What Really Works - The 4+2 Formula For Sustained Business Success

What does it require to take a concept rapidly and effectively from mind to market? The Benevolent Dictator recognizes that entrepreneurship is a gauntlet. Those who succeed are benevolent dictators—able to make the intricate process happen in days, weeks and months to win.

The Benevolent Dictator gives you no-nonsense how-to advice and examples that have worked. This non-traditional, gung-ho guide is not afraid to lay out the leadership methods that can effectively get a new business off the ground, and through the requisite fast-track growth phases that produce tangible success measured by your bottom line and your wallet.

• Learn critical specifics on how to move from idea development to build-out, through steps for continuous improvement, and on to the big cash out
• Features proven tools, strategies, and tactics that will help you bottle entrepreneurial lightning over and over again
• As the cofounder of office retail giant OfficeMax, the author turned a $3 million investment into a $1.5 billion sale in his 16 years as CEO

Thirty-nine of America's most successful business leaders share the most important decisions of their careers—and the life and career lessons they hold for us all.

When former CEO Harlan Steinbaum decided to buy back his retail drug chain with his partners, his life changed dramatically. The personal impact that this one business decision—this "tough call"—had on Steinbaum made him wonder if others had experienced similar kinds of defining moments in their own careers. To find out, he reached out to some of the most successful people in the country—leaders from companies such as Verizon, Chrysler, ESPN, Ogilvy & Mather, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, WellPoint, and Panera Bread Company—to pinpoint the career-defining decisions that were integral to their success. The result is Tough Calls from the Corner Office, a treasure trove of rich business wisdom, stories of tough decisions and hard-won victories, and lessons from a lifetime of achievement in the world of business.

Tough Calls from the Corner Office offers inspiring stories, lessons, principles, strategies, ideas, and solutions drawn from every stage in a successful career, from early key choices to the final leave-taking from the world of work. Given unprecedented access to such visionaries as Union Square Hospitality Group's Danny Meyer, ESPN's Bill Rasmussen, Build-A-Bear's Maxine Clark, and Let's Make a Deal's Monty Hall, Steinbaum shares their experiences, told in their own words, so that others may learn from them. In a time when many people are at professional crossroads, Tough Calls from the Corner Office offers inspiration and the confidence to believe that tough decisions can be the first step to extraordinary success.

ASP.NET MVC 2.0 is now available and shipping with Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4. A new update to Microsoft’s Model-View-Controller technologies, MVC 2 enables developers to build dynamic, data-driven Web sites. Professional ASP.NET MVC 2 shows you step-by-step how to use MVC 2. You’ll learn both the theory behind MVC 2, as well as walk through practical tutorials, where you’ll create a real-world application. Topics include transitioning from ASP.NET development, as well as an overview of related tools and technologies, including LINQ, jQuery, and REST.

This book is divided into two very broad sections, each comprising several chapters.

The first half of the book is concerned with introducing the MVC pattern and how ASP.NET MVC 2 implements that pattern.

Chapter 1 "NerdDinner" uses a small but complete application to walk you through how to build an ASP.NET MVC 2 application and some of the core concepts behind ASP.NET 2 MVC. 

Chapter 2 "Model-View-Controller and ASP.NET" starts off with a description of the Model-View-Controller pattern, explaining the basic concepts of the pattern and providing a bit of its history. The chapter goes on to describe the state of the MVC pattern on the web today as it is implemented by various frameworks, such as ASP.NET MVC 2.

Chapter 3 "ASP.NET > ASP.NET MVC" then covers the ways that ASP.NET MVC is different from ASP.NET Web Forms.

Chapter 4 "Routes and URLs" digs deep into routing to describe the role that URLs play in your application and how routing figures into that. It also differentiates routing from URL rewriting and covers a bit on extending routing and writing unit tests for routes.

Chapter 5 "Controllers" takes a look at controllers and controller actions-what they are, and how to write them. It also covers action results, which are returned by controller actions and what they are used for.

Chapters 6 "Views" and 7 "Ajax" cover views and view engines, and then add a little flavor on top by examining the role that AJAX plays in your views.

The second half of the book focuses entirely on advanced techniques and extending the framework.

Chapter 8 "Filters" goes into detail on action filters, which provide an extensibility point for adding cross-cutting behaviors to action methods.

Chapter 9 "Securing Your Application" covers security and good practices for building a secure application.

Chapter 10 "Test Driven Development with ASP.NET MVC" provides a brief introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD) as it applies to ASP.NET MVC.

Chapter 11 "Testable Design Patterns" shows you real-world patterns and practices for building applications that are testable.

Chapter 12 "The Best of Both Worlds: Web Forms and MVC Together" discusses how Web Forms and MVC work together.

Chapter 13 "What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2" covers what's new in MVC 2.

This book is for web developers who are looking to add more complete testing to their web sites, and who are perhaps ready for "something different."

In some places, we assume that you're somewhat familiar with ASP.NET WebForms, at least peripherally. There are a lot of ASP.NET WebForms developers out there who are interested in ASP.NET MVC so there are a number of places in this book where we contrast the two technologies. Even if you're not already an ASP.NET developer, you might still find these sections interesting for context, as well as for your own edification as ASP.NET MVC may not be the web technology that you're looking for.

"By far the best book on corporate and institutional governance." —Nicholas Katzenbach, former attorney general of the United States

Is your company run by a team with no name?

At the top of every organization chart lies a myth—that a Senior Management Team makes a company's critical decisions. The reality is that critical decisions are typically made by the boss and a small group of confidants—a "team with no name"—outside of formal processes. Meanwhile, other members of the management team wonder why they weren't in the room or even consulted ahead of time. The dysfunction that results from this gap between myth and reality has led to years of unproductive team building exercises. The problems, Frisch shows, are ones of process and structure, not psychology.

In Who's in the Room? Bob Frisch provides a unique perspective to this widely misunderstood issue. Flying in the face of decades of organizational psychology, he argues that the solution lies not in addressing behaviors, but in unseating the senior management team as the epicenter of decision making. Using a broad portfolio of teams—large and small, permanent and temporary, formal and informal—great leaders match each decision to the appropriate team in a fluid, flexible approach that you won't find described in management textbooks.

Who's in the Room? is based on interviews with CEOs at organizations ranging from MasterCard to Ticketmaster to The Red Cross.

• Understand and embrace the way decision-making actually happens in their organizations
• Use these "teams with no names" to best advantage
• Engage the Senior Management Team in the three critical tasks for which it is ideally suited 

Organizations will get better decisions and superior results by unleashing the full potential of their Senior Management Teams. And bosses will see a dramatic drop-off in people coming into their offices asking, "Why wasn't I in the room?"

Boards That Deliver gets beyond the rhetoric of corporate governance reform. It captures the tried-and-true practices used by high-performance boards. In contrast to experts who base prescriptions on number-crunching exercises, Charan identifies the real problems that drain directors' time and suppress their best judgments???and explains clearly and succinctly how boards can solve those problems. These battle-tested solutions help boards achieve what rules and regulations alone cannot???to get succession right, refine a winning strategy, and design a rational CEO compensation package.