"Martin Latz's Gain the Edge! is the best book I've ever read on negotiation strategy. If you negotiate for a living or only occasionally, Latz gives you the tools and tactics to succeed before you sit down at the table. Whether it's negotiating Randy Johnson's contract or the purchase of your next car, Gain the Edge! is clear, concise, and unfailingly useful." --Jerry Colangelo, Chairman and CEO, Arizona Diamondbacks and Phoenix Suns There's always more to learn about negotiation. That one new strategy or tactic you gain from this book may make the difference between your walking away a winner and leaving empty-handed. The margin of difference can be infinitesimal, yet the ramifications are often huge. Negotiating a new salary? Buying a car or a house? Closing a deal with a big client? Discussing where to vacation with your spouse? We negotiate every day. Yet most of us negotiate instinctively and don't give the process the strategic attention it deserves. We suffer as a result. Now negotiation expert Martin E. Latz reveals an easy-to-use strategic template you can use in every negotiation. This is not ivory-tower advice, or advice just based on instincts and experience: The tactics and techniques here come from the most up-to-date research and the knowledge Latz has developed in negotiating on the White House Advance Teams, from consulting with top executives at Fortune 500 companies and law firms nationwide, and from teaching thousands of business professionals and lawyers how to negotiate more effectively. The result is a comprehensive guide that takes you all the way from general strategies and principles--Latz's Five Golden Rules of Negotiation--to specific tips, techniques, and even phrases you can use at the table. Gain the Edge! will arm you with: * Practical strategies to get the information you need before you sit down at the table * Tactics to maximize your leverage when seemingly powerless * Secrets to success in emotionally charged negotiations * A step-by-step system to design the most effective offer-concession strategy * Ways to deal with different personality types, ethics, and negotiation "games" * Specific advice on how to negotiate for your next salary, car, or house * Negotiating tips for other business and personal matters Leave behind instinctive negotiating and its inherent uncertainties. Learn to negotiate strategically. Easy to understand and instantly applicable to real-life situations, Gain the Edge! is the ultimate how-to guide for anyone looking to master this critical subject.

"Originally published in 2009 by Summerside Press."

How do you launch a product in today's ultra-competitive and often saturated markets, break through the clutter, and develop strong and lasting customer loyalty? Get in touch with your customers' deepest emotions, of course. Emotional Branding teaches you the how's and why's of, "How does our product or service make our customers feel?" Author Daryl Travis (with a little help from Harry) leads you on a journey filled with colorful ideas and bottom-line lessons that will teach you how to instill brand loyalty in your customers. Whether you are a CEO, an advertising guru, or an innovative businessperson, you will discover how to use a brand's mystique to create powerful and lasting emotional connections with your customers. Travis also addresses: ·Branding as a product of intuitive thinking ·How people develop emotional responses to brands ·Bringing together a company's elements to form a brand ·Developing successful offshoot brands from existing ones ·And much more! Emotional Branding teaches you how to identify and empower your product's appeal and connect it to your customers' experiences with your product. The results unlock the secrets to emotional branding, enhance the brand-consumer relationship, and show you and your business new prosperity—all from discovering and applying these powerful new ways to use the "F" word, F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S. "Today's marketplace confusion can only be sorted out one way: by brand power. Daryl Travis's Emotional Branding sings, a book to savor and ponder. And, if approached in the right spirit, a book to change your worldview and renovate your bottom line. Hint: It's for finance and human resource folks as much as for marketers, as much for three-person architectural studios as for Virgin or GE execs." —Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence "Every CEO's job is to create value and build assets, and every company's most formidable asset is its brand. Daryl's book is an important reminder that brands must be protected and nurtured. Read it, take it to heart, and expect some amazing things to happen in your business." —James Berrien, president of Forbes magazine "I've been in the business of building global brands for more than 25 years, and I've yet to read a better account of what it takes to make a brand. Apply all the analytics you want to a great company or brand and in the end you'll find it comes down to how people feel about it. This book reveals why." —Thomas Oliver, CEO of Bass Hotels & Resorts, former executive VP of marketing, FedEx

"In business, imitation gets a bad rap: some business leaders see imitators as 'me too' players forced to copy because they have nothing original to offer. In Copycats, Oded Shenkar challenges this viewpoint. He reveals how imitation - the exact or broad-brushed copying of an innovation - is as critical to prosperity as innovation, especially when the two are used together."--Inside jacket.

Business leaders, large and small, need to learn a new game with very different rules. They must accept an ever-changing and uncertain landscape, but a landscape that can be constantly leveraged for greater profitability. They must believe that their companies are caterpillars with the potential to become butterflies. The Caterpillar's Edge shows why we must embrace a future of flux. It exposes the addictions that chain us to our past and the truths that influence our behaviors. And, it shows just how to seize breakthrough advantages by pushing through all the noise around "big data." Within its DNA, the caterpillar aspires and pushes for more, and it gets just that, evolving gracefully from one entity into another, always building a competitive edge in the process. Break free from accepted archaic business practices by cracking that secret code which demands evolving your business always.

Many people have the misconception that success is the result of innate talent, dumb luck, or a magic formula. In reality, winners succeed through a combination of three things: the concentration to retain focus, the discipline to continually improve, and the endurance to overcome obstacles and failures. The Specific Edge is a blueprint for the average person to achieve success and fulfillment far above average. You will be guided to discover your specific edge and develop a strategy to outsmart your competitors. You will acquire tools to sustain effort while avoiding burn-out. Whether you are an entrepreneur, a corporate executive, or an individual building your career, identifying and capitalizing upon your specific edge creates a competitive advantage. With your specific edge, you create a point of differentiation and tune into opportunities around you.Learn how you can improve performance and win in business and in life from Mike Wien's personal stories paired with practical tips. Included are hard-earned insights from the first twenty-eight years of Mike's career with leadership roles in marketing at Pepsi, Frito-Lay, Citibank, and Deloitte. These insights are combined with strategies learned from the second-half of his career--when he ditched corporate life and became a world-class triathlete. Mike has competed in the Ironman Triathlon World Championship four times in the past eight years.

As organizations strive to meet stringent budgets, the mandate to produce greater results with fewer resources is no longer sufficient. Rather than accepting less, managers and executives must strive for better--evaluating every process and every role and doing away with assumptions about how work gets done and who does it in order to streamline processes and maximize efficiency. William Rothwell, who was honored with the ASTD Distinguished Contribution Award in Workplace Learning and Peformance, presents a system for analyzing work and selecting the ideal combination of cost-effective resources--employees, consultants, contractors, temporary workers, and vendors--to accomplish it. Lean but Agile does this by teaching readers to focus on outcomes and work backwards--exploring the introduction, implementation, and management of lean work and agile staffing methods that will produce those outcomes. You’ll also learn about advantageous changes in hiring, goal-setting, learning and development, and performance management, and the fundamental role technology can play in transforming your processes. Packed with practical advice, examples, guides, worksheets, diagrams, and metrics, Lean but Agile will help leaders, managers, and human resource professionals optimize their workforces while still achieving superior results.