Read about our pricing and services
List Price:
| Price | Quantity |
| $23.99 | 1-24 |
| $20.99 | 25-99 |
| $19.49 | 100-499 |
| $18.89 | 500+ |
Bulk discounts are non-returnable. | |
Customize It
Hardcover
320 pages
ISBN 9780066620992 Published Oct. 2001
HarperBusiness
See all formats
Tweet
Posted Jan. 10, 2012 8:11 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
The time has come! Drum roll, please...
General Business
In The Quest, Daniel Yergin expands his Pulitzer Prize winning history of oil, The Prize, to capture the entire energy picture. The story he tells captures the immediacy of the headlines while at the same time revealing a deeper, more dramatic narrative of behind-the-scenes personalities and maneuvering. Taking us from The Caspian Sea to Nigeria, Venezuela to the Persian Gulf, China and everywhere in between, The Quest is 700+ pages of fascinating stories and detail.
Leadership
Based on nine years of research, Great by Choice is a book that identifies and studies enterprises that have not only excelled statistically, but did so in a particularly turbulent environment. But beyond the vital research—and this book presents plenty of it, with almost 40 pages of research notes at the back of the book—a book has to be readable, the advice applicable, the examples memorable to really get you thinking and inspire change. Ten years after the release of Good to Great, Jim Collins and Morten Hansen have done all of that, given us the perfect book for our times and the understanding that it is the choices we make—not chance—that determines a company’s fate.
Management
Most managers probably don’t consider themselves designers—they manage people and processes. But consider this: Instead of just thinking about who does what, how and when, what if managers began to think about how these tasks interact with customers, how the space these activities are done in (both the real space and metaphorical space) create efficiency, buy-in, job fulfillment, and profitability? By treating management as a design process, managers can create systems that have quality built in rather than simply offering rules and guidelines for employees to follow. This book is the guide to making that shift, and is an important resource for those who lead people.
Marketing and Sales
Gary Vaynerchuck’s first book, Crush It, showed us how to use social media to turn our passions into a business. The Thank You Economy details how to use social media to maintain and improve that business, and allow the personalities of people at all levels of a company to create real, authentic conversations about the way business is conducted. Filled with practical stories and ideas on how to use customer service, strategy, innovation, and sales and marketing to create a strong and trustworthy company, The Thank You Economy is the essential guidebook for leveraging social media to improve your business.
Entrepreneurship & Small Business
Written by a serial entrepreneur, this book examines the innovations made by his successful startups, lessons learned by those that weren't and how the actions that paved their way can be replicated and lead to radically successful businesses, according to Ries. Based on the precepts of lean manufacturing, The Lean Startup illustrates how to get closer to customers, design products and services they really want and then streamline processes and procedures to help business startups become more successful. Heady, but immensely interesting, the book can help startups succeed at a time when they desperately need to.
Personal Development
At first glance, Uncertainty looks like one of those niche books that will appeal primarily to born risk-takers whose pursuit of a personal dream outruns any natural fear of failure. And, while it does offer many stories about uber-successful, seemingly fearless folks who look uncertainty in the eye and never blink, what is so good about Uncertainty is that it goes beyond the anecdotal. Author Jonathan Fields very clearly presents the tools, talents and traits that people such as Randy Komisar, Sebastian Junger, and Haruki Murakami have put into practice to navigate the unknown and find success. And practice is the key word here, for being able to tolerate uncertainty isn't the result of some innate DNA strand, but of the ability to make small changes and a commitment to doing the work that we are passionate about, despite the risk.
Innovation & Creativity
Don’t think outside the box. Make a better box. Shapiro’s book looks at how to make improvements, find solutions to problems, and overcome a number of challenges by not following the usual methods. Through Shapiro’s research, case studies, and insights, this is a book readers can instantly put into action, and when it comes to change, new ideas, and new approaches, those on the path to innovation first will have a head start toward success.
Finance & Economics
This year’s Finance & Economics shortlist is full of books about economic and financial bad behavior, tricks, gimmick and wars. Martin’s book is about fixing the game. There are many fixes in the book, but the big one is to break shareholder value theory’s influence on the business world in the same way the NFL broke gambling’s influence on the game in its early days—by not letting those who play the game gamble on it or, put in business terms, by segregating the actual market from the expectations market. The best books of the past few years have focused of the economic challenges of the recent past; it seems we’re now finally beginning to see a transition to addressing the great many challenges we face in the future.
Cheers to all the winners! Which one of these excellent books will be awarded the top prize next week?
Jack Covert Selects - Great by Choice
Posted Oct. 14, 2011 3:52 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, which has gone on to sell well over 4 million copies, and we liked it enough to pick it as one of our 100 best business books of all time, has written, with Morten Hansen, another seminal book. All of Collins’s books are research-based and are often quite contrarian. But Collins also has shown a remarkable ability to create metaphors that explain very complicated concepts, metaphors that stick in your brain, like the Hedgehog Concept and the Flywheel, which represent important business ideas and have become part of the business lexicon. With Great by Choice, Collins and Hansen continue this winning model.
Based on nine years of research, the authors looked for enterprises that excelled statistically but also excelled in a particularly turbulent environment. “From an initial list of 20,400 companies, we systematically sifted through 11 layers of cuts to identify cases that met all our tests.” Out of this research they found a final set of companies they called 10X because they beat their industry index by at least 10 times. I appreciate that for people who have read Good to Great this sound familiar. The difference is the second basis the researchers used: “The enterprise achieved these results in a particularly turbulent environment, full of events that were uncontrollable, fast-moving, uncertain and potentially harmful.”
The researchers believe that 10Xers display three core behaviors: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity and productive paranoia.
By embracing the myriad of possible dangers, they put themselves in a superior position to overcome danger. 10Xers distinguish themselves not by paranoia per se, but by how they take effective action as a result. Paranoid behavior is enormously functional if fear is channeled into extensive preparation and calm, clear-headed action, hence our term “productive paranoia.”
In the end, the number of 10xer companies were distilled to seven, Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker, and we meet them all in great detail and with surprisingly fresh stories in Great by Choice.
Research is all well and good--and this book presents plenty of it including a substantial section at the back of the book of research notes--, but a book has to be readable, the advice applicable, the examples memorable to really get you thinking and inspire change. Collins and Hansen have done all of that, and in doing so, have given us the perfect book for our times.
Jeff Hayzlett's Business Library
Posted April 27, 2010 8:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
- The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
- Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco by Bryan Burrough & John Helyar
- How to Win Friend and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't by Jim Collins
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R Covey
- The Practice of Management by Peter F. Drucker
- The E-Myth: Why Most Businesses Don't Work and What to Do about It by Michael Gerber
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
- The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt & Jeff Cox
- Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
- Iacocca: An Autobiography by Lee Iacocca with William Novak
- What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
- Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone. by Mitch Joel
- Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T Kiyosaki with Sharon L Lechter
- Guerrilla Marketing: Easy and Inexpensive Strategies for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business by Jay Conrad Levinson
- Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive: Outsell, Outmanage, Outmotivate, and Outnegotiate Your Competition by Harvey MacKay
- The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino
- In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies by Tom Peters & Robert H Waterman
- The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
- Trump: The Art of the Deal by Donald J Trump with Tony Schwartz
- The Art of War by SinTzu
- Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
- Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
Not only does his book get extra points from me for including a list of his favorites, Hayzlett himself gets extra credit for using a Garrison Keillor quote to introduce the list: "A book is a gift you can open again and again."
800-CEO-READ's Decade-in-Review
Posted Dec. 31, 2009 9:45 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In - 800 CEO Read Blog
It's an admittedly worn device to use the alphabet to organize one's thoughts, but when reflecting over the past decade and trying to distill the most notable events and objects that affected our company and also the publishing industry and business sector into a brief blog post, I found such a device to be quite helpful. As Jack put it when we initially discussed writing a decade-in-review post, not only is it like opening a can of worms, it seems like whenever one harkens back to the Millenium, one can't help but get sidetracked into thoughts about 9/11. But of course there were many more ups and downs that we've all been a victim and/or a participant in, and this list is an attempt to do that chaos a little bit of justice.
Amazon (may not have its origins in this decade, but grew from 1.6B in 1999 to 19.1 in 2008; Annual 800ceoread Business Book Awards (Inaugural 2007); Erika Anderson, founder of Proteus International, Inc., author of Growing Great Employees, and great friend of 800-CEO-READ who introduced us to a new in-office vocabulary (2007)
Blue Ocean Strategy (our decade's Best Seller, 2005); Bill George, author of three 800-CEO-READ best sellers, Authentic Leadership (2004), True North (2007) and Seven Lessons for Leading in Crisis
ChangeThis (website presenting ideas via manifesto PDFs adopted by 800-CEO-READ from Seth Godin, 2005)
Disasters, natural and otherwise (Dot Com Bust, 2000; 9/11, 2001; tsunami, 2004; Hurricane Katrina, 2005; banking, 2009)
Enron bankruptcy (2001); Eight years of George W. Bush (2000-2008); Election of Barack Obama (2008)
Farewell, Schwartz Bookshops (2009); free/freemium changes everything; Facebook leads the herd.
Good to Great by Jim Collins; Green, Global and Google become top trends
Heath Brothers’ Made to Stick (2007) introduced us to a new language for the creation of ideas
InBubbleWrap offers free business books from 800-CEO-READ (2005); In the Books, 800-CEO-READ's yearly review of business books (2007); It's Your Ship by D. Michael Abrashoff (2002), an 800-CEO-READ bestseller with legs.
JackCovertSelects reviews (Inaugural 2000); Joy Panos Stauber, design extraordinaire and great friend of 800-CEO-READ.
Kindle (2007) and the advancing threat (revelation?) of digital books.
Lay-Offs (2009), Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics (2005), The Long Tail by Chris Anderson (2006); 800-CEO-READ's LeaveSmarter events (2006) kick off in Milwaukee.
Mega-Sales of Oprah’s Recommendations, Harry Potter & the Twilight series, lend hopefulness that books still beguile.
New York (book launch, company party, annual awards fete, 2009)
The 100 Business Books of All Time (written & anguished over during 2008, published 2009)
PechaKucha – 800-CEO-READ becomes the Milwaukee host for this exciting new way to present ideas in 20 images in 20 seconds (2008).
QbQ! The Question behind the Question by John Miller (2004), an 800-CEO-READ best seller that tapped into the perceived absence of personal accountability.
Rich Dad books populate the decade as the best selling personal finance books; Rehiring & Remodeling (2009)
Seth Godin (Unleashing the Idea Virus 2001 to Purple Cow 2003 to Tribes 2008); Strengths-based management books and strategies from Gallup.
Todd Sattersten (consultant 2004 - coauthor, 2008 - president, 2009), The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (2000); Twitter
Used books on Amazon (2001); The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld (2006) became the basis of some important questions we asked of our company and our customers.
Visit 800ceoread's Daily Blog for daily business insight (2001).
Wiki-anything; The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki (2004) and The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman (2005), two books that changed the way we think.
X-treme changes to news and publishing industry
You're a blueberry (2008), an 800-CEO-READ inside joke that encapsulates the relationships of the 800-CEO-READ employees.
Zero percent. The likelihood that 2010 will be anything but another exhilarating ride.
Okay, so in terms of adhering to the alphabetization of this list, some are a bit of a cheat. And some inclusions are events that had a direct effect on our company internally, but most were important occurrences felt by everyone in business. If there is anything I missed, feel free to add in comments.
Happy New Year everyone!
Bygones
Posted Dec. 3, 2009 6:22 a.m. by sally-haldorson
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog
I received a copy of Bas Bleu’s catalog via snailmail the other day. Bas Bleu (means “blue stocking,” the antiquated label used for an educated woman) is a specialty book and gift strictly mail-order company whose motto is: “Champion of the Odd Little Book…and your source for inspired gifts and accessories for readers.” It surprised me to get this catalog since it seems like the days of hard copy catalogs are far behind us (JCPenney's just announced they will discontinue their Big Book). Like Bas Bleu's name, I suppose you could say the company’s approach is a bit old-fashioned, though you can certainly shop their stock online. The physical catalog features a select number of books with personalized summaries written by staff members, as well as odds and ends that may appeal to the folks who take seriously the book.
It continually amazes and impresses me when a company can find its niche, zero in on it, and continue to prosper to whatever degree in the face of the monoliths like Amazon and Walmart. It's the advice found in so many of the best business books. See Good to Great, anything by Seth Godin, Positioning and Repositioning, Chris Zook's Core books.
800ceoread has done its best to do the same by concentrating on our core customers. For a number of strategic reasons, our snailmail catalog was discontinued in 2005. But just last week, while drafting a new email newsletter we may begin using at the start of the new year, I was digging through a file of our old marketing materials. This search certainly brought back some memories for me. I started working for the company in 1997, when we were Schwartz Business Books, and our catalog, then called the Gazette, was a raging success. Well, it was until I was hired. At that same time, Amazon hit the book sales industry with its full force and the Internet almost instantly made our mail order catalog response negligible. Soon my job became more about adapting our marketing to the Internet than responding to a deluge of mail orders.
But if, like me, you are feeling a bit nostalgic for the good old days of having a catalog in hand, pages between your fingers, the ability to checkmark or circle everything you want to buy, check out these scans of our past catalogs.
[caption id="attachment_5566" align="alignnone" width="218" caption="The Schwartz Business Books Gazette Circa 1994-95"]
[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_5573" align="alignnone" width="218" caption="800ceoread Gazette"]
[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_5571" align="alignnone" width="218" caption="800ceoread Keen Thinker"]
[/caption]
[caption id="attachment_5574" align="alignnone" width="218" caption="800ceoread Keen Thinker - Final Edition"]
[/caption]
