Recently, we have seen the increasing non-traditional business models' presence and success in the market, from multimillionaire "tiktokers" to teenagers making millions from NFTs. These shows exactly what is asked for in any successful business or finance model: innovation and management. In this blog, we offer the top picks from our Business, Finance, and Law collection that explain how the successful people did it. We hope to provide a place for you to explore your interests in management, entrepreneurship, investments, marketing, and many more. Read along to start your own journey!
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Investment & Securities
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Management & Entrepreneurship
Management and entrepreneurship are the heart of any business. Whether you're a leader of a student organisation, a community group, or a million-dollar company, good management strategies are crucial for your group's success. Below are our top picks in Management & Entrepreneurship to help you get started.
Direct from Dell Strategies
By Michael Dell
At the age of twelve, founder of Dell Computer and one of the world's top businessmen, Michael Dell earned USD 2000 from selling stamps. By the age of eighteen, he was selling customized PCs from his dorm room. He went on to found one of the most successful computer businesses in the world, redefining the industry with his direct model process and pioneering customer support.
Drawing from his own formidable success, Dell explains how to foster and maintain a competitive edge, how to get to the front of the pack and stay there. Direct from Dell is both a success story and a manifesto for revolutionizing any industry.
Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry's Road from Glory to Disaster
By Paul Ingrassia
In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves did? He also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work). Along the way, we meet Detroit's frustrated reformers and witness the wrenching decisions that Ford executives had to make to avoid GM's fate. Informed by Ingrassia's twenty-five years of experience covering the auto industry for "The Wall Street Journal," and showing an appreciation for Detroit's profound influence on our country's society and culture, Crash Course is a uniquely American and deeply instructive story, one not to be missed.
Big Potential : How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being
By Shawn Achor
Bestselling author Shawn Achor shows how to unlock hidden sources of potential in ourselves and others. In a world that thrives on competition and individual achievement, we are measuring and pursuing potential all wrong. In his highly anticipated follow-up to The Happiness Advantage, Achor reveals a better approach. Drawing on his work in 50 countries, he shows that success and happiness are not competitive sports. Rather, they depend almost entirely on how well we connect with, relate to, and learn from each other. Achor offers five strategies–the SEEDS of Big Potential–for lifting the ceiling on what we can achieve while returning happiness and meaning to our lives. The dramatic shifts in how we approach work today demand an equally dramatic shift in our approach to success.
The Progress Principle : Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work
By Teresa Amabile
What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives–consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly. Through rigorous analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries provided by 238 employees in 7 companies, the authors explain how managers can foster progress and enhance inner work life every day. The book shows how to remove obstacles to progress, including meaningless tasks and toxic relationships. Brimming with honest examples from the companies studied, The Progress Principle equips aspiring and seasoned leaders alike with the insights they need to maximize their people's performance.
The New New Thing : How Silicon Valley Defines the Ways We Think and Live as We Enter a New Century
By Michael Lewis
In the last years of the millennium, bestselling author Michael Lewis sets out to find the world s most important technology entrepreneur, the man who embodies the spirit of the coming age. He finds him in Jim Clark, the billionaire who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and who now aims to turn the healthcare industry on its head with his new billion-dollar project. Lewis accompanies Clark on the maiden voyage of his vast yacht and, on the sometimes hazardous journey, takes the reader on the ride of a lifetime through a landscape of geeks and billionaires. Through every brilliant anecdote and funny character sketch, Michael Lewis allows us an inside look at the world of the super-rich, whilst drawing a map of free enterprise in the twenty-first century.
The Power of Pull : How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
By John Hagel
In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream. Individuals and companies can no longer rely on the stocks of knowledge that they've carefully built up and stored away. Pull can turn uncertainty into opportunity, and enable small moves to achieve outsized impact. Drawing on pioneering research, The Power of Pull shows how to apply its principles to unlock the hidden potential of individuals and organizations, and how to use it as a force for social change and the development of creative talent. The Power of Pull is an essential read for entrepreneurs, managers, and anybody interested in understanding and harnessing the shifting forces of our networked world.
Investment & Securities
You don't have to be a full-time investor to make profit through investment. Whether you are looking to be more financially aware this year or need a better investment strategy for your business, you'll find these recommendations in Investments & Securities helpful.
Winning Now, Winning Later : How Companies Can Succeed in the Short Term While Investing for the Long Term
By David M. Cote
Winning Now, Winning Later reveals the bold the operational reforms and counterintuitive leadership practices you can put into practice that will allow you to do two conflicting things at the same time-pursue strong short- and long-term results. This tested and proven approach can strengthen your business like never before, and even rescue it from the brink of disaster no matter how dire the current circumstances may seem. Presenting a comprehensive solution to a perennial problem, Winning Now, Winning Later is a go-to guide for you and leaders everywhere to finally transcend short-termism's daily grind and leave an enduring legacy of success.
The Greatest Trade Ever : How One Man Bet Against the Markets and Made $20 Billion
By Gregory Zuckerman
John Paulson, a softly spoken hedge-fund manager who still took the bus to work, seemed unlikely to stake his career on one big gamble. But he did–and The Greatest Trade Ever is the story of how he realised that the sub-prime housing bubble was going to burst, making $15 Billion for his fund and more than $4 Billion for himself in a single year. It's a tale of folly and wizardry, individual brilliance versus institutional stupidity. John Paulson made the biggest winning bet in history. And The Greatest Trade Ever shows how he did it.
The Millionaire Real Estate Investor
By Gary Keller
Anyone who seeks financial wealth must first learn the fundamental truths and models that drive it. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor represents the collected wisdom and experience of over 100 millionaire investors from all walks of life who pursued financial wealth and achieved the life-changing freedom it delivers. This book--in straightforward, no nonsense, easy-to-read style--reveals their proven strategies. The Millionaire Real Estate Investor is your handbook to the tried and true financial wealth building vehicle that rewards patience and perseverance and is available to all–real estate.
More Than You Know : Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places
By Michael J. Mauboussin
Mauboussin explores and applies ideas from a variety of disciplines to develop sound investment strategies and new approaches to understanding such concepts as choice, risk, and innovation. In this engaging book, he builds upon the visionary ideas of such figures as Warren Buffett and E. O. Wilson to offer surprising insights from unexpected sources. How can an investor learn from poker experts David Slansky and Puggy Pearson? What does guppy mate selection tell us about stock market booms? Do Tupperware parties have anything to tell us about how we select stocks? Illustrating his points with lessons drawn from casino gambling, horse racing, psychology, evolutionary biology, and other activities and disciplines, Mauboussin shows how attention to process, an understanding of the psychology of decision making, and an even temperament produce the best long-term financial results for investors.
Sales & Marketing
No business can succeed without a good marketing strategy and sales model. Give these top picks a read and learn from others' success stories!
Ultimate Sales Machine
By Chet Holmes
Chet Holmes helps his clients blow away both the competition and their own expectations. And his advice starts with one simple concept: focus! Instead of trying to master four thousand strategies to improve your business, zero in on the few essential skill areas that make the big difference. The Ultimate Sales Machine shows you how to tune up and soup up virtually every part of your business by spending just an hour per week on each impact area you want to improve?sales, marketing, management, and more.
Onward : How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
By Howard Schultz
In 2008, Howard Schultz, the president and chairman of Starbucks, made the unprecedented decision to return as the CEO eight years after he stepped down from daily oversight of the company and became chairman. Concerned that Starbucks had lost its way, Schultz was determined to help it return to its core values and restore not only its financial health, but also its soul. In Onward, he shares the remarkable story of his return and the company's ongoing transformation under his leadership, revealing how, during one of the most tumultuous economic times in history, Starbucks again achieved profitability and sustainability without sacrificing humanity. Offering readers a snapshot of a moment in history that left no company unscathed, the book zooms in to show, in riveting detail, how one company struggled and recreated itself in the midst of it all. The fast paced narrative is driven by day-to-day tension as conflicts arise and lets readers into Schultz's psyche as he comes to terms with his limitations and evolving leadership style. Onward is a compelling, candid narrative documenting the maturing of a brand as well as a businessman.
How Google Works
By Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new management philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub smart creatives. The authors illustrate management maxims with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history, many of which are shared here for the first time.
In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. How Google Works explains how to do just that.
The Long Tail - Why The Future Of Business Is Selling Less Of More
By Chris Anderson
What happens when the bottlenecks that stand between supply and demand in our culture go away and everything becomes available to everyone? The Long Tail is a powerful new force in our economy: the rise of the niche. As the cost of reaching consumers drops dramatically, our markets are shifting from a one-size-fits-all model of mass appeal to one of unlimited variety for unique tastes. After a century of obsessing over the few products at the head of the demand curve, the new economics of distribution allow us to turn our focus to the many more products in the tail, which collectively can create a new market as big as the one we already know. The Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance. New efficiencies in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing are essentially resetting the definition of what's commercially viable across the board. If the 20th century was about hits, the 21st will be equally about niches.
ZAG : The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands
By Marty Neumeier
"When everybody zigs, zag," says author Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. The author argues that in an extremely cluttered marketplace, traditional differentiation is no longer enough-today companies need "radical differentiation" to create lasting value for their shareholders and customers. In an entertaining 3-hour read you'll learn why me-too brands are doomed to fail; how to "read" customer feedback on new products and messages; the 17 steps for designing "difference" into your brand; how to turn your brand's "onliness" into a "trueline" to drive synergy; the secrets of naming products, services, and companies; the four deadly dangers faced by brand portfolios; and many more.
We hope you find these recommendations helpful! If you are interested in learning more, head to our website and browse our entire collection on Business, Finance, and Law. Do not forget to enjoy your Buy 2 Get 1 Free promotion happening from Jan 21-23!
