The Talent Management Handbook: Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage by Selecting, Developing, and Promoting the Best People

Create new solutions to old problems with the power of mentoring!

Mentoring is an extraordinarily powerful way of getting top performance from every employee. It’s one of the hottest management techniques used in business today, and every manager serious about developing talented employees and implementing change in his or her organization needs to master it. Manager’s Guide to Mentoring is a detailed overview covering

• Types of mentors, from professional to corporate to informal
• Mentoring across traditional cultural and gender boundaries
• Developing a mentoring program within your organization

Manager’s Guide to Mentoring provides all the skills for using one of today’s most innovative management techniques to drive positive change in your company.

Briefcase Books, written specifically for today’s busy manager, feature eye-catching icons, checklists, and sidebars to guide managers step-by-step through everyday workplace situations. Look for these innovative design features to help you navigate through each page:

• Clear definitions of key terms, concepts, and jargon
• Tactics and strategies for mentoring
• Insider tips for creating a mentoring program
• Practical advice for mentors
• Warning signs when preparing for and undertaking a mentoring initiative
• Stories and insights from the experiences of others
• Specific mentoring procedures, tactics, and hands-on techniques

This book systematically explains how to maximize shareholder value. Columbia University's Don Sexton fully identifies the real drivers of shareholder value, unifying key concepts from marketing, branding, economics, management, finance, accounting, and statistics. Sexton introduces a powerful new metric: Customer Value Added (CVA), the difference between customer-perceived value and variable cost per unit. Next, he demonstrates CVA at work, presents research and case studies that prove its value, and shows how to use it to consistently measure, manage, and optimize profit, cash flow, and shareholder value. Readers will learn why CVA works; how to measure it; how changes in CVA correlate to changes in profits and cash flow; and how to use CVA to steer the enterprise. Along the way, Sexton illuminates CVA's key implications for managers, including why managers must focus attention simultaneously on both customers and costs, and why well-publicized "generic strategies" such as "net recommend" offer only part of the solution. Finally, drawing on his own extensive experience consulting on CVA and related issues, Sexton presents easy-to-use worksheets for translating CVA concepts into reality in your own organization.

“Definitely, a game changer! Design experience is the power shift to our era what mass marketing was to the last century.”

John Sculley  former CEO, Pepsi and Apple

“Great design is about creating a deep relationship with your customers. If you don’t, you’re roadkill. This book shows you how and much, much more. Be prepared to have your mind blown.”

Bill Burnett  Executive Director, Design Program, Stanford University

“Design is the last great differentiator, and yet so few really understand it. Do You Matter? offers a marvelous series of direct, in-your-face observations and drives home the means to an absolutely integrated design strategy.”

Ray Riley  Design GM, Entertainment and Devices, Microsoft

“This book will challenge you to ask and answer what arguably are the most important questions an executive can ponder today. So open up.” 

Noah Kerner  CEO, Noise and coauthor, Chasing Cool

More and more companies are coming to understand the competitive advantage offered by outstanding design. With this, you can create products, services, and experiences that truly matter to your customers' lives and thereby drive powerful, sustainable improvements in business performance. But delivering great designs is not easy. Many companies accomplish it once, or twice; few do it consistently. The secret: building a truly design-driven business, in which design is central to everything you do. Do You Matter? shows how to do precisely that. Legendary industrial designer Robert Brunner (who laid the groundwork for Apple's brilliant design language) and Stewart Emery (Success Built to Last) begin by making an incontrovertible case for the power of design in making emotional connections, deepening relationships, and strengthening brands. You'll learn what it really means to be "design-driven" and how that translates into action at Nike, Apple, BMW and IKEA. You'll learn design-driven techniques for managing your entire experience chain; define effective design strategies and languages; and learn how to manage design from the top, encouraging "risky" design innovations that lead to entirely new markets. The authors show how (and how not) to use research; how to extend design values into marketing, manufacturing, and beyond; and how to keep building on your progress, truly "baking" design into all your processes and culture.