Sharp Objects

Brief Summary You've got a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it to the group, but get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets in return. Before you know what's happened, your idea is dead, shot down. You're furious. Everyone has lost: Those who would have benefited from your proposal. You. Your company. Perhaps even the country. It doesn't have to be this way, maintain John Kotter and Lorne Whitehead. In Buy-In, they reveal how to win the support your idea needs to deliver valuable results. The key? Understand the generic attack strategies that naysayers and obfuscators deploy time and time again. Then engage these adversaries with tactics tailored to each strategy. By "inviting in the lions" to critique your idea--and being prepared for them--you'll capture busy people's attention, help them grasp your proposal's value, and secure their commitment to implementing the solution. The book presents a fresh and amusing fictional narrative showing attack strategies in action. It then provides several specific counterstrategies for each basic category the authors have defined--including: • Death-by-delay: Your enemies push discussion of your idea so far into the future it's forgotten. • Confusion: They present so much data that confidence in your proposal dies. • Fearmongering: Critics catalyze irrational anxieties about your idea. • Character assassination: They slam your reputation and credibility. Smart, practical, and filled with useful advice, Buy-In equips you to anticipate and combat attacks--so your good idea makes it through to make a positive change. " ISBN:B003ZSISOO Author:John P. Kotter and Lorne A. Whitehead

Brief Summary Imagine if you could identify your business’s most profitable customers, craft a better marketing strategy to communicate with them, and inspire them to buy more? Well now you can. And the best part is that you can do it using the data you already have. Today, everything we do creates data, and the volumes are enormous. Virtually every time someone views something online, enters search on Google, or even surfs the web on a smart phone, another chunk gets added – in real time - to the multibillion gigabyte (and growing) trove of data that can help us better understand and predict consumer behavior. We no longer need expertise in math or statistics or even expensive modeling software to get the most out of all these revealing consumer insights. A revolution in data analysis is underway, and the methods and tools for aggregating and analyzing this "data deluge” are suddenly far simpler, less expensive, and more precise than they were. In this book – the first of its kind – Dimitri Maex, Managing Director of global advertising agency Ogilvy One New York and the engine behind the agency’s global analytics practice, reveal show to turn your data - those sexy little numbers that can mean more profit for your business – into actionable strategies that drive real growth and revenues. And he can show you how to do it at virtually no cost. In his clear, easy-to-understand style, he explains how to: • Identify which customers are most valuable, which have the most potential to be valuable, which are most likely to buy more in the future, and which are not worth targeting. • Allocate your marketing assets in the best possible way and pinpoint the outlays that will generate the highest possible returns. • Figure out precisely which communication or media brought a customer to your company’s web site and what that customer will do once she arrives. • Predict which products or services customers will want in the future. • Learn which customers are preparing to defect to the competition and how to stop them. • Determine which customers buy your product because it is perfect for their needs, which ones purchase because they liked your ad, which ones chose you because of an appealing price, and which ones came to you through word-of-mouth…or some combination of all these factors. • Drill your geographic targeting down to the regional, zip code, and even neighborhood level. • Optimize your web presence to get the maximum return from search. A must read for marketers striving to get the biggest ROI on their advertising dollars, small business owners eager to grow faster, researchers needing a consumer in mind for whom to create new products or services, those in finance responsible for growing the bottom line, and even creatives looking for feedback to help them improve their output, Sexy Little Number sis THE essential tool not just for math nerds and number crunchers, but for anyone wishing to use the data at their fingertips to grow their business and increase their profits dramatically. ISBN:9780449009918 Author:Dimitri Maex and Paul B Brown