails and another succeeds, and how you can become the latter. Combining equal measures of solemn-faced hype and a wide range of popular business delusions, statistical and otherwise, these self-styled experts cloud our ability to think critically about the nature of success. Central among these delusions is the Halo Effect—the tendency to focus on the high financial performance of a successful company and then spread its golden glow to all its attributes—clear strategy, strong values, brilliant leadership, and outstanding execution. But should the same company’s sales head south, the very same attributes are universally derided—suddenly the strategy was wrong, the culture was complacent, and the leader became arrogant. The Halo Effect not only identifies these delusions that keep us from understanding business performance, but also suggests a more accurate way to think about leading a company. This approach—focusing on strategic choice and execution, while recognizing the inherent riskiness of both—clarifies the priorities that managers face. Brilliant and unconventional, irreverent and witty, The Halo Effect is essential reading for anyone wanting to separate fact from fiction in the world of business.

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First break all the rules
Marcus Buckingham

Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its revolutionary study of more than 80,000 managers in First, Break All the Rules, revealing what the world’s greatest managers do differently. With vital performance and career lessons and ideas for how to apply them, it is a must-read for managers at every level. Included with this re-release of First, Break All the Rules: updated meta-analytic research and access to the Clifton StrengthsFinder assessment, which reveals people’s top themes of talent, and to Gallup’s Q12 employee engagement survey, the most effective measure of employee engagement and its impact on business outcomes. What separates the greatest managers from all the rest? They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites. In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers. Some were in leadership positions. Others were front-line supervisors. Some were in Fortune 500 companies; others were key players in small, entrepreneurial firms. Whatever their circumstances, the managers who ultimately became the focus of Gallup’s research were those who excelled at turning each individual employee’s talent into high performance. Gallup has found that the front-line manager is the key to attracting and retaining talented employees. This book explains how the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience, set expectations, build on each person’s unique strengths rather than trying to fix his or her weaknesses, and get the best performance out of their teams. And perhaps most important, Gallup’s research produced the 12 simple statements that distinguish the strongest departments of a company from all the rest. First, Break All the Rules is the first book to present this essential measuring stick and to prove the link between employee opinions and productivity, profit, customer satisfaction and the rate of turnover. First, Break All the Rules presents vital performance and career lessons for managers at every level — and best of all, shows you how to apply them to your own situation.

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High output management
Andrew S. Growe

In this legendary business book and Silicon Valley staple, the former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses—the art of the entrepreneur—can be summed up in a single word: managing. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, High Output Management is equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance—throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.

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Book recommendations for Infrastructure & Security

The DevOps Handbook - How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
Gene Kim, Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, John Willis

Increase profitability, elevate work culture, and exceed productivity goals through DevOps practices. More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater—whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud. And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Etsy, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day. Following in the footsteps of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook shows leaders how to replicate these incredible outcomes, by showing how to integrate Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Information Security to elevate your company and win in the marketplace.

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Book recommendations for Career Advice & Self Mastery

The 4 hour work week
Tim Ferris

Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan - there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, this book is the blueprint. This step-by step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: how Tim went from $40,000 dollars per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per MONTH and 4 hours per week; how to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want; how blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs; how to eliminate 50 per cent of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist; and, how to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent 'mini-retirements'. This new updated and expanded edition includes: more than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled their income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point; real-world templates you can copy for eliminating email, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than GBP5 a meal; how lifestyle design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times; and, the latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either.

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The 12 week year
Brian P Moran

The guide to shortening your execution cycle down from one year to twelve weeks Most organizations and individuals work in the context of annual goals and plans; a twelve-month execution cycle. Instead, The 12 Week Year avoids the pitfalls and low productivity of annualized thinking. This book redefines your "year" to be 12 weeks long. In 12 weeks, there just isn't enough time to get complacent, and urgency increases and intensifies. The 12 Week Year creates focus and clarity on what matters most and a sense of urgency to do it now. In the end more of the important stuff gets done and the impact on results is profound. Explains how to leverage the power of a 12 week year to drive improved results in any area of your life Offers a how-to book for both individuals and organizations seeking to improve their execution effectiveness Authors are leading experts on execution and implementation Turn your organization's idea of a year on its head, and speed your journey to success.

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Flow: The psychology of optimal experience
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

THE BESTSELLING CLASSIC ON 'FLOW' – THE KEY TO UNLOCKING MEANING, CREATIVITY, PEAK PERFORMANCE, AND TRUE HAPPINESS Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi ("the leading researcher into ‘flow states’" —Newsweek) demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives. "Explores a happy state of mind called flow, the feeling of complete engagement in a creative or playful activity." —Time

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Story Driven
Bernadette Jiwa

"When you have something to say, you don't need to shout. Bernadette Jiwa helps us learn how to create the change we seek to make in the world." SETH GODIN Every one of us—regardless of where we were born, how we were brought up, how many setbacks we’ve endured or privileges we’ve been afforded—has been conditioned to compete to win. Ironically, the people who create fulfilling lives and careers—the ones we respect, admire and try to emulate—choose an alternative path to success. They have a powerful sense of identity. They don’t worry about differentiating themselves from the competition or obsess about telling the right story. They tell the real story instead. Successful organisations and the people who create, build and lead them don’t feel the need to compete, because they know who they are and they’re not afraid to show us. How about you? What do you stand for? Where are you headed and why? What’s been the making of you? What will make your career or company great? You must be able to answer these questions if you want to build a great company, thriving entrepreneurial venture or fulfilling career. Whether you’re an individual or you’re representing an organisation or a movement, a city or a country, Story Driven gives you a framework to help you consistently articulate, live and lead with your story. This book is about how to stop competing and start succeeding by being who you are, so you can do work you’re proud of and create the future you want to see.

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The Start-up of You
Reid Hoffmann

A blueprint for thriving in your job and building a career by applying the lessons of Silicon Valley's most innovative entrepreneurs. The career escalator is jammed at every level. Unemployment rates are sky-high. Creative disruption is shaking every industry. Global competition for jobs is fierce. The employer-employee pact is over and traditional job security is a thing of the past. Here, LinkedIn cofounder and chairman Reid Hoffman and author Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today's competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a start-up business: a living, breathing, growing start-up of you. Why? Start-ups - and the entrepreneurs who run them - are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn't about cover letters or resumes. Instead, you will learn the best practices of Silicon Valley start-ups, and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, a small local business, or launching your own venture, you need to know how to: * Adapt your career plans as you change, the people around you change, and industries change. * Develop a competitive advantage to win the best jobs and opportunities. * Strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships. * Find the unique breakout opportunities that massively accelerate career growth. * Take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis. * Tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions. A revolutionary new guide to thriving in today's fractured world of work, the strategies in this book will help you survive and thrive and achieve your boldest professional ambitions. The Start-Up of You empowers you to become the CEO of your career and take control of your future.

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Book recommendations for Finance, Accounting & Controlling

Monetizing Innovation - How Smart Companies Design the Product Around the Price
Madhavan Ramanujam, Georg Tacke

Surprising rules for successful monetization Innovation is the most important driver of growth. Today, more than ever, companies need to innovate to survive. But successful innovation—measured in dollars and cents—is a very hard target to hit. Companies obsess over being creative and innovative and spend significant time and expense in designing and building products, yet struggle to monetize them: 72% of innovations fail to meet their financial targets—or fail entirely. Many companies have come to accept that a high failure rate, and the billions of dollars lost annually, is just the cost of doing business. Monetizing Innovations argues that this is tragic, wasteful, and wrong. Radically improving the odds that your innovation will succeed is just a matter of removing the guesswork. That happens when you put customer demand and willingness to pay in the driver seat—when you design the product around the price. It’s a new paradigm, and that opens the door to true game change: You can stop hoping to monetize, and start knowing that you will. The authors at Simon Kucher know what they’re talking about. As the world’s premier pricing and monetization consulting services company, with 800 professionals in 30 cities around the globe, they have helped clients ranging from massive pharmaceuticals to fast-growing startups find success. In Monetizing Innovation, they distil the lessons of thirty years and over 10,000 projects into a practical, nine-step approach. Whether you are a CEO, executive leadership, or part of the team responsible for innovation and new product development, this book is for you, with special sections and checklist-driven summaries to make monetizing innovation part of your company’s DNA. Illustrative case studies show how some of the world’s best innovative companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Porsche, Optimizely, Draeger, Swarovski and big pharmaceutical companies have used principles outlined in this book. A direct challenge to the status quo “spray and pray” style of innovation, Monetizing Innovation presents a practical approach that can be adopted by any organization, in any industry. Most monetizing innovation failure point home. Now more than ever, companies must rethink the practices that have lost countless billions of dollars. Monetizing Innovation presents a new way forward, and a clear promise: Go from hope to certainty.

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Book recommendations for Marketing & Growth

Quantum Marketing
Raja Rajamannar

Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard, shares breakthrough, frontier strategies to navigate the challenges marketers face to thrive in a modern business world that is changing with unprecedented speed and disruption. As technology has continually evolved in the last several decades, marketing has had to change with it, evolving through four significant stages that build on the strategies and tools of the previous era. What happens next in the fifth stage, or Fifth Paradigm, will not be an evolution, but a revolution. Almost everything about how marketing is done today, including the very notion of a brand itself, will require a complete re-imagination. As Chief Marketing Officer of Mastercard—one of the world’s most recognizable and decorated brands—Raja Rajamannar shares the forward-thinking ways all businesses must rethink their entire marketing landscape to remain relevant and be successful. Readers will: Understand the evolution of marketing and how to be at the forefront of future change. Get clarity on the right marketing strategies and tactics to pursue amidst an ever-evolving industry. Achieve breakthroughs in innovative thinking in order to compete in modern business. Gain perspective from top marketers across industries. Quantum Marketing is for all business people who seek to understand how rapidly marketing is evolving, what some of the smartest people in the discipline are doing to get ready for this dramatic shift, and what the new world will look like for companies, consumers, and society at large as the race to develop revolutionary marketing strategies reaches a whole new level.

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Marketing 5.0: Technology for Humanity
Philip Kotler

In Marketing 5.0, the celebrated promoter of the “Four P’s of Marketing,” Philip Kotler, explains how marketers can use technology to address customers’ needs and make a difference in the world. In a new age when marketers are struggling with the digital transformation of business and the changing behavior of customers, this book provides marketers with a way to integrate technological and business model evolution with the dramatic shifts in consumer behavior that have happened in the last decade. Following the pattern presented in his bestselling Marketing X.0 series, Philip Kotler covers the crucial topics necessary to understand modern marketing, including: · Artificial Intelligence for marketing automation · Agile marketing · “Segments of one” marketing · Contextual technology · Facial recognition and voice tech for marketing · The future of Customer Experience (CX) · Transmedia storytelling · The “Whatever-Whenever-Wherever” service delivery · “Everything-As-A-Service” business model · Internet of Things and blockchain for marketing · Virtual and augmented reality marketing · Corporate activism Perfect for traditional and digital marketers, as well as students and teachers of marketing and business, Marketing 5.0 reinvigorates the field of marketing with actionable recommendations and unique insights.

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From Backroom to Boardroom - Earn Your Seat with Strategic Marketing Operations
Debbie Qaqish

From Backroom to Boardroom is not a book about technology, data models or the latest in a series of bright and shiny toys so loved by marketers. It is a book about building a strategic marketing operations organization that transports marketing from the backroom to the boardroom. The journey begins with defining the new breed of marketing leadership and continues by exploring the integration of business acumen, marketing experience and the power of the digital age. This book is a practical guide that will help you reimagine, rescript and rearchitect the role of marketing forever.

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Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments - A Practical Guide to A/B Testing
Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, Ya Xu

Getting numbers is easy; getting numbers you can trust is hard. This practical guide by experimentation leaders at Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft will teach you how to accelerate innovation using trustworthy online controlled experiments, or A/B tests. Based on practical experiences at companies that each run more than 20,000 controlled experiments a year, the authors share examples, pitfalls, and advice for students and industry professionals getting started with experiments, plus deeper dives into advanced topics for practitioners who want to improve the way they make data-driven decisions. Learn how to • Use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses using controlled experiments • Define key metrics and ideally an Overall Evaluation Criterion • Test for trustworthiness of the results and alert experimenters to violated assumptions • Build a scalable platform that lowers the marginal cost of experiments close to zero • Avoid pitfalls like carryover effects and Twyman's law • Understand how statistical issues play out in practice.

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Shortcut Your Startup: Ten Ways to Speed Up Entrepreneurial Success
Courtney & Carter Reum

_____________ An indispensable guide to starting your business from scratch _____________ Think you know how to launch a successful business? Think again. Courtney and Carter Reum know startups. As early investors in the likes of Lyft, Pinterest and SpaceX, as well as founders of a multi-million-dollar company, they’ve seen what makes some businesses thrive – and some fail. Now, they draw on what they’ve learnt to offer a holistic guide to building your business. They reveal that most of the received wisdom is wrong – and offer counterintuitive examples from the likes of Airbnb, Uber and Facebook that chart a different path. From initial idea to exit strategy, these startup shortcuts offer an unexpected new route to success. Praise for Shortcut Your Startup ‘Shortcut Your Startup shows you how to launch a sustainable startup so that both you and your business can thrive.’ Arianna Huffington ‘Courtney and Carter Reum reveal the tools and tactics that many of the most successful startups use to disrupt, scale and succeed.’ Tony Robbins ‘Carter and Courtney echo what we increasingly know to be true: entrepreneurial success isn’t about pedigree and popularity but about pounding the pavement, taking smart risks and trusting your instincts.’ Sophia Amurosu, author of #GIRLBOSS ‘In Shortcut Your Startup, Courtney and Carter share the best insights from their own ventures as well as what they’ve learned through their vast network.’ Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone

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Book recommendations for Human Resources & Recruiting

Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them
Tessa West

A practical and hilarious guide to getting difficult people off your back, for anyone pulling their hair out over an irritating colleague who's not technically breaking any rules From open floor plans and Zoom calls to Slack channels, the workplace has changed a lot over the years. But there’s one thing that never changes: you’ll always encounter jerks. Jerks at Work is the definitive guide to dealing with—and ultimately breaking free from—the overbearing bosses, irritating coworkers, and all-around difficult people who make work and life miserable. Social psychologist Tessa West has spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. What she discovered is that most of our go-to tactics don’t work because they fail to address the specific motivations that drive bad behavior. In this book, she takes you on a rollicking deep dive of the seven jerks you’re most likely to encounter at the office, drawing on decades of original research to expose their inner workings and weak points—and ultimately deliver an effective game plan for stopping each type before they take you down with them. Jerks at Work is packed with everyday examples and clever strategies, such as how to: • Stop a Bulldozer from gaining influence by making sure they're not the first to speak up in meetings • Report a Kiss Up/Kick Downer to a manager who idolizes them without looking like the bad guy • Protect your high-achieving team from Free Riders without stifling collaboration • Use a Gaslighter’s tactics to beat them at their own game For anyone who’s said “I can’t stand that jerk!” more times than they’d like to admit, Jerks at Work is the ultimate playbook you wish you didn’t need but will always turn to.

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Full Stack Recruiter - The Ultimate Edition
Jan Tegze

Are you ready to learn everything you need to know about sourcing and recruitment? Then you've found the right book! Whether you are already working in recruitment, new to the industry, or just hoping to begin your career as a recruiter, there are essential strategies used by successful recruiters that will help you accelerate your career. Of course, no one is born knowing these things; they come from years of experience in the field. That's exactly what this book is: years of practical, real-world experience distilled into one comprehensive guide to succeeding in your recruiting career in the digital era. This book is designed to help recruiters gain a broad understanding of the industry while expanding and deepening the knowledge of more senior professionals. Whether you belong in the first category or the second, this book will help you take your career to the next level. This comprehensive recruitment and sourcing guide is divided into two parts. The first part focuses entirely on sourcing strategies. You'll learn new and creative ways to source and find great candidates, as well as how to uncover their contact details and approach them in a respectful and effective manner. And much more! The second part deals with recruitment. You'll learn how to excel in recruitment marketing, candidate engagement, recruitment analytics, candidate engagement, cold-calling, and efficiently manage many other essential aspects of your role. Both sections work together to create a comprehensive guide to excelling in every aspect of your recruitment career! The author, Jan Tegze, is an experienced recruiter with extensive talent acquisition expertise and demonstrated success in start-ups and fast-growth environments. In this book, he shares the most successful methods, tips, and strategies that he has learned, tested and implemented throughout his career, with the hope of providing the inspiration and guidance you need to develop into a top-performing recruiter and sourcer. Do you want to learn more about sourcing and recruiting? Do you want to gain a greater understanding of the recruitment business? Do you want to expand your knowledge and become a top-performing recruiter? Do you want to launch a career in the recruitment industry? Do you want to learn the strategies used by the most successful recruiters in the business? If you have answered "YES" to these questions, start reading this book NOW!

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High-Impact Interview Questions - 701 Behavior-Based Questions to Find the Right Person for Every Job
Victoria Hoevemeyer

Most prospective hires come well prepared for the formulaic interview questions we have all come to expect. And not surprisingly their answers do not often distinguish them from any other applicant. So the employer is left with no choice but to take a hunch.But with High-Impact Interview Questions by your side, you will no longer have to do your best guess work on what answers are genuine, which are rehearsed, and which will end up not reflecting the employee in the least. This invaluable resource shows you how to dig deeper using competency-based behavioral interviewing methods to uncover truly relevant and useful information. When the candidate is asked to describe specific, job-related situations, the interviewer will gain a clearer picture of past behaviors--and more accurately predict future performance.Complete with advice on evaluating answers and assessing cultural fit, the second edition of this user-friendly guide features dozens of all-new questions designed to gauge accountability, assertiveness, attention to detail, judgment, follow-through, risk-taking, social media usage, and more. By interviews’s end, the real person behind the résumé will be revealed and you will be able to make an offer based on accurate findings, not hopeful hunches.

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Book recommendations for Sales

Value-Based Fees - How to Charge - and Get - What You're Worth
Alan Weiss

In this thoroughly revised edition of his classic book, Alan Weiss shows how consulting fees are dependent on only two things: value provided in the perception of the buyer and the intent of the buyer and the consultant to act ethically. Many consultants, however, fail to understand that perceived value is the basis of the fee, or that they must translate the importance of their advice into long-term gains for the client in the client's perception. Still others fail to have the courage and the belief system that support the high value delivered to clients, thereby reducing fees to a level commensurate with the consultant's own low self-esteem. Ultimately, says Weiss, consultants, not clients, are the main cause of low consulting fees.

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Book recommendations for Social Entrepreneurship & Charity

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take
Paul Polman

The ex-Unilever CEO who increased his shareholders' returns by 300% while ensuring the company ranked #1 in the world for sustainability for eleven years running has, for the first time, revealed how to do it. Teaming up with Andrew Winston, one of the world's most authoritative voices on corporate sustainability, Paul Polman shows business leaders how to take on humanity's greatest and most urgent challenges—climate change and inequality—and build a thriving business as a result. In this candid and straight-talking handbook, Polman and Winston reveal the secrets of Unilever's success and pull back the curtain on some of the world's most powerful c-suites. Net Positive boldly argues that the companies of the future will profit by fixing the world's problems, not creating them. Together the authors explode our most prevalent corporate myths: from the idea that business' only function is to maximise profits, to the naïve hope that Corporate Social Responsibility will save our species from disaster. These approaches, they argue, are destined for the graveyard. Instead, they show corporate leaders how to make their companies "Net Positive"—thriving by giving back more to the world than they take. Net Positive companies unleash innovation, build trust, attract the best people, thrill customers, and secure lasting success, all by helping create stronger, more inclusive societies and a healthier planet. Heal the world first, they argue, and you’ll satisfy your investors as a result. With ambitious vision and compelling stories, Net Positive will teach you how to find the inner purpose and courage you need to embrace the only business model that will matter in the years ahead. You will learn how to lead others and unlock your company's soul, while setting and delivering big and aggressive goals, and taking responsibility for all of your company's impacts. You'll find out the secrets to partnering with others, including your competition and critics, to drive transformative change from which you will prosper. You'll build a company that serves your people, your customers, your communities, your shareholders—and your children and grandchildren will thank you for it. Is this win-win for business and humanity too good to be true? Don't believe it. The world's smartest CEOs are already taking their companies on the Net Positive journey and benefitting as a result. Will you be left behind?

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Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons from Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship
Alex Counts

Some people are dreamers. They choose careers shaped by dreams of making the world a better place. When your dreams are that powerful, it’s easy to neglect yourself. Both lives and dreams can suffer the consequences. If you’re one of the dreamers, this is the book for you. Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind is a down-to-earth guide to mission-driven leadership. Drawing on his decades as an acclaimed nonprofit leader, Alex Counts offers practical advice on such vital activities as fundraising, team-building, communications, and management. He shows you how to run an organization—and your own life—both effectively and sustainably, giving joyfully to those around you while also caring generously for yourself. Candid, funny, insightful, and wise, it’s a book you’ll refer to throughout your career . . . wherever your dreams may lead you. “A life of service to other and to society can be deeply fulfilling. Anyone who seeks to live a life informed by this insight will benefit from this exceptional, and highly readable, book.”--From the Foreword by Muhammad Yunus, co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alex Counts founded Grameen Foundation and became its president and CEO in 1997. A Cornell University graduate, Counts’s commitment to poverty eradication deepened as a Fulbright scholar in Bangladesh, where he trained under Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder and managing director of Grameen Bank, and co-recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. Since its modest beginnings, Grameen Foundation has grown to become a leading international humanitarian organization. Counts is the author of Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance Are Changing the World. Today he is an independent consultant to nonprofit organizations and a professor at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland College Park.

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Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World
Scott Harrison

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An inspiring personal story of redemption, second chances, and the transformative power within us all, from the founder and CEO of the nonprofit charity: water. At 28 years old, Scott Harrison had it all. A top nightclub promoter in New York City, his life was an endless cycle of drugs, booze, models—repeat. But 10 years in, desperately unhappy and morally bankrupt, he asked himself, "What would the exact opposite of my life look like?" Walking away from everything, Harrison spent the next 16 months on a hospital ship in West Africa and discovered his true calling. In 2006, with no money and less than no experience, Harrison founded charity: water. Today, his organization has raised over $400 million to bring clean drinking water to more than 10 million people around the globe. In Thirst, Harrison recounts the twists and turns that built charity: water into one of the most trusted and admired nonprofits in the world. Renowned for its 100% donation model, bold storytelling, imaginative branding, and radical commitment to transparency, charity: water has disrupted how social entrepreneurs work while inspiring millions of people to join its mission of bringing clean water to everyone on the planet within our lifetime. In the tradition of such bestselling books as Shoe Dog and Mountains Beyond Mountains, Thirst is a riveting account of how to build a better charity, a better business, a better life—and a gritty tale that proves it’s never too late to make a change. 100% of the author’s net proceeds from Thirst will go to fund charity: water projects around the world.

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Design Before You Design: How Organization Innovation Can Empower Social Entrepreneurship
Jacob DeNeui

Do you want to create social impact but feel there must be a better way? There is. So many problems the world faces go largely unadressed because social entrepreneurs are unaware that they hold the power to design a better organization for creating more effective social impact. Not anymore. Whether you're a doctor, a pastor, a student, or anywhere in between, Design Before You Design will empower you to design an organization that allows you to create social change you're passionate about. Don't be stuck with an outdated framework when you can be a social impact pioneer and lead the way to greater effectiveness in meeting the world's biggest needs. It's time to design.

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How to Save the World: How to Make Changing The World The Greatest Game We've Ever Played
Katie Patrick

You want to change the world. You want your work to have meaning. Maybe you’re even audacious enough to want saving the world to be fun - then don't keep living without this book. What if saving the Earth were a game? Not just any game, but the greatest game we’ve ever played. Ranked by Forbes as one of the top five books for social change entrepreneurs, this workbook helps social and environmental change professionals learn how to implement powerful techniques from the fields of game design, behavioral psychology, design, data science, and storytelling, that are not only proven to have impact, but also can make your project fun. In a 10-step framework of exercises, tutorials, and case studies, How to Save the World will teach you the art of changing the world—and it’s often not what you think. Did you know that just by putting a sign above a recycling bin that showed people the number of cans inside increased the recycling rate by 67 percent? Or when people standing in line at a café were told that other customers before them had ordered a vegetarian meal, that this simple intervention doubled the total rate of vegetarian meal orders? As you implement these academically researched and measurement-driven techniques, How to Save the World will drive you to dig into your creativity and unearth your greatest ideas that shift the numbers on the causes you most care about, so you can experience the joy and satisfaction of seeing your work really, actually change the world every single day.

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Book recommendations for Software Engineering

Design Patterns
Gang of four

Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable designs without having to rediscover the design solutions themselves. The authors begin by describing what patterns are and how they can help you design object-oriented software. They then go on to systematically name, explain, evaluate, and catalog recurring designs in object-oriented systems. With Design Patterns as your guide, you will learn how these important patterns fit into the software development process, and how you can leverage them to solve your own design problems most efficiently. Each pattern describes the circumstances in which it is applicable, when it can be applied in view of other design constraints, and the consequences and trade-offs of using the pattern within a larger design. All patterns are compiled from real systems and are based on real-world examples. Each pattern also includes code that demonstrates how it may be implemented in object-oriented programming languages like C++ or Smalltalk.

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Peopleware
Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister

Few books in computing have had as profound an influence on software management as Peopleware. The unique insight of this longtime best seller is that the major issues of software development are human, not technical. They’re not easy issues; but solve them, and you’ll maximize your chances of success. “Peopleware has long been one of my two favorite books on software engineering. Its underlying strength is its base of immense real experience, much of it quantified. Many, many varied projects have been reflected on and distilled; but what we are given is not just lifeless distillate, but vivid examples from which we share the authors’ inductions. Their premise is right: most software project problems are sociological, not technological. The insights on team jelling and work environment have changed my thinking and teaching. The third edition adds strength to strength.” ― Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., Kenan Professor of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Author of The Mythical Man-Month and The Design of Design “Peopleware is the one book that everyone who runs a software team needs to read and reread once a year. In the quarter century since the first edition appeared, it has become more important, not less, to think about the social and human issues in software develop¿ment. This is the only way we’re going to make more humane, productive workplaces. Buy it, read it, and keep a stock on hand in the office supply closet.” ―Joel Spolsky, Co-founder, Stack Overflow “When a book about a field as volatile as software design and use extends to a third edition, you can be sure that the authors write of deep principle, of the fundamental causes for what we readers experience, and not of the surface that everyone recognizes. And to bring people, actual human beings, into the mix! How excellent. How rare. The authors have made this third edition, with its additions, entirely terrific.” ―Lee Devin and Rob Austin, Co-authors of The Soul of Design and Artful Making For this third edition, the authors have added six new chapters and updated the text throughout, bringing it in line with today’s development environments and challenges. For example, the book now discusses pathologies of leadership that hadn’t previously been judged to be pathological; an evolving culture of meetings; hybrid teams made up of people from seemingly incompatible generations; and a growing awareness that some of our most common tools are more like anchors than propellers. Anyone who needs to manage a software project or software organization will find invaluable advice throughout the book.

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eXtreme Programming Explained
Kent Beck

Nearly five years after the first edition of this book exploded on to the market,noted software engineering guru and the father of Extreme Programming (XP)Kent Beck provides a fresh look at this controversial topic. XP remains themost popular agile methodology in software development, and many believe itis ideal for small to mid-size development organizations. However, XP is notwithout its detractors. The goal of the book remains to help programmers andteams decide if XP is the right path to pursue. The book offers advice, but doesnot provide a prescriptive, "how to" style format. This Fifth AnniversaryEdition enhances the full knowledge of XP and gives both the advocate andskeptic of XP full detail to move forward with an informed opinion.

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Domain Driven Design
Eric Evans

Domain-Driven Design fills that need. This is not a book about specific technologies. It offers readers a systematic approach to domain-driven design, presenting an extensive set of design best practices, experience-based techniques, and fundamental principles that facilitate the development of software projects facing complex domains. Intertwining design and development practice, this book incorporates numerous examples based on actual projects to illustrate the application of domain-driven design to real-world software development. Readers learn how to use a domain model to make a complex development effort more focused and dynamic. A core of best practices and standard patterns provides a common language for the development team. A shift in emphasis–refactoring not just the code but the model underlying the code–in combination with the frequent iterations of Agile development leads to deeper insight into domains and enhanced communication between domain expert and programmer. Domain-Driven Design then builds on this foundation, and addresses modeling and design for complex systems and larger organizations.Specific topics covered include: With this book in hand, object-oriented developers, system analysts, and designers will have the guidance they need to organize and focus their work, create rich and useful domain models, and leverage those models into quality, long-lasting software implementations.

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Designing Data-Intensive Applications
Martin Kleppmann

Data is at the center of many challenges in system design today. Difficult issues need to be figured out, such as scalability, consistency, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability. In addition, we have an overwhelming variety of tools, including relational databases, NoSQL datastores, stream or batch processors, and message brokers. What are the right choices for your application? How do you make sense of all these buzzwords? In this practical and comprehensive guide, author Martin Kleppmann helps you navigate this diverse landscape by examining the pros and cons of various technologies for processing and storing data. Software keeps changing, but the fundamental principles remain the same. With this book, software engineers and architects will learn how to apply those ideas in practice, and how to make full use of data in modern applications. Peer under the hood of the systems you already use, and learn how to use and operate them more effectively Make informed decisions by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of different tools Navigate the trade-offs around consistency, scalability, fault tolerance, and complexity Understand the distributed systems research upon which modern databases are built Peek behind the scenes of major online services, and learn from their architectures

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Book recommendations for Startup: Founding & Funding

The Art of Startup Fundraising - Pitching Investors, Negotiating the Deal, and Everything Else Entrepreneurs Need to Know
Alejandro Cremades

Startup money is moving online, and this guide shows you how it works. The Art of Startup Fundraising takes a fresh look at raising money for startups, with a focus on the changing face of startup finance. New regulations are making the old go-to advice less relevant, as startup money is increasingly moving online. These new waters are all but uncharted—and founders need an accessible guide. This book helps you navigate the online world of startup fundraising with easy-to-follow explanations and expert perspective on the new digital world of finance. You'll find tips and tricks on raising money and investing in startups from early stage to growth stage, and develop a clear strategy based on the new realities surrounding today's startup landscape. The finance world is in a massive state of flux. Changes are occurring at an increasing pace in all sectors, but few more intensely than the startup sphere. When the paradigm changes, your processes must change with it. This book shows you how startup funding works, with expert coaching toward the new rules on the field. Learn how the JOBS Act impacts the fundraising model Gain insight on startups from early stage to growth stage Find the money you need to get your venture going Craft your pitch and optimize the strategy Build momentum Identify the right investors Avoid the common mistakes Don't rely on the "how we did it" tales from superstar startups, as these stories are unique and applied to exceptional scenarios. The game has changed, and playing by the old rules only gets you left behind. Whether you're founding a startup or looking to invest, The Art of Startup Fundraising provides the up-to-the-minute guidance you need.

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Shortcut Your Startup: Ten Ways to Speed Up Entrepreneurial Success
Courtney & Carter Reum

_____________ An indispensable guide to starting your business from scratch _____________ Think you know how to launch a successful business? Think again. Courtney and Carter Reum know startups. As early investors in the likes of Lyft, Pinterest and SpaceX, as well as founders of a multi-million-dollar company, they’ve seen what makes some businesses thrive – and some fail. Now, they draw on what they’ve learnt to offer a holistic guide to building your business. They reveal that most of the received wisdom is wrong – and offer counterintuitive examples from the likes of Airbnb, Uber and Facebook that chart a different path. From initial idea to exit strategy, these startup shortcuts offer an unexpected new route to success. Praise for Shortcut Your Startup ‘Shortcut Your Startup shows you how to launch a sustainable startup so that both you and your business can thrive.’ Arianna Huffington ‘Courtney and Carter Reum reveal the tools and tactics that many of the most successful startups use to disrupt, scale and succeed.’ Tony Robbins ‘Carter and Courtney echo what we increasingly know to be true: entrepreneurial success isn’t about pedigree and popularity but about pounding the pavement, taking smart risks and trusting your instincts.’ Sophia Amurosu, author of #GIRLBOSS ‘In Shortcut Your Startup, Courtney and Carter share the best insights from their own ventures as well as what they’ve learned through their vast network.’ Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone

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The Startup Owner's Manual - The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
Steve Blank, Bob Dorf

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it's taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why? The Startup Owner's Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, co-creator with Eric Ries of the "Lean Startup" movement and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. This 608-page how-to guide includes over 100 charts, graphs, and diagrams, plus 77 valuable checklists that guide you as you drive your company toward profitability. It will help you: • Avoid the 9 deadly sins that destroy startups' chances for success • Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life • Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses • Identify your customers and determine how to "get, keep and grow" customers profitably • Compute how you'll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits. The Startup OwnerÂs Manual was originally published by K&S Ranch Publishing Inc. and is now available from Wiley. The cover, design, and content are the same as the prior release and should not be considered a new or updated product.

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Book recommendations for UX, Design & User Research

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville

Today's web sites have moved far beyond "brochureware." They are larger and more complex, have great strategic value to their sponsors, and their users are busier and less forgiving. Designers, information architects, and web site managers are required to juggle vast amounts of information, frequent changes, new technologies, and sometimes even multiple objectives, making some web sites look like a fast-growing but poorly planned city-roads everywhere, but impossible to navigate. Well-planned information architecture has never been as essential as it is now. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition, shows you how to blend aesthetics and mechanics for distinctive, cohesive web sites that work. Most books on web development concentrate on either the graphics or the technical issues of a site. This book focuses on the framework that holds the two together. This edition contains more than 75% new material. You'll find updated chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching; and a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies and metadata will help you understand the interconnectedness of these systems. The authors have expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. They've also complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions. A whole new section addresses the opportunities and challenges of practicing information architecture, while another section discusses how that work impacts and is influenced by the broader organizational context. New case studies provide models for creating enterprise intranet portals and online communities. Finally, you'll find pointers to a wealth of essential information architecture resources, many of which did not exist a few years ago. By applying the principles outlined in this completely updated classic, you'll build web sites and intranets that are easier to navigate and appealing to your users, as well as scalable and simple to maintain. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Edition is a treasure trove of ideas and practical advice for anyone involved in building or maintaining a large, complex web site or intranet.

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NoSQL Distilled - A Brief Guide to the Emerging World of Polyglot Persistence
Pramod J. Sadalage, Martin Fowler

The need to handle increasingly larger data volumes is one factor driving the adoption of a new class of nonrelational “NoSQL” databases. Advocates of NoSQL databases claim they can be used to build systems that are more performant, scale better, and are easier to program. NoSQL Distilled is a concise but thorough introduction to this rapidly emerging technology. Pramod J. Sadalage and Martin Fowler explain how NoSQL databases work and the ways that they may be a superior alternative to a traditional RDBMS. The authors provide a fast-paced guide to the concepts you need to know in order to evaluate whether NoSQL databases are right for your needs and, if so, which technologies you should explore further. The first part of the book concentrates on core concepts, including schemaless data models, aggregates, new distribution models, the CAP theorem, and map-reduce. In the second part, the authors explore architectural and design issues associated with implementing NoSQL. They also present realistic use cases that demonstrate NoSQL databases at work and feature representative examples using Riak, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Neo4j. In addition, by drawing on Pramod Sadalage’s pioneering work, NoSQL Distilled shows how to implement evolutionary design with schema migration: an essential technique for applying NoSQL databases. The book concludes by describing how NoSQL is ushering in a new age of Polyglot Persistence, where multiple data-storage worlds coexist, and architects can choose the technology best optimized for each type of data access.

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Validating Product Ideas - Through Lean User Research
Tomer Sharon

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

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The UX Book - Agile UX Design for a Quality User Experience
Rex Hartson, Pardha S. Pyla

The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is the second edition of The UX Book, but so much of it is new, it is more like a sequel. One of the major positive trends in UX is the continued emphasis on design—a kind of design that highlights the designer’s creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with usability, usefulness, aesthetics, and meaningfulness to the user. In this edition a new conceptual top-down design framework is introduced to help readers with this evolution. This entire edition is oriented toward an agile UX lifecycle process, explained in the funnel model of agile UX, as a better match to the now de facto standard agile approach to software engineering. To reflect these trends, even the subtitle of the book is changed to “Agile UX design for a quality user experience . Designed as a how-to-do-it handbook and field guide for UX professionals and a textbook for aspiring students, the book is accompanied by in-class exercises and team projects. The approach is practical rather than formal or theoretical. The primary goal is still to imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it. To better serve this, processes, methods, and techniques are introduced early to establish process-related concepts as context for discussion in later chapters. Winner of a 2020 Textbook Excellence Award (College) (Texty) from the Textbook and Academic Authors Association A comprehensive textbook for UX/HCI/Interaction Design students readymade for the classroom, complete with instructors’ manual, dedicated web site, sample syllabus, examples, exercises, and lecture slides Features HCI theory, process, practice, and a host of real world stories and contributions from industry luminaries to prepare students for working in the field The only HCI textbook to cover agile methodology, design approaches, and a full, modern suite of classroom material (stemming from tried and tested classroom use by the authors)

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UX for Lean Startups - Faster, Smarter User Experience Research and Design
Laura Klein

p>Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market. No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product. Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle Understand why you should design a test before you design a product Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality

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Book recommendations for DataScience & Analytics

Python Machine Learning
Sebastian Raschka

Unlock deeper insights into Machine Leaning with this vital guide to cutting-edge predictive analytics About This BookLeverage Python's most powerful open-source libraries for deep learning, data wrangling, and data visualizationLearn effective strategies and best practices to improve and optimize machine learning systems and algorithmsAsk – and answer – tough questions of your data with robust statistical models, built for a range of datasetsWho This Book Is For If you want to find out how to use Python to start answering critical questions of your data, pick up Python Machine Learning – whether you want to get started from scratch or want to extend your data science knowledge, this is an essential and unmissable resource. What You Will LearnExplore how to use different machine learning models to ask different questions of your dataLearn how to build neural networks using Keras and TheanoFind out how to write clean and elegant Python code that will optimize the strength of your algorithmsDiscover how to embed your machine learning model in a web application for increased accessibilityPredict continuous target outcomes using regression analysisUncover hidden patterns and structures in data with clusteringOrganize data using effective pre-processing techniquesGet to grips with sentiment analysis to delve deeper into textual and social media dataIn Detail Machine learning and predictive analytics are transforming the way businesses and other organizations operate. Being able to understand trends and patterns in complex data is critical to success, becoming one of the key strategies for unlocking growth in a challenging contemporary marketplace. Python can help you deliver key insights into your data – its unique capabilities as a language let you build sophisticated algorithms and statistical models that can reveal new perspectives and answer key questions that are vital for success. Python Machine Learning gives you access to the world of predictive analytics and demonstrates why Python is one of the world's leading data science languages. If you want to ask better questions of data, or need to improve and extend the capabilities of your machine learning systems, this practical data science book is invaluable. Covering a wide range of powerful Python libraries, including scikit-learn, Theano, and Keras, and featuring guidance and tips on everything from sentiment analysis to neural networks, you'll soon be able to answer some of the most important questions facing you and your organization. Style and approach Python Machine Learning connects the fundamental theoretical principles behind machine learning to their practical application in a way that focuses you on asking and answering the right questions. It walks you through the key elements of Python and its powerful machine learning libraries, while demonstrating how to get to grips with a range of statistical models.

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Data Mining and Predictive Analytics
Daniel T. Larose

Learn methods of data analysis and their application to real-world data sets This updated second edition serves as an introduction to data mining methods and models, including association rules, clustering, neural networks, logistic regression, and multivariate analysis. The authors apply a unified “white box” approach to data mining methods and models. This approach is designed to walk readers through the operations and nuances of the various methods, using small data sets, so readers can gain an insight into the inner workings of the method under review. Chapters provide readers with hands-on analysis problems, representing an opportunity for readers to apply their newly-acquired data mining expertise to solving real problems using large, real-world data sets. Data Mining and Predictive Analytics: Offers comprehensive coverage of association rules, clustering, neural networks, logistic regression, multivariate analysis, and R statistical programming language Features over 750 chapter exercises, allowing readers to assess their understanding of the new material Provides a detailed case study that brings together the lessons learned in the book Includes access to the companion website, www.dataminingconsultant, with exclusive password-protected instructor content Data Mining and Predictive Analytics will appeal to computer science and statistic students, as well as students in MBA programs, and chief executives.

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Lean Analytics - Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

If you’re involved with a startup, analytics help you find your way to the right product and market before the money runs out. But with a flood of information available, where do you start? This book shows you what to measure, how to analyze it, and how to report it, whether you’re evaluating your business model, testing new features, enticing investors, or reporting progress to advisers. Written by Alistair Croll (founder of Coradiant) and Ben Yoskovitz (co-founder of Year One Labs), Lean Analytics lays out practical, proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond. Examples and case studies show entrepreneurs and intrapreneneurs (entrepreneurs inside larger organizations) how to identify and measure a startup’s single most important metric, and how to iterate until you get it right. While the authors primarily cover technology startups, their lessons can be applied far beyond the Web. Even traditional businesses are embracing a lean, learn-first approach, as demonstrated by owners of a San Francisco deli that used a temporary "pop-up" method to optimize their menu and operations before launching a permanent restaurant.

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Storytelling with Data - A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

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Invisible Women - Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
Caroline Criado Perez

Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development, to healthcare, to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems. And women pay tremendous costs for this bias, in time, money, and often with their lives. Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates shocking root cause of gender inequality and research in Invisible Women†‹, diving into women’s lives at home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more. Built on hundreds of studies in the US, the UK, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, unforgettable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.

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Book recommendations for Culture

Ruthless Consistency: How Committed Leaders Execute Strategy, Implement Change, and Build Organizations That Win
Michael Canic

When all is said and done, a lot more gets said than done. What is the antidote to this? Ruthless Consistency. According to Harvard Business Review, “most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organizational change projects―a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970s to the present.” Drawing on his 20+ years of experience as a strategy and execution consultant specializing in midsize companies, Michael Canic helps committed leaders drive the odds in their favor. In Ruthless Consistency, he identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives. Leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience. Leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success. Simply put, leaders who develop the right focus, create the right environment, and build the right team―consistently―are leaders whose organizations win. Finally, it details each element of the model and offers ready-to-apply processes, practices, techniques, and tools to make it happen. It’s a must-read for every leader who wants to implement change successfully.

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Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them
Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini

A Wall Street Journal Bestseller In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring. Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In the age of upheaval, top-down power structures and rule-choked management systems are a liability. They crush creativity and stifle initiative. As leaders, employees, investors, and citizens, we deserve better. We need organizations that are bold, entrepreneurial, and as nimble as change itself. Hence this book. In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them. Critical building blocks include: Motivation: Rallying colleagues to the challenge of busting bureaucracy Models: Leveraging the experience of organizations that have profitably challenged the bureaucratic status quo Mindsets: Escaping the industrial age thinking that frustrates progress Mobilization: Activating a pro-change coalition to hack outmoded management systems and processes Migration: Embedding the principles of humanocracy—ownership, markets, meritocracy, community, openness, experimentation, and paradox—in your organization's DNA If you've finally run out of patience with bureaucratic bullshit . . . If you want to build an organization that can outrun change . . . If you're committed to giving every team member the chance to learn, grow, and contribute . . . . . . then this book's for you. Whatever your role or title, Humanocracy will show you how to launch an unstoppable movement to equip and empower everyone in your organization to be their best and to do their best. The ultimate prize: an organization that's fit for the future and fit for human beings.

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The Insider's Guide to Culture Change: Creating a Workplace That Delivers, Grows, and Adapts
Siobhan McHale

The secret to the success or failure of any business boils down to its culture. From disengaged employees to underserved customers, business failures invariably stem from a culture problem. In The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change, acclaimed culture transformation expert and global executive Siobhan McHale shares her proven four-step process to demystifying culture transformation and starting down the path to positive change. Many leaders and managers struggle to get a handle on exactly what culture is and how pervasive its impact is throughout an organization. Some try to change the culture by publishing a statement of core values but soon find that, aside from some short-term lip service, no meaningful change happens. Others try to unify the culture around a set of shared goals that satisfy shareholders but find their efforts backfire as stressed employees throw their hands up because “leadership just doesn’t get it.” Others implement expensive new IT systems to try to bring about change, only to find that employees find “workarounds” and soon go back to their old ways. Culture transformation expert Siobhan McHale defines culture simply: “It’s how things work around here.” The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change walks readers through McHale’s four-step process to culture transformation, including how to Understand what “corporate culture” really is and how it impacts every aspect of the way your organization operates Analyze where your culture is broken or not adding maximum value Unlock the power of reframing roles within your company, to empower and engage your employees Utilize proven methods and tools to break through deeply embedded patterns and change your company mind-set Keep the momentum going by consolidating gains and maintaining your foot on the change accelerator With The Insider’s Guide to Culture Change, watch your employees go from followers to change leaders who drive an agile culture that constantly outperforms.

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The Long-Distance Teammate: Stay Engaged and Connected While Working Anywhere
Kevin Eikenberry, Wayne Turmel

What does it mean to “go to work” when you don't actually leave the house? This is the ultimate guide for remote workers who want to stay engaged as team members, maintain robust work relationships, and keep an eye on their long-term career goals. Even before the coronavirus hit, remote work was growing at nearly 30 percent per year, and now it's just a fact of life. There are many millions of people who once worked at a central location every day who now find themselves facing an entirely new way of working. Written by the founders of the Remote Leadership Institute, this book is the most authoritative single resource for helping remote workers get work done effectively, build relationships that are both productive and satisfying, and maintain a career trajectory when they are not in constant close contact with their leader, coworkers, or the organization in general. The Long-Distance Teammate tackles three important issues: navigating the personal and interpersonal, growing the skills to be productive, and communicating effectively—all from a distance. In short, there is a big difference between working at home and being an effective member of a team. This practical guide describes that difference and allows you to be a great remote teammate.

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The Culture Quotient: Ten Dimensions of a High-Performance Culture
Greg Besner

Based on never-before-shared insights from more than 1,000 organizations and millions of employees, this insightful book reveals the ten essential culture qualities that can help any organization prepare for, and thrive in a constantly changing future. The Culture Quotient provides a simple, easy-to-read approach to culture that guides readers every step of the way. It focuses on helping companies achieve better financial results, as well as increasing employee engagement, and improving talent acquisition and retention. The Culture Quotient is written with three main goals. The first is to inspire readers. The second is to provide tangible data, tips, and actions. And the third is to share culture stories from many industry leaders that show the power and results of culture initiatives in action. The Culture Quotient features forty-five culture stories and excerpts written exclusively for this book. Some featured companies include American Express, GoDaddy, Bazaarvoice, and many others. The Culture Quotient combines these three goals to provide practical takeaways and tips to help readers implement similar culture programs at their company. The author Greg Besner, is the founder of CultureIQ, a company that helps organizations around the world create high-performance cultures. He is also a highly rated adjunct professor at New York University Stern School of Business, and he was one of the original investors in Zappos.com. Besner was recently ranked in USA Today as the eighth best CEO in the United States among a pool of fifty thousand companies. He also was named the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® in New Jersey. The Culture Quotient highlights qualities that help any organization achieve a high-performance culture. Business leaders have been seeking a practical yet data-driven solution for managing culture for a very long time. Now leaders have it with The Culture Quotient.

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Book recommendations for Product Management

Cracking the PM interview
Gayle Laakmann McDowell

How many pizzas are delivered in Manhattan? How do you design an alarm clock for the blind? What is your favorite piece of software and why? How would you launch a video rental service in India? This book will teach you how to answer these questions and more. Cracking the PM Interview is a comprehensive book about landing a product management role in a startup or bigger tech company. Learn how the ambiguously-named "PM" (product manager / program manager) role varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great PM resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the interview: estimation questions, behavioral questions, case questions, product questions, technical questions, and the super important "pitch."

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The Lean Startup
Eric Ries

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

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Value Proposition Design
A. Osterwalder Yves Pigneur

The authors of the international bestseller Business Model Generation explain how to create value propositions customers can’t resist Value Proposition Design helps you tackle the core challenge of every business ― creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell. Using the same stunning visual format as the authors’ global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the “Value Proposition Canvas” to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want. Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions; it’s for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work. You’ll learn the simple process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers’ needs and desires. In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more. Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the ”Business Model Canvas” from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced globally by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more. Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models."

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Escaping he Build Trap
Melissa Perri

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

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The Lean Product Playbook
Dan Olsen

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

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Book recommendations for Project Management

Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Jeff Sutherland

We live in a world that is broken. For those who believe that there "must "be a more efficient way for people to get things done, here from Scrum pioneer Jeff Sutherland is a brilliantly discursive, thought-provoking book about the management process that is changing the way we live. In the future, historians may look back on human progress and draw a sharp line designating ""before "Scrum" and ""after" Scrum." Scrum is "that" ground-breaking. It already drives most of the world's top technology companies. And now it's starting to spread to every domain where people wrestle with complex projects. If you've ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there's no more lucid - or "compelling" - explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago. The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things quickly and efficiently. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact. In this book you'll journey to Scrum's front lines where Jeff's system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, "Scrum "is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable - whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.

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Productivity Project
Chris Bailey

A fresh, personal, and entertaining exploration of a topic that concerns all of us: how to be more productive at work and in every facet of our lives. Chris Bailey turned down lucrative job offers to pursue a lifelong dream—to spend a year performing a deep dive experiment into the pursuit of productivity, a subject he had been enamored with since he was a teenager. After obtaining his business degree, he created a blog to chronicle a year-long series of productivity experiments he conducted on himself, where he also continued his research and interviews with some of the world’s foremost experts, from Charles Duhigg to David Allen. Among the experiments that he tackled: Bailey went several weeks with getting by on little to no sleep; he cut out caffeine and sugar; he lived in total isolation for 10 days; he used his smartphone for just an hour a day for three months; he gained ten pounds of muscle mass; he stretched his work week to 90 hours; a late riser, he got up at 5:30 every morning for three months—all the while monitoring the impact of his experiments on the quality and quantity of his work. The Productivity Project—and the lessons Chris learned—are the result of that year-long journey. Among the counterintuitive insights Chris Bailey will teach you: · slowing down to work more deliberately; · shrinking or eliminating the unimportant; · the rule of three; · striving for imperfection; · scheduling less time for important tasks; · the 20 second rule to distract yourself from the inevitable distractions; · and the concept of productive procrastination. In an eye-opening and thoroughly engaging read, Bailey offers a treasure trove of insights and over 25 best practices that will help you accomplish more.

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The Pyramid Principle - Logic in Writing and Thinking
Barbara Minto

The communication of ideas, whether to colleagues or clients, is one of the key factors in determining personal success. The Pyramid Principle shows how to structure and present arguments so that they gain immediate understanding.

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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Platforms and Ecosystems (with bonus article by "Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't" By Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti)
Harvard Business Review, Marco Iansiti, Karim R. Lakhani, Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

Help your company adapt to the new rules of competition. If you read nothing else on creating value with business platforms and ecosystems, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reap the rewards of multisided platforms (MSPs)—or defend your company against these formidable opponents. This book will inspire you to: Assess the threat of disruption from platforms in your industry Decide whether and how to play with increasingly powerful platform businesses Choose the right strategy for transforming your product into a platform Harness network effects to maximize value for the partners in your ecosystem Shift from managing products to managing interactions Learn when moving first and growing fast will work—and when it won’t Manage winner-take-all dynamics This collection of articles includes "Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy," by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary; "Strategies for Two-Sided Markets," Thomas R. Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne; "Finding the Platform in Your Product," by Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth Altman; "What's Your Google Strategy?," by Andrei Hagiu and David B. Yoffie; "In the Ecosystem Economy, What’s Your Strategy?," by Michael G. Jacobides; "Right Tech, Wrong Time," by Ron Adner and Rahul Kapoor; "Managing Our Hub Economy," by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani; "Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don't," by Feng Zhu and Marco Iansiti; "Spontaneous Deregulation," by Benjamin Edelman and Damien Geradin; "Alibaba and the Future of Business," by Ming Zeng; and "Fixing Discrimination in Online Marketplaces," by Ray Fisman and Michael Luca. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

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Building Successful Partner Channels - Channel Development & Management in the Software Industry
Hans Peter Peter Bech

"Building Successful Partner Channels" is a book laying out the roadmap for achieving global market leadership through independent channel partners in the software industry. When Microsoft acquired Navision in 2002 there is no doubt that the price they paid was heavily influenced by the value of our channel partner eco-system. I can think of no one better suited than Hans Peter to write a book with the title Building Successful Partner Channels. Preben Damgaard, Co-founder and CEO of Navision Predictable growth and market leadership through independent channel partners are on every software industry CEO and sales executives' mind. However, it is rarely achieved. With "Building Successful Partner Channels" Hans Peter Bech provides a great tactical approach toward reaching this goal. Torulf Nilsson, Product Executive, Visma Retail, Oslo, Norway Hans Peter Bech has been at the forefront developing indirect channels in the software industry for more than three decades and his track record is impressive. I'd highly recommend this book to anyone searching for the route to global market leadership in the software industry. Yusuf Soner, School of Management at the Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey Building Successful Partner Channels provides a powerful, practical approach to building a strong network of independent channel partners, so as to optimize sales and marketing activities. The book helps senior sales and marketing executives understand how to work in concert to achieve global market leadership through the indirect-channel approach. Toke Kruse, Founder and CEO at Billy, San Francisco, USA

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Book recommendations for Agile & Lean

Scrum - The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Jeff Sutherland

We live in a world that is broken. For those who believe that there "must "be a more efficient way for people to get things done, here from Scrum pioneer Jeff Sutherland is a brilliantly discursive, thought-provoking book about the management process that is changing the way we live. In the future, historians may look back on human progress and draw a sharp line designating ""before "Scrum" and ""after" Scrum." Scrum is "that" ground-breaking. It already drives most of the world's top technology companies. And now it's starting to spread to every domain where people wrestle with complex projects. If you've ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there's no more lucid - or "compelling" - explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago. The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things quickly and efficiently. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact. In this book you'll journey to Scrum's front lines where Jeff's system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, "Scrum "is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable - whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.

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Slack
Tom DeMarco

If your company’s goal is to become fast, responsive, and agile, more efficiency is not the answer--you need more slack. Why is it that today’s superefficient organizations are ailing? Tom DeMarco, a leading management consultant to both Fortune 500 and up-and-coming companies, reveals a counterintuitive principle that explains why efficiency efforts can slow a company down. That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

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Designing Your Life - How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life
William Burnett (Consulting professor of design), Bill Burnett, David John Evans

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - At last, a book that shows you how to build--design--a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home--at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

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Management 3.0 - Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
Jurgen Appelo

In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo’s Management 3.0 model recognizes that today’s organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Management 3.0 doesn’t offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them. Coverage includes • Getting beyond “Management 1.0” control and “Management 2.0” fads • Understanding how complexity affects your organization • Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated • Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own • Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals • Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship • Crafting an organizational network that promotes success • Implementing continuous improvement that actually works Thoroughly pragmatic–and never trendy–Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

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Team Topologies - Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

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Book recommendations for Team Structure & Work Methodologies

Five Dysfunct. of a Team
P. Lencioni, Ch. Stransky

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams. Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight. Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.

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Time to Think - Listening to Ignite the Human Mind
Nancy Kline

Most people think they listen well, but they rarely do - not at this level. Listening this way is a radical act. The power of effective listening is recognised as the essential tool of good management. In this book, Nancy Kline describes how we can achieve this, and presents a step-by-step guide that can be used in any situation. Whether you want to have more productive meetings, solve business problems, create bold strategies, or build stronger relationships, this book offers you a new world of possibilities. From blue chip companies developing high-powered teams to individuals seeking personal growth, a Thinking Environment has come to mean transformation of the highest quality.

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Team Topologies - Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

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The Scrum Fieldbook - A Master Class on Accelerating Performance, Getting Results, and Defining the Future
J.J. Sutherland

Based on years of work in the field with scores of companies, including Bosch, 3M, Schlumberger, and Rio Tinto, The Scrum Fieldbook delivers a hands-on, practical approach to rapidly delivering value for companies and organizations. Scrum is the secret weapon behind some of today’s most successful companies. Businesses like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple use Scrum to drive incredibly fast innovation, laser focus on customers, and continuous improvement, and to decrease decision times in order to reshape the world. Scrum is the most utilized Agile framework. In recent years, its use has exploded across the corporate world, far beyond its software and technology roots. J. J. Sutherland and the team at Scrum Inc. have dramatically improved performance at global banks, utility providers, medical device manufacturers, mining giants, and firms on the cutting edge of genetic science. Scrum has helped companies large and small thrive in the age of disruption. In Sutherland’s first book, the national bestseller Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, coauthored with his father, Jeff, the co-creator of Scrum, he laid out the Scrum framework used by almost all of today’s leading technology companies. In The Scrum Fieldbook, he draws on his firm’s extensive experience in the field to take leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and new opportunities organizations face in an Agile transformation. He shows how the Scrum framework can be successfully applied to any project in any industry, from automobile manufacturers in the U.S. and Europe to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from fighter plane builders in Sweden to U.S. Navy Special Forces teams in regions of the world we can’t mention.

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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy (including featured article "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter)
Harvard Business Review, Michael E. Porter, W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne

Is your company spending too much time on strategy development—with too little to show for it? If you read nothing else on strategy, read these 10 articles (featuring “What Is Strategy?” by Michael E. Porter). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you catalyze your organization's strategy development and execution. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategy will inspire you to: Distinguish your company from rivals Clarify what your company will and won't do Craft a vision for an uncertain future Create blue oceans of uncontested market space Use the Balanced Scorecard to measure your strategy Capture your strategy in a memorable phrase Make priorities explicit Allocate resources early Clarify decision rights for faster decision making This collection of best-selling articles includes: featured article "What Is Strategy?" by Michael E. Porter, "The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy," "Building Your Company's Vision," "Reinventing Your Business Model," "Blue Ocean Strategy," "The Secrets to Successful Strategy Execution," "Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System," "Transforming Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action," "Turning Great Strategy into Great Performance," and "Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance."

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Book recommendations for Transformation

Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change
Greg Satell

What does it take to change the world? This book will show you how to harness the power of CASCADES to create a revolutionary movement! If you could make a change―any change you wanted―what would it be? Would it be something in your organization or your industry? Maybe something it’s in your community or throughout society as a whole? Creating true change is never easy. Most startups don’t survive. Most community groups never get beyond small local actions. Even when a spark catches fire and protesters swarm the streets, it often seems to fizzle out almost as fast as it started. The status quo is, almost by definition, well entrenched and never gives up without a fight. In this groundbreaking book, one of today's top innovation experts delivers a guide for driving transformational change. To truly change the world or even just your little corner of it, you don’t need a charismatic leader or a catchy slogan. What you need is a cascade: small groups that are loosely connected but united by a common purpose. As individual entities, these groups may seem inconsequential, but when they synchronize their collective behavior as networks, they become immensely powerful. Through the power of cascades, a company can be made anew, an industry disrupted, or even an entire society reshaped. As Satell takes us through past and present movements, he explains exactly why and how some succeed while others fail.

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Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life - Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships
Marshall B. Rosenberg, Deepak Chopra

5,000,000 COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE • TRANSLATED IN MORE THAN 35 LANGUAGES What is Violent Communication? If "violent" means acting in ways that result in hurt or harm, then much of how we communicate—judging others, bullying, having racial bias, blaming, finger pointing, discriminating, speaking without listening, criticizing others or ourselves, name-calling, reacting when angry, using political rhetoric, being defensive or judging who's "good/bad" or what's "right/wrong" with people—could indeed be called "violent communication." What is Nonviolent Communication? Nonviolent Communication is the integration of four things: • Consciousness: a set of principles that support living a life of compassion, collaboration, courage, and authenticity • Language: understanding how words contribute to connection or distance • Communication: knowing how to ask for what we want, how to hear others even in disagreement, and how to move toward solutions that work for all • Means of influence: sharing "power with others" rather than using "power over others" Nonviolent Communication serves our desire to do three things: • Increase our ability to live with choice, meaning, and connection • Connect empathically with self and others to have more satisfying relationships • Sharing of resources so everyone is able to benefit

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Designing Your Life - How to Build a Well-lived, Joyful Life
William Burnett (Consulting professor of design), Bill Burnett, David John Evans

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - At last, a book that shows you how to build--design--a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home--at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

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Management 3.0 - Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders
Jurgen Appelo

In many organizations, management is the biggest obstacle to successful Agile development. Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo’s Management 3.0 model recognizes that today’s organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Management 3.0 doesn’t offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them. Coverage includes • Getting beyond “Management 1.0” control and “Management 2.0” fads • Understanding how complexity affects your organization • Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated • Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own • Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals • Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship • Crafting an organizational network that promotes success • Implementing continuous improvement that actually works Thoroughly pragmatic–and never trendy–Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

View
Team Topologies - Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow
Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

Effective software teams are essential for any organization to deliver value continuously and sustainably. But how do you build the best team organization for your specific goals, culture, and needs? Team Topologies is a practical, step-by-step, adaptive model for organizational design and team interaction based on four fundamental team types and three team interaction patterns. It is a model that treats teams as the fundamental means of delivery, where team structures and communication pathways are able to evolve with technological and organizational maturity. In Team Topologies, IT consultants Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais share secrets of successful team patterns and interactions to help readers choose and evolve the right team patterns for their organization, making sure to keep the software healthy and optimize value streams. Team Topologies is a major step forward in organizational design for software, presenting a well-defined way for teams to interact and interrelate that helps make the resulting software architecture clearer and more sustainable, turning inter-team problems into valuable signals for the self-steering organization.

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Find more books and learning resources on Transformation here.

Book recommendations for Strategy & Business Development

Shoe Dog
Phil Knight

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and board chairman Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands. Young, searching, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed fifty dollars from his father and launched a company with one simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost running shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed eight thousand dollars that first year, 1963. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In this age of start-ups, Knight’s Nike is the gold standard, and its swoosh is more than a logo. A symbol of grace and greatness, it’s one of the few icons instantly recognized in every corner of the world. But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always been a mystery. Now, in a memoir that’s surprising, humble, unfiltered, funny, and beautifully crafted, he tells his story at last. It all begins with a classic crossroads moment. Twenty-four years old, backpacking through Asia and Europe and Africa, wrestling with life’s Great Questions, Knight decides the unconventional path is the only one for him. Rather than work for a big corporation, he will create something all his own, something new, dynamic, different. Knight details the many terrifying risks he encountered along the way, the crushing setbacks, the ruthless competitors, the countless doubters and haters and hostile bankers—as well as his many thrilling triumphs and narrow escapes. Above all, he recalls the foundational relationships that formed the heart and soul of Nike, with his former track coach, the irascible and charismatic Bill Bowerman, and with his first employees, a ragtag group of misfits and savants who quickly became a band of swoosh-crazed brothers. Together, harnessing the electrifying power of a bold vision and a shared belief in the redemptive, transformative power of sports, they created a brand, and a culture, that changed everything.

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Business Model Generation
A. Osterwalder Yves Pigneur

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"

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The Deal that made the World
Jacques Peretti

An award-winning investigative journalist takes us inside the ten business deals that have transformed the modern world We tend to think of our world as controlled by forces we basically understand, primarily the politicians we elect. But in The Deals That Made the World, Jacques Peretti makes a provocative and quite different argument: much of the world around us—from the food we eat to teh products we buy to the medications we take—is shaped by private negotiations and business deals few of us know about. The Deals That Made the World takes us inside the sphere of these powerful players, examining ten groundbreaking business deals that have transformed our modern economy. Peretti reveals how corporate executives engineered an entire diet industry built on failure; how PayPal conquered online payments (and the specific behavioral science that underpins its success); and how pharmaceutical executives concocted a plan to successfully market medications to healthy people. For twenty years, Peretti has interviewed the people behind the decisions that have altered our world, from the CEOs of multinational corporations to politicians, economists, and scientists. Drawing on his vast knowledge, Peretti reveals a host of fascinating and startling connections, from how Wall Street's actions on food commodities helped spark the Arab Spring to the link between the AIDS epidemic in 1980s San Francisco and the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008. Touching upon tech, finance, artificial intelligence, and the other levers of power in a postglobalization environment, Peretti offers a compelling way to understand the last hundred years—and a suggestion of what the next hundred might hold. An essential book for anyone seeking to understand the hidden forces that shape our modern economy, The Deals That Made the World is illuminating and surprising—and an immensely fun read.

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Zero to One
Peter Thiel

If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets. The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself. Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique. Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

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Disciplined Entrepreneur
Bill Aulet

Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

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Book recommendations for Sustainability

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take
Paul Polman

The ex-Unilever CEO who increased his shareholders' returns by 300% while ensuring the company ranked #1 in the world for sustainability for eleven years running has, for the first time, revealed how to do it. Teaming up with Andrew Winston, one of the world's most authoritative voices on corporate sustainability, Paul Polman shows business leaders how to take on humanity's greatest and most urgent challenges—climate change and inequality—and build a thriving business as a result. In this candid and straight-talking handbook, Polman and Winston reveal the secrets of Unilever's success and pull back the curtain on some of the world's most powerful c-suites. Net Positive boldly argues that the companies of the future will profit by fixing the world's problems, not creating them. Together the authors explode our most prevalent corporate myths: from the idea that business' only function is to maximise profits, to the naïve hope that Corporate Social Responsibility will save our species from disaster. These approaches, they argue, are destined for the graveyard. Instead, they show corporate leaders how to make their companies "Net Positive"—thriving by giving back more to the world than they take. Net Positive companies unleash innovation, build trust, attract the best people, thrill customers, and secure lasting success, all by helping create stronger, more inclusive societies and a healthier planet. Heal the world first, they argue, and you’ll satisfy your investors as a result. With ambitious vision and compelling stories, Net Positive will teach you how to find the inner purpose and courage you need to embrace the only business model that will matter in the years ahead. You will learn how to lead others and unlock your company's soul, while setting and delivering big and aggressive goals, and taking responsibility for all of your company's impacts. You'll find out the secrets to partnering with others, including your competition and critics, to drive transformative change from which you will prosper. You'll build a company that serves your people, your customers, your communities, your shareholders—and your children and grandchildren will thank you for it. Is this win-win for business and humanity too good to be true? Don't believe it. The world's smartest CEOs are already taking their companies on the Net Positive journey and benefitting as a result. Will you be left behind?

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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
William McDonough

Did you know that up to 90% of the materials used in traditional manufacturing models ends up as waste? This book challenges the way the traditional “cradle to grave” cycle works and envisions a world where we don’t have to harm the natural environment in order to create new products. Rather than settling for recycling or downcycling, the authors argue for designing products in such a way that, after their useful life, they provide genuine nourishment or life to something new.

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Sustainable Software Architecture - Analyze and Reduce Technical Debt
Carola Lilienthal

Today's programmers don't develop software systems from scratch. instead, they spend their time fixing, extending, modifying, and enhancing existing software. Legacy systems often turn into an unwieldy mess that becomes increasingly difficult to modify, and with architecture that continually accumulates technical debt. Carola Lilienthal has analyzed more than 300 software systems written in Java, C#, C++, PHP, ABAP, and TypeScript and, together with her teams, has successfully refactored them. This book condenses her experience with monolithic systems, architectural and design patterns, layered architectures, domain-driven design, and microservices. With more than 200 color images from real-world systems, good and sub-optimal sample solutions are presented in a comprehensible and thorough way, while recommendations and suggestions based on practical projects allow the reader to directly apply the author's knowledge to their daily work. "Throughout the book, Dr. Lilienthal has provided sound advice on diagnosing, understanding, disentangling, and ultimately preventing the issues that make software systems brittle and subject to breakage. In addition to the technical examples that you'd expect in a book on software architecture, she takes the time to dive into the behavioral and human aspects that impact sustainability and, in my experience, are inextricably linked to the health of a codebase. She also expertly zooms out, exploring architecture concepts such as domains and layers, and then zooms in to the class level where your typical developer works day-to-day. This holistic approach is crucial for implementing long-lasting change." From the Foreword of Andrea Goulet CEO, Corgibytes, Founder, Legacy Code Rocks

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