Love it? Hate it? Or, just don’t care? How we feel about something dramatically affects how we interact with it. When we feel, we care. When we care, things happen. Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes – they are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most. If you want your customers to be brand ambassadors and your employees to brag about you to their friends, you need them to not just think you’re great – you need them to feel you’re great. You need them to love you – and for that, you need them to feel that you love them. For over a decade Marc Cox has been helping companies whose toxic cultures, miserable employees, and angry customers have all but destroyed them to rebuild their company spirit, discover the business case for love and build an organization that is wonderful to work for, brilliant to do business with and has the mindset of creating memorable employee and customer experiences. Underpinned by fresh insights and perspectives, robustly tested and refined by the real world experience of working with a wide range of companies and over 2,000 senior executives drawn from all parts of the world, and filled with fascinating and illustrative “love stories” the book will help you to make the business case for love. It will help you to find a more rewarding and invigorating way of working – both emotionally and financially. In short, it shows what happens when the love is put back into business.

How do you decide on the best course of action for your company to take advantage of new opportunities? By building a business case. This book provides a framework for building a business case. You'll learn how to: Clearly define the opportunity you'll want to address in your business case Identify and analyze a range of alternatives Recommend one option and assess its risks Create a high-level implementation plan for your proposed alternative Communicate your case to key stakeholders

TV society reporter Alaine Delacroix feels like David facing Goliath when she takes on the biggest corporation in town to keep them from putting her parents’ garden center out of business. Lawyer Forbes Guidry wants nothing more than to stand up for the endangered local-business owners—but it will mean risking his job and crossing his powerful parents. Can Alaine and Forbes make A Case for Love?

"Just the understanding and insights you will pick up about how people encounter and cope with combinations of technical, social, political, and economic opportunities and challenges make the book a joy to read and worth much more than the price of it alone." --Barry Boehm, from the Foreword This practical handbook shows you how to build an effective business case when you need to justify--and persuade management to accept--software change or improvement. Based on real-world scenarios, the book covers the most common situations in which business case analyses are required and explains specific techniques that have proved successful in practice. Drawing on years of experience in winning the "battle of the budget," the author shows you how to use commonly accepted engineering economic arguments to make your numbers "sing" to management. The book provides examples of successful business cases; along the way, tables, tools, facts, figures, and metrics guide you through the entire analytic process. Writing in a concise and witty style, the author makes this valuable guidance accessible to every software engineer, manager, and IT professional. Highlights include: How and where business case analyses fit into the software and IT life cycle process Explanations of the most common tools for business case analysis, such as present-value, return-on-investment, break-even, and cost/benefit calculation Tying the business process to the software development life cycle Packaging the business case for management consumption Frameworks and guidelines for justifying IT productivity, quality, and delivery cycle improvement strategies Case studies for applying appropriate decision situations to software process improvement Strategic guidelines for various business case analyses With this book in hand, you will find the facts, examples, hard data, and case studies needed for preparing your own winning business cases in today's complex software environment.

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.

An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen. We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communities and small businesses. Facebook turns us into addicts while putting our personal data at risk. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” to millennials, only 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in big business is at an all-time low. But are big companies inherently evil? If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don’t love business enough. In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, only 12 percent of Americans trust big business “quite a lot,” and only 6 percent trust it “a great deal.” Yet Americans as a group are remarkably willing to trust businesses, whether in the form of buying a new phone on the day of its release or simply showing up to work in the expectation they will be paid. Cowen illuminates the crucial role businesses play in spurring innovation, rewarding talent and hard work, and creating the bounty on which we’ve all come to depend.