1,000 Dollars and an Idea

by Sam Wyly

(Newmarket Press, 256 Pages)

The rags-to-riches story of an amazing business wizard—from the Louisiana cotton fields to the worlds of computers, retailing, fast food, high finance, and green energy—life lessons from a man ahead of the pack and ahead of his time.

"My work is to create companies and build them," says the billionaire whom Fortune magazine, over thirty years ago, characterized_as "one of the most, if not the most, important entrepreneurs" of the century. This was even before Wyly contributed to nearly every great technological, service industry, and investment business breakthrough in the second half of the twentieth century.

Now, in his fast-paced, fascinating, and candid memoir, Wyly reveals the thought processes, relationships, and financial machinations behind the building of his diverse businesses over the last four decades.

Here's the story of how he worked his way through Louisiana Tech selling class rings and why, after his first job in which he broke sales records for IBM (along with Ross Perot, a fellow IBM salesman) and a brief stint at Honeywell, he decided to risk $1,000 of his savings to found the first "computer utility" company in the business world. This was in 1963. Two years later, he took his University Computing Company public and became an instant millionaire.

Never losing his entrepreneurial spirit, Wyly undertook one challenge after another, such as:
• Waging a successful anti-monopoly battle against AT&T, enabling him to build a "telephone highway" for computers
• Growing the modest Bonanza Steak House chain, which he "inherited" as the result of a bad debt, to a total of 600 outlets before selling it for a huge profit
• Creating a new systems software company, Sterling Software, which he eventually sold for $4 billion
• Dividending Sterling Commerce to public shareholders and selling to AT&T_for $4 billion in 2000
• Expanding the small arts-and-crafts chain Michaels Stores from 10 to 1,000 stores before selling it for $6 billion in 2006
• Founding Green Mountain Energy, which has become the largest and most profitable green business in the country.

Part autobiography and part inspirational self-help business guide, Wyly not only provides his homespun life lessons in the practice of starting and building businesses, but he also delivers refreshing new insights into how many American businesses operated from the 1950s to the present.

About the Author

Sam Wyly, a self-made billionaire of Scottish-Irish descent, grew up in Louisiana, attending local schools before eventually going to Louisiana Tech to study journalism and accounting. He was awarded a scholarship to the University of Michigan Business School, where he earned his MBA. Always an avid reader, student of history, and environmentalist, Sam and his brother, Charles, his partner in many of his businesses, together funded The Charles Wyly Sr. Tower of Learning at Louisiana Tech, built in memory of their father. Sam is an active proponent of clean air through clean energy. Recently, he and his wife, Cheryl, purchased the independent Explore Booksellers and Bistro in Aspen, where he maintains a home, as well as in Dallas and New York City.

Unleashing Innovation

by Nancy Tennant Snyder, Deborah L. Duarte

(Jossey-Bass Inc Pub, 0 Pages)

In 1999, Whirlpool was undergoing a company-wide reorganization to meet the demands of the post-globalization marketplace. To succeed in executing their transformative Brand-Focused Value-Creation strategy, Whirlpool needed to be both operationally excellent and innovative.

In publications such as BusinessWeek and Fast Company, the media have celebrated Whirlpool's transformation into a leading-edge innovator and Nancy Tennant Snyder's role as chief innovation officer. Ten years after this remarkable transformation, Unleashing Innovation tells the inside story of one of the most successful innovation turnarounds in American history. Nancy Tennant Snyder and coauthor Deborah L. Duarte reveal how Whirlpool undertook one of the largest change efforts in corporate history and show how innovation was embedded throughout the company, which ultimately led to bottom-line results.

Unleashing Innovation is filled with illustrative examples from Whirlpool and Whirlpool's cutting-edge brands including Jenn-Air, Bauknecht, KitchenAid, and Brastemp. Snyder and Duarte reveal the inner workings of Whirlpool's innovation machine, a framework that creates consistent and profitable innovation by involving all of Whirlpool's employees, and they debunk the myth that innovation comes only from the geniuses at the top. Rather than a cookie-cutter "how to" manual, Unleashing Innovation shows what happens when an organization creates a machine that involves everyone and fosters an environment that puts the emphasis on "learning and creating, dreaming, the mythology of heroes, and the spirit of winning." Unleashing Innovation shows how the engine of its innovation can be adapted to run in any business of any size and captures the steps the company took along the way, the key learnings, the tools used, the challenging setbacks, and the critical successes.

How the Wise Decide

by Aaron Sandoski, Bryn Zeckhauser

(Crown , 224 Pages)

ABOUT THIS BOOK
Discover the formula used by twenty-one of the world’s most extraordinary leaders to make consistent and smart decisions.

How do the wise decide and lead businesses and organizations to great success is the question Bryn Zeckhauser and Aaron Sandoski posed to themselves after landing their first jobs as managers. Despite the best training the world could offer—Harvard MBAs and stints at McKinsey & Company, the elite powerhouse consulting firm—they felt unprepared when faced with the pressure to make critical decisions. So they set out on a three-year quest to discover how people with remarkable success and experience in both corporate and public life—“the wise”—went about making crucial, often make-or-break decisions.

* How did William George, when CEO of Medtronic, get the real story about why a critical tool used by cardiologists was failing and use that information to fix a systemic problem within the company?

* When inventor Dean Kamen has to make a decision about investing in a new technology, why does he find it useful to “fill a room with barbarians” to get the best thinking from his team?

* How did Shelly Lazarus assess the risks of making a nontraditional career move, a decision that eventually led her to being appointed CEO?

* How did Stephen Schwarzman and Peter Peterson, the founders of The Blackstone Group, turn $400,000 of their own money into one of the world’s preeminent alternative asset managers with $100 billion under management?

These and the other accounts of the direct conversations Zeckhauser and Sandoski had with twenty-one major leaders show that between wise decisions and poor ones lie vast fortunes and extraordinary contrasts in success. How the Wise Decide distills their wisdom, and it reveals how you can use this wisdom to be on the winning side of the ledger.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BRYN ZECKHAUSER is a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and a principal at Equity Resource Investments, a real-estate investment firm with funds in the United States and Asia. She developed her interest in strategic decision making working with portfolio companies at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and with her Fortune 500 clients at McKinsey and Company.

AARON SANDOSKI is managing director of Norwich Ventures, a medical device venture capital firm. He began his professional career with the consulting firm McKinsey & Company and has also been a teaching fellow at Harvard University, where he won the Allyn Young Teaching Prize.

Executive Warfare

by Dalessandro

(McGraw-Hill, 288 Pages)

BrandDigital

by Allen P. Adamson

(Palgrave Macmillan, 256 Pages)

In his best-selling book, BrandSimple: How the Best Brands Keep it Simple and Succeed, Allen Adamson explained, in a straightforward manner, how powerful brands are built. Adopting the same engaging style in BrandDigital: Simple Ways Top Brands Succeed in the Digital World, he explains that in the fast accelerating digital marketplace the basic principles of building a powerful brand have not changed (as some may think) but, rather, have been magnified. He clearly demonstrates that in an environment where everything is visible, audible, and sharable, brand professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to learn more about their customers than ever before, making it possible to deliver experiences that reinforce customer relationships – and brand equity – more successfully than ever before.

Based on over 100 interviews with top branding executives on both the corporate side and the agency side of the table, Adamson makes his point by using case studies from companies including Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Nikon, Ameriprise, Burger King, PepsiCo, and General Mills. Citing lessons learned from these professionals, he provides example after example of why, in the digital arena, it’s never been more important to gain significant insights about consumers, to establish a simple and compelling brand promise based on these insights, and to make good on the brand promise through interactions that are as memorable as they are credible. He puts into proper context all the talk about Google, YouTube, Second Life, social networks, and blogs, and makes clear their role in the branding process. Chock full of stories from the frontlines of branding, Adamson puts into plain words how the best companies are taking advantage of digital technology and the behavior it generates to build more powerful bonds with their customers, and stronger, more positive associations with their brands.

For more information, please visit www.branddigital.com.

Navigating the Healthcare Maze

by Jeff Knott

(DC Press, 364 Pages)

13 Things That Don't Make Sense

by Michael Brooks

(Doubleday, 224 Pages)

Equipped to Lead

by Dan J. Sanders, Galen Walters

(McGraw-Hill, 224 Pages)

Product Description

Unless you manage a hook-and-ladder company, your workday shouldn't be spent putting out fires. Yet leaders often spend most of their time running from crisis to crisis.

In his groundbreaking New York Times bestseller Built to Serve, United Supermarkets CEO Dan Sanders showed how putting profi ts before people encourages organizational chaos, saps motivation, stifles innovation, and undercuts competitiveness. He also unveiled a revolutionary peoplecentered business model championed by United and challenged other business leaders to put the human factor first.

In this follow-up to that inspirational bestseller, Dan and coauthor Galen Walters provide the tools needed to put the people-first model to work in your company. You’ll master the 4Ps critical to long-term success: People, Process, Partners, and Performance. And you will create an organization that puts front-line people before bottom-line profits, allowing you and your organization to profit more than you ever thought possible.

Loneliness

by John T. Cacioppo

(W W Norton & Co Inc, 288 Pages)

John T. Cacioppo's groundbreaking research topples one of the pillars of modern medicine and psychology: the focus on the individual as the unit of inquiry. By employing brain scans, monitoring blood pressure, and analyzing immune function, he demonstrates the overpowering influence of social context—a factor so strong that it can alter DNA replication. He defines an unrecognized syndrome—chronic loneliness—brings it out of the shadow of its cousin depression, and shows how this subjective sense of social isolation uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behavior, and physiology, becoming a trap that not only reinforces isolation but can also lead to early death. He gives the lie to the Hobbesian view of human nature as a "war of all against all," and he shows how social cooperation is, in fact, humanity's defining characteristic. Most important, he shows how we can break the trap of isolation for our benefit both as individuals and as a society. 12 illustrations.

About the Author
John T. Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and president of the Association for Psychological Science. He lives in Chicago, Illinois. William Patrick, former editor for science and medicine at Harvard University Press, is editor in chief of the Journal of Life Sciences. He lives near Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Lessons from the Mouse

by Dennis Snow

(DC Press, 156 Pages)

Lessons From the Mouse is constructed as a series of lessons -- because therein lies the secret to discovering Disney s magic -- understanding and applying these ideas every day in a disciplined way. Each chapter explores how a particular lesson was taught and reinforced at Disney World and why it s important and how to apply it to other industries by using examples from the author's consulting work and from conversations with leaders and employees of other organizations. The end of each chapter provides some questions and ideas for utilizing the lesson. The book has multiple uses: raising the bar for personal performance, using a chapter for a series of staff meetings, or training modules for an entire organization. The ideas in the book have been applied to hospitals, law firms, banks, trucking companies, and gas station chains. Topics include identification of appropriate and inappropriate corporate behaviors, consistency, accepting responsibility, understanding how customers can make or break an organization, building loyalty among employee and customers, bring passion to your work, making your boss look good, and respect. Several books have already been written about the Disney way, but there is a gap in the Disney literature. Most of the books out there were written by people who had never actually worked at Disney or were written from the perspective of senior management. It was thought that there was a need for a Disney book written by someone who had actually worked on the rides, controlled the crowds at parades, stood in the rain for hours telling guests Space Mountain was closed, and even had to reprimand Goofy for poor attendance. Over the past eight years Dennis Snow has helped many organizations apply the principles found inside this book the principles he was privileged to learn at Disney. The results for these companies have been positive: improved customer satisfaction; reduced employee turnover; and increased profitability. There are a lot of ways you can apply the lessons in this book. You might decide to use them to raise the bar of your own performance. You might decide to make each chapter a topic for a series of staff meetings to get the whole team involved. If you re really ambitious, you can use each chapter as a training module for the entire organization. Or you might simply open the book periodically to any chapter for a quick dose of inspiration. However you decide to use Lessons From the Mouse, the important thing is to put the lessons to work. Anybody and any organization can employ these ideas. They have been applied by major research hospitals and by gas stations. Bank presidents as well as truck mechanics have put these principles to good use. It all comes down to commitment, consistency, and hard work.

Mind Capture

by Tony Rubleski

(Morgan James Publishing, 196 Pages)

Product Description

FINALLY! A New Business Book That's Not Boring And Long Overdue. In mind capture you'll discover: *Ways to quickly investigate, cross pollinate and then detonate ideas into your marketing and sales efforts for maximum profits *Proven ways to crank up sales immediately and make your marketing sizzle *Simple strategies to save you time and money from becoming a marketing victim *Actual exhibits of successful marketing and publicity techniques in action *Why the shift from sales pitch to great content is critical to your success *How to quickly stand out in the age of media chaos and advertising noise to capture attention, repeat business and referrals Each generation a bold, unique, disruptor emerges to shake up the scene and status quo with a unique perspective on business. If you're looking to positively impact your sales, market, and industry you've found the perfect book.

About the Author

Tony Rubleski is currently the president of Mind Capture Group, based in Spring Lake, Michigan. He focuses on referral, retention and repeat marketing strategies for a wide range of industries including real estate, insurance, telecom, casinos, retail, direct sales, banking to a wide range of entrepreneurs and sales teams. A highly sought after speaker and agent of change, his live seminars and keynote talks continue to receive rave reviews from meeting planners coast to coast.

Nice Guys Can Get the Corner Office

by Russ Edelman, Charles G. Manz, Tim Hiltabiddle

(Portfolio, 176 Pages)

From Publishers Weekly

In this winning success guide, the authors expose Nice Guy Syndrome, where the afflicted—overly selfless men and women—give away their power in the workplace and often face frustration and career derailment. While 61% of Americans believe that niceness impedes business success, the authors argue that the condition is correctable, and it is possible to succeed without resorting to aggression or excessive competitiveness. Their Bill of Rights—eight rights and corresponding strategies emphasizing self-awareness and setting boundaries—will aid readers in fending off the typical mistakes nice guys make: valuing agreeableness over assertiveness, overcommitting and prioritizing other people's needs. Equally valuable are the authors' demonstration of the roots of self-sabotaging behavior and the revelation that certain nice guy behaviors may be less well-intentioned than they seem. Drawing on extensive interviews with 350 business professionals and an assortment of celebrity CEOs, this well-organized and psychologically astute book excels in its presentation of a simple and encouraging message: that nice doesn't have to mean weak and that nice guys can make it to the top. (Aug.) "" Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved."

Ahead of the Curve

by Philip Delves Broughton

(Penguin Pr, 256 Pages)

Execution Premium

by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

(Harvard Business School Pr, 0 Pages)

Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3,000

by Pete Blackshaw

(Doubleday, 208 Pages)

Book Description
In today’s Internet-driven world, customers have more power than ever. Through what interactive marketing expert Pete Blackshaw calls "consumer-generated media"—blogs, social networking pages, message boards, product review sites—even a single disgruntled customer can broadcast his complaints to an audience of millions. Blackshaw shows managers, marketers, and business leaders how to establish and maintain credibility for their brand by being authentic, listening and responding to customers, and forming relationships built on openness, transparency, and trust.

Filled with stories based on his experience working with Fortune 500 brands such as Toyota, Dell, Nike, Sony, General Motors, Unilever, Nestlé, Southwest Airlines, and Bank of America, Blackshaw offers a clear strategy to sustain a competitive advantage by creating enduring, loyal relationships with today’s consumer.