Innovation Tournaments - Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities

Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.

Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term.

The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.

People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

The Web has changed the game for your customers— and, therefore, for you. Now, CustomerCentric Selling, already recognized as one of the premier methodologies for managing the buyer-seller relationship, helps you level the playing field so you can reach clients when they are ready to buy and create a superior customer experience.

Your business and its people need to be “CustomerCentric”—willing and able to identify and serve customers’ needs in a world where competition waits just a mouse-click away. Traditional wisdom has long held that selling means convincing and persuading buyers. But today’s buyers no longer want or need to be sold in traditional ways.

CustomerCentric Selling gives you mastery of the crucial eight aspects of communicating with today’s clients to achieve optimal results:

• Having conversations instead of making presentations
• Asking relevant questions instead of offering opinions
• Focusing on solutions and not only relationships
• Targeting businesspeople instead of gravitating toward users
• Relating product usage instead of relying on features
• Competing to win—not just to stay busy
• Closing on the buyer’s timeline (instead of yours)
• Empowering buyers instead of trying to “sell” them

What’s more, CustomerCentric Selling teaches and reinforces key tactics that will make the most of your organization’s resources. Perhaps you feel you don’t have the smartest internal systems in place to ensure an ideal workflow. (Perhaps, as is all too common, you lack identifiable systems almost entirely.) From the basics—and beyond—of strategic budgeting and negotiation to assessing and developing the skills of your sales force, you’ll learn how to make sure that each step your business takes is the right one.

In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.

Shed Revenue-Draining Complexity Costs by Thirty Percent!

“This is an ambitious book packed with insight and fresh thinking. Separating good from bad complexity costs is a critical task facing companies today, and the authors provide a compelling roadmap for solving the problem.”
Michael B. McCallister, President and CEO, Humana Inc.

“Waging War on Complexity Costs examines an incredibly important and often overlooked aspect of business and organizations in general—regulators and government officials should read this book and take notice. Complexity dramatically increases costs and risk of failure. It is like a cancer that eats away at efficiency and profitability.”
Andy Beal, Chairman and CEO, Beal Bank

“This is by far the best and most useful explanation of how to address complexity in a business. Waging War on Complexity Costs frames the issue in a way that companies can finally tackle the problem—this book delivers.”
Ahmad R. Chatila, CEO, MEMC Electronic Materials Inc.

“This is the first book that really targets organizational complexity in a compelling way, making this a must-read for any organization that is looking to distance itself from the competition. After years of cost-cutting, many companies are realizing that they still don’t have a discernable cost advantage. This book provides the platform to achieve just that, by attacking the complexity that bogs them down.”
Tom DiDonato, EVP Human Resources, American Eagle Outfitters, Inc.

About the Book:

Complexity costs are the single biggest determinant of your company’s cost competitiveness. For the past two decades the pursuit of growth has created massive complexity in processes, product portfolios, and organizations, adding costs that companies can ill afford. The only good news is that your competitors may be carrying as much complexity as you are. Learn how to eliminate this complexity, and you can create a tremendous cost advantage over your competition.

In Waging War on Complexity Costs, Stephen Wilson and Andrei Perumal deliver a powerful and practical approach for reclaiming your cost advantage. This executive-level resource presents a wealth of insight and new research to definitively answer key questions such as:

• How can I quantify the cost of complexity without getting lost in a sea of data?
• Where are the biggest opportunities for reducing product, process, and organizational complexity, and how can I cut through the interdependencies that trap these costs?
• How can I see results quickly by taking targeted actions against key levers?
• How do I keep complexity costs at bay?

The definitive guide to the use of mechanical ventilation in critically ill patients – now in full color and updated to reflect the latest advances

Principles & Practice of Mechanical Ventilation, 3e provides comprehensive, authoritative coverage of all the clinical, pharmacological, and technical issues surrounding the use of mechanical ventilation.

Editor Martin J. Tobin – past editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine – has enlisted more than 100 authors, all of whom are at the forefront of research in their chosen subfield in order to provide the most authoritative and up-to-date information possible. No other text so thoroughly and comprehensively explores the myriad advances in modes and methodologies that have occurred in this ever-changing field as this cornerstone text.

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