Business Problem Solving

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

This book adds examples from over twenty years of experience by Dr. Liker in working with companies outside of Toyota. This audiobook treats you as a student who will be actively engaged in developing lean leader skills as you read. It acts as a tutorial for beginning the journey!

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.

Whether you're starting a business from scratch or in an existing company facing new threats, this audiobook offers the direction you need. The HBR Guide to Setting Your Strategy provides practical tips and advice that break down the process of crafting strategy so you can identify the areas your company should build on and help it thrive long into the future.

Performing Under Pressure tackles the greatest obstacle to personal success, whether in a sales presentation, at home, on the golf course, interviewing for a job, or performing onstage at Carnegie Hall. Despite sports mythology, no one rises to the occasion under pressure and does better than they do in practice. The reality is pressure makes us do worse and sometimes leads us to fail utterly. But there are things we can do to diminish its effects on our performance.

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford - the usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

Why does your weather app say “there’s a 10 percent chance of rain” instead of “it will be sunny”? In large part, this is due to the insight of award-winning physicist Tim Palmer, who pioneered the introduction of uncertainty into weather and climate prediction. Now, he wants to apply it to how we study everything else.

Los catalizadores eliminan los obstáculos y reducen las barreras para el cambio. En lugar de preguntar: “¿Cómo podría cambiar la opinión de alguien?”, proponen preguntas diferentes: “¿Por qué no han cambiado ya?” En este libro aprenderás cómo los catalizadores consiguen cambiar la opinión de los demás en las situaciones más difíciles: cómo los negociadores de rehenes consiguen que la gente salga con las manos en alto, cómo los vendedores consiguen que los nuevos productos se pongan de moda y cómo los líderes transforman la cultura organizativa.

In this thought-provoking exploration, Matthew May defines elegance as the elusive combination of unusual simplicity and surprising power, and pinpoints the four key elements that characterize it: seduction, subtraction, symmetry, and sustainability. In a story-driven narrative that sheds light on the need for elegance in design, engineering, physics, art, urban planning, sports, and work, May offers a surprising array of stories that illustrate why what's "not there" often matters more than what is.

This reissue of Thomas Sowell’s classic study of decision making, which includes a preface by the author, updates his seminal work in the context of The Vision of the Anointed. Sowell, one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals, describes in concrete detail how knowledge is shared and disseminated throughout modern society. He warns that society suffers from an ever-widening gap between firsthand knowledge and decision making—a gap that threatens not only our economic and political efficiency but our very freedom.

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.

We can’t imagine Superman without his X-ray vision and train-stopping strength. And what would Flash be without his speed? Yet, many entrepreneurs are stuck, running their businesses with their superpowers untapped. Fear of increasing costs and loss of control stop them in their tracks, and even those who open the door to their secret strength often don’t know how to properly utilize it.

In an audiobook that challenges everything you thought you knew, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne assert that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed, not by battling their rivals for market share in the bloody "red ocean" of a shrinking profit pool, but by creating "blue oceans" of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.

In For the Culture, Marcus Collins argues that true cultural engagement is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior. If you want to get people to move, you must first understand the underlying cultural forces that make them tick. Collins uses stories from his own work as an award-winning marketer—from spearheading digital strategy for Beyoncé, to working on Apple and Nike collaborations, to the successful launch of the Brooklyn Nets NBA team—to break down the ways in which culture influences behavior and how listeners can do the same

In Bet on You, Angie Morgan and Courtney Lynch reveal hard-earned, real-world insights that will help you realize your potential by enacting risk in ways most meaningful to you. The author’s risk-taking guidance has been embraced by the world’s best businesses: Google, Boston Scientific, FedEx, and Oracle. Their insights are the secret sauce behind any transformative journey to a success-filled life.

No matter what your business niche is, there’s one thing to work on if you want to see success… and that’s your mindset. Entrepreneurial success isn’t about what you do… It’s about how you think. You need the psychological know-how to rewire your brain and develop the skills you need to make a success of any business venture you put your mind to… and you need a collection of effective strategies to make sure you don’t lose sight of the prize or burn out in the process.

Here, drawing on revealing, honest stories from his five decades in business - the company's many successes as well as its stumbles - Koch walks the listener step by step through the five dimensions of Market-Based Management to show stockholders, entrepreneurs, leaders, students - and innovators, supervisors and employees of all kinds, in any field - how to apply the principles to generate Good Profit in their organizations, companies, and lives.

On February 15, 2015, Kate Matrosova, an avid mountaineer, set off before sunrise for a traverse of the Northern Presidential Range in New Hampshire's White Mountains. Late the following day, rescuers carried her frozen body out of the mountains amid some of the worst weather ever recorded on these deceptively rugged slopes. At thirty-two, Matrosova was healthy and had already summited much larger mountains. What went wrong? Where You'll Find Me offers possible answers to that question.