Most Recent Articles
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Blog / News & Opinion
Situations Matter
By 800-CEO-READ
Sam Sommers', Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World is one of those great books that make you look at completely normal situations in a whole new way. From assumptions to knee-jerk reactions to decision making, Sommers tells us some interesting stories and evidence that the outcomes of situations could be much more positive if we understood that each one matters. How does this translate to work and business?
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
Pow Wow 2011
By 800-CEO-READ
A few of us just returned from this year's Author Pow Wow in Austin, TX at The Driskill. As for me, I'm exhausted, but also refreshed with a sense of perspective. In support of my previous post, I do feel empowered, and I know others that attended do as well.
Categories: news-opinion, publishing-industry
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Masters of Management
By 800-CEO-READ
Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—For Better and for Worse by Adrian Wooldridge, HarperBusiness, 464 pages, $29. 99, Hardcover, November 2011, ISBN 9780061771132 Just from the title alone, you can tell that Masters of Management is a bit softer in tone than the book it revised and updated—a classic, The Witch Doctors by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, released in 1996. Micklethwait, now the editor-in-chief at The Economist, bowed out of this updated version, but Wooldridge carries the torch forward to cover the rise of the Internet, globalization, the explosion in entrepreneurship, and the ever-expanding field of management and leadership literature.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Screw Business as Usual
By 800-CEO-READ
Screw Business as Usual by Richard Branson, Portfolio, 384 pages, $26. 95, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9781591844341 By the time you get to page four of Richard Branson’s Screw Business as Usual, you will have already been treated to stories of Kate Winslett saving his mother from his burning home on Necker Island—literally carrying her soot-faced down the stairs as the fire rages behind them—and discussing the state of the world over dinner with the Queen and Barack Obama at Buckingham Palace. (And, to apologize for name-dropping, he shares a joke told to him by Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / Jack Covert Selects
Jack Covert Selects - Situations Matter
By 800-CEO-READ
Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers, Riverhead, 304 pages, $25. 95, Hardcover, December 2011, ISBN 9781594488184 It is raining out, and you are in a rush. You back into the only open parallel parking space you can find on your third trip around the block.
Categories: jack-covert-selects
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Blog / News & Opinion
Find Your Next
By 800-CEO-READ
Andrea Kates has just released a new book, Find Your Next: Using the Business Genome Process to Find Your Company’s Next Competitive Edge, that reveals the keys to a revolutionary model of business innovation which has the capacity to change business as we know it. If you’re a manager, executive, or entrepreneur, you understand that your business is unique, with its own challenges and rewards. By using the new science of the Business Genome® process, you’ll discover what works and what doesn’t for your business’s genomic type.
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / News & Opinion
ChangeThis: Issue 89
By 800-CEO-READ
The Promise of Entrepreneurship by Adelaide Lancaster “We are made to believe that when it comes to business success, bigger is always better. In our super-sized, consumption-oriented culture, not even small business is exempt from the pressure to grow for growth’s sake. .
Categories: news-opinion
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Blog / ChangeThis
Putting a Signature on Customer Experience
By Michael T. Kanazawa
"To reach it's full impact, customer experience needs to be thought of as a strategic agenda item on par with and actually integrated with corporate strategy, managing the brand, and new product development. Customer experience should not be confused with existing efforts to focus on customer service or touch-point management. These efforts are focused more on delivering tactical reengineering of customer-facing processes. As a customer experience leader, you want customers to talk with everyone they know (and don't know) about your company, employees to live and exude the best qualities of the brand on and off the job, and to be rewarded as a market leader. If you share that vision for your customer experience efforts, here are some strategic tools and ideas to help you do that."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
The Business Genome Approach: Finding Your Next Competitive Advantage
By Andrea Kates
"You have the wrong tools. And you use them the wrong way. It isn't your fault. You were taught, as we all were, to make forecast models out of past results. You were taught to look in the rear-view mirror. You were also taught to look straight ahead of you. If that competitor was in your line of sight, you had their number. That's how you knew you were staying ahead. They were good people that taught you these skills, great professors of the craft in business school, veteran managers and executives in your first, third, and twentieth job. But that was a different time. That was when we could see the future by looking back. Somehow, it made sense back then. But, now, the rules have changed: our game plans have gone public, and whoever knows what the customer will do next wins."
Categories: changethis
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Blog / ChangeThis
Does Your Customer Really Need You? Lessons from Zappos
By Joseph Michelli
"For those of you not familiar with Zappos, the company is an online retailer who defied the odds and built an Internet empire, initially as a virtual shoe store and now expanding its inventory well beyond shoes alone. Zappos has always charged top dollar for its products and has succeeded primarily because the leadership innovated an experience that consistently exceeds the expectations of customers, vendors, and people who simply encounter the brand. ... Unlike other failed online vendors from the "dot gone" bust, Zappos invested in both the delivery infrastructure and the corporate culture necessary to produce customer evangelists. To help you appreciate how Zappos might serve as a provocative benchmark for your customer experience, let me give you a few highlights from the 5 principles outlined in The Zappos Experience"
Categories: changethis
