QUICK DELIVERY
Swift dispatch
The Passion Economy by Adam Davidson
Brief Summary
The Passion Economy: The New Rules for Thriving in the Twenty-First Century.
The brilliant creator of NPR's Planet Money podcast and award-winning New Yorker staff writer explains our current economy: laying out its internal logic and revealing the transformative hope it offers for millions of people to thrive as they never have before.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the middle class is not dying and robots are not stealing our jobs. In fact, writes Adam Davidson--one of our leading public voices on economic issues-- the twenty-first-century economic paradigm offers new ways of making money, fresh paths toward professional fulfillment, and unprecedented opportunities for curious, ambitious individuals to combine the things they love with their careers.
Drawing on the stories of average people doing exactly this--a dissatisfied accountant overturning his industry, a zealous father creating a better chocolate bar for his children, a family of craftsmen meeting the technological needs of Amish farmers--as well as the latest academic research, Davidson demonstrates how the twentieth-century economy of scale has given way in this century to an economy of passion.
He makes clear, too, that though the adjustment has brought measures of dislocation, confusion, and even panic, these are most often the result of a lack of understanding. In The Passion Economy, he delineates the ground rules of the new economy, and armed with these, we begin to see how we can succeed in it according to its own terms--intimacy, insight, attention, automation, and, of course, passion. An indispensable road map and a refreshingly optimistic take on our economic future.
ISBN:9780385353526
Author:Adam Davidson
The Foundations of Islamic Banking Th...
Brief Summary
After barely half a century of experience, Islamic banking has become established as a new niche industry across the world, offering new and sophisticated financial products designed to be compliant with Islamic legal principles and common law. This comprehensive book explores the theory, principles and practices underpinning this rapidly expanding sector of banking.
Expert contributors - including eminent scholars and senior practitioners in the field - examine the roots of the principles of ethical Islamic financial transactions, which have evolved over several millennia, on issues including usury, interest rates, and financial contracting for funding enterprises, mortgages, leasing and other transactions. Regulatory and governance issues are discussed, and the practice and operation of Islamic financial institutions are explained via three distinct case studies. Importantly, the final chapter looks at what steps are being taken to provide professional accreditation to Islamic banking professional personnel, and prescribes requirements for training in this growing industry.
This rich and wide-ranging guide to the foundations and fundamental principles of this new form of ethics-based financial practice will prove a fascinating and illuminating read for regulators, practitioners, and scholars in the fields of economics, finance, money and banking.
ISBN:9781849807920
Author:Mohamed Ariff and Munawar Iqbal
Scaling Lean by Ash Maurya
Brief Summary
Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth.
Is your "big idea” worth pursuing? What if you could test your business model earlier in the process—before you’ve expended valuable time and resources?
You’ve talked to customers. You’ve identified problems that need solving, and maybe even built a minimum viable product. But now there’s a second bridge to cross. How do you tell whether your idea represents a viable business? Do you really have to go through the whole cycle of development, failure, iteration, tweak, repeat?
Scaling Lean offers an invaluable blueprint for modÂeling startup success. You’ll learn the essential metrics that measure the output of a working business model, give you the pulse of your company, communicate its health to investors, and enable you to make precise interventions when things go wrong. You’ll also learn how to:
· ballpark the viability of a business model using a simple five-minute back-of-the-envelope estimation.
· stop using current revenue as a measure of progress (it forces you to fly blind and, often, to overpromise to your shareholders) and instead embrace the metÂric of traction—which helps you identify the leading indicators for future business model growth.
· set progressive goals that set you up for exponenÂtial long-term success by implementing a staged 10X rollout strategy, like one employed by FaceÂbook and Tesla.
· stop burying your breakthrough insights in failed experiments, but rather illuminate them using two-week LEAN sprints to quickly source, rank, and test ideas.
Ash Maurya, a serial entrepreneur and author of the startup cult classic Running Lean, pairs real-world examples of startups like Airbnb and Hubspot with techniques from the manufacturing world in this tactiÂcal handbook for scaling with maximum efficiency and efficacy. This is vital reading for any startup founder graduating from the incubator stage.
ISBN:9781101980521
Author:Ash Maurya
How to Kill a Unicorn by Mark Payne
Brief Summary
How to Kill a Unicorn: How the World's Hottest Innovation Factory Builds Bold Ideas That Make It to Market.
A unique behind-the-scenes look at the groundbreaking methodology that today's most in-demand innovation factory uses to create some of the boldest products and successfully bring them to market.
Today, innovation is seen by business leaders and the media alike as the key to growth, a burning issue in every company, from startups to the Fortune 500. And in that space, Fahrenheit 212 is viewed as a high-performance innovation SWAT team, able to solve the most complex, mission-critical challenges. Under Mark Payne, the firm's president and head of Idea Development, Fahrenheit 212, since its inception a decade ago, has worked with such giants of industry as Coca-Cola, Samsung, Hershey's, Campbell's Soup, LG, Starbucks, Mattel, Office Depot, Citibank, P&G, American Express, Nutrisystem, GE, and Goldman Sachs, to name but a few. It has been praised as a hotspot for innovation in publications like Fortune, Esquire, Businessweek, and FastCompany.
What Drives Fahrenheit 212's success is its unique methodology, combining what it calls Magic--the creative side of innovation--with Money, the business side. They explore every potential idea with the end goal in mind--bringing an innovative product to market in a way that will transform a company's business and growth.
In How to Kill a Unicorn, Mark Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm and offers blow by blow inside accounts of how they grapple with and solved their biggest challenges.
ISBN:9780804138734
Author:Mark Payne
How We Win by Farah Pandith Hardcover
Brief Summary
How We Win: How Cutting-Edge Entrepreneurs, Political Visionaries, Enlightened Business Leaders, and Social Media Mavens Can Defeat the Extremist Threat.
There is a war being fought, and we are losing it.
Despite the billions of dollars spent since 9/11 trying to defeat terrorist organizations, the so-called Islamic State, Al Qaeda, and other groups remain a terrifying geopolitical threat. In some ways the threat has grown worse: The 9/11 hijackers came from far away; the danger today can come from anywhere—from the other side of the world to across the street. Unable to stem recruitment, we seem doomed to a worsening struggle with a constantly evolving enemy that remains several steps ahead of us. Unfortunately, current policies seem almost guaranteed not to reduce extremist violence but instead to make it easier for terrorists to spread their hateful ideas, recruit new members, and carry out attacks.
We actually possess the means right now to inoculate communities against extremist ideologies. In How We Win, Farah Pandith presents a revolutionary new analysis of global extremism as well as powerful but seldom-used strategies for vanquishing it. Drawing on her visits to eighty countries, the hundreds of interviews and focus groups she’s conducted around the world, and her high-level experience in the Bush and Obama administrations, Pandith argues for a paradigm shift in our approach to combat extremism, one that mobilizes the expertise and resources of diplomats, corporate leaders, mental health experts, social scientists, entrepreneurs, local communities, and, most of all, global youth themselves.
There is a war being fought, and we can win it. This is how.
ISBN:B01NGZL02Z
Author:Farah Pandith
Herding Tigers by Todd Henry Hardcover
Brief Summary
Herding Tigers: Be the Leader That Creative People Need
A practical handbook for every manager charged with leading teams to creative brilliance, from the author of The Accidental Creative and Die Empty.
Doing the work and leading the work are very different things. When you make the transition from maker to manager, you give ownership of projects to your team even though you could do them yourself better and faster. You're juggling expectations from your manager, who wants consistent, predictable output from an inherently unpredictable creative process. And you're managing the pushback from your team of brilliant, headstrong, and possibly overqualified creatives.
Leading talented, creative people requires a different skill set than the one many management books offer. As a consultant to creative companies, Todd Henry knows firsthand what prevents creative leaders from guiding their teams to success, and in Herding Tigers he provides a bold new blueprint to help you be the leader your team needs. Learn to lead by influence instead of control. Discover how to create a stable culture that empowers your team to take bold creative risks. And learn how to fight to protect the time, energy, and resources they need to do their best work.
Full of stories and practical advice, Herding Tigers will give you the confidence and the skills to foster an environment where clients, management, and employees have a product they can be proud of and a process that works.
ISBN:9780735211728
Author:Todd Henry
How to Make One Million Dollars in Re...
Brief Summary
Stocks may soar and crash, but one investment constantly increases in value: choice real estate. Tyler G. Hicks, a world-renowned authority and bestselling author on the subject of real estate investments, shares his proven strategies for finding and financing properties with wealth-building power. Current, comprehensive, and reliable, this guide delivers the know-how and hands-on tools to build a real estate fortune in a few short years -- with little or no cash required.
Filled with true stories of men and women who have followed Hicks' methods with amazing results, How To Make Million$ In Real Estate In Three Years Starting With No Cash emphasizes "safe" risks, savvy borrowing, and pyramid investments. Exploring a wide range of options -- from single-family homes to malls, from vacant land to offshore waters -- this resource leads the way to not only fast but lasting financial success.
Page after page, this book comes through with incredible insider secrets -- including how to sell the rights to thin air for hard cash. This completely updated edition also features an extensive directory, listing thousands of sources for additional information and guidance.
ISBN:9780134236742
Author:Tyler G Hicks
Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rat...
Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow: A Landmark Study of Great Leaders, Teams, and the Reasons Why We Follow.
Nearly a decade ago, Gallup unveiled the results of a landmark 30-year research project that ignited a global conversation on the topic of strengths. More than 19 million people have since taken Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment, which forms the core of several books on this topic, including the #1 international bestseller StrengthsFinder 2.0.
In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been examining decades of data on the topic of leadership. They studied more than 1 million work teams, conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders and even interviewed more than 10,000 followers around the world to ask exactly why they followed the most important leader in their life.
In Strengths Based Leadership, #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership consultant Barry Conchie reveal the results of this research. Based on their discoveries, the book identifies three keys to being a more effective leader: knowing your strengths and investing in others’ strengths, getting people with the right strengths on your team, and understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.
As you read Strengths Based Leadership, you’ll hear firsthand accounts from some of the most successful organizational leaders in recent history, from the founder of Teach For America to the president of The Ritz-Carlton, as they discuss how their unique strengths have driven their success. Filled with novel research and actionable ideas, Strengths Based Leadership will give you a new road map for leading people toward a better future.
A unique access code allows you to take a new leadership version of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder program. The new version of this program provides you with specific strategies for leading with your top five strengths and enables you to plot the strengths of your team based on the four domains of leadership strength revealed in the book.
Sisyphus Task by Waithaka Waihenya
Brief Summary
The battle for the soul of Kenya broadcasting corporation.
Kenya broadcasting corporation has been an enigmatic media house. Broadcasting house, as its headquarters is known has been the spawning ground for many journalist careers and has remained one of the most enduring emblems of journalism to date.
Standing on the steps of this house, Waithaka Waihenya sets out to explore the history of this giant media house, beloved by many but also loathed and detested by many.
Tracing its origins from colonial times, the author navigates through the eddies and currents and the whirligig of time and motion that have seen this giant media house move from one crisis to another.
ISBN:9789966013545
Author:Waithaka Waihenya
The Code of Capital by Katharina Pistor
Brief Summary
The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
A compelling explanation of how the law shapes the distribution of wealth.
Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.
In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively "codes" certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital--and lawyers are the keepers of the code. Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients' needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations--assets that exist only in law.
A powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.
ISBN:9780691178974
Author:Katharina Pistor
Conquer the Chaos by Clate Mask and S...
Brief Summary
Conquer the Chaos: How to Grow a Successful Small Business Without Going Crazy
Create the business you want without sacrificing the lifestyle you deserve
The majority of new entrepreneurs (and even those with a little more experience) are finding themselves trapped, controlled, and consumed by their own businesses. They are struggling just to keep their businesses running, let alone actually growing their companies and experiencing the success they anticipated.
Conquer the Chaos speaks to you as a small business owner by making sense of the overwhelming demands on your business and providing a twenty-first century recipe for success with sanity. With engaging stories, quotes, and examples, Conquer the Chaos leads you through the six strategies you can incorporate to bring order to your business today. Find the money, time, and freedom in entrepreneurship that inspired you in the first place
• Successfully juggle customers, prospects, management of employees, marketing, sales, accounting, and more
• Get from just surviving to growing your company and experiencing success
Conquer the Chaos gives you the no-nonsense, ready-to-go guide that gets your business exactly where you want it to be.
ISBN:9780470599327
Author:Clate Mask and Scott Martineau
Narrative Economics by by Robert J Sh...
Brief Summary
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.
From Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a new way to think about how popular stories help drive economic events.
In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior--what he calls "narrative economics"--has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events.
Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets--whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up, that housing prices never fall, or that some firms are too big to fail. Whether true or false, stories like these--transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media--drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that by laying the foundation for a way of understanding how stories help propel economic events that have had led to war, mass unemployment, and increased inequality.
The stories people tell--about economic confidence or panic, housing booms, the American dream, or Bitcoin--affect economic outcomes. Narrative Economics explains how we can begin to take these stories seriously. It may be Robert Shiller's most important book to date.
ISBN:9780691182292
Author:Robert J Shiller
What Got You Here Wont Get You There ...
Brief Summary
What Got You Here Won't Get You There in Sales: How Successful Salespeople Take it to the Next Level.
One of the most influential business coaches of our time, Marshall Goldsmith helps businesspeople pinpoint career-harming behaviors, understand why they engage in them and, most importantly?stop. His book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There wasn’t just a runaway bestseller, it has helped untold numbers dramatically improve their careers and personal lives.
Now, Goldsmith teams up with leading sales thought leaders Don Brown and Bill Hawkins to help you break the habits that specifically damage sales relationships. This dream team’s combined clients have increased their sales from 5 to 30 percent?and their gross profit up to 50 percent! In short, their approach works.
What Got You Here Won’t Get You There in Sales! provides simple-to-use tools for maintaining and leveraging quality personal connections by doing something much easier than learning new behaviors: simply stopping old ones. When dealing with your customers, do you:
• Needlessly verbalize and execute every possible step in the sales process?
• Repeatedly initiate communication for no apparent purpose?
• Attempt to verbally "one up” your customer in conversation?
The authors name 16 bad habits in all, and they provide proven techniques for reversing their negative effects by putting them to rest for good. There is no profession that depends more on good relationships than sales. And there’s no one more qualified to coach you to create and nurture productive sales relationships than these three authors.
You do have the power to change. Let Goldsmith, Brown, and Hawkins help you kick your bad habits to improve relationships, increase sales, and enjoy a more fulfilling, enriching career.
ISBN:9780071773942
Author:Bill Hawkins and Marshall Goldsmith
Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer
Brief Summary
Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers.
Haters are not your problem. . . .
Ignoring them is.
Eighty percent of companies say they deliver out¬standing customer service, but only 8 percent of their customers agree. This book will help you close that gap by reconfiguring your customer service to deliver knockout experiences.
The near-universal adoption of smartphones and social media has fundamentally altered the science of complaints. Critics ("haters”) can now express their displeasure faster and more pub¬licly than ever. These trends have resulted in an overall increase in complaints and a belief by many businesses that they have to "pick their spots” when choosing to answer criticisms.
Bestselling author Jay Baer shows why that approach is a major mistake. Based on an exten¬sive proprietary study of how, where, and why we complain, Hug Your Haters proves that there are two types of complainers, each with very differ¬ent motivations:
·Offstage haters. These people simply want solutions to their problems. They complain via legacy channels where the likelihood of a response is highest—phone, e-mail, and com¬pany websites. Offstage haters don’t care if any¬one else finds out, as long as they get answers.
·Onstage haters. These people are often disap¬pointed by a substandard interaction via tradi¬tional channels, so they turn to indirect venues, such as social media, online review sites, and discussion boards. Onstage haters want more than solutions—they want an audience to share their righteous indignation.
Hug Your Haters shows exactly how to deal with both groups, drawing on meticulously researched case studies from businesses of all types and sizes from around the world. It includes specific play-books and formulas as well as a fold-out poster of "the Hatrix,” which summarizes the best strate¬gies for different situations. The book is also filled with poignant and hilarious examples of haters gone wild, and companies gone crazy, as well as inspirational stories of companies responding with speed, compassion, and humanity.
Whether you work for a mom-and-pop store or a global brand, you will have haters—and you can’t afford to ignore them. Baer’s insights and tactics will teach you how to embrace complaints, put haters to work for you, and turn bad news into good outcomes.
ISBN:9781101980675
Author:Jay Baer
Little Red Book of Selling 12.5 Princ...
Inside Coca Cola by Neville Isdell an...
Brief Summary
Inside Coca-Cola: A CEO's Life Story of Building the World's Most Popular Brand.
The first book by a Coca-Cola CEO tells the remarkable story of the company's revival.
Neville Isdell was a key player at Coca-Cola for more than 30 years, retiring in 2009 as CEO after regilding the tarnished brand image of the world's leading soft-drink company. This first book by a Coca-Cola CEO tells an extraordinary personal and professional world-wide story, ranging from Northern Ireland to South Africa to Australia, the Philippines, Russia, Germany, India, South Africa and Turkey.
Isdell helped put out huge public relations fires (India and Turkey), opened markets(Russia, Eastern Europe, Philippines and Africa), championed Muhtar Kent, the current Turkish-American CEO, all while living the ideal of corporate responsibility.
Isdell's, and Coke's, story is newsy without being gossipy; principled without being preachy. "Inside Coca-Cola" is filled with stories and lessons appealing to anybody who has ever taken "the pause that refreshes." It's also a readable and important look at how companies can market and govern themselves more-ethically and to great success.
ISBN:9780312617950
Author:Neville Isdell and David Beasley
Profit over People by Noam Chomsky
Brief Summary
Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
In "Profit Over People," Noam Chomsky takes on neoliberalism: the pro-corporate system of economic and political policies presently waging a form of class war worldwide. By examining the contradictions between the democratic and market principles proclaimed by those in power and those actually practiced, Chomsky critiques the tyranny of the few that restricts the public arena and enacts policies that vastly increase private wealth, often with complete disregard for social and ecological consequences.
Combining detailed historical examples and uncompromising criticism, Chomsky offers a profound sense of hope that social activism can reclaim people's rights as citizens rather than as consumers, redefining democracy as a global movement, not a global market.
"
ISBN:9781888363821
Author:Noam Chomsky
Creating Competitive Advantage by Jay...
Brief Summary
Creating Competitive Advantage: Give Customers a Reason to Choose You Over Your Competitors
Why should I do business with you… and not your competitor?
Whether you are a retailer, manufacturer, distributor, or service provider – if you cannot answer this question, you are surely losing customers, clients and market share. This eye-opening book reveals how identifying your competitive advantages (and trumpeting them to the marketplace) is the most surefire way to close deals, retain clients, and stay miles ahead of the competition.
The five fatal flaws of most companies:
• They don’t have a competitive advantage but think they do
• They have a competitive advantage but don’t know what it is—so they lower prices instead
• They know what their competitive advantage is but neglect to tell clients about it
• They mistake "strengths” for competitive advantages
• They don’t concentrate on competitive advantages when making strategic and operational decisions
The good news is that you can overcome these costly mistakes – by identifying your competitive advantages and creating new ones. Consultant, public speaker, and competitive advantage expert Jaynie Smith will show you how scores of small and large companies substantially increased their sales by focusing on their competitive advantages. When advising a CEO frustrated by his salespeople’s inability to close deals, Smith discovered that his company stayed on schedule 95 percent of the time – an achievement no one else in his industry could claim. By touting this and other competitive advantages to customers, closing rates increased by 30 percent—and so did company revenues.
Jack Welch has said, "If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.” This straight-to-the-point book is filled with insightful stories and specific steps on how to pinpoint your competitive advantages, develop new ones, and get the message out about them.
ISBN:9780385517096
Author:Jaynie L Smith
Political Risk by Condoleezza Rice an...
Brief Summary
Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity
The world is changing fast. Political risk-the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business-is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets.
Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. The very institutions and laws that were supposed to reduce business uncertainty and risk are often having the opposite effect. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.
POLITICAL RISK investigates and analyzes this evolving landscape, what businesses can do to navigate it, and what all of us can learn about how to better understand and grapple with these rapidly changing global political dynamics. Drawing on lessons from the successes and failures of companies across multiple industries as well as examples from aircraft carrier operations, NASA missions, and other unusual places, POLITICAL RISK offers a first-of-its-kind framework that can be deployed in any organization, from startups to Fortune 500 companies.
Organizations that take a serious, systematic approach to political risk management are likely to be surprised less often and recover better. Companies that don't get these basics right are more likely to get blindsided.
ISBN:9781455542369
Author:Condoleezza Rice and Amy B Zegart
Dubai The Vulnerability of Success by...
Brief Summary
Dubai is a remarkable success story. From its origins as a small fishing and pearling community, the emirate has steadily grown in strength to become the premier trading center of the Arabian Gulf. It is also the locus of an exciting and innovative architectural revolution.
Despite the lack of democratization and genuine civil society, Dubai is now a booming metropolis of more than two million people, most of whom are expatriates enjoying the benefits of the city's increasingly diversified economy. After providing a detailed history, Christopher Davidson explains Dubai's current prosperity by presenting an in-depth study of its post-oil development strategies and how they were implemented against a backdrop of near complete political stability.
Davidson addresses future problems that may surface as the need for sustained foreign direct investment encourages far-reaching socioeconomic reforms, many of which may affect the legitimacy of the traditional monarchy.
ISBN:9781850658887
Author:Christopher Davidson