800-CEO-READ New Releases

Firing Back

by Jeffrey Sonnefeld, Anderw Ward

(Harvard Business School Press, 320 Pages)

Is it possible to rescue your career and restore your reputation after a major professional setback? In an age when we’re bombarded with press accounts of disgraced CEOs, politicians, and celebrities, this question is more important than ever. In Firing Back, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Andrew Ward lay out a novel five-step recovery process: "Fight, not flight" (face the difficult situation), "Recruit others into battle" (enlist the right assistance), "Rebuild heroic stature" (spread the true nature of the adversity), "Prove your mettle" (regain trust and credibility), and "Rediscover the heroic mission" (clear the past and chart the future).

Anchored in original research and decades of scholarly studies across fields, this book is packed with engrossing stories and first-hand accounts from humbled CEOs and executives from firms as esteemed as GE, The Home Depot, Morgan Stanley, Apple, Staples, and Hewlett-Packard, Firing Back offers a clear plan for any businessperson who needs to recover from career setbacks and reclaim lost prestige and reputation. The authors also identify common barriers to recovery that even seasoned executives can fall prey to, and explain how to surmount them.

The Definitive Drucker

by Elizabeth Haas Edersheim

(McGraw-Hill, 256 Pages)

With commentary from industry icons including Jack Welch, A. G. Lafley, John Bachmann, and Bill Donaldson

For Elizabeth Edersheim, a former senior consultant and partner for McKinsey & Co., a request directly from Peter Drucker to write about his life's work and his latest insights was a dream come true. For 16 months, Edersheim had extraordinary, unprecedented access to Drucker, talking with the father of modern management about business practices, economic changes, and contemporary trends-many of which he had predicted decades ago.

During this period, she also interviewed top executives at P&G, Medtronics, General Electric, and Toyota about Drucker's influence. These individuals in turn gave their expert points of view on his management wisdom. With thorough analysis and intriguing insight, The Definitive Drucker delivers the business biography of Drucker's most influential concepts, demonstrating how they are shaping every major organization and business trend of our time.

• Includes Drucker's perspective on modern business in his own words as told to the author in a series of interviews conducted in the months prior to his death
• Edersheim blends her own analysis with the experiences and thinking of current business leaders underscoring Drucker's vast influence, including A. G. Lafley, Jack Welch, and Michael Hammer
• Delivers the most updated and comprehensive view of Drucker's contribution to the discipline of management over the past 75 years, updated for the modern business approach with new applications of his timeless principles

Be the Elephant

by Steve Kaplan

(Workman Pub Co, 224 Pages)

Get big! A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Business Week bestseller, Steve Kaplan’s 2005 book Bag the Elephant helped smart businesspeople win and keep those all-important elephants—the big, make-or-break customers. Now Be the Elephant shows businesspeople how to grow their businesses and become bigger. Steve Kaplan has owned 35 businesses, sold 30 of them, and has consulted with more than 100 companies, helping them to grow. Be the Elephant combines dynamic advice, deep real-life experience, and a friendly, no-nonsense writing style to take the mystery and fear out of achieving significant business growth. Kaplan gets readers to understand, without blinkers or delusion, the exact nature of their business. He then shows how to define objectives, identify risks, and get the operation on solid footing in preparation for growth. There are tips on creating the right strategy; how to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of business growth—grow too slow and wither, or grow too fast and lose control; how to create a timeline; develop the all-important USP—unique selling proposition; and avoid the Five Killer Mistakes that can ruin your company. The book is illustrated throughout, including, of course, the many faces of Nellie the elephant.

The Halo Effect

by Phil Rosenzweig

(Free Press, 0 Pages)

Much of our business thinking is shaped by delusions -- errors of logic and flawed judgments that distort our understanding of the real reasons for a company's performance. In a brilliant and unconventional book, Phil Rosenzweig unmasks the delusions that are commonly found in the corporate world. These delusions affect the business press and academic research, as well as many bestselling books that promise to reveal the secrets of success or the path to greatness. Such books claim to be based on rigorous thinking, but operate mainly at the level of storytelling. They provide comfort and inspiration, but deceive managers about the true nature of business success.

The most pervasive delusion is the Halo Effect. When a company's sales and profits are up, people often conclude that it has a brilliant strategy, a visionary leader, capable employees, and a superb corporate culture. When performance falters, they conclude that the strategy was wrong, the leader became arrogant, the people were complacent, and the culture was stagnant. In fact, little may have changed -- company performance creates a Halo that shapes the way we perceive strategy, leadership, people, culture, and more.

Drawing on examples from leading companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, Nokia, and ABB, Rosenzweig shows how the Halo Effect is widespread, undermining the usefulness of business bestsellers from In Search of Excellence to Built to Last and Good to Great.

Rosenzweig identifies nine popular business delusions. Among them:

• The Delusion of Absolute Performance: Company performance is relative to competition, not absolute, which is why following a formula can never guarantee results. Success comes from doing things better than rivals, which means that managers have to take risks.
• The Delusion of Rigorous Research: Many bestselling authors praise themselves for the vast amount of data they have gathered, but forget that if the data aren't valid, it doesn't matter how much was gathered or how sophisticated the research methods appear to be. They trick the reader by substituting sizzle for substance.
• The Delusion of Single Explanations: Many studies show that a particular factor, such as corporate culture or social responsibility or customer focus, leads to improved performance. But since many of these factors are highly correlated, the effect of each one is usually less than suggested.

In what promises to be a landmark book, The Halo Effect replaces mistaken thinking with a sharper understanding of what drives business success and failure. The Halo Effect is a guide for the thinking manager, a way to detect errors in business research and to reach a clearer understanding of what drives business success and failure.

Skeptical, brilliant, iconoclastic, and mercifully free of business jargon, Rosenzweig's book is nevertheless dead serious, making his arguments about important issues in an unsparing and direct way that will appeal to a broad business audience. For managers who want to separate fact from fiction in the world of business, The Halo Effect is essential reading -- witty, often funny, and sharply argued, it's an antidote to so much of the conventional thinking that clutters business bookshelves.

The Winner's Attitude

by Jeff Gee, Val Gee

(McGraw-Hill, 214 Pages)

Have you ever wondered how much more you could achieve if you could maximize your brain power? In The Winner's Attitude, motivational gurus Jeff and Val Gee introduce you to Switch, a personal performance technology that's nothing short of an upgrade for the human mind.

Never again will you be overwhelmed by angry customers, bad managers, and stresses that undermine your confidence. Instead of reacting with anger or fear, you'll greet challenges with the calm focus of a born winner. Using the powerful Switch methods and tools in this book, you'll:

• Channel stress and make it work for you
• Spontaneously tailor a winning approach to every person or situation
• Connect with managers, co-workers, and customers like never before
• Take the leap from adequate to outstanding in everything you do

Turning Silver into Gold

by Mary S. Furlong

(Wharton School Pub, 0 Pages)

Seasoned digital-marketing strategist Furlong explores the breadth and depth of the baby-boomer market.

Boomers make up 25% of the population, own 77% of the country's financial assets and are looking at greater discretionary income as they go about retiring the word "retire." They are now marching well into middle age and their marketplace desires are morphing, explains Furlong in this broad and thoughtful book. The author sees them as representing hundreds of market segments: Boomers have concerns and interests including health, investing, entertainment and travel, sexuality, entrepreneurship and technology, religion and spirituality and a vast array of philanthropic and social commitments. The title's silver may mean hair color, but the gold represents wisdom as well as wealth, "and how they will transform their financial worth into good works." Still, Furlong has profit-oriented business advice to tender, giving dozens of examples of how the boomers' interests can be met, particularly by Internet-savvy businesspeople, from software that helps sharpen memory to dealing with loneliness to safe sex to civic engagement.

Firms of Endearment

by David Wolfe, Jagdish Sheth, Rajendra Sisodia

(Pearson Education, 0 Pages)

It's a fact: People are increasingly searching for higher meaning in their lives, not just more possessions. This trend is transforming the marketplace, the workplace, and the very soul of capitalism. Increasingly, today's most successful companies are those who've brought love, joy, authenticity, empathy, and soulfulness into their businesses: companies that deliver emotional, experiential, and social value, not just profits. Firms of Endearment illuminates this: the most fundamental transformation in capitalism since Adam Smith. It's not a book about corporate social responsibility: it's about building companies that can sustain success in a radically new era. It's about great companies like IDEO and IKEA, Commerce Bank and Costco, Wegmans and Whole Foods: how they've earned powerful loyalty and affection from all their stakeholders, while achieving stock performance that is truly breathtaking. It's about gaining "share of heart," not just share of wallet. It's about aligning the interests of all your stakeholders, not just juggling them. It's about understanding how the "new rules of capitalism" mirror the self-actualization focus of our aging society. It's about building companies that leave the world a better place. Most of all, it's about why you must do all this, or risk being left in the dust... and how to get there from wherever you are now.

Flower Confidential

by Amy Stewart

(Workman Pub Co, 306 Pages)

We buy more flowers a year than we do Big Macs, spending $6.2 billion annually. We use them to mark our most important events, to express sentiments that might otherwise go unsaid. And we demand perfection. So it’s no surprise that there is a $40 billion global industry devoted to making flowers flawless.

Amy Stewart takes us inside the flower trade—from the hybridizers, who create new varieties in the laboratory, to the growers, who produce flowers by the millions (often in a factory-like setting), to the Dutch auctioneers, who set the bar (and the price), and ultimately to the neighborhood florists orchestrating the mind-boggling demands of Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. There’s the breeder intent on developing the first blue rose; an eccentric horticultural legend who created the world’s most popular lily; a grower of gerberas of every color imaginable; and the equivalent of a Tiffany diamond: the “ Forever Young” rose.

Stewart explores the relevance of flowers in our lives and in our history, and in the process she reveals all that has been gained—and lost—by tinkering with nature.

Strengths Finder 2.0

by Tom Rath

(Pub Group West, 192 Pages)

Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?

Chances are, you don't? All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthFinder helped millions to discover their Top 5 talents.

In StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more. While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your stengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself--and the world around you--forever.

Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur

by Stuart Skorman

(Jossey-Bass, 224 Pages)

Looking for the audio CD? Click here.

Book Description
Entrepreneur Stuart Skorman—the founder of Elephant Pharmacy, Hungryminds.com, Reel.com, and Empire Video—grew up in a retailing family in Ohio. He worked every kind of job, from cab driver to professional poker player to CEO. In this entertaining, personal account of his coming-of- age in the business world, Skorman gives an insider’s view of what it takes to start a business from the ground up.

Stuart Skorman offers his hard-won lessons in business for any entrepreneur or small businessperson who wants to create a company that has a heart and soul. He reveals what he learned about marketing while working a stint as a rock band manager and bares his soul about his failure during the dot-com bubble. He describes in vivid terms the roller coaster ride of the entrepreneur in good times and bad and explains how to survive in today’s uncertain business environment.

From Edison to Ipod

by Lawrence E. Apolzon, Frederick Mostert

(Dk Pub, 288 Pages)

Clear, concise, and accessible, this practical guide will give readers an unprecedented introduction to the fascinating world of Intellectual Property, one of the hottest and most misunderstood topics among business owners, inventors, and anyone with an idea. Frederick Mostert, one of the world's foremost experts, will help readers understand how, why, and when to protect their ideas and inventions.

The Strategy Paradox

by Michael E. Raynor

(Currency, 320 Pages)

A compelling vision. Bold leadership. Decisive action. Unfortunately, these prerequisites of success are almost always the ingredients of failure, too. In fact, most managers seeking to maximize their chances for glory are often unwittingly setting themselves up for ruin. The sad truth is that most companies have left their futures almost entirely to chance, and don’t even realize it. The reason? Managers feel they must make choices with far-reaching consequences today, but must base those choices on assumptions about a future they cannot predict. It is this collision between commitment and uncertainty that creates Thge Strategy Paradox.

This paradox sets up a ubiquitous but little-understood tradeoff. Because managers feel they must base their strategies on assumptions about an unknown future, the more ambitious of them hope their guesses will be right – or that they can somehow adapt to the turbulence that will arise. In fact, only a small number of lucky daredevils prosper, while many more unfortunate, but no less capable managers find themselves at the helms of sinking ships. Realizing this, even if only intuitively, most managers shy away from the bold commitments that success seems to demand, choosing instead timid, unremarkable strategies, sacrificing any chance at greatness for a better chance at mere survival.

Michael E. Raynor, coauthor of the bestselling The Innovator's Solution, explains how leaders can break this tradeoff and achieve results historically reserved for the fortunate few even as they reduce the risks they must accept in the pursuit of success. In the cutthroat world of competitive strategy, this is as close as you can come to getting something for nothing.

Drawing on leading-edge scholarship and extensive original research, Raynor’s revolutionary principle of Requisite Uncertainty yields a clutch of critical, counter-intuitive findings. Among them:

With detailed case studies of success and failure at Sony, Microsoft, Vivendi Universal, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T and other major companies in industries from financial services to energy, Raynor presents a concrete framework for strategic action that allows companies to seize today’s opportunities while simultaneously preparing for tomorrow’s promise.

The Unwritten Laws of Business

by J.W King, Alan Sklar, James G. Skakoon

(Bantam Dell Pub Group, 112 Pages)

Every once in awhile, there is a book with a message so timeless, so universal, that it transcends generations. The Unwritten Laws of Business is such a book. Originally published over 60 years ago as The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, it has sold over 100,000 copies, despite the fact that it has never been available before to general readers. Fully revised for business readers today, here are but a few of the gems you’ll find in this little-known business classic:

If you take care of your present job well, the future will take care of itself.
The individual who says nothing is usually credited with having nothing to say.
Whenever you are performing someone else’s function, you are probably neglecting your own.
Martyrdom only rarely makes heroes, and in the business world, such heroes and martyrs often find themselves unemployed.

Refreshingly free of the latest business fads and jargon, this is a book that is wise and insightful, capturing and distilling the timeless truths and principles that underlie management and business the world over.

The No Asshole Rule

by Robert I. Sutton

(Warner Books Inc, 224 Pages)

Today's deluge of business books exhaustively addresses problems with leadership, corporate strategy, sales, budgeting, incentives, innovation, execution, and on and on. But scant attention is devoted to a problem that plagues every workplace: Assholes. In a landmark Harvard Business Review essay, Stanford Professor Robert Sutton showed how assholes weren't just an office nuisance, but a serious and costly threat to corporate success and employee health. In his new book, Sutton reveals the huge TCA (Total Cost of Assholes) in today's corporations. He shows how to spot an asshole (hint: they are addicted to rude interruptions and subtle putdowns, and enjoy using "sarcastic jokes" and "teasing" as "insult delivery systems"), and provides a "self-test" to determine whether you deserve to be branded as a "certified asshole." And he offers tips that you can use to keep your "inner jerk" from rearing its ugly head. Sutton then uses in-depth research and analysis to show how managers can eliminate mean-spirited and unproductive behavior (while positively channeling some of the virtues of assholes) to generate an asshole free--and newly productive--workplace. Enlightening case studies include an analysis of how Google's "don't be evil" maxim helped launch the company to unprecedented early growth, how JetBlue and Southwest Airlines "fire" passengers who demean their employees, and how a "belligerent" e-mail from Cerner CEO Neal Patterson made his company's stock plunge 22% in three days (and how his graceful apology helped the stock bounce back).

There's a Business in Every Woman

by Ann Holmes

(Ballantine Books, 304 Pages)

Thank You for Arguing

by Jay Heinrichs

(Random House Inc, 288 Pages)

Thank You for Arguing is your master class in the art of persuasion, taught by professors ranging from Bart Simpson to Winston Churchill. The time-tested secrets the book discloses include Cicero’s three-step strategy for moving an audience to actionÑas well as Honest Abe’s Shameless Trick of lowering an audience’s expectations by pretending to be unpolished. But it’s also replete with contemporary techniques such as politicians’ use of “code” language to appeal to specific groups and an eye-opening assortment of popular-culture dodges, including:

The Eddie Haskell Ploy
Eminem’s Rules of Decorum
The Belushi Paradigm
Stalin’s Timing Secret
The Yoda Technique

Whether you’re an inveterate lover of language books or just want to win a lot more anger-free arguments on the page, at the podium, or over a beer, Thank You for Arguing is for you. Written by one of today’s most popular online language mavens, it’s warm, witty, erudite, and truly enlightening. It not only teaches you how to recognize a paralipsis and a chiasmus when you hear them, but also how to wield such handy and persuasive weapons the next time you really, really want to get your own way.