Business Management

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

From the best-selling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new edition of Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process - including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world.

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities.

Each year, sales professionals leave billions of dollars on the table because they are out gunned, out maneuvered, and out played by savvy buyers, who have been schooled in the art and science of negotiation. Because today's buyers have more power than ever before - more information, more at stake, and more control over the buying process-they almost always enter sales negotiations in a much stronger position than the salespeople on the other side of the table. The results are sadly predictable: Salespeople and their companies end up on the losing end of the deal.

Reframing Organizations provides time-tested guidance for more effective organizational leadership. Rooted in decades of social science research across multiple disciplines, Bolman and Deal's four-frame model has continued to evolve since its conception more than 25 years ago. This new seventh edition will be updated to include additional coverage of cross-sector collaboration, generational differences, virtual environments, globalization, sustainability, and communication across cultures.

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. 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.

In Build a Business You Love, #1 New York Times bestselling author and Ramsey Solutions Founder and CEO, Dave Ramsey breaks down the system that took his business from a card table in his living room to a $250 million operation. Business leaders face all kinds of challenges and fears as they work to grow their business. Dave Ramsey gets it—because he’s been there. Over the past 30 years, he and his team have taken some right (and plenty of wrong) turns as they worked to build his one-man financial counseling business into Ramsey Solutions, a $250 million company with over 1,000 team members.

The number of people who will become first-time supervisors will likely grow in the next 10 years, as Baby Boomers retire. Perhaps the most challenging leadership experience anyone will face isn't one at the top, but their first promotion to leadership. They must deal with the change and uncertainty that comes with a new job, requiring new skills, and they've been promoted from peer to leader.

Bruce Greenwald, one of the nation's leading business professors, presents a new and simplified approach to strategy that cuts through much of the fog that has surrounded the subject. Based on his hugely popular course at Columbia Business School, Greenwald and his co-author, Judd Kahn, offer an easy-to-follow method for understanding the competitive structure of your industry and developing an appropriate strategy for your specific position.

Whether it's among colleagues at lunch or an audience of 1000, a leader's role is to move and inspire others. It's not only the big occasions that test a leader's mettle, but the little ones as well - in a casual conversation in the elevator, in phone calls, or one of many incidental, seemingly "insignificant" interactions in everyday work life. Written by one of the world's leading communications coaches, Speaking as a Leader shows you how to make the most of your daily communications, creating a presence on the job as a genuine and constant leader.

Leadership isn't easy. It takes grit, courage, and vision, among other things, that can be hard to come by on your toughest days. When leaders and aspiring leaders seek out advice, they're often told to try harder. Dig deeper. Look in the mirror and own your natural-born strengths and fix any real or perceived career-limiting deficiencies. Frances Frei and Anne Morriss offer a different worldview. They argue that this popular leadership advice glosses over the most important thing you do as a leader: build others up. Leadership isn't about you.

The bar is set high for inventory control professionals - and well-ordered stock rooms and records are just the beginning. Beyond core tasks such as locating items, you've got to project future business needs, hold down costs, and fix supply chain problems. You need strategic and financial knowledge and the skills to manage many moving parts. Essentials of Inventory Management is the answer audiobook on which practitioners and students rely. It breaks down the job into easy concepts and concrete steps.

It's no secret that we're pushed to the limit. Today's professionals feel rushed, overwhelmed, and perennially behind. How can we break out of the cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives that we all seek? Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives.

Dealing with People You Can't Stand has been helping good people deal with bad behavior in a positive, professional way for nearly two decades. Unfortunately, as the world becomes smaller and time more compressed, new difficult people are being made all the time. So Kirschner and Brinkman have updated their global best seller to help you wring positive results from even the most twisted interactions you're likely to experience today.

In this book, psychotherapist and business coach Lynn Grodzki acts as your personal business coach and shows you how to build an ideal private practice - one that is both highly profitable and personally satisfying. Today, being a talented professional is not enough to ensure the success of your private practice; you also need to be an enthusiastic, talented businessperson. Grodzki's business strategies are effective and immediately useful for a wide range of private practitioners....

Whether you are moving up, moving on, or just starting out, America's top career coach, Robin Ryan, offers proven, easy-to-learn techniques for mastering the job interview and landing the job of your dreams. This brief, compact book, newly updated in 2008, is packed with useful tips such as: how to establish a career identity or personal brand in the opening minutes of an interview using the 60 Second Sell¿, answers to more than 100 of the toughest interview questions.

Managing up helps you build the sort of relationships that foster more communication, collaboration, cooperation, and understanding between people at different levels of power, with a variety of perspectives and skills. Managing Up is your personal manual for building this vital skill so you can begin building your best future. Real-world strategies give you a set of actionable steps, supplemented by expert advice from a top leadership consultant that helps you get on track to advancement.

During his long business career, Donald Trump has known astonishing highs and lows. In Never Give Up, the world's most famous businessman talks candidly about his own biggest challenges, lowest moments, and toughest fights - and how he turned those setbacks into new successes.

Stuck in a "win-win versus win-lose" mind-set, most negotiators focus on the face-to-face process at the table. David Lax and James Sebenius urge bargainers to look beyond tactics at the table. Persuasive tactics are only the "first dimension" of the authors' path-breaking approach, developed from their decades of doing deals and analyzing great dealmakers.