Business Stories

If you are beginning a new venture or in the process of scaling you company, this is a wonderful book to learn lessons from other founders and avoid their mistakes. Better understand the macro and micro impacts from the investor community to customer experience.

Marketing messages should make consumers anticipate and connect with the brand's emotions and values. They must make consumers fascinated for some reason. Understanding the Languages of Fascination to create focus is a first step because the adjectives drive the right messaging and tactics. It is a planning process that leads to creative ideas that make consumers feel an emotional connection to the brand’s message.

Building a dependable stream of revenue that grows may be easier than you think. Predictable Revenue reveals in-depth outbound sales strategies that do not require your continuous supervision. You will also learn about a new way to make cold calls, how to build a productive sales team, and how to categorize leads for optimal success.

Measuring a manager’s individual output does not capture the whole picture. Instead, the focus should be on the quality and total output of their team. High Output Management shows how to give beneficial performance reviews, design an effective delegation process, and a value-based decision-making process.

Benjamin Franklin is famous as an accomplished diplomat, visionary inventor, and hard-working businessman. This biography gives you an in-depth look to figure out how he achieved so much. Learn how Benjamin Franklin listened to diverse perspectives and used his ferocious intellect to found a new country.

In both sports and business, effective leaders exude confidence tempered with humility, poise in the face of adversity, and helping others find their strengths to accomplish a team victory. Good leaders motivate like teachers instead of commanding like bosses. Filled with personal stories from decades as a coach, this book will show you how to become a better leader.

Radical truths can be used as a powerful tool to achieve many kinds of goals. Embracing harsh realities and encouraging thoughtful disagreement help ensure that all perspectives are taken into account. This book also guides you through five steps that will help you achieve all of your life goals.

Drawing on years of interviews with successful individuals across many fields, Ferriss gives you the tools of the titans to generate your own triumphs. These wildly successful titans are flawed people who focus on a few of their strengths while transforming their weaknesses into competitive advantages. 

Imagine founding a business with one million dollars in revenue that is built on your passion. Outsourcing and automating can make that business infinitely scalable and profitable. This book covers how to set effectively-sized goals as well as a crash course in market research. Igniting an interest in continuous learning is also very important in achieving a million-dollar one-person business.

If you are struggling to create content that attracts customers, this book may have some answers. Content needs to educate instead of sell. Forthright communication offers much higher value to customers. You will also learn how to acquire more and better-qualified leads with a higher conversion rate.

Buckets of talent do not always result in success. A winning strategy and hard work can lead to more winning than impressive amounts of talent. Entrepreneurs, politicians, and athletes all use the same strategies to achieve wins. Another secret to being a winner is to never stop believing in more success.

Before building momentum, an organization needs traction. Clarifying the organization’s vision, defining core processes, and matching people to positions are the initial steps to gaining organizational traction. Quantitative goals and 90-day targets are other tools that can be used to build success.

Google understands a few things about success. “Work Rules!” explains the eight successful attributes of high-performing managers and why giving employees more authority can lead to earth-shattering results. When employees thrive, the organization benefits from increased resilience and better insights.

Add some management strategies to your toolkit that will build your team up to work together and achieve their highest potential. Start by giving candid feedback -- a harsh truth is more helpful than a pretty lie. Focus on creating a safe environment for your team and on the team’s achievements instead of individual achievements.

Staying focused on long-term goals and bringing people together to solve problems are skills that leaders should have when muddling through the messy middle. “The Messy Middle” covers many tools in a successful leader’s toolkit including advice from Jeff Bezos and how to harness milestones as motivation.

Strong branding is vital to stick out and stand above your competition. Higher sales, greater profits, and increased employee loyalty are all consequences of effective branding. Get your brand stuck in your customers’ brains through constant innovation and by always delivering end-results beyond expectations.

Stop being crippled by fear. Being courageous and learning the value of change are the first steps to making bold, swift decisions. Identifying what scares you and confronting those fears are the first steps to being courageous. You will also learn to commit to your purpose and to initiate change through executing your actions.

Negotiation begins with a real conversation built on a foundation of trust and empathy. Discovering strategies to build trust and empathy is the first step to successful negotiation. Part of negotiation is the balance of listening to the other party’s issues while staying focused on your own goals only.

Business is won and lost based on an organization's ability to successfully nurture and productize loonshots. A loonshot is an out of the box idea that radically changes the way an industry works, or even creates a new industry. Uber was a loonshot for the taxi industry. The smartphone was a loonshot for the mobile industry.

Failure is a healthy step on the road to success that will inspire you to achieve higher goals. Stay disciplined and focus on your own business’s future without fixating on your competition. Read about ways to work with individual employees as well as how to determine when it is the right time to invest in new team members.

Did you know there are triggers that will result in an automatic “yes”? Influence teaches you about the psychology behind decisions with emphasis on those that end with a “yes.” Develop six weapons of influence to become a master of persuasion and to defend your opinions from other master persuaders.

What motivates grit? Combining passion, perseverance, and hard work is more likely to lead to success than talent alone. Moving forward after failing is an important attitude to adopt in order to achieve success. Learn to look beyond your title and to embrace hard work as a more consistent means to success.

Combining creative thinking with scientific observation, recording, and feedback loops can solve some of the most complex problems in the workplace. George Lucas’ role in the digital revolution of arts, entertainment, and academia is discussed, and you will learn about the best way to manage in a creative organization.

Understanding why customers choose your company’s products is the first step in creating products that customers will want to buy regardless of cost. This book will teach you about the “job to be done” approach and how it can help you in everyday life. Clearly defining your questions, business, and competition are three ways to get started.

Built to Sell is filled with advice on the best way to package your company to sell. This book will not only teach you how to receive a more desirable valuation, but also how to position products to sell. If your organization is in the service industry, you will learn how to package services as products.