Some leaders consistently see possibilities others miss. They learn more, learn faster, and transform their insights into breakaway strategies. They are more effective collaborators, more powerful influencers, better at handling adversity, and dramatically more successful at execution. They are the Advantage-Makers. Their winning skills are not innate: they are entirely teachable and learnable. Steven Feinberg has been teaching these skills to executives for more than twenty years: leaders who’ve gone on to transform their organizations. Now, it’s your turn. In this book, Feinberg helps you master every skill Advantage-Makers need. He doesn’t just exhort you to “think different”: he shows you how. You’ll learn how to find the “commanding vantage point” in your situation, no matter how complex or dynamic...and use your high ground to spot and maximize every opportunity. Shift the odds in your favor Change focus to discover your next breakthrough solution Drive superior outcomes despite limited resources Engage your constraints, and put them to work for you Grab hold of your hidden “levers of opportunity” Learn how to leverage timing, interaction, perception, and structure Use dissatisfaction and skepticism constructively Pinpoint the real difficulties then transform them into opportunities Avoid the “Laws of Defeat” Discover the surprising mistakes that keep leaders from succeeding

Discover the next frontier in sports training—improving your mental game, no matter your age or experience—and how to become the Playmaker, both in your professional and personal life. Coaches search for it. Parents dream of it. Fans love it. Athletes want it. The playmaker on any sports team possesses it: an elusive, intangible quality combining anticipation, perception, and decision-making skills. This quality raises their game above the competition and allows them to pass when no one else can, anticipate the movement of opponents, avoid costly mental mistakes, and ultimately, hold the team together. Now, for the first time, cognitive science research is revealing the secrets of the playmaker’s keen sense of awareness. Just as tests of speed, strength, and agility have provided a baseline of physiological biomarkers, coaches can now capture cognitive metrics including attention, pattern recognition, anticipation, and the ability to take quick, decisive action during the chaos of competition. The Playmaker’s Advantage is a groundbreaking book that will educate athletes of all ages about this essential creative capability in an accessible, easy to understand method.

Ultimately, the book reveals the complex link between government intervention and private initiative in a country struggling to create a political economy that balanced military competence with commercial needs.

Powerful ideas to transform hiring into a massive competitive advantage for your business Talent Makers: How the Best Organizations Win through Structured and Inclusive Hiring is essential reading for every leader who knows that hiring is crucial to their organization and wants to compete for top talent, diversify their organization, and build winning teams. Daniel Chait and Jon Stross, co-founders of Greenhouse Software, Inc, provide readers with a comprehensive and proven framework to improve hiring quickly, substantially, and measurably. Talent Makers will provide a step-by-step plan and actionable advice to help leaders assess their talent practice (or lack thereof) and transform hiring into a measurable competitive advantage. Readers will understand and employ: A proven system and principles for hiring used by the world's best companies Hiring practices that remove bias and result in more diverse teams An assessment of their hiring practice using the Hiring Maturity model Measurement of employee lifetime value in quantifiable terms, and how to increase that value through hiring The Talent Makers methodology is the result of the authors’ experience and the ideas and stories from their community of more than 4,000 organizations. This is the book that CEOs, hiring managers, talent practitioners, and human resources leaders must read to transform their hiring and propel their organization to new heights.

Now, for the first time ever, the time-tested, proven techniques perfected by the world-famous Dale Carnegie® sales training program are available in book form. The two crucial questions most often asked by salespeople are: "How can I close more sales?" and "What can I do to reduce objections?" The answer to both questions is the same: You learn to sell from a buyer's point of view. Global markets, increased technology, information overload, corporate mergers, and complex products and services have combined to make the buying/selling process more complicated than ever. Salespeople must understand and balance these factors to survive amid a broad spectrum of competition. Moreover, a lot of what the typical old-time salesperson did as recently as ten years ago is now done by e-commerce. The new sales professional has to capture and maintain customers by taking a consultative approach and learning to unearth the four pieces of information critical to buyers, none of which e-commerce alone can yield. The Sales Advantage will enable any salesperson to develop long-term customer relationships and help make those customers more successful—a key competitive advantage. The book includes specific advice for each stage of the eleven-stage selling process, such as: • How to find prospects from both existing and new accounts • The importance of doing research before approaching potential customers • How to determine customers' needs, such as their primary interest (what they want), buying criteria (requirements of the sale), and dominant buying motive (why they want it) • How to reach the decision makers • How to sell beyond questions of price The cutting-edge sales techniques in this book are based on interviews accumulated from the sales experiences of professionals in North America, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. This book, containing more than one hundred examples from successful salespeople representing a wide variety of products and services from around the world, provides practical advice in each chapter to turn real-world challenges into new opportunities. The Sales Advantage is a proven, logical, step-by-step guide from the most recognized name in sales training. It will create mutually beneficial results for salespeople and customers alike.

Acclaimed historian Leslie Berlin’s “deeply researched and dramatic narrative of Silicon Valley’s early years…is a meticulously told…compelling history” (The New York Times) of the men and women who chased innovation, and ended up changing the world. Troublemakers is the gripping tale of seven exceptional men and women, pioneers of Silicon Valley in the 1970s and early 1980s. Together, they worked across generations, industries, and companies to bring technology from Pentagon offices and university laboratories to the rest of us. In doing so, they changed the world. “In this vigorous account…a sturdy, skillfully constructed work” (Kirkus Reviews), historian Leslie Berlin introduces the people and stories behind the birth of the Internet and the microprocessor, as well as Apple, Atari, Genentech, Xerox PARC, ROLM, ASK, and the iconic venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In the space of only seven years, five major industries—personal computing, video games, biotechnology, modern venture capital, and advanced semiconductor logic—were born. “There is much to learn from Berlin’s account, particularly that Silicon Valley has long provided the backdrop where technology, elite education, institutional capital, and entrepreneurship collide with incredible force” (The Christian Science Monitor). Featured among well-known Silicon Valley innovators are Mike Markkula, the underappreciated chairman of Apple who owned one-third of the company; Bob Taylor, who masterminded the personal computer; software entrepreneur Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public; Bob Swanson, the cofounder of Genentech; Al Alcorn, the Atari engineer behind the first successful video game; Fawn Alvarez, who rose from the factory line to the executive suite; and Niels Reimers, the Stanford administrator who changed how university innovations reach the public. Together, these troublemakers rewrote the rules and invented the future.