Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Business Development

Early in the 21st century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, or software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success.

In the years following the publication of Patrick Lencioni's best seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, fans have been clamoring for more information on how to implement the ideas outlined in the book. In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni offers more specific, practical guidance for overcoming the five dysfunctions, using tools, exercises, assessments, and real-world examples.

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service, but didn't take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company - perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven't known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator's method.

Shut Up, Stop Whining, and Get a Life is a Wall Street Journal number-one best seller that isn't afraid to tell you it's time to change. From motivational speaker Larry Winget, also known as "The Pit-bull of Personal Development" and "The World's Only Irritational Speaker", comes a not-so-typical self-help book. Winget's hilarious and in-your-face observations about the sometimes ugly truth of life will kick you in the butt and encourage you to change your life for the better.

It's very likely that best practices - ideas, processes, and strategies that are commonplace in your industry - are actually hurting your business. Although best practices can help businesses operate more competitively and efficiently, they are often outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategy professor at London Business School, offers the tools to identify bad practices, eliminate them from your organization, and then move on to create new sources of innovation and growth by outthinking your competitors.

Becoming an effective leader who lifts your organization to new heights may seem challenging, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. Strong leadership is rooted in basic principles. Although the specific nature of the organizations you may work for throughout your career will vary on a case-by-case basis, the essential steps you must take to lead with skill will remain constant. The Blueprint explains what those steps are. More importantly, it demonstrates how we can take them in our own careers and lives.

Will Africa be the world's next hub of manufacturing? China is answering in the affirmative and investing accordingly. This book dispels the notion that this crucial story is merely about China's exploitation of Africa's resources, illuminating deep questions about our own Western approach to development and the implications for the future of manufacturing. The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, in particular the United States.

Immigration is a fraught and misunderstood topic in America’s social discourse, with much of what we believe based largely on myth. Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan have spent the last decade searching for the facts. Their pioneering research digs deep into the data on immigration, linking the experiences of immigrants from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to those of immigrants today. Using powerful storytelling alongside big data, they provide new evidence about the past and present of the American Dream that will change our thinking and policies.

Yes, the world faces substantial environmental challenges - climate change, pollution, and extinction. But the surprisingly good news is that we have solutions to these problems. In the past 50 years, a remarkable number of environmental problems have been solved while substantial progress is ongoing on others. The Optimistic Environmentalist chronicles these remarkable success stories. Endangered species - from bald eagles to gray whales - pulled back from the precipice of extinction.

In this indispensable new book, Andrew Winston provides 10 crucial strategies for leaders and companies ready to move boldly forward and win in this new reality. With concrete advice and tactics, and new stories from companies like British Telecom, Diageo, Dow, Ford, Nike, Unilever, Walmart, and many others, The Big Pivot will help you, and all of us, create more resilient businesses and a more prosperous world. This book is the blueprint to get you started.

In Ringside Stories, real estate guru Dick Corbett reveals the secrets to his success in business and in life, tracking the rough-and-ready life of a man who won't accept failure as an outcome. Setbacks large and small are taken as lessons for the future, and one small success leads to another, larger one until the dream achieved is grander than any restless youth could have imagined.

You have a great idea. Now what? That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process. The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers’s life’s work. It’s a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth.