Leadership Research

The best companies in the world discover what their customers desire - and then deliver it in memorable and deeply human experiences. How well do you know your customers? What Customers Crave examines how the hyper-connected economy is radically changing consumer expectations, and reveals what companies need to do to stay on top. The solution rests on two simple questions: What do your customers love? What do they hate? Find the answers, and you're well on your way to success

With so many choices available to them today's customers are smarter and more demanding than ever before, putting repeat business at risk. In order to keep them coming back, you can't just give them good, or even great, customer service...you have to knock their socks off!

The most important document for any business is the business plan. It is the strategy for bringing your product or service to the market. So, your business plan outlines what you see as an opportunity and how you plan to take advantage of that opportunity. The best business plans are concise, clear, and easy to understand. If a business plan is too complicated, it will not be taken seriously. If it is too simple, it will not be helpful. This is a step-by-step guide on how to write a simple and successful business plan.

The Buyer-Centric Operating System isn't just another business book—it's a wake-up call for leaders who want to revolutionize their growth strategy by placing their buyers at the core of every decision. Forget outdated personas, funnel thinking, and superficial metrics. Andy Halko challenges traditional business frameworks, offering a radical approach to truly understanding, aligning with, and delighting your buyer. Through sharp insights, practical frameworks, and relatable experiences, this book walks you through transforming your organization into one that thrives on customer obsession.

It's Monday. Time to hit the pause button on your personality and get ready for the next meeting because, for the next five days, we'll be speaking the language of business. And, from bloated jargon and monotonous memos to syrupy slogans and deadly dull presentations, the official language of business is bull. The second we get to work, we join the masses who trade the wit and warmth of their voices for a corporate stamp of approval and the comfort of conformity.

Series editor Andrew Leckey and guest editor Marshall Loeb have scoured the print media, consulted with the editors of major business and general interest publications, and surveyed journalism school deans in order to find the thirty best business stories from the past 12 months. Among those selected: Ken Auletta on Herb Allen's CEO retreat, from The New Yorker; Diane Brady on Martha Stewart, from Business Week; Steve Silberman on creating a borderless global cyber-marketplace, from Wired; and many others.

For the last several years Adm. James Stavridis and his co-author, R. Manning Ancell, have surveyed over 200 active and retired four-star military officers about their reading habits and favorite books, asking each for a list of titles that strongly influenced their leadership skills and provided them with special insights that helped propel them to success in spite of the many demanding challenges they faced. The Leader's Bookshelf synthesizes their responses to identify the top 50 books that can help virtually anyone become a better leader.

Do you want to know exactly how to get the upper hand in conversations, debates, and negotiations? Do you desire the ability to persuade individuals as well as audiences? Persuasion often gets a bad rap; naysayers call it manipulative. However, persuasion is all around us. You are affected by it every day. Simple choices like the colors of a company logo influence the way you think. You may already practice persuasion without even realizing it.

Book coach Cathy Fyock doesn’t tell you how to create a Blog2Book - she shows you! If you’ve been writing weekly blog posts for a year, you likely have enough content for your own book. In this easy format, Cathy provides you a framework along with tips and tools to create your own book quickly!

Disruption - the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts - drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware. Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs.

In Demand, Adrian Slywotzky provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications - not just for people in business but also for social activists, government leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators. To succeed in their various missions, all these groups need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why “very good” does not equal “magnetic”....

CEO and founder of Moves the Needle and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur Brant Cooper teaches leaders how to ensure their organizations are resilient, agile, and dynamic enough to endure long-term, weathering the storms of disruption and uncertainty. One thing in life...

An organization's future success depends on their decision makers' ability to anticipate changes and disruptions in the marketplace. This book provides the information you need to anticipate the future, understand tomorrow's market dynamics, and make the necessary decisions to meet the future on your terms. Small Data, Big Disruptions lets you exploit the period between the moment you could know about emerging disruptions and the moment most everybody will know about it. It's the difference between being ahead of the curve and struggling to catch up.

The Bible is rich with leadership gold. But we haven't mined it for all it's worth. Leaders know a lot about the Bible and a lot about leadership — separately. We haven't yet explored the depths of the Bible as a primary source for leadership insight. This book aims to change that.

Finally, a paradigm on leadership, transforming colleges, teaching, teams, business, sports and organizations based on research from the very best leaders and their qualities of momentum and focus as demonstrated from the research rather than whims, opinions, or influencers. Talent alone does not win championships but the research in this work shows thoughts, words, actions, habits and unified momentum does. Key leaders in the research include Jesus of Nazareth and John Wooden of UCLA.

Von den einen geliebt, von den anderen gehasst - doch wie schafft man es, so erfolgreich wie Amazon zu sein? Kindle, Prime, Alexa - Amazon hat die Wirtschaftswelt wie kein zweites Unternehmen verändert. Wie ist es dem Netzgiganten gelungen, sich derart auf die Bedürfnisse seiner Kunden einzustellen, um alle anderen Konkurrenten zu überholen? Welche wesentlichen Bausteine der Unternehmenskultur führten zu diesem Erfolg, und was sind die 14 Leadership-Prinzipien von Amazon?

The Review Cycle is a disruptive new consumer behavior model developed by social innovator, Matt R. Vance. This four-phase model illustrates the cyclical consumer decision-making process, informed by online reviews. Such decisions include everything from what we buy and where we eat to what doctor we use and where we apply for jobs.

You negotiate every day in everything you do: vacation time, work duties, even child care. Yet you probably have never had a course in how to negotiate effectively. Often, we are afraid of negotiating because we think it will strain or kill relationships. But negotiation doesn’t have to be a win-loss game. You can strike a deal good for everyone. The skill lies in negotiating in a way that relationships can be built, developed and maintained. This is the first book ever written on how to combine negotiation with psychology to get the outcome you want.

For many companies, large and small, customer data is a noisy mess. There are problems across the ecosystem from partners to page views and from KPIs to campaign tracking. But the biggest problem is not the technical data silos but the human ones. In The Age of Customer Equity, marketing expert with a passion for analytics Allison Hartsoe helps you cut through the noise and gives you the tools you need to humanize your customer data to connect to the right customers at the right time.

YouthNation is an indispensable brand road map to the youth-driven economy. Exploring the idea that youth is no longer an age - it's a commodity that's available to everyone - this book shows what it takes to stay connected, agile, authentic, and relevant in today's marketplace. Listeners will learn the ins and outs of the new consumer and the tools, methods, and techniques that ensure brand survival in the age of perpetual youth.