Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, he has learned that being an artist isn’t about your specific output, it’s about your relationship to the world.

Unleash the Power of Storytelling offers a practical roadmap to crafting and delivering more powerful, persuasive stories that you can use to get more of what you want out of your career and your life. Study after study confirms that stories have unparalleled power to break down walls, build trust, and influence people to act. More than facts and data alone, stories are fundamental to capturing and expressing our ideas, wishes, and beliefs and getting the results we want.

Created as a primer for the beginning actor, To Be or Wanna Be takes you on a journey that reveals the path to becoming a successful actor, as well as how to avoid the pitfalls of the starving artist. Beginning with the simple, yet important distinctions of how to take control of your career, and through personal anecdotes of how he discovered them, Sean Pratt guides you toward the more complex and powerful concepts that will make all the difference in your future success as an actor.

Since taking over TED in the early 2000s, Chris Anderson has shown how carefully crafted short talks can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience's worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.

Many people have a fear of public speaking or are insecure about their ability to give a successful presentation. Now public speaking coach and best-selling author Carmine Gallo explores what makes a great presentation by examining the widely acclaimed TED Talks, which have redefined the elements of a successful presentation and become the gold standard for public speaking. TED - which stands for technology, entertainment, and design - brings together the world's leading thinkers.

In his bravest and most challenging book yet, Seth Godin shows how we can thrive in an economy that rewards art, not compliance. He explains why true innovators focus on trust, remarkability, leadership, and stories that spread. And he makes a passionate argument for why you should be treating your work as art. Art is not a gene or a specific talent. It's an attitude, available to anyone who has a vision that others don't, and the guts to do something about it.

Within each corporation are anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright demonstrate how these tribes develop - and show you how to assess them and lead them to maximize productivity and growth. A business management book like no other, Tribal Leadership is an essential tool to help managers and business leaders take better control of their organizations by utilizing the unique characteristics of the tribes that exist within.

Simplicity isn’t just a design principle at Apple - it’s a value that permeates every level of the organization. The obsession with Simplicity is what separates Apple from other technology companies. It’s what helped Apple recover from near death in 1997 to become the most valuable company on Earth in 2011. Thanks to Steve Jobs’s uncompromising ways, you can see Simplicity in everything Apple does: the way it’s structured, the way it innovates, and the way it speaks to its customers.

We have been spoon-fed the notion that creativity is the province of genius - of those favored, brilliant few whose moments of insight arrive in unpredictable flashes of divine inspiration. And if we are not geniuses, we might as well pack it in and give up. Either we have that gift, or we don’t. But Allen Gannett shows that simply isn’t true. Recent research has shown that there is a predictable science behind achieving commercial success in any creative endeavor, from writing a popular novel to starting up a successful company to creating an effective marketing campaign.

Our world is flooded by advice, ideas, and experts, but we shouldn't make decisions based on "best practices". Instead, we should do what works best for us, building careers and companies with the sort of clarity that leads to exceptional work. Only first, we need to escape the endless cycle of stale approaches and trendy tactics that hold us back. We need to break the wheel.

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Best-selling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear - but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including more than 200 interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions - and breakthrough insights - and how anyone can create them.

Dr. Luntz offers more than 70 new “words that work” for private one-on-one meetings with your boss, for public presentations to hundreds of colleagues, or for television appearances that reach millions. There are more than three dozen specific lessons and recommendations—and each one directly illustrates the nine essential action-oriented principles of winning at every level: People-Centered, Paradigm-Breaking, Prioritizing, Perfection, Partnerships, Passion, Persuasion, Persistence, and Principles.

The first book to reveal how thinking like a designer can help solve the greatest challenges we face in business, society, and our daily lives. What can we learn from the ways great designers think-and how can it improve our world? In this highly original book by journalist Warren Berger, in collaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, ten groundbreaking principles of design are shown in action-addressing business, social, and personal challenges and improving the way we think, work, and live.

"Years ago, I wrote about a retail store in the Palo Alto environs—a good one, which had a box of two-cent candies at the checkout. I subsequently remember that 'little' parting gesture of the two-cent candy as a symbol of all that is Excellent at that store. Dozens of people who have attended seminars of mine have come up to remind me, sometimes 15 or 20 years later, of “the two-cent candy story,” and to tell me how it had a sizable impact on how they did business."

What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic Plans all have in common? Best-selling author Peter Sims found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to discover and develop new ideas.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear - but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including more than 200 interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions - and breakthrough insights - and how anyone can create them.

The first book to reveal how thinking like a designer can help solve the greatest challenges we face in business, society, and our daily lives. What can we learn from the ways great designers think-and how can it improve our world? In this highly original book by journalist Warren Berger, in collaboration with celebrated designer Bruce Mau, ten groundbreaking principles of design are shown in action-addressing business, social, and personal challenges and improving the way we think, work, and live.

The Second City has launched the careers of celebrated comic performers such as Tina Fey and Stephen Colbert and produced award-winning content. But it's the actual improvisational process developed and honed over the years by The Second City that has become its legacy. Players master an ability to cocreate in ensembles using philosophies that celebrate a "yes, and" approach.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

Three short years ago, when Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote their best seller, Trust Agents, being interesting and human on the Web was enough to build a significant audience. But now, everybody has a platform. The problem is that most of them are just making noise. In The Impact Equation, Brogan and Smith show that to make people truly care about what you have to say - you need more than just a good idea, trust among your audience, or a certain number of fol­lowers.

When it comes to creating ideas, we hold ourselves back. Thats because inside each of us is an internal editor whose job is to forever polish our thoughts, so we sound smart and in control, and so that we fit into society. But what happens when we encounter problems for which such conventional thinking fails us? How do we get unstuck? For Mark Levy, the answer is freewriting....

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

Too often we feel like underdogs fighting a system that stacks the odds against us. We work hard, follow the rules, and dream of a better life. But these days, working harder doesn't always lead to fulfillment. In fact, according to Gallup research, nearly 90% of people feel disconnected from their jobs. So how do you break free from the drudgery and achieve more success on your own terms? You hustle.

Erik Wahl, a visual artist, speaker, and entrepreneur, helps us unite the yin and yang of creativity - the dynamic new ideas with the dogged effort. He shows why we won't get far if we rely on the spark without the grind or the grind without the spark. What the world really needs are the creators who can hold the two in balance. This audiobook offers surprising insights and practical advice about how to fan the sparks and make the grind more productive.

After getting rejected from many business schools and fired from several sales jobs, Srinivas Rao decided to stop doing what he thought he was supposed to do and start working in a way that felt honest. He launched the Unmistakable Creative Podcast to interview some of the greatest minds in business - including Seth Godin, Simon Sinek, Pam Slim, Elle Luna, and Ryan Holiday - and found a surprisingly big audience. This book distills the lessons, anecdotes, and insights of the 500+ people he has interviewed.

On the one hand we aren’t surprised by the uncertainty of everyday life, but on the other we believe that success can be analyzed and planned for. It is a revealing paradox. The implications are explosive and they obliterate every common-sense notion we have about strategy and planning. The Click Moment is about two very simple but highly provocative ideas.

In this book Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create lives that are both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of whom or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

In Awakening the Entrepreneur Within you are invited into the Dreaming Room, where your own entrepreneurial dreams will come alive and become reality. Michael will help you shape your dream into a viable, economically successful company! If you see something missing in your world, it's time to start dreaming. Let Michael Gerber welcome you to the Dreaming Room.