Showing results by narrator "Walter Dixon" in All Categories

Shift your strategy downstream. Why do your customers buy from you rather than from your competitors? If you think the answer is your superior products, think again. Products are important, of course. For decades, businesses sought competitive advantage almost exclusively in activities related to new product creation. They won by building bigger factories, by finding cheaper raw materials or labor, or by coming up with more efficient ways to move and store inventory - and by inventing exciting new products that competitors could not replicate.

Soccer moms drive Priuses. Sport utility vehicles are going hybrid. Families are using hemp shopping bags. More and more companies are developing "green" buildings. What's more, the business consultants say going green is easy and profitable. In reality, though, many green-leaning businesses, families, and governments are still fiddling with the small stuff while the planet burns. Why?

Family Inc. is not just a personal finance book; it is a "how to" guide for achieving financial security. By borrowing time tested principles used in business and applying them to family financial planning, Family Inc. provides a powerful framework for navigating all of life's big financial decisions. You will learn how to think strategically as the Family Chief Financial Officer; how to make investments in education and yourself to benefit your career; how to manage your hard-earned money to make it work for you; and much more.

When Fortune announced its list of the World’s Greatest Leaders, the top spot was awarded - not to a captain of industry - but to the new pontiff. In the year since his election, Pope Francis earned that accolade - and more. He has achieved the remarkable: breathed life into an aging institution, reinvigorated a global base, and created real hope for the future.How did a man who spent his life laboring in slums far from the Vatican manage to do this and so quickly?

Anyone suffering under the crushing weight of debt knows how impossible it can seem to find a way out. It's overwhelming - and the more complicated the proposed solution, the harder it is to stick with it. That's why The Debt-Free Spending Plan is simple. It doesn't require sifting through chapters of high-minded financial advice or digging up your past spending history. It assumes you need help right now, and gives it to you.

Because they're doing the day-to-day work, front-line employees see many problems and opportunities their managers don't. But most organizations fail to realize this potentially extraordinary source of revenue-enhancing ideas. The authors of Ideas Are Free use real-world examples from their work with hundreds of organizations to show how to exploit the virtually free, perpetually renewable resource of employee ideas.

Betterness: Economics for Humans is a powerful call to arms for a post-capitalist economy. Umair Haque argues that just as positive psychology revolutionized our understanding of mental health by recasting the field as more than just treating mental illness, we need to rethink our economic paradigm. Why? Because business as we know it has reached a state of diminishing returns - though we work harder and harder, we never seem to get anywhere.

The literature of ideas. When author Pamela Sargent used those words to describe science fiction in 1975, the genre had exploded into the literary mainstream. As a literature of ideas, science fiction has proven to be a powerful metaphor for the world around us, offering a rich tapestry of imagination through which to explore how we lead, how we think, and how we interact. To Boldly Go assembles more than 30 writers from around the world to help us better understand ourselves through the lens of science fiction.

You Only Live Once is the guide to achieving your best life through smart money moves. Before you even begin making a budget, you need to think about why. Where do you see yourself financially in 10 years? Five years? This time next year? What does money do for you? Once you know your destination, you can begin charting your course. Step-by-step guidance walks you through the budgeting process, and shows you how to plan your financial path to point toward your goals.

Why work harder than you have to? One manager kept his senior execs happy by secretly hacking into the company’s database, providing them the reports they needed in one-third the time. Hacking is a powerful solution to every stupid procedure, tool, rule, and process we are forced to endure. Benevolent hackers are saving business from itself. It would be so much easier to do great work if not for lingering bureaucracies, outdated technologies, and deeply irrational rules and procedures.

In Ethereum for Business, Paul Brody provides a plain English guide to doing business on the world's largest blockchain. The book covers an overview of Ethereum, business applications on Ethereum, and various advanced topics. Including case studies and examples from the world of Ethereum, Ethereum for Business is readable both linearly and by dipping in and out of chapters. The book is aimed at business executives who want to understand the potential of blockchain for solving real-world business problems, and listeners with technical knowledge who want to understand the business use cases.

Most of the information available on cloud computing is either highly technical, with details that are irrelevant to nontechnologists, or pure marketing hype, in which the cloud is simply a selling point. This book, however, explains the cloud from the user's viewpoint - the business user's in particular. Nayan Ruparelia explains what the cloud is, when to use it (and when not to), how to select a cloud service, how to integrate it with other technologies, and what the best practices are for using cloud computing.

An industry-specific guide to the applications of advanced analytics and AI to the banking industry.

Since founding Orange County Choppers in Upstate New York in 1999, Teutul has grown the business from a hobby into a 70-person-plus operation that produces and sells 150 custom bikes a year at retail prices starting at $30,000 and quickly escalating to six figures. Teutul and his team not only sell their choppers from their world headquarters in Newburgh, New York, but throughout a multicountry dealership network in the US and abroad.

Cyber Intelligence-Driven Risk provides a solution to one of the most pressing issues that executives and risk managers face: How can we weave information security into our business decisions to minimize overall business risk?

In this evocative biography, presidential historian and former White House speechwriter Kasey Pipes explores President Richard Nixon's post-White House life, beginning with his days in virtual exile and ending with his unlikely redemption through the work he did later in life.

Increasingly, organizations count on project teams to develop products and deliver services to their customers. Consequently, effective teamwork and team leadership are integral components of an organization's success. Authors Stephen E. Kohn and Vincent D. O'Connell define the essence of superior performance by project teams at work and identify nine attributes of team membership and team leadership that set the stage for accomplishment of group objectives. Kohn and O'Connell bring these proven strategies to life with real-world examples drawn from decades of experience.

If you don't like what you see when you look in the mirror, you may not realize that these feelings are entirely within your grasp. You don't need extensive cosmetic surgery, pricey beauty treatments, or weight loss programs, but you may need to do something even more drastic - change your perspective and the way you view yourself. The Body Image Workbook offers a comprehensive program to help you stop focusing on your perceived imperfections and start feeling more confident about the way you look.

Think you can spot the leaders in your company? Don't assume that you can identify them by their positions. What about those employees who consistently step up: the field agent who solves a previously intractable problem, the service rep who thinks outside the box and creates unshakeable customer loyalty? These are more than "good employees". - these are "hidden leaders", and they are critical to an organization's long-term success.

More than 20 years ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the balanced scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the balanced scorecard into action.