BusinessWeek Best Sellers
During his 40-year career in the worlds of law, sports, business, and politics, Ron Shapiro has worked with a great variety of people. He's found that the secret for getting into the winner's circle is simply disciplined preparation.
In Dare to Prepare, successful people, such as wine guru Robert Parker, investment legend Bill Miller, pianist Leon Fleisher, Goldman Sachs partner Lisa Fontenelli, broadcaster Bob Costas, firefighter Ann Marie Tierney, New York Mets manager Willie Randolph, and many others share the way they apply discipline in preparing for career-changing games, deals, meetings, and interviews.
Cal Ripken, Jr., played thousands of games in the major leagues but prepared for each like it was his first. Here are the steps necessary for you to prepare like a champion.
Creating a World Without Poverty (Unabridged)
While free markets have brought positive change, traditional capitalism cannot solve problems of inequality and poverty because of its view of people as solely profit-driven. In fact, humans have other drives and passions, including spiritual, social, and altruistic.
Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet. Creating a World Without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus' own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in an economic and social revolution that is already underway and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.
Our Iceberg is Melting (Unabridged)
Our Iceberg is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning Eight Steps work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations.
The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. When one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home, no one listens to him. The characters in the story, Fred, Alice, Louis, Buddy, the Professor, and NoNo, are like people we recognize, even ourselves. Their tale is one of resistance to change and heroic action, seemingly intractable obstacles and the most clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles. It's a story that is occurring in different forms all around us today, but the penguins handle the very real challenges a great deal better than most of us.
If the 20th century was the American century, then the 21st century belongs to China. Now the one and only Jim Rogers shows how any investor can get in on the ground floor of "the greatest economic boom since England's Industrial Revolution". In this indispensable new book, Rogers, one of the world's most successful investors, brings his unerring investment acumen to bear on this huge and unruly land now being opened to the world and exploding in potential.
Rogers didn't just wake up a Sinophile yesterday. He has been tracking the Chinese economy since he first went to China in 1984 in preparation for his round-the-world motorcycle trip and then again when he saw Shanghai's newly reopened stock exchange. In the decades that followed, especially in recent years, with the easing of Communist Party financial dictates, the facts speak for themselves:
If you had the opportunity to work where, when, and with whom you wanted - all while getting paid very well - would you take it? Self-made multimillionaire and best-selling author Michael Masterson did, and with Ready, Fire, Aim he'll show you how to do the same.
Whether you're thinking about starting a new business or growing an existing one, Ready, Fire, Aim has what you need to succeed in your entrepreneurial endeavors. In it, Masterson shares the knowledge he has gained from creating and expanding numerous businesses and outlines a focused strategy for guiding a small business through the four stages of entrepreneurial growth. Along the way, you'll learn the skills needed to succeed in this dynamic environment. Discover how to:
Over the course of his remarkably successful career, Masterson has developed dozens of businesses, including one still growing at $300 million. Now he shows you how to outsell your competitors by implementing innovative operational procedures to reduce costs and using the power of the Internet to reduce customer complaints and increase profits.
Just as we were getting used to the Information Age, Daniel Pink tells us that it is ending. With it goes our focus on charts, statistics, and linear thinking. Traditional "left-brain" activities, like logic, analysis, and repetitive production, are being turned over to robots, computers, and offshore labor. The valued skills of the 21st Century will be those of the right brain: empathy, design, synthesis, and contextual thinking. In this live presentation, author and lecturer Daniel Pink tells you:
Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life
The host of CNBC's Mad Money presents the ultimate guide to lifetime investing for listeners of any age.
Whether you're a recent college grad trying to figure out how to start investing, a young parent struggling to decide where and how to put away money, or someone well into middle age and worried about whether you've saved enough money for retirement, Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life has the answers.
"The media's most electrifying market pundit" (USA Today), best-selling author Jim Cramer covers all the essentials: how to save, where to invest, which pitfalls to avoid. He offers valuable advice on everything from mortgages to college tuition. He explains what professional money managers do right that amateur investors do wrong. Because there is always a bull market somewhere, Cramer tells listeners where to find the bull markets of the future, and for those willing to do the homework, he chooses 20 stocks that could be long-term money-makers. For those who don't have the time or the temperament to invest in stocks, he identifies the mutual funds that are proven winners. He's investigated these mutual funds by using his own 25 years of experience managing money for himself and dozens of America's wealthiest families. Throughout, he draws on rigorous research and his own enormously successful experience to back up his advice.
Jim Cramer is America's number-one financial guru and Jim Cramer's Stay Mad for Life is the definitive money guide, full of practical, insightful, and invaluable financial advice.
Leadership and Self-Deception (Unabridged)
Most personal and organizational problems are the result of a little-known problem called "self-deception". We deceive ourselves into thinking we're doing the right thing for the right reason, but people won't follow a leader whose motives are selfish. The tricky thing is, we don't know that our motivation is flawed. Through an entertaining and highly instructive story, this audio shows what self-deception is, how people get trapped in it, how it undermines relationships and organizational achievement, and, most importantly, the surprising way to solve it.
The Arbinger Institute is a consulting firm and scholarly consortium that includes people trained in business, law, economics, philosophy, the family, education, and psychology. Arbinger has worked with leaders from such major organizations as Microsoft, 3M, Cornell University, and the U.S. Navy.
The World Is Flat (Unabridged)
With the "flattening" of the globe, has the world gotten too small and too fast for human beings and their political systems to adjust in a stable manner? Now in a third edition with a new preface, Friedman's account of the flattening of the earth is a modern classic.
Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are both concerned. Their concern is that the rich are getting richer, but America is getting poorer. The entitlement mentality is epidemic, creating people who expect their country, employer, or family to take care of them. And like the polar ice caps, the middle class is disappearing. America is becoming a two-class society, and soon you will be either rich or poor. Trump and Kiyosaki want you to be rich.
Both are successful businessmen and natural teachers who share a passion for education. They have joined forces to address these challenges, because they believe you cannot solve money problems with money - you can only solve money problems with financial education. Trump and Kiyosaki want to teach you to be rich. Why We Want You to Be Rich was written for you.
Maverick thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb had an illustrious career on Wall Street before turning his focus to his black swan theory. Not all swans are white, and not all events, no matter what the experts think, are predictable. Taleb shows that black swans, like 9/11, cannot be foreseen and have an immeasurable impact on the world.
Predictably Irrational (Unabridged)
Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin? Why does recalling the 10 Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught? Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save 25 cents on a can of soup? Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full? And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?
When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we? In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.
Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable - making us predictably irrational.
From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact with the world - one small decision at a time.
Download the accompanying reference guide.
The 4 Hour Work Week (Unabridged)
Tim Ferriss is an extraordinary young man on a mission. The 28-year-old serial vagabond and successful entrepreneur has been teaching a wildly popular course at Princeton University for the past four years: a how-to and why-to guide to throwing out the old methods for success (balancing life and work, retiring well, having a great nest egg) and replacing them with an entirely new way of living.
The 4 Hour Work Week explains what a lifestyle entrepreneur is and why you should want to become one. It teaches you how to "kill" your job and design a life, the 80/20 rule and how it increases productivity, how to replace your dreams with goals, and more. Listeners can lead a rich life by working only four hours a week, freeing up the rest of their time to spend it living the lives they want.