How do you gain influence for an idea?In Breaking Out, idea developer and adviser John Butman shows how the methods of today’s most popular idea entrepreneurs”-including dog psychologist Cesar Millan, French lifestyle guru Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat), TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and many others-can help you take an idea public and build influence for it.It isn’t easy. Butman argues that the rise of the ideaplex” (TED,...

Townie takes place in Oldon, Massachusetts, a burgeoning New England village that has become the favored residence of the mega-rich, a town whose historic past has been preserved and polished until it gleams with the arrogant intensity of a Colonial theme park.Alan Lowe inhabits a different Oldon, however, a town that he loved as a boy for the “power and rightness of its countryside.” Now, in early middle age, he finds himself living on the margins of the changing town, in...

In Breaking Out, idea developer and adviser John Butman shows how the methods of today’s most popular “idea entrepreneurs”—including dog psychologist Cesar Millan, French lifestyle guru Mireille Guiliano (French Women Don’t Get Fat), TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie, and many others—can help you take an idea public and build influence for it.It isn’t easy. Butman argues that the rise of the “ideaplex” (TED, Twitter, NPR, YouTube, online learning, and all the rest) has caused such an exp...

Trading up isn't just for the wealthy anymore. These days no one is shocked when an administrative assistant buys silk pajamas at Victoria's Secret. Or a young professional buys only Kendall-Jackson premium wines. Or a construction worker splurges on a $3,000 set of Callaway golf clubs.In dozens of categories, these new luxury brands now sell at huge premiums over conventional goods, and in much larger volumes than traditional old luxury goods. Trading Up has become the de...

The essential follow-up to the BusinessWeek bestseller Trading UpA BMW in a Costco parking lot? A working class family with a 50-inch plasma TV? What's going on in the mind of the new consumer?Today's consumers can seem impossible to understand, and even harder to please. For instance, the average mall shopper will spend about $100, then leave when she hits that limit. She'll probably buy shoes rather than clothing, because she doesn't wan...

Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive.Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth centu...

In Women Want More, Michael Silverstein and Kate Sayre, two of the world’s leading authorities on the retail business, argue that women are the key to fixing the economy. Based on a groundbreaking study and offering tremendous insight into the purchasing habits and power of women, Women Want More doesn’t just offer a glimpse into consumer behavior; it reveals what consumer behavior says about human psychology and desire.

Haven't women gotten everything they want? Economic power? Social influence? Business clout?Yes, but it turns out that these fantastic gains have come at a heavy price, as consumer goods experts Michael J. Silverstein and Kate Sayre discovered in an unprecedented study of 12,000 women in forty countries.That relentless upward climb has left women feeling stressed out, time starved, and overburdened. As a result, they look to products and services ...

Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive.Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth centu...

Great companies stumble and fall when they lose it. Highfliers crash when a competitor notices they don't have it. Start-ups shut down if they can't develop it. "It" is a strategy so powerful and an execution-driven mindset so relentless that companies use it to gain more than just competitive advantage--they achieve an industry dominance that is virtually unassailable and that competitors often try to explain away as unfair. In their "hardball manifesto," authors George Stalk and Rob Lach...

A BMW in a Costco parking lot?A working-class family with a 50-inch plasma TV?What’s going on in the mind of the new consumer?TREASURE HUNT takes us into the homes of real people making real decisions, and into the CEO's offices of innovative companies finding new ways to accommodate them. Written with the same flair, empathy, and intelligence that made Trading Up an instant classic, this is an essential guide to the moods and habits of the constantly chang...

It's easy to miss many innovations in strategy until they appear on the front page of a major business publication. But by then everyone--including all your competitors--is using them.As a CEO or senior executive, your job is to detect these strategies?and implement them--before your competitors.That's where this book comes in.Author George Stalk has often been called a guru of business strategy. In the 1980s, before anyone else saw its importance, he and his collea...