Business

Brief Summary Plan B: How to Hatch a Second Plan That's Always Better Than Your First Why has Facebook been so limber, evolving so successfully even after a number of stumbles, while Myspace stalled and lost ground? Why was Wal-Mart able to expand so successfully into new offerings, such as groceries, while H&R Block dramatically failed to expand into offering financial services? The answer, David Murray reveals, is that Facebook and Wal-Mart both started with business models that empowered them to effectively adapt their plans as they executed them. The failure of detailed strategic plans that have taken a great deal of time and money to develop is one of the worst problems in business, and it’s ever more urgent as the pace of change in business continues to accelerate. Murray, author of the acclaimed Wall Street Journal bestseller Borrowing Brilliance, argues that valiantly sticking to even a well-thought-out Plan A is the road to disaster. The greatest success comes to those who know how to construct and implement an adaptive Plan A that has within it the means of evolving into a superior Plan B by responding to problems confronted, discoveries made, changing market conditions, and the competition. Writing in a lively, engaging voice and using a series of specific examples drawn from companies including IBM, Intel, Facebook, American Express, and Kaiser Permanente, as well as from the art of war, including the Battle of Gettysburg and the D-Day invasion, and even from the space program, Murray presents powerful methods for constructing a plan that has the mechanisms for adaptation built in. Drawing on a wealth of research, he explains why we are fairly good at short-term predictions but why, in our ever more rapidly changing business world, even the best laid plans will eventually go astray. He then introduces the best techniques for creating an optimal original plan that takes into account our limited ability to predict, showing that vital to this process is that it be constructed so that we are alerted in time to make the right changes. In a brilliant discussion of strategy and tactics, he shows that the core of this adaptability is making sure that your strategy and tactics are well aligned with one another and that you have established the right metrics for measuring results. He then details precisely how to adapt throughout the execution process by constantly monitoring and assessing results, developing worst-case scenarios, and recognizing unanticipated opportunities. Plan B is an essential guide to harnessing the forces of change to achieve long-lasting success despite the most vexing challenges. ISBN:B004INH9TA Author:David Kord Murray

Brief Summary Does Your Marketing Sell?: The Secret of Effective Marketing Communication is the result of the distillation of twenty-five years of successful sales and marketing experience, hundreds of real world case studies, the best in marketing communications research and the received wisdom of some of the world's greatest marketers. These elements combine to form a simple, practical model that will help you to create striking marketing communications and to discover and remove the flaws from your marketing message. Highlighting the best of contemporary marketing campaigns with numerous illustrations and examples, delivered in a clever and accessible style, Does Your Marketing Sell? will show you how to make the most out of your marketing. ISBN:9781857883503 Author:Ian Moore

Brief Summary Boxing great and business success George Foreman shares his knockout business secrets for entrepreneurs. Readers remember George Foreman as the former Heavyweight Boxing Champion and the spokesman for the popular George Foreman Grill. What they may not know is that he is also a successful entrepreneur whose portfolio today boasts the George Foreman Grill, George Foreman's Knockout Cleaner, a line of clothing with Casual Male, fitness videos, Elgin watches, and much more. In Knockout Entrepreneur, Foreman shares his success secrets with aspiring and current entrepreneurs. ISBN:9780785222088 Author:George Foreman

Brief Summary Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think The next great technological disruption is coming The titans of Silicon Valley are racing to build the last, best computer that the world will ever need. They know that whoever successfully creates it will revolutionize our relationship with technology--and make billions of dollars in the process. They call it conversational AI. Computers that can speak and think like humans may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they are rapidly moving toward reality. In Talk to Me, veteran tech journalist James Vlahos meets the researchers at Amazon, Google, and Apple who are leading the way. He explores how voice tech will transform every sector of society: handing untold new powers to businesses, overturning traditional notions of privacy, upending how we access information, and fundamentally altering the way we understand human consciousness. And he even tries to understand the significance of the voice-computing revolution first-hand -- by building a chatbot version of his terminally ill father. Vlahos's research leads him to one fundamental question: What happens when our computers become as articulate, compassionate, and creative as we are? ISBN:9781328799302 Author:James Vlahos