Jim Collins

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Good to Great

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Dambisa Moyo

And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

A New York Times bestselling author and veteran board member offers an insider's view of corporate boards, their struggles, and why they must adapt to survive.



Corporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, and Wells Fargo have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. In How Boards Work, prizewinning economist and veteran board director Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times.



Moyo argues that corporations need boards that are more transparent, more knowledgeable, more diverse, and more deeply involved in setting the strategic course of the companies they lead. How Boards Work offers a road map for how boards can steer companies through tomorrow's challenges and ensure they thrive to benefit their employees, shareholders, and society at large.

How Boards Work

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Jerry I. Porras

Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor even is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"

What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell-Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell-Douglas lacked?

By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished outstanding companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.

Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Built to Last

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Brené Brown

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience

In her latest book, five-time #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr. Brené Brown writes, “If we want to find the way back to ourselves and one another, we need language and the grounded confidence to both tell our stories and to be stewards of the stories that we hear. This is the framework for meaningful connection.” In Atlas of the Heart, Brown takes us on a journey through eighty-seven of the emotions and experiences that define what it means to be human. As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances—a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection. Over the past two decades, Brown’s extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as on Brown’s singular skills as a storyteller, to show us how accurately naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice. Brown shares, “I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves.”

Atlas of the Heart

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Robbie Kellman Baxter

Develop and cultivate the kind of robust, long-term customer relationships that power companies like Nike, Spotify, LinkedIn, and Target

More and more companies are concluding that the potential rewards of subscription-based products and services are worth the risk of radically changing their business models. They're correct. The Membership Economy is here and it's here to stay--and if you want to compete for the long run, you need to join it. 

Strategy consultant Robbie Kellman Baxter has been helping companies excel in this business environment for more than a decade. Now, in The Forever Transaction, she reveals all her secrets. Whatever industry you're in, Baxter provides the inspiration, tools, and insight you need to build and execute a business model that will leave your competition in the dust.

You'll find out how industry leaders like Under Armour, Microsoft, and Netflix have created an ever-expanding customer base of loyal subscribers―and are keeping them coming back. You'll learn how to lead your organization through every step of the process―from initial start-up to new product testing, scaling for long-term growth and sustainability to revamping your culture so everyone works together to optimize customer lifetime value. You'll also master all the essentials of succeeding in the Membership Economy, like subscription pricing, Software-as-a-Service, digital community engagement, and freemium incentives as a way to turn casual browsers into cash-paying super-users.

With The Forever Transaction, you have everything you need to build durable, long-term relationships with every customer, and leverage them for ultimate business success―today, tomorrow, and forever.


 

The Forever Transaction: How to Build a Subscription Model So Compelling, Your Customers Will Never Want to Leave

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Matthew Ball

And How It Will Revolutionize Everything

The term "Metaverse" is suddenly everywhere, from the front pages of national newspapers and the latest fashion trends to the plans of the most powerful companies in history. It is already shaping the policy platforms of the US government, the European Union, and the Chinese Communist Party.

But what, exactly, is the Metaverse? As pioneering theorist and venture capitalist Matthew Ball explains, it is a persistent and interconnected network of 3D virtual worlds that will eventually serve as the gateway to most online experiences, and also underpin much of the physical world. For decades, these ideas have been limited to science fiction and video games, but they are now poised to revolutionize every industry and function, from finance and healthcare to education, consumer products, city planning, dating, and well beyond.

Taking us on an expansive tour of the "next internet," Ball demonstrates that many proto-Metaverses are already here, such as Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. Yet these offer only a glimpse of what is to come. Ball presents a comprehensive definition of the Metaverse before explaining the technologies that will power it--and the breakthroughs that will be necessary to fully realize it. He addresses the governance challenges the Metaverse entails; investigates the role of Web3, blockchains, and NFTs; and predicts Metaverse winners and losers. Most importantly, he examines many of the Metaverse's almost unlimited applications.

The internet will no longer be at arm's length; instead, it will surround us, with much of our lives, labor, and leisure taking place inside the Metaverse. Bringing clarity and authority to a frequently misunderstood concept, Ball foresees trillions of dollars in new value--and the radical reshaping of society.

The Metaverse

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Chip Heath

Dan Heath

How to Change Things When Change Is Hard

Switch

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Adam Jentleson

The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy

Kill Switch

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Dawn Maslar

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

The Neuroscience of Meeting, Dating, Losing Your Mind, and Finding True Love

The first book to offer cutting-edge research that explains how the brain works when two people first meet, start to date, fall in love, and then move into long-term, real love.

Men Chase, Women Choose

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Eric Schmidt

Jonathan Rosenberg

Alan Eagle

Larry Page

Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption. The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history. 'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'

How Google Works

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Keith Ferrazzi

Noel Weyrich

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

How the New Power of Co-Elevation Can Break down Silos, Transform Teams, and Reinvent Collaboration

"The author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Never Eat Alone redefines collaboration for the twenty-first century with a radical new workplace operating system in which leadership no longer demands an official title. Many are quick to respond to the mounting pressures facing today's organizations by blaming the pace of technological change. But bestselling author, CEO, and coach to Fortune 100 companies Keith Ferrazzi disagrees. This era of explosive change, he says, has merely exposed the flaws in how we have always worked. At a time when constant innovation, agility, and speed of decision-making can mean the difference between success and failure, he says, we can no longer afford to waste time navigating the complex chains of command or bureaucratic bottlenecks present in most companies. In times like these, the ability to lead without authority is an essential workplace competency. Enter a bold new methodology Ferrazzi calls co-elevation. With the guiding ethos of "going higher together," co-elevation allows us to turn colleagues and partners into teammates. And you don't have to have formal authority, or direct reports, to do it. In fact, the other person doesn't even need to be aware of your efforts. You simply have to marshal a commitment to a shared mission and care about the success and development of others as much as you care about your own. By helping others to be better at what they do, we create a level of trust, candor, mutual accountability, and purpose that exceeds what could have been accomplished under the status quo. In Leading Without Authority, Ferrazzi draws on over a decade of research and over thirty years helping CEOs and senior leaders drive innovation and build high-performing teams to reveal how we can all transform our business and our relationships with the people around us. The result is a new roadmap for thriving amid the disruptive pressures afflicting every industry"--

Leading Without Authority

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Bill George

David Gergen

Revised edition of the author's Finding your true north, 2008.

Discover Your True North

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Adam. Grant

Why Helping Others Drives Our Success

A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the bestselling author of Think Again and Originals For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.

Give and Take

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John T. Rourke

Mark A. Boyer

This concise text provides students and instructors with a comprehensive overview of world politics, inviting them in a straightforward and accessible way to explore international relations and its new challenges. A hallmark of the text is the authors' position that politics affect the lives of all of us, and that the individual can have an impact, whether small or large, by being politically aware and by taking action.

International Politics on the World Stage

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W. Pauli

Arnold Sommerfeld

Nobel Laureate's brilliant early treatise on Einstein's theory consists of his original 1921 text plus retrospective comments 35 years later. Concise and comprehensive, it pays special attention to unified field theories.

Theory of Relativity

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Don Tapscott

Anthony D. Williams

How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

An updated edition of the national bestseller?now with a new introduction and a new chapter

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.



Wikinomics

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Robert Byrne

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Drawing from diverse personages from Goethe to Churchill to Woody Allen, The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said is a witty wise quotation collection that deserves a special place on every humor lover's bookshelf.

These unique, funny, and outrageous quotations, previously published in four separate volumes, are now gathered together in a seemingly limitless trove of pithy and often irreverent one-liners, retorts, put-downs, jokes, and last words that cover every conceivable subject and will appeal to every taste.

Highlights include:

--W. C. Fields: "Start every day with a smile and get it over with."
--George Burns:" "Happiness is having a large loving family in another city."

And many more.

The 2,548 Best Things Anybody Ever Said

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Shawn Achor

The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

A Harvard lecturer identifies seven core principles of positive psychology to counsel readers on how to achieve greater effectiveness and fulfillment in the workplace, explaining the role of happiness in enabling success and productivity.

The Happiness Advantage

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Thomas L. Friedman

The World in the Age of Terrorism

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times columnist and bestselling author of From Beirut to Jerusalem and The Lexus and the Olive Tree comes this smart, penetrating, brilliantly informed book that is indispensable for understanding today’s radically new world and America’s complex place in it.

Thomas L. Freidman received his third Pulitzer Prize in 2002 “for his clarity of vision, based on extensive reporting, in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat.” In Longitudes and Attitudes he gives us all of the columns he has published about the most momentous news story of our time, as well as a diary of his private experiences and reflections during his post–September 11 travels. Updated for this new paperback edition, with over two years’ worth of Friedman’s columns and an expanded version of his diary, Longitudes and Attitudes is a broadly influential work from our most trusted observer of the international scene.

Longitudes and Attitudes

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Geoffrey A. Moore

Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment. This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.

Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition

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Donna Freitas

Christian Smith

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

How Social Media Is Driving a Generation to Appear Perfect at Any Cost

Sexting. Cyberbullying. Narcissism. Social media has become the dominant force in young people's lives, and each day seems to bring another shocking tale of private pictures getting into the wrong hands, or a lament that young people feel compelled to share their each and every thought withthe entire world. Have smartphones and social media created a generation of self-obsessed egomaniacs?Absolutely not, Donna Freitas argues in this provocative book. And, she says, these alarmist fears are drawing attention away from the real issues that young adults are facing.Drawing on a large-scale survey and interviews with students on thirteen college campuses, Freitas finds that what young people are overwhelmingly concerned with - what they really want to talk about - is happiness. They face enormous pressure to look perfect online - not just happy, but blissful,ecstatic, and fabulously successful. Unable to achieve this impossible standard, they are anxious about letting the less-than-perfect parts of themselves become public. Far from wanting to share everything, they are brutally selective when it comes to curating their personal profiles, and worryobsessively that they might unwittingly post something that could come back to haunt them later in life. Through candid conversations with young people from diverse backgrounds, Freitas reveals how even the most well-adjusted individuals can be stricken by self-doubt when they compare theirexperiences with the vast collective utopia that they see online. And sometimes, as on anonymous platforms like Yik Yak, what they see instead is a depressing cesspool of racism and misogyny. Yet young people are also extremely attached to their smartphones and apps, which sometimes bring them greatpleasure. It is very much a love-hate relationship.While much of the public's attention has been focused on headline-grabbing stories, the everyday struggles and joys of young people have remained under the radar. Freitas brings their feelings to the fore, in the words of young people themselves. The Happiness Effect is an eye-opening window intotheir first-hand experiences of social media and its impact on them.

The Happiness Effect

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Tony Juniper

H. R. H. The The Prince of Wales

The Facts Simply Explained

An easy-to-understand overview of the state of our planet and its future, using eye-opening and accessible charts, graphs, and infographics. By 2050, the global population is expected to reach 9 billion. What's Really Happening to Our Planet? uses a graphic approach to chart the dramatic explosion of the human population and consumption and its impact on the planet. Based on unmatched scientific data, What's Really Happening to Our Planet? brings together major areas of public concern, such as deforestation, climate change, water shortages, and inequality. Easy-to-reference charts and infographics illustrate key findings, while clear, jargon-free text explains the science behind the figures. In addition to charting global trends and showing how they are connected, this book articulates how we can live more sustainably in the future. What's Really Happening to Our Planet? is a new and heart-stopping analysis of the latest chapter in human history and offers a fresh perspective on our future.

What's Really Happening to Our Planet?

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Viet Thanh Nguyen

The winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, compared by critics to the works of Graham Greene, Denis Johnson, and George Orwell,The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity, politics, and America, wrought in electric prose. The narrator, a Vietnamese army captain, is a man of divided loyalties, a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist sleeper agent in America after the end of the Vietnam War. A powerful story of love and friendship, and a gripping espionage novel,The Sympathizer examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

The Sympathizer

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Tahl Raz

And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time

A networking expert explains how to use the power of relationships for mutually beneficial results, outlining specific strategies and principles for generosity-based networking with colleagues, friends and associates.

Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated

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