Written By: Jim Collins
Jim Collins Answers the Social Sector with a Monograph to Accompany Good to Great. 30-50% of those who bought Good to Great work in the Social Sector.
- This monograph is a response to questions raised by readers in the social sector. It is not a new book.
- Jim Collins wants to avoid any confusion about the monograph being a book by limiting its distribution to online retailers.
- Based on interviews and workshops with over 100 social sector leaders.
- The difference between successful organizations is not between the business and the social sector, the difference is between good organizations and great ones.
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Written By: David Scott Duncan
A detective story for anyone looking to solve the mystery of who their customers really are, what they really want, why they leave, and how to bring them back.
Customers can be a mystery. Despite the availability of more data than ever before, everyone, from the CEO to salespeople in the field, still finds it challenging to understand who their customers really are, why they act as they do, and what they really want.
To solve this challenge, learn to think like a market detective.
David Scott Duncan shows you how in his instructive and entertaining story of Tazza, a fictional chain of cafes trying to go big time. The only problem: sales are declining, and its leaders can’t figure out why. In response, they launch an investigation led by a cast of characters including Cate Forrest, Tazza’s CEO, Alex Baker, a self-described "Market Detective," and Jordan Sims, a young computer whiz at Tazza. Together, they discover why even their most loyal customers walked out the door – and how they can get them back.
The key lesson of the Tazza story is a simple, powerful idea that upends how most businesses view their customers. Customers have "jobs to be done". They "hire" companies to solve these jobs and "fire" them when unhappy. Through vivid characters and situations that people working in any kind of organization can relate to, The Secret Lives of Customers provides an innovative path and practical tools for solving whatever market mysteries you face."
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Written By: Safi Bahcall
Why do good teams kill great ideas?
Loonshots reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs.
Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice.
Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how a new kind of science can help us become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise.
Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this new science―the science of phase transitions―to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into practical lessons creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can use to change our world.
Along the way, readers will learn how chickens saved millions of lives, what James Bond and Lipitor have in common, what the movie Imitation Game got wrong about WWII, and what really killed Pan Am, Polaroid, and the Qing Dynasty.
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Written By: Adam Grant
Discover the critical art of rethinking: how questioning your opinions can position you for publisher excellence at work and wisdom in life.
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there's another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval -and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.
Organizational psychologist Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people's minds and our own. As Wharton's top-rated professor and the bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take, he makes it one of his guiding principles to argue like he's right but listen like he's wrong. With bold ideas and rigorous evidence, he investigates how we can embrace the joy of being wrong, bring nuance to charged conversations, and build schools, workplaces, and communities of lifelong learners. You'll learn how an international debate champion wins arguments, a Black musician persuades white supremacists to abandon hate, a vaccine whisperer convinces concerned parents to immunize their children, and Adam has coaxed Yankees fans to root for the Red Sox. Think Again reveals that we don't have to believe everything we think or internalize everything we feel. It's an invitation to let go of views that are no longer serving us well and prize mental flexibility over foolish consistency. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.
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Written By: David J. Epstein
"David Epstein manages to make me thoroughly enjoy the experience of being told that everything I thought about something was wrong. I loved Range." Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author of Outliers.
Range is the ground-breaking and exhilarating New York Times bestselling exploration into how to be successful in the 21st Century, from David Epstein the acclaimed author of The Sports Gene.
What if everything you have been taught about how to succeed in life was wrong? From the '10,000 hours rule' to the power of Tiger parenting, we have been taught that success in any field requires early specialization and many hours of deliberate practice. And, worse, that if you dabble or delay, you'll never catch up with those who got a head start. This is completely wrong.
In this landmark book, David Epstein shows that the way to excel is by sampling widely, gaining a breadth of experiences, taking detours, experimenting relentlessly, juggling many interests -in other words, by developing range.
Studying the world's most successful athletes, artists, musicians, inventors, and scientists Epstein discovered that in most fields -especially those that are complex and unpredictable -generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel. They are also more creative, more agile, and able to make connections their more specialized peers can't see. Range proves that by spreading your knowledge across multiple domains is the key to success rather than deepening their knowledge in a single area.
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Written By: Anne Fadiman
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down explores the clash between a small county hospital in California and a refugee family from Laos over the care of Lia Lee, a Hmong child diagnosed with severe epilepsy.
Lia's parents and her doctors both wanted what was best for Lia, but the lack of understanding between them led to tragedy.
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Current Interest, and the Salon Book Award, Anne Fadiman's compassionate account of this cultural impasse is literary journalism at its finest.
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