In this "refreshingly different" high-toned business book, three leading business school professors take to America's back roads in search of offbeat small businesses—enterprises that hold valuable lessons for executives and entrepreneurs everywhere (Bloomberg Businessweek). While playing hooky from a conference in Boston a few years back, three former colleagues from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management hopped in a car and embarked on a life-changing road trip. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a "secret shopper" program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off. Instead of teaching the tried-and-true case studies involving GE and Microsoft, these three men decided to pull their heads out of their ivory towers and search for insights about product differentiation, pricing, brand management, building a team, and a host of other topics. Why take your cues on employee compensation from Wall Street when you can learn from a Main Street company like Couer D'Alene's best crime-scene cleaner? Want to learn about scaling a business? Come meet Dr. Burris, the flying orthodontist, who operates multiple, profitable practices in rural Arkansas. Spiced with vehicular mishaps and unexpected finds, this is one business book you won't want to miss.

From the mind of the ultimate corporate gunslinger comes this no-nonsense, real-world curriculum, designed to augment—if not replace—the more traditional path to achieving mastery of the business universe. Conquer this sharp, practical and often amusing course of study and save $250,000 of wasted business school tuition. Unlike those august, Ivy-encrusted factories that churn out masterful business administrators, The Curriculum will teach you the art of business, employing a smart, tactical battle plan that will prove infinitely more awesome as you make your way in the world. We begin, in the Core Curriculum, with the acquisition and maintenance of Power. Included are such essentials as Not Appearing Stupid (an early career requirement), Fabricating A Sustainable Business Personality, and the arts of Management and Selling. The Advanced Curriculum hones the skills that are required to seize Success by the throat and shake it until valuable prizes fall out of its pockets, including fundamentals on Strategic Thinking, Self-Branding, mastering Electronic Communications, and dealing with Crazy People. Tutorials and Electives, which students may pursue as their interest or discretion advises, include lessons on Giving an Effective Presentation, Business Drinking, and the Care and Feeding of Ultra-Senior Officers. Lavishly enhanced with numerous charts, graphs, and other illuminating business illustrations, and backed up by years of study from Mr. Bing’s proprietary research organization (The National Association of Serious Studies), The Curriculum will occupy a place of pride on any bookshelf dedicated to the study of business, how it works, and how it can be used against those who don’t know how it works.

Make a lasting impact by launching new initiatives, inspiring others, and championing innovative approaches with this from-the-trenches guide by trusted executive mentor, entrepreneur, and leadership expert Joel Peterson. Many leaders see their roles as presidents/managers, with a primary focus on keeping results consistent with past performance and on budget. These kinds of leaders make important contributions but rarely leave a mark on the businesses they serve. For those wanting to make a lasting impact, new skills are required. Joel Peterson calls these higher-level leaders “entrepreneurial leaders,” and they create durable enterprises that deliver on their promise. After three careers and demanding roles as CFO, CEO, chairman, lead director, adjunct professor, founder, author, entrepreneur and investor, Joel Peterson is often sought as a mentor and coach by leaders and aspiring leaders. He has worked with all types of leaders and considers the entrepreneurial leader to be the highest level of influence. In Entrepreneurial Leadership, Peterson lays out a path to achieving this summit with a series of leadership maps organized around the four essential basecamps: Establishing Trust Creating a Sense of Mission Building a Cohesive Team Executing and Delivering Results These core philosophies, while easy to summarize, can be extremely difficult to implement. This book of maps and mindsets is aimed at those who hope to lead others, help them achieve their best, break new barriers, change the status quo, create a legacy, develop a brand, and enjoy a life-altering experience. Let Entrepreneurial Leadership guide you on your journey.

From longtime New York Times columnist Bob Herbert comes a wrenching portrayal of ordinary Americans struggling for survival in a nation that has lost its way In his eighteen years as an opinion columnist for The New York Times, Herbert championed the working poor and the middle class. After filing his last column in 2011, he set off on a journey across the country to report on Americans who were being left behind in an economy that has never fully recovered from the Great Recession. The portraits of those he encountered fuel his new book, Losing Our Way. Herbert’s combination of heartrending reporting and keen political analysis is the purest expression since the Occupy movement of the plight of the 99 percent. The individuals and families who are paying the price of America’s bad choices in recent decades form the book’s emotional center: an exhausted high school student in Brooklyn who works the overnight shift in a factory at minimum wage to help pay her family’s rent; a twenty-four-year-old soldier from Peachtree City, Georgia, who loses both legs in a misguided, mismanaged, seemingly endless war; a young woman, only recently engaged, who suffers devastating injuries in a tragic bridge collapse in Minneapolis; and a group of parents in Pittsburgh who courageously fight back against the politicians who decimated funding for their children’s schools. Herbert reminds us of a time in America when unemployment was low, wages and profits were high, and the nation’s wealth, by current standards, was distributed much more equitably. Today, the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened dramatically, the nation’s physical plant is crumbling, and the inability to find decent work is a plague on a generation. Herbert traces where we went wrong and spotlights the drastic and dangerous shift of political power from ordinary Americans to the corporate and financial elite. Hope for America, he argues, lies in a concerted push to redress that political imbalance. Searing and unforgettable, Losing Our Way ultimately inspires with its faith in ordinary citizens to take back their true political power and reclaim the American dream.

"One of the most provocative entrepreneurs of our time, who started Eckō Unltd out of his parents' garage and turned it into a media empire, Marc Eckō reveals his formula for building an authentic brand or business. Marc Eckō began his career by spray-painting t-shirts in the garage of his childhood home in suburban New Jersey. A graffiti artist with no connections and no fashion pedigree, he left the safety net of pharmacy school to start his own company. Armed with only hustle, sweat equity, and creativity, he flipped a $5,000 bag of cash into a global corporation now worth $500 million. Unlabel is a success story, but it's one that shares the bruises, scabs, and gut-wrenching mistakes that every entrepreneur must overcome to succeed. Through his personal prescription for success--the Authenticity Formula--Eckō recounts his many innovations and misadventures in his journey from misfit kid to the CEO. It wasn't a meteoric rise; in fact, it was a rollercoaster that dipped to the edge of bankruptcy and even to national notoriety, but this is an underdog story we can learn from: Ecko's doubling down on the core principles of the brand and his formula for action over talk are all lessons for today's entrepreneurs. Ecko offers a brash message with his inspirational story: embrace pain, take risks, and be yourself. Unlabel demonstrates that, like or not, you are a brand and it's up you to take control of it and create something authentic. Unlabel is a groundbreaking guide to channeling your creativity, finding the courage to defy convention, and summoning the confidence to act and be competitive in any environment"--

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely known as the greatest Russian writers of science fiction, and their 1964 novel Hard to Be a God is considered one of the greatest of their works. It tells the story of Don Rumata, who is sent from Earth to the medieval kingdom of Arkanar with instructions to observe and to influence, but never to directly interfere. Masquerading as an arrogant nobleman, a dueler and a brawler, Don Rumata is never defeated but can never kill. With his doubt and compassion, and his deep love for a local girl named Kira, Rumata wants to save the kingdom from the machinations of Don Reba, the First Minister to the king. But given his orders, what role can he play? Hard to Be a God has inspired a computer role-playing game and two movies, including Aleksei German's long-awaited swan song. Yet until now the only English version (out of print for over thirty years) was based on a German translation, and was full of errors, infelicities, and misunderstandings. This new edition—translated by Olena Bormashenko, whose translation of the authors' Roadside Picnic has received widespread acclaim, and supplemented with a new foreword by Hari Kunzru and an afterword by Boris Strugatsky, both of which supply much-needed context—reintroduces one of the most profound Soviet-era novels to an eager audience.

Managers of multinational organizations are struggling to win the strategic competition for the hearts and minds of external stakeholders. These stakeholders differ fundamentally in their worldview, their understanding of the market economy and their aspirations and fears for the future. Their collective opinions of managers and corporations will shape the competitive landscape of the global economy and have serious consequences for businesses that fail to meet their expectations. This important new book argues that the strategic management of relationships with external stakeholders – what the author calls "Corporate Diplomacy" – is not just canny PR, but creates real and lasting business value.Using a mix of colourful examples, practically relevant tools and considered perspectives, the book hones in on a fundamental challenge that managers of multinational corporations face as they strive to compete in the 21st century. As falling communication costs shrink, the distance between external stakeholders and shareholder value is increasingly created and protected through a strategic integration of the external stakeholder facing functions. These include government affairs, stakeholder relations, sustainability, enterprise risk management, community relations and corporate communications. Through such integration, the place where business, politics and society intersect need not be a source of nasty surprises or unexpected expenses. Most of the firms profiled in the book are now at the frontier of corporate diplomacy. But they didn’t start there. Many of them were motivated by past failings. They fell into conflicts with critical stakeholders – politicians, communities, NGO staffers, or activists – and they suffered. They experienced delays or disruptions to their operations, higher costs, angry customers, or thwarted attempts at expansion. Eventually, the managers of these companies developed smarter strategies for stakeholder engagement. They became corporate diplomats. The book draws on their experiences to take the reader to the forefront of stakeholder engagement and to highlight the six elements of corprate diplomacy.