800-CEO-READ New Releases

The Secret to GE's Success

by William E. Rothschild

(McGraw-Hill, 288 Pages)

Learn why GE has always had the best inventors, the best strategic planners, and the best results

William Rothschild, who witnessed GE’s revolution firsthand, explains the five keys that made GE a global phenomenon—and gives managers a complete toolkit for duplicating its remarkable success. He explains the GE Code—the hallmark of all GE leadership teams—and provides a far-ranging prescriptive plan for strategizing the GE way.

Citizen Marketers

by Ben McConnell, Jackie Huba

(Dearborn Trade Pub, 224 Pages)

The woman sitting next to you at Starbucks focused intently on her laptop may just be determining the next big thing.

In coffee houses, offices, homes, dorm rooms, and airport lounges around the world, millions of people use laptops and cell phones to become today's new publishers and broadcasters. Armed with only a broadband connection, these regular citizens are exercising enormous influence on culture and what we buy.

Who are they? What motivates them? In their provocative new book Citizen Marketers, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba explore the ramifications of today's burgeoning social media. As everyday people increasingly create content on behalf of companies, brands, or products—to which they have no official connection—they are turning traditional notions of media upside down. Collaborating with others just like themselves, they are forming ever-growing communities of enthusiasts and evangelists using videos, photos, songs, and animations, as well as the "user-generated media" of blogs, online bulletin boards, and podcasts. From the rough to the sophisticated, their creations are influencing companies' customer relationships, product design, and marketing campaigns—whether the companies participate willingly or not.

Whether freeing Fiona Apple, building buzz for Snakes on a Plane, or denouncing Dell Hell, citizen marketers are democratizing traditional notions of communication and marketing, even entire business models. Citizen Marketers examines some of the early winners and losers in this new culture of business, as well as some of its most noted constituents.

Wal-Smart

by William H. Marquard

(McGraw-Hill, 256 Pages)

Stock Up . . . on the insider intelligence that will empower your businesses to profit in the new commerce culture

In providing a new level of convenience, low price, and efficiency, Wal-Mart has substantially changed the rules of our global economy, the customer expectations for every business—and the ways your organization must deliver to keep up.

William Marquard designed Wal-Mart's first-ever strategic planning process and ran it for three and a half years—then spent the next seven years competing against that strategy as a Fortune 200 executive and as an advisor to other firms. Marquard’s insights from both inside and outside Wal-Mart enable leaders of all organizations—public and private, manufacturing and service, local and international, large and small—to respond to the challenges posed by dominant industry players like Wal-Mart.

Wal-Smart is not just a book about Wal-Mart. Wal-Smart starts by exploring the elements of Wal-Mart’s success that few people see: its productivity loop, its powerful process disciplines, and its hidden management “DNA.” It then crafts compelling strategies that any company in any industry can use to survive and thrive in this brave new Wal-Mart world.

The Power of Positive Profit

by Graham Foster

(John Wiley & Sons Inc, 272 Pages)

It's all in the math!

In The Power of Positive Profit, a legendary corporate strategist and bottom-line expert reveals how many companies have gotten into serious trouble by trying to gain market share through price and cost cutting. Using his straightforward and easy-to-follow MoneyMath© profit charts, Foster demonstrates why companies need to focus on margin when pricing their products or services. Then, he offers proven advice on balancing your selling and management efforts, bullet-proofing your bottom line, enabling sales reps to sell higher, and surviving and recovering from price wars.

By any measure, profit is a more important number than market share. Whether you're in a small to medium-sized company or a large multi-national corporation, read The Power of Positive Profit and find out how to put raising your bottom line on the top of your to-do list.

The Wal-Mart Effect

by Charles Fishman

(Penguin, 336 Pages)

Wal-Mart isn’t just the world’s biggest company, it is probably the world’s most written-about. But no book until this one has managed to penetrate its wall of silence or go beyond the usual polemics to analyze its actual effects on its customers, workers, and suppliers. Drawing on unprecedented interviews with former Wal-Mart executives and a wealth of staggering data (e.g., Americans spend $36 million an hour at Wal-Mart stores, and in 2004 its growth alone was bigger than the total revenue of 469 of the Fortune 500), The Wal-Mart Effect is an intimate look at a business that is dramatically reshaping our lives.

The High-purpose Company

by Christine Arena

(Harpercollins, 288 Pages)

In The High-Purpose Company, corporate strategist and researcher Christine Arena shows why corporate responsibility is more than just a hot topic of the moment—why it is an essential means to success in today's corporate world. She draws a clear line in the sand between the extraordinary companies driven by purposeful ideals and those companies that merely pretend to be responsible. Readers will be able to easily distinguish between the two groups and see how and why many of the most successful corporations are generating extraordinary profits from their responsible actions.

Using a groundbreaking methodology, Arena and her research team conducted thousands of hours of analysis on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices of 75 well-known firms. What they discovered surprised even them—it's not always the obvious companies in ecologically friendly areas of business that are truly the most responsible. Ben & Jerry's or Tyco? Ford or GE? Wal-Mart or Gap? The results of the study defy long-held myths, rewrite rules, reframe strategic priorities, and reveal a new paradigm for business.

Unstuck

by Keith Yamashita, Sandra Spataro

(Penguin USA, 208 Pages)

Everyone gets stuck sooner or later. The big question is how do you get unstuck?

People and organizations get stuck because the most ambitious and rewarding work brings with it the most challenges.

Unstuck is a smart, fearless, totally practical guide to turn to for inspiration and immediate solutions. It’s meant to be acted on, not just read. And it’s based on the proven practices the authors have discovered while working with IBM, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Gap Inc., and many other major companies.

Whether you need to step back to move forward, motivate a struggling team, change your goals, or create a clearer vision, Unstuck helps you diagnose your situation, identify the most important challenges, and implement the right tools and techniques to get things moving again. Now with updated case studies, this is the perfect book to get you and your team unstuck.

Accelerants

by Michael A. Boylan

(Portfolio, 240 Pages)

"Many sales processes don't work anymore--period. But companies don't know exactly what's not working, or why, or what needs fixing. What's worse, many companies are in denial that their processes are broken and will not support what they need to do going forward."

Today it's tougher than ever for sales, marketing, and business development organizations to keep improving their revenue and profits. Potential clients want to see salespeople less and less, real decision makers hide behind skilled gatekeepers, and even when you actually reach them, they have impossibly short attention spans. Sales and closing cycles get longer, margins get thinner, and customers keep raising the bar – demanding more value, cheaper prices, and better service.

Michael Boylan's Accelerants offers a powerful solution to these impediments to growth. Giving business leaders the tools to diagnose what is hindering revenue growth, Boylan first identifies twelve constraints that apply consistent downward pressure on companies, making them less efficient, effective, and profitable. He then prescribes the Accelerant Principles—twelve field-proven tools Boylan has perfected over twenty years that can help any organization overcome, minimize, or dissolve the constraints to business growth.

Together, the Accelerant principles offer a cohesive framework that can help any business:

With ideas that are relevant, timely, and applicable, Accelerants provides a program that will foster empowerment, cohesion, and clarity of purpose within any sales, marketing, or business development organization.

Wikinomics

by Don Tapscott

(Penguin USA, 288 Pages)

In just the last few years, traditional collaboration?in a meeting room, a conference call, even a convention center?has been superseded by collaborations on an astronomical scale.

Today, encyclopedias, jetliners, operating systems, mutual funds, and many other items are being created by teams numbering in the thousands or even millions. While some leaders fear the heaving growth of these massive online communities, Wikinomics proves this fear is folly. Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success.

A brilliant guide to one of the most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply-rooted assumptions about business and will prove indispensable to anyone who wants to understand competitiveness in the twenty-first century.

Based on a $9 million research project led by bestselling author Don Tapscott, Wikinomics shows how masses of people can participate in the economy like never before. They are creating TV news stories, sequencing the human genome, remixing their favorite music, designing software, finding a cure for disease, editing school texts, inventing new cosmetics, or even building motorcycles. You'll read about:

• Rob McEwen, the Goldcorp, Inc. CEO who used open source tactics and an online competition to save his company and breathe new life into an old-fashioned industry.
• Flickr, Second Life, YouTube, and other thriving online communities that transcend social networking to pioneer a new form of collaborative production.
• Mature companies like Procter & Gamble that cultivate nimble, trust-based relationships with external collaborators to form vibrant business ecosystems.

An important look into the future, Wikinomics will be your road map for doing business in the twenty-first century.

Growing Great Employees

by Erika Andersen

(Portfolio, 288 Pages)

"If life were fair, employees would be perfect. They would do exactly what we asked them to do, exactly when we asked them to do it - except, of course, for the fantastic ideas they would cook up on their own ... Back to reality. Your employees are, like you and me, flawed and hopeful human beings whose success is at least partly dependent on your skill as a manager, human beings who will thrive with skillful and consistent attention and wither without it."

In business today we're told that management development is a thing of the past. Staying limber, preparing to change hats at a moment's notice, and keeping your finger on the pulse of the "new" - that's what we're told is critical.

At this moment when companies and managers aren't focusing on the long haul, Erika Andersen says just the opposite. If you want to compete with the market leaders, grow your business, and succeed in your field, you need support: an all-star staff that epitomizes your company's mission and has the skills to implement it.

How do you achieve this? Grow great employees.

For twenty-five years Erika Andersen has been helping some of the best-managed companies in the world develop their employees. In Growing Great Employees you'll learn how they stay ahead of the competition by investing in their people. You'll discover that:

Whether you're a manager or a senior executive, Growing Great Employees is your guide to creating a dynamic workplace where the efforts you make with your employees today will blossom into success for years to come.

About the Author:

Erika Andersen is the founder of Proteus International, a consulting firm that works with CEOs and top executives of many major corporations, including Molson Coors Brewing, MTV Networks, Union Square Hospitality Group, ESPN, Comcast, Lifetime Television, and Madison Square Garden.

Open Business Models

by Henry Chesbrough

(Harvard Business School Press, 224 Pages)

In his landmark book Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough demonstrated that because useful knowledge is no longer concentrated in a few large organizations, business leaders must adopt a new, "open" model of innovation. Using this model, companies look outside their boundaries for ideas and intellectual property (IP) they can bring in, as well as license their unutilized home-grown IP to other organizations.

In Open Business Models, Chesbrough takes readers to the next step, explaining how to make money in an open innovation landscape. He provides a diagnostic instrument enabling you to assess your company's current business model, and explains how to overcome common barriers to creating a more open model. He also offers compelling examples of companies that have developed such models�including Procter & Gamble, IBM, and Air Products.

In addition, Chesbrough introduces a new set of players,"innovation intermediaries",who facilitate companies access to external technologies. He explores the impact of stronger IP protection on intermediate markets for innovation, and profiles firms (such as Intellectual Ventures and Qualcomm) that center their business model on innovation and IP.

This vital resource provides a much-needed road map to connect innovation with IP management, so companies can create and capture value from ideas and technologies wherever in the world they are found.