Pamela Slim, a former corporate training manager, left her office job twelve years ago to go solo and has enjoyed every bit of it. In her groundbreaking book, based on her popular blog Escape from Cubicle Nation, Slim explores both the emotional issues of leaving the corporate world and the nuts and bolts of launching a business. Drawing on her own career, as well as stories from her coaching clients and blog readers, Slim will help readers weigh their options, and make a successful escape if they decide to go for it.

These days it's increasingly rare to have a stable career in any field. More and more of us are blending big company jobs, startup gigs, freelance work, and volunteer side projects. We take chances to expand our knowledge, capabilities, and experience. But how do we make sense of that kind of career - and explain it? Pamela Slim, the acclaimed author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, gives us the tools to have meaningful careers in this new world of work. She shows how to find the connections among diverse accomplishments, sell your story, and continually reinvent and relaunch your brand.

Discover and create a dynamic new model for growing your business by connecting with customers outside your usual field of view Do you think you know your ideal customer? Think again. Many businesses create an ideal consumer profile—aiming all their sales and marketing efforts towards this single type of person—and end up missing out on endless opportunities to sell their services or products. Award-winning business coach, speaker and author Pamela Slim has helped thousands of entrepreneurs around the world start, sustain, and scale their businesses. In The Widest Net, she explains how to build strong diverse relationships, identify and connect with new partners, expand markets, generate leads, and find new customers in places you may never have considered. Social media is a valuable business tool, but it can often create a comfortable cocoon for entrepreneurs, marketers, and leaders who all need to understand the entirety of the marketplace, not just their own social graph. With this book as a guide, you’ll learn how to connect with potential clients and customers using the true breadth of the marketplace, which she calls an ecosystem of living connections. The Widest Net shows how to: Search outside your own lens/bias/routine/history to target ideal customers. Attract the interest and attention of new leads by learning more about them authentically. Develop products and services suited to these customers. Sell through a trusted reciprocity framework where your customers become part of your ecosystem and you each help the other grow. Build and sustain loyalty and trust with new customers. Nurture a diverse and resilient customer base by identifying and adjusting to the ideal customer target over time.

"One is tempted to say 'the only book you'll need on starting a business.' Brilliant! Genius! Choose your superlative-it'll fit."-Tom Peters People starting out in business tend to seek step-by-step formulas or rules, but in reality there are no magic bullets. Rather, says veteran company-builder Norm Brodsky, there's a mentality that helps street- smart entrepreneurs solve problems and pursue opportunities as they arise. Brodsky shares his hard-earned wisdom every month in Inc. magazine, in the hugely popular "Street Smarts" column he cowrites with Bo Burlingham. Now they've adapted their best advice into a comprehensive guide for anyone running a small business.

When a predator attacks, prey are faced with a series of 'if', 'when' and 'how' escape decisions – these critical questions are the foci of this book. Cooper and Blumstein bring together a balance of theory and empirical research to summarise over fifty years of scattered research and benchmark current thinking in the rapidly expanding literature on the behavioural ecology of escaping. The book consolidates current and new behaviour models with taxonomically divided empirical chapters that demonstrate the application of escape theory to different groups. The chapters integrate behaviour with physiology, genetics and evolution to lead the reader through the complex decisions faced by prey during a predator attack, examining how these decisions interact with life history and individual variation. The chapter on best practice field methodology and the ideas for future research presented throughout, ensure this volume is practical as well as informative.

The bestselling co-author of The Go-Giver offers new insights into what it means to be truly influential Faced with the task of persuading someone to do what we want, most of us expect resistance. We see the other person as an adversary and often resort to coercion or manipulation to get our way. But while this approach might bring us short-term results, it leaves people with a bad feeling about themselves and about us. At that point, our relationship is weakened and our influence dramatically decreased. There has to be a better way. Drawing on his own experiences and the stories of other influential people, communication expert Bob Burg offers five simple principles of what he calls Ultimate Influence—the ability to win people to your side in a way that leaves everyone feeling great about the outcome. In the tradition of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Burg offers a tried-and-true framework for building alliances at work, at home, and anywhere else you seek to win people over.

The book also examines social responsibility, institution building, and longstanding traditions of giving throughout African-American culture and history.