Meet a genuine American folk hero cut from the homespun clothof America's heartland: Sam Walton, who parlayed a single dimestore in a hardscrabble cotton town into Wal-Mart, the largestretailer in the world. The undisputed merchant king ofthe late twentieth century, Sam never lost the commontouch. Here, finally, inimitablewords. Genuinely modest, but always sure if hisambitions and achievements. Sam shares his thinking in acandid, straight-from-the-shoulder style. In a story rich with anecdotes and the "rules of the road" of bothMain Street and Wall Street, Sam Walton chronicles the inspiration,heart, and optimism that propelled him to lasso the AmericanDream.

The path to your professional success starts with a criticallook in the mirror. If you read nothing else on managing yourself, read these 10articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Reviewarticles to select the most important ones to help you maximizeyourself. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself will inspire youto: - Stay engaged throughout your 50+-year work life - Tap into your deepest values - Solicit candid feedback - Replenish physical and mental energy - Balance work, home, community, and self - Spread positive energy throughout your organization - Rebound from tough times - Decrease distractibility and frenzy - Delegate and develop employees' initiative

Jesus Built an Inspired Team. You Can, Too. Laurie Beth Jones has given hundreds of thousands of businessreaders insight into how the ideas of Jesus can be used to enhanceperformance. In Teach Your Team to Fish , Jones focuses onone of the most critical areas for anyone in business: teamwork.Leaders today face their greatest challenges not only in definingstrategies and getting updated information but also in gettingdiverse human beings to pull together without falling apart. Jesus is a role model for team leaders everywhere. Teach YourTeam to Fish offers dozens of stories from the Bible, showinghow Jesus managed his team of disciples and other followers, withsuggestions for how to apply these lessons to real-worldteambuilding and management problems. It offers guidance andinspiration on: ? How to excite your team members in order to motivate them ? How to ground them so they’ll be realistic about what can beachieved ? How to transform them into a truly well-functioning team ? How to release them int

Business revolves around making decisions, often riskydecisions, usually with incomplete information and too often inless time than we need. Executives at every level, in everyindustry, are confronted with information overload, less leeway formistakes, and a business environment that changes rapidly. In lightof this increased pressure and volatility, the old-fashioned waysof making decisions–depending on intuition, common sense, andspecialized expertise–are simply no longer sufficient. Distillingover thirty years of groundbreaking research, WinningDecisions , written by two seasoned business advisers and worldleaders in behavioral decision studies, is a comprehensive,one-of-a-kind guide to the proven methods of making criticalbusiness decisions confidently, quickly–and correctly. Decision-making is a business skill which managers often take forgranted in themselves and others–but it's not as easy as some mightthink. The authors, whose expertise has been sought out by over ahundred companies, includi

THE REMARKABLE AND INSPIRING TRUE STORY OF ONE GUY WHOTRANSFORMED HIS UNCERTAINTY ABOUT THE FUTURE INTO ACTION A year and a half after he graduated from college, Sean Aikenfound himself struggling to answer the question “What should I dowith my life?” His mother suggested teaching. His older sister toldhim to apply for an entry-level corporate position. His fathersaid, “It doesn’t matter what you do, just make sure it’s somethingyou’re passionate about.” Taking his father’s advice to heart, Seancreated the One-Week Job Project and launched himself on an epicjourney to find his passion. His goal: to work fifty-two jobs infifty-two weeks. After the launch of his website, oneweekjob.com, the offers beganpouring in. Sean’s first gig was—literally—jumping off a bridge, asa bungee operator in British Columbia. From there he traveledacross Canada and the United States, reinventing himself as afirefighter, an aquarium host, a radio DJ, a martial artsinstructor, an NHL mascot,

A revolutionary guide to earning power and personal budgetingshows readers how to spend wisely, streamline their finances, anddevelop a budget that puts their money where they want it to go.Reprint.

How anyone can be more effective with less effort by learninghow to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle--the well-known,unpublicized secret that 80 percent of all our results in businessand in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts. The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highlyeffective people and organizations. Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers accountfor 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accountsfor 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle showshow we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, andresources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has longinfluenced today's business world, author Richard Koch reveals howthe principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic andpractical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve ourcareers and our companies. The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 princip

Do you think it's possible to truly enjoy your job? No matterwhat it is or where you are? Timothy Gallwey does, and in thisgroundbreaking book he tells you how to overcome the innerobstacles that sabotage your efforts to be your best on thejob. Timothy Gallwey burst upon the scene twenty years ago with hisrevolutionary approach to excellence in sports. His bestsellingbooks The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game ofGolf , with over one million copies in print, changed the way wethink about learning and coaching. But the Inner Game that Gallweydiscovered on the tennis court is about more than learning a betterbackhand; it is about learning how to learn, a critical skill that,in this case, separates the productive, satisfied employee from therest of the pack. For the past twenty years Gallwey has taken hisInner Game expertise to many of America's top companies, includingAT T, Coca-Cola, Apple, and IBM, to teach their managers andemployees how to gain better access to their own internalresourc

In Seduced by Success, Robert J. Herbold, the former Chief Operating Officer of Microsoft, shows you how to avoid the nine traps of success-the “legacy practices” that almost felled such giants as General Motors, Kodak and Sony. Herbold, a 26-year-veteran of Procter & Gamble who lived through each trap, gives you proven tactics for preventing arrogance, bloat, and neglect while capitalizing on your accomplishments, sustaining your momentum, and retaining your position in the marketplace. The nine traps every successful organization must avoid are Neglect: Sticking with Yesterday's Business Model Pride: Allowing Your Products to Become Outdated Boredom: Clinging to Your Once-Successful Branding Complexity: Ignoring Your Business Processes Bloat: Rationalizing Your Loss of Speed and Agility Mediocrity: Letting Your Star Employees Languish Lethargy: Getting Lulled into a Culture of Comfort Timidity: Not Confronting Turf Wars and Obstructionists

The Remarkable discoveries about what drives and sustainssuccessful women leaders. Based on five years of proprietary research, How Remarkable WomenLead speaks to you as no other book has, with its hopeful outlookand unique ideas about success. It's the new "right stuff" ofleadership, raising provocative issues such as whether feminineleadership traits (for women and men) are better suited for ourfast-changing, hyper-competitive, and increasingly complexworld. The authors, McKinsey Company consultants Joanna Barsh andSusie Cranston, establish the links between joy, happiness, anddistinctive performance with the groundbreaking model of CenteredLeadership. The book's personal stories and related insights show you themagic that happens when you put the five elements of CenteredLeadership–meaning, framing, connecting, engaging, andenergizing–to work. They include: How Alondra de la Parra built on her strengths and passions toinfuse her life with meaning and make her way in the

Combining fascinating research with revealing commentary fromhundreds of women, this groundbreaking book explores the personaland societal reasons women seldom ask for what they need, want, anddeserve at home and at work–and shows how they can develop thiscrucial skill. By neglecting to negotiate her starting salary for her first job,a woman may sacrifice over half a million dollars in earnings bythe end of her career. Yet, as research reveals, men are four timesmore likely to ask for higher pay than are women with the samequalifications. From career promotions to help with child care,studies show time and again that women don’t ask–and frequentlydon’t even realize that they can. Women Don’t Ask offers real-lifeexamples of the differences between the negotiating habits of menand women, and guides women in retooling their attitudes andapproaches. Discover how to: ? Take the first step–choosing to negotiate at all ? Develop a comfortable, effective negotiation st

Using a straightforward rational-choice approach, ProfessorRamseyerexplores the impact that law had on various markets inJapanese historyand the effect that those markets had on economicgrowth. In doing so,he applies an economic logic to markets in adifferent world in a differenthistorical period with a differentpolitical regime and a different legalsystem. He looks hardest atthose markets that have most often strucktraditional observers as"exploitative" (e.g., the markets for indenturedservants and forsexual services). Within those markets, he focuses on thewayparticipants handled informational asymmetries in thecontractingprocess. Ramseyer finds that Japanese courts generally definedimportant prop-erty rights clearly, and that Japanese marketsgenerally protected an indi-vidual's control over his or her ownlabor. As a result, that the Japaneseeconomy grew at relativelyefficient levels follows directly from standardeconomic theory. Healso concludes that the legal system usually pro-moted mutuallyadva

Spain. A land of eternal passion and unceasing bloodshed. Fromthe vengeance of a pitiless tyrant, four women flee the sacred,once-safe walls of a convent: LUCIA, the proud survivor harboring amurderous secret from the savage clan wars of Sicily...GRACIELLA,the beauty still unpurged of guilt from one reckless, youthfulsin...MEGAN, the orphan seeking perilous refuge in the arms of adefiant Basque rebel...and TERESA, the believer haunted by a faiththat mocks her with silence. Leaving innocence but not hope behind,they venture into an alien, dazzling world, where each willencounter an unexpected destiny -- and the truth about herself.

"This is not another 'how to start your own business' book,but rather one man's struggle to find meaning and fulfillment inwork, latching onto elephants when needed, but mostly flying solowithout a net." -Booklist Social philosopher and international business guru, CharlesHandy provides a firsthand account of how we got here and where weare headed. Handy takes us on his life's journey, looking back tosuch topics as his childhood and education and how they prepared(or, rather, did not prepare) him for a career in business; thechanging nature of organizational life within the context of theold economy and the new; the great variety of capitalism around theworld; and, through it all, his struggle to find meaning andfulfillment in work. This book is both a poignant personal memoirand a deep reflection on the past and future of world capitalism,with all its possibilities and pitfalls.

The authors present important research showing thatcorporatist institutions generate smaller non-competitive wagedifferentials than a decentralized system. A theoreticalexplanation is developed based on the hold-up problem ininvestments, arguing that corporatist institutions solve theproblem by specifying ex ante nominal contracts that remove thenecessity of ex post bargaining over the surplus of an employmentrelationship. The authors also argue that such institutions allowsufficient flexibility to accommodate aggregate shocks, even moreso than decentralized systems. Corporatism or Competition? is thefirst book to bring together the mass of research on comparativewage differences, wage movements and employment behaviour indifferent countries with different institutional frameworks, in anorganized and coherent fashion.

Creative folks often know all too well that the muse doesn’talways strike when you want it to, or when the deadline for yournext brilliant project is creeping up on you like an ill-fittingturtleneck. Originality doesn’t follow a time clock, even when youhave to. While conventional time management books offer tons ofinstruction for using time wisely, they are traditionally organizedin a linear fashion, which just isn’t helpful for the right-brainmind. In Time Management for the Creative Person , creativityguru Lee Silber offers real advice for using the strengths ofartistic folks—like originality and resourcefulness—to adoptinnovative time-saving solutions, such as: * Learning to say no when your plate is just too full * How to know when a good job, not a great one, is goodenough * Making “to do” lists that include fun stuff, too—that way youwon’t feel overwhelmed by work * Time-saving techniques around the house that give you more timeto get your work done and more time to spend with your

From the man the Wall Street Journal hailed as "theguru of Revenue Management" comes revolutionary ways to recoverfrom the after effects of downsizing and refocus your business ongrowth. Whatever happened to growth? In Revenue Management, RobertG. Cross answers this question with his ground-breaking approach torevitalizing businesses: focusing on the revenue side of the ledgerinstead of the cost side. The antithesis of slash-and-burn methodsthat left companies with empty profits and dissatisfiedstockholders, Revenue Management overturns conventionalthinking on marketing strategies and offers the key to initiatingand sustaining growth. Using case studies from a variety of industries, smallbusinesses, and nonprofit organizations, Cross describes no-tech,low-tech, and high-tech methods that managers can use to increaserevenue without increasing products or promotions; predict consumerbehavior; tap into new markets; and deliver products and servicesto customers effectively and efficiently

Book De*ion In his phenomenal bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, DanielGoleman mapped the territory where IQ meets EQ, where we apply whatwe know to how we live. Spending over a year on the New York Timesbestseller list, Emotional Intelligence provided the evidence forwhat many successful people already knew: being smart isn't just amatter of mastering facts; it's a matter of mastering your ownemotions and understanding the emotions of the people aroundyou.Now, in Working With Emotional Intelligence, Goleman shows whyemotional intelligence has become the new yardstick for success forCEOs and junior hires alike. Drawing on both unparalleled access tobusiness leaders and in-depth research, he documents that starperformance in every field depends more on emotional intelligencethan IQ or technical skills. And the impact of emotionalintelligence is even greater at the top of the leadershippyramid.Goleman vividly shows how self-awareness, motivation,influence, conflict management, and team-building pl

Adam Smith's masterpiece, first published in 1776, is thefoundation of modern economic thought and remains the single mostimportant account of the rise of, and the principles behind, moderncapitalism. Written in clear and incisive prose, The Wealth ofNations articulates the concepts indispensable to an understandingof contemporary society; and Robert Reich's new Introduction forthis edition both clarifies Smith's analyses and illuminates hisoverall relevance to the world in which we live. As Reich writes,"Smith's mind ranged over issues as fresh and topical today as theywere in the late eighteenth century--jobs, wages, politics,government, trade, education, business, and ethics." "From theTrade Paperback edition."

Mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and celebrated businessleaders Don Hutson and Ethan Willis present an inspiring story thatreveals the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur. In THE ONE MINUTE ENTREPRENEUR, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the #1bestselling business classic The One Minute Manager), Don Hutson,CEO of U.S. Learning, and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning,tell the inspiring story of one man’s challenges in creating hisown business. Through a powerful and engaging narrative, weconfront many of the typical problems all entrepreneurs face instarting up their business, from finding new sources of revenue tosecuring the commitment of their people and the loyalty of theircustomers. More important, we learn the secrets to becoming asuccessful entrepreneur, including how to build a firm foundation,how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendaryservice. In addition, the book offers invaluable advice, deliveredthrough One Minute Insights, from such entrepreneurs and t

When you start a new job, you are in a “temporary state ofincompetence,” faced with having to do the most when you know theleast. Tom Neff and Jim Citrin, two of the world’s experts onleadership and career achievement, know what it takes to succeed ina new position. Through compelling, first-hand stories, from CEOslike Jeffrey Immelt of GE and Bob Eckert of Mattel, You’re inCharge—Now What? offers an eight-point plan to show you how tolay the groundwork for long-term momentum and greatperformance.

Meet John and Peter, two young business school graduates aboutto become frustrated foot soldiers for the world of high finance.20 hour days, inflated salaries, senseless prospects, outlandishcharacters and strip club lap dances make escaping with theirsanity sound like the best deal of all.