Heres the one-minute description of TQW: You have a Big Question of some kind. You know its a Big Question because its keeping you up at night, the outcome is important, and you dont have a ready answer. There are four stages you need to go through to answer a Big Question. I dont know where you are in the process; so let me describe the four stages. The first stage involves fully understanding your situation and your motives for wanting to resolve the question that comes from being in tha...

Written by two highly successful business coaches and management consultants, this book explains how to improve profitability by focusing on turning a business's already satisfied customers into highly satisfied customers by removing their sense of risk. The authors also provide a fail-safe method for identifying the risks inherent in your business.Every business owner or manager knows that creating satisfied customers is key to establishing customer loyalty and bu...

Competitive advantage. The value chain. Five forces. Industry structure. Differentiation. Relative cost. If you want to understand how companies achieve and sustain competitive success, Michael Porter’s frameworks are the foundation. But while everyone in business may know Porter’s name, many managers misunderstand and misuse his concepts.Understanding Michael Porter sets the record straight, providing the first concise, accessible summary of Porter’s revolutionar...

Have you ever wondered what makes your favorite nonfiction books so compelling, understandable, or enjoyable to read? Those works connect with you, as a reader.When you recognize what's happening, you can apply those same methods to your own writing.Writing To Be Understood is the thinking writer's guide to effective nonfiction writing techniques, such as:Using analogies to illustrate unseen conceptsAppealing to the reader's innate curiosity...

The classic bestseller outlining tactics for any business striving to achieve market dominanceWhat does your company do better than anyone else? What unique value do you provide to your customers? How will you increase that value next year? Drawing on in-depth studies and interviews with the top CEOs in the country, renowned business strategists Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema reveal that successful companies do not attempt to be everything to everyone. Instead, t...

How Successful Career Changers Turn Fantasy into RealityWhether as a daydream or a spoken desire, nearly all of us have entertained the notion of reinventing ourselves. Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model ...

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship.In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a dama...

Dialogue provides practical guidelines for one of the essential elements of true partnership--learning how to talk together in honest and effective ways. Reveals how problems between managers and employees, and between companies or divisions within a larger corporation, stem from an inability to conduct a successful dialogue.

A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder's online tutoring sessions with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon. Today millions of students, parents, and teachers use the Khan Academy's free videos and software, which have expanded to encompass nearly every conceivable subject; and Academy techniques are being employed with exciting results in a...

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate readers in one of the hottest trends in business: "design thinking," or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Liedtka and Ogilvie cover the mind-set, techniques, and vocabulary of design thinking, unpack the mysterious connection between design and growth, and teach managers in a straightforward way how to exploit design's exciting potential.Exemplified by Apple and the success of its elega...

Be a Network Marketing Superstar provides a proven 26-step program designed to help business leaders quickly become stars in this fast-growing and profitable industry.As far as career opportunities go, network marketing is hard to beat. It costs almost nothing to start, allows for flexible hours, and paves the way for financial independence. Network marketing -- also known as direct selling and multi-level marketing -- has turned millions of people into su...

Stories have tremendous power. They can persuade, promote empathy, and provoke action. Better than any other communication tool, stories explain who you are, what you want...and why it matters. In presentations, department meetings, over lunch-any place you make a case for new customers, more business, or your next big idea-you'll have greater impact if you have a compelling story to relate. Whoever Tells the Best Story Wins will teach you to narrate personal experiences as well as borrowe...