Showing results by narrator "Walter Dixon" in All Categories

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

If you don't like what you see when you look in the mirror, you may not realize that these feelings are entirely within your grasp. You don't need extensive cosmetic surgery, pricey beauty treatments, or weight loss programs, but you may need to do something even more drastic - change your perspective and the way you view yourself. The Body Image Workbook offers a comprehensive program to help you stop focusing on your perceived imperfections and start feeling more confident about the way you look.

Nothing is more dangerous than a single compelling idea that is lived out and nothing is more harmless than lots of little ideas never applied. By creatively communicating one Big Idea every week your church will transform people into genuine Christ followers who live out the mission of Jesus. Less is more!

Warren Buffett has repeatedly acknowledged Benjamin Graham, a man he personally studied and worked under, as the primary influence on his investment approach. Indeed, there is a direct line between the record-shattering investing performance of Buffett (and other value investors) and Graham's life. In six books and dozens of papers, Graham—widely known as the "Dean of Wall Street"—left an extensive account of an investing system that, as Buffett can attest to, actually works!

We all know that life in prison ain't grand, but the utter horror of it springs from the pages of this autobiography, written by a one-time death-row inmate. Billy Wayne Sinclair is now serving a reduced 90-year sentence for murdering a Baton Rouge convenience store owner in a robbery gone wrong more than three decades ago. His story of an adult life spent in one of Louisiana's harshest prisons is amazing, not only because he has survived with his soul intact, but because it provides such a raw look at the inner workings of a system bent on revenge, not rehabilitation.

Marc Freedman, hailed by the New York Times as “the voice of aging baby boomers [seeking] meaningful and sustaining work later in life”, makes an impassioned call to accept the decades opening up between midlife and anything approximating old age for what they really are: an entirely new stage of life, which he dubs the encore years. The whole 60- to 80-year-old period is simply new territory, he writes, and the people in this period constitute a whole new phenomenon in the 21st century.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of 77 government organizations—ranging from small departments to entire states—Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don’t work well in the public sector.

Art Ciocca orchestrated the creation of the largest wine brand that has dominated the industry for over twenty years. It is an achievement that even the best entrepreneurs can only dream of, yet perhaps you've never even heard his name. Inspired by Art, Andreas Widmer crafts a practical model of principled entrepreneurship that anyone can adopt in their work. Widmer outlines five pillars that form the foundation of an entrepreneurial mindset that places the human person at the center of work.

For many organizations, the word strategy conjures up endless ideas, concepts, and tools - while the intent is correct, the awful reality is most companies do not have a simple, common definition of strategy or a simple approach to make the big decisions. Too many PowerPoints, not enough one pagers that can be put into practice. The lack of a common approach to strategy frustrates executives, creates conflict where there is none, fast-tracks dubious alternatives, lengthens decision-making, and hampers the quality of the decisions that finally emerge.

These days more and more employers are using “competency-based” job interview questions to try to ensure that new hires’ experience and abilities match the demands of the positions they’re filling. Designed to elicit real-life career events demonstrating your knowledge, judgment, and skills, this new breed of interview question can trip up even the savviest job seekers. And in this extremely tough job market, there are no second chances.

America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past. In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts.

In The New Nature of Business: The Path to Prosperity and Sustainability, businessman Andre Hoffmann and journalist Peter Vanham describe how companies should change their ways to have continued success, and why the current modus operandi is not working. They present a template for creating "sustainable prosperity", and case-studies of companies that survived and thrived by opting for change. In doing so, they provide a way out of long-standing dilemmas, such as how to balance business needs with impact on nature, shareholders with stakeholders, and short-term vs. long-term profits.

What do Blendtec, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Barack Obama have in common? They all created huge amounts of buzz and generated millions of dollars in sales and campaign contributions by using the principles found in this enlightening audio book. A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products Whether you're located in San Francisco, Dubai, or Reykjavik, it's when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web.

Reviled as a fascist by his great rival Ben-Gurion, venerated by Israel’s underclass, the first Israeli to win the Nobel Peace Prize, a proud Jew but not a conventionally religious one, Menachem Begin was both complex and controversial. Born in Poland in 1913, Begin was a youthful admirer of the Revisionist Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky and soon became a leader within Jabotinsky’s Betar movement.

Generational distrust and ageism are seeping into organizations worldwide. Smart leaders are harnessing age diversity and encouraging mutual learning, cross-generational collaboration, and a culture that embraces both similarities and differences across age groups. Multigenerational Workplace: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you bridge divides, reduce prejudice, and unlock the benefits of age-diverse teams.

Your organization can save and thrive in the cloud with this first nontechnical guide to cloud computing for business leaders.

Two high-powered consultants give executives the frameworks they need to solve one of today's most pressing challenges: how to achieve maximum revenue growth while adding as little complexity as possible to your business. Growth in the Age of Complexity is a high-level guide that offers six main strategies for growth and profits.

Decades of research demonstrate how important the relationships with peers and professors are for students academically, personally, and professionally. Yet many students lack the strategies to develop educationally purposeful relationships in college. Connections Are Everything shows students the simple steps they can take to make their own college experience meaningful and transformational.

Two leading data scientists offer an up-close and user-friendly look at artificial intelligence: what it is, how it works, where it came from and how to harness its power for a better world. Dozens of times per day, we all interact with intelligent machines that are constantly learning from the wealth of data now available to them. These machines, from smartphones to talking robots to self-driving cars, are remaking the world in the 21st century in the same way that the Industrial Revolution remade the world in the 19th.

Marketing management is racing to keep pace with the technological advances that are disrupting how customers connect and interact with brands. Instead of planning and producing a few big campaigns, marketers today must design and operate an explosion of continuous marketing touchpoints that evolve as quickly as their organization can manage.