Amazon.com Widgets
Explosive reading material well worth taking a look at …
The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.
The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:
- Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
- The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
- A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
- The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?
Meet the innovators and upstarts who are inventing the future of business. Their unconventional ideas and groundbreaking strategies can become your business plan for the twenty-first century a better way to lead, compete, and succeed.
Business as usual is a bust. In industry after indus-try, the old guard is cutting back and losing ground. Meanwhile, organizations that were once dismissed as upstarts, as wildcards or mavericks are making waves and growing fast. There is a reason: In an age of hypercompetition and nonstop innovation, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something truly original.
That’s the lesson behind the companies, executives, and entrepreneurs you’ll meet in Mavericks at Work.They are winning big in business by rethinking the logic of how business gets done. They have devised exciting new answers to the timeless challenges facing organizations of every size and leaders in every field: how you make strategy, how you unleash new ideas, how you connect with customers, how your best people achieve great results.
Who are these mavericks? They are break-the-mold business units inside giants such as IBM and Procter & Gamble, as well as high-profile innovators such as HBO and Pixar. They are Internet banks and gold mines, fashion retailers and advertising agencies, funky sandwich shops and hard-charging computer programmers. Together, they are creating an inspiring agenda that every business can put to work.
Their success demonstrates that:
- Being different makes all the difference
- Sharing values beats selling value
- The company with the smartest customers wins
- Nobody is as smart as everybody
- Character counts for as much as credentials
- Great leaders are insatiable learners
Whether you’re a young professional setting out on your career, a senior executive looking to make your organization grow, or an entrepreneur building a company from scratch, Mavericks at Work will help you think bigger, aim higher, and win more decisively.
In this first new and totally revised edition of the over two million copy bestseller, The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business. Next, he walks you through the steps in the life of a business — from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed — and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether it is a franchise or not. Finally, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business. After you have read The E-Myth Revisited, you will truly be able to grow your business in a predictable and productive way.
Add the Internet to Your Marketing Arsenal-Guerrilla Style!
The Father of Guerrilla Marketing, Jay Conrad Levinson, changed marketing forever when he unleashed his original arsenal of marketing tactics for surviving the advertising jungle on a shoestring budget. And now, Levinson and online marketing masters Mitch Meyerson and Mary Eule Scarborough once again show you how to beat the odds by combining the unconventional, take-no-prisoners Guerrilla Marketing approach with today’s ultimate marketing weapon-the Internet.
Learn how to use the internet Guerrilla style. Level the playing field, and achieve greater online visibility. Boost traffic to your website. Convert visitors into paying clients. Capture and keep your market share, and create multiple income streams-all while saving time and money!
This complete Guerrilla Marketing online guide includes:
- The 10 most effective Guerrilla strategies
- Case studies of the five greatest online Guerrilla Marketing campaigns
- How to create a high-impact website on a budget
- Low-cost tactics for maximizing traffic
- The 12 biggest internet marketing mistakes and how to avoid them
- Creative tactics and cutting-edge tools that inspire customers to take action
- Essential information on cutting-edge technology
Buffett is back . . . and better than before!
A decade has passed since the book that introduced the world to Warren Buffett — The Warren Buffett Way by Robert Hagstrom — first appeared. That groundbreaking book spent 21 weeks on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Bestseller list and sold over 1 million copies.
Since then, Warren Buffett has solidified his reputation as the greatest investor of all time — becoming even richer and more successful, despite the wild fluctuation of the markets. How does this value investing legend continue to do it? That’s where Robert Hagstrom and the Second Edition of The Warren Buffet Way come in. This edition is a completely revised and updated look at the Oracle of Omaha — comprising Buffett’s numerous investments and accomplishments over the past ten years, as well as the timeless and highly successful investment strategies and techniques he has always used to come out a market winner. This edition is especially accessible as Buffett’s basic tenets of investing are presented and illuminated with relevant and up to date examples.
Did you hear the one about …
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