The Success Cycle is comprised of three components that, when implemented correctly, give you the best chance to create long lasting success and prosperity. A retired NFL player shares his story of achieving maximum success as a professional athlete, followed by notoriety in corporate America, then catastrophic failures that cost him everything he owned in just ninety days. But even in the face of crushing defeat, he identified and put into action the traits required to rise from the ashes and find success again. Now this inspiring, candidly written, and time-tested method of success is available to you!

In this clear-eyed, candid, and ultimately reassuring

Unknowingly, too many of us operate from an inward mindset—a narrow-minded focus on self-centered goals and objectives. When faced with personal ineffectiveness or lagging organizational performance, most of us instinctively look for quick-fix behavioral band-aids, not recognizing the underlying mindset at the heart of our most persistent challenges. Through true stories and simple yet profound guidance and tools, The Outward Mindset enables individuals and organizations to make the one change that most dramatically improves performance, sparks collaboration, and accelerates innovation—a shift to an outward mindset.

Owning Game-Changing Subcategories is about creating organizational growth in the digital age by creating and owning game-changing subcategories fueled by digital. Owning Game-Changing Subcategories outlines the path to finding, managing, and leveraging new subcategories. In the digital age, the path has been made wider, shorter, and more frequently traveled. Throughout Owning Game-Changing Subcategories, David Aaker discusses certain aspects of the digital age that alter this path, such as E-commerce providing fast, inexpensive market access bypassing the cost of gaining distribution into storefront retailers or creating personal sales teams and social media and websites enabling communication on steroids in comparison with traditional use of advertising or events. Growth is not only a success measure but also creates energy and opportunity for customers and employees. And such growth almost never occurs with “my brand is better than your brand” marketing. Owning Game-Changing Subcategories explores the only ways to grow a business (with rare exceptions) which is to: develop new “must haves” that define a game-changing subcategory that provides a new or markedly superior buying or use experience or brand relationship to a core customer base; become the exemplar brand that represents the subcategory and drives its visibility, positioning, and success; and create barriers to competitors that could include “must-have” associations and a basis of relationships that go beyond functional benefits.

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?

Can a company be cool, socially responsible ... and still make money? Welcome to the looptail. This is the extraordinary true story of Bruce Poon Tip and how, with nothing more than two credit cards and a burning desire to create an authentic, sustainable travel experience like nothing the world had ever seen, he created G Adventures, the world's most successful adventure travel company. G Adventures operates in more than 100 countries, on all seven continents, serves more than 100,000 customers every year - and is now a significant player in Australia. In this unique first-person account, Poon Tip reveals his unusual management secrets that allowed him to keep growing his company, his employees fully engaged and energised, and his customers extremely happy. This is a singularly stunning story of why community, culture and karma matter in business, and how one man's desire to do the right thing and generate profits can be blended into a win–win for all involved. In this special Australian edition, Bruce Poon Tip writes about the unique experiences and lessons learned which have fuelled the growth of his Australian business, and also about how Australia really could be better at presenting itself to the world's travellers. www.gadventures.com.au

While finishing her doctorate, Rebecca gave birth to her firstborn. But hospital practices and policies that were more than 20 years out of date left her with preventable complications. Join Rebecca as she exposes the stark realities of institutional care during childbirth and reveals inspirational solutions for parents and professionals alike.