THE MBA HANDBOOK
Getting an MBA is an expensive choice-one almost impossible to justify regardless of the state of the economy. Even the elite schools like Harvard and Wharton offer outdated, assembly-line programs that teach you more about PowerPoint presentations and unnecessary financial models than what it takes to run a real business. You can get better results (and save hundreds of thousands of dollars) by skipping business school altogether.
Josh Kaufman founded PersonalMBA.com as an alternative to the business school boondoggle. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. Now, he shares the essentials of entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, negotiation, operations, productivity, systems design, and much more, in one comprehensive volume. The Personal MBA distills the most valuable business lessons into simple, memorable mental models that can be applied to real-world challenges.
About the Author
Josh Kaufman is the author of The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business, an international bestseller with translations in 12 languages. Josh specializes in teaching professionals in all industries and disciplines how to master practical business knowledge and skills. Josh's unique, multidisciplinary approach to business mastery has helped millions of readers around the world learn essential business concepts on their own terms. PersonalMBA.com hosts over 50,000 readers every month, and has been visited over 2 million times by readers all over the world since its founding in 2005. Josh's work has directly saved prospective business students millions of dollars in unnecessary tuition, fees, and interest by providing an effective, affordable, and debt-free method of learning fundamental business principles.
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THANKS FOR THE FEEDBACK
A significant improvement on their initial book, Difficult Conversations, coauthors Stone and Heen have spent the last fifteen years working with businesses, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. The authors point out that the real focus should be on receiving feedback (creating a pull instead of the push attitude). “Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it’s about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow”.
About the Authors
Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen are co-authors of the New York Times Business Bestseller Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Principals at Triad Consulting, and have been teaching negotiation at Harvard Law School for twenty years.
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THE HIGH GROWTH HANDBOOK
High Growth Handbook is the playbook. Warning about playbooks: they work for certain circumstances. I caution people using playbooks that are designed to do things like “turn a startup into a unicorn” because I think that is a snake oil pitch and generally bad advice. However, playbooks are helpful for navigating complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups. Playbooks are helpful to the effective diagnostician, covering key topics like the role of the CEO, managing the board, recruiting and managing an executive team, M&A, IPOs and late-stage funding rounds, and is interspersed with over a dozen interviews with some of the most influential leaders in Silicon Valley including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box).
About the Author
Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from startups into global brands.
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THE MESSY MIDDLE
No matter what it is you’re trying to create or transform, the myth of a successful journey is that it starts with an idea, followed by a ton of hardship, and then a gradual and linear rise to the finish line. But no extraordinary journey is linear. In reality, the middle is extraordinarily volatile — a continuous sequence of ups and downs, flush with uncertainty and struggle. Every advance reveals a new shortcoming. Your job is to endure the lows and optimize the highs to achieve a positive slope within the jaggedness of the messy middle — so that, on average, every low is less low than the one before it, and every subsequent high is a little higher.
About the Author
Scott Belsky is an entrepreneur, author, and investor. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Adobe, serves as a board member to several early stage companies, and is a Venture Partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He was previously the founder and CEO of Behance, a leading online platform to showcase and discover creative work. He is also the creator of 99U, Behance's think tank and annual conference devoted to execution in the creative world. Belsky is the author of Making Ideas Happen and coauthor of the 99U book series.
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STUBBORN ATTACHMENTS
If we want to continue on our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us—and in the world at large and most of all our descendants in the future. So, how do we proceed? Cowen, in a culmination of 20 years of thinking and research, provides a roadmap for moving forward. Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals argues that our reason and common sense can help free us of the faulty ideas that hold us back as people and as a society. Cowen’s latest book, at its heart, makes the contemporary moral case for economic growth and in doing so engenders a great dose of inspiration and optimism about our future possibilities.
About the Author
Tyler Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University and also Director of the Mercatus Center. He received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. He was recently named in an Economist poll as one of the most influential economists of the last decade and several years ago Bloomberg Businessweek dubbed him “America’s Hottest Economist.” Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of its “Top 100 Global Thinkers” of 2011. He also cowrites a blog called Marginal Revolution, runs a podcast series called Conversations with Tyler, and has co-founded the online economics education project, MRUniversity.com. He has published several books including the New York Times best-seller, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better, and The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.
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THE DREAM MACHINE
At a time when computers were a short step removed from mechanical data processors, Licklider was writing treatises on “human-computer symbiosis,” “computers as communication devices,” and a now not-so-unfamiliar “Intergalactic Network.” His ideas became so influential, his passion so contagious, that Waldrop coined him “computing’s Johnny Appleseed.” In a simultaneously compelling personal narrative and comprehensive historical exposition, Waldrop tells the story of the man who not only instigated the work that led to the internet, but also shifted our understanding of what computers were and could be.
About the Author
M. Mitchell Waldrop is a freelance writer and editor. He earned a PhD in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin, and a Master’s in journalism at Wisconsin. He was previously a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News and senior writer at Science, editorial page and features editor at Nature, and worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence and Complexity (Simon & Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.
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MEASURE WHAT MATTERS
General Electric, Microsoft, Google. All of these companies have championed the idea of data-driven decision making by monitoring OKR, Objectives and Key Results. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.
About the Author
John Doerr is an engineer, acclaimed venture capitalist, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He was an original investor and board member at Google and Amazon, helping to create more than half a million jobs and the world's second and third most valuable companies. He's passionate about encouraging leaders to reimagine the future, from transforming healthcare to advancing applications of machine learning. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John works with social entrepreneurs for change in public education, the climate crisis, and global poverty. John serves on the board of the Obama Foundation and ONE.org.
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THE REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC AND THE CRISIS OF AUTHORITY IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM
In the words of economist and scholar Arnold Kling, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.” Technology has categorically reversed the information balance of power between the public and the elites who manage the great hierarchical institutions of the industrial age—government, political parties, the media. The Revolt of the Public tells the story of how insurgencies, enabled by digital devices and a vast information sphere, have mobilized millions of ordinary people around the world. Originally published in 2014, this updated edition of The Revolt of the Public includes an extensive analysis of Donald Trump’s improbable rise to the presidency and the electoral triumphs of “Brexit” and concludes with a speculative look forward, pondering whether the current elite class can bring about a reformation of the democratic process, and whether new organizing principles, adapted to a digital world, can arise out of the present political turbulence.
About the Author
Martin Gurri is a geopolitical analyst and student of new media and information effects. He spent many years working in the corner of CIA dedicated to the analysis of open media. After leaving government, Gurri focused his research on the motive forces powering the transformation and has churned out countless articles, studies, and blog posts on the topic including co-authoring Our Visual Persuasion Gap (Parameters, Spring 2010). His blog, The Fifth Wave, pursues the themes first elaborated in The Revolt of the Public.
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GET TOGETHER
Although communities feel magical, they don't come together by magic. Get Together is a guide to cultivating a community—people who come together over what they care about. Whether starting a run crew, helping online streamers connect with fans, or sparking a movement of K-12 teachers, the secret to community-building is the same: don’t fixate on what you can do for people (or what they can do for you). Instead, focus on what you can do with them. In Get Together, the People & Company team provides stories, prompts, and principles for each stage of cultivating a passionate group of people. Every organization holds the potential to build and sustain a thriving community. Get Together shows readers how companies and customers, artist and fans, or organizers and advocates, can join forces to accomplish more together than they could have alone.
About the Authors
Bailey Richardson, Kevin Huynh, and Kai Elmer Sotto comprise People & Company, an agency that helps organizations build communities. They’ve supported the creation and ongoing care for communities of investors, entrepreneurs, teachers, caregivers, dog-walkers, power users, runners, surfers, and more. Bailey brings her expertise as a storyteller and researcher. She helped shape the communities around Instagram, IDEO, and Pop-Up Magazine. Kevin breathes strategy and structure. He advises groups that build empowered communities and in the past operationalized CreativeMornings, rolling out events to 100 cities. Kai focuses on how true communities fuel growth for companies. He helped pioneer Facebook’s growth discipline and launch Instagram’s business internationally.
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