Rocket tells the story of how sixteen remarkable business leaders created great brands. Leslie Wexner tells you how he turned a two-store chain into a $6.5 billion worldwide brand called Victoria Secret, and Howard Schultz shares how he took his passion for a little coffee shop in Seattle and grew it into a 22,000-store chain, just to name two. Every story is connected to a “how-to” lesson, and by the end, you’ll have what you need to turn your best customers into apostles, cravers, and brand ambassadors. A must-have guide for everyone who wants to grow their business faster than a competitor, this authentic, vibrant, and engaging book brings you the latest practical techniques for knowing your customers’ desires and behaviors in order to deliver intimately rewarding experiences every time they shop—including knowing what they need before they do. Included is a “self critique” to identify where you are currently before you transform your career and company by mastering how to: • Create a demand-space map and predict how big a share of a demand space you can win with the proper mix of emotional and functional benefits satisfying the attributes of that space • Determine a strategic direction for where to place investment bets, identify which brands are best suited to win, and which are most responsive to investment • Deliver all the core benefits of a particular demand space in your product—from packaging, shelving, pricing, and promotion to message development, store operations, delivery, and employee engagement • Maintain a long-term vision to continuously quantify and modify for ongoing improvement, while using your successes to convert more champions along the way With Rocket, you can rise into a cycle of renewal, energy, and power that can launch startups to phenomenal success and turn around the fate of multinational corporations.

This textbook offers a personal perspective on the broad and complex topic of corporate strategy. The book is structured to follow the journey of systematic corporate strategy development and implementation. “Corporate Strategy” presents frameworks and concepts for strategy development that have proven to be useful in corporate practice. The book covers the fundamental questions of daily strategy work and illustrates them with examples from real companies. It addresses all key elements of corporate strategy in a clear and systematic way: • Corporate ambition and capabilities • Corporate portfolio analysis • Corporate growth and portfolio strategy • Managing and transforming the corporate profile • Corporate parenting strategy and organization • Corporate financial strategy • Corporate strategy process The book serves not only as a practice-oriented textbook for students and teachers of corporate strategy, it also functions as a sophisticated handbook for practitioners who are responsible for developing and implementing effective corporate strategies.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING BOOKS OF 2018 BY INC. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST STARTUP BOOKS OF ALL TIME BY BOOKAUTHORITY The Messy Middle is the indispensable guide to navigating the volatility of new ventures and leading bold creative projects by Scott Belsky, bestselling author, entrepreneur, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, and product advisor to many of today's top start-ups. Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.

Rocket tells the story of how sixteen remarkable business leaders created great brands. Leslie Wexner tells you how he turned a two-store chain into a $6.5 billion worldwide brand called Victoria Secret, and Howard Schultz shares how he took his passion for a little coffee shop in Seattle and grew it into a 22,000-store chain, just to name two. Every story is connected to a “how-to” lesson, and by the end, you’ll have what you need to turn your best customers into apostles, cravers, and brand ambassadors. A must-have guide for everyone who wants to grow their business faster than a competitor, this authentic, vibrant, and engaging book brings you the latest practical techniques for knowing your customers’ desires and behaviors in order to deliver intimately rewarding experiences every time they shop—including knowing what they need before they do. Included is a “self critique” to identify where you are currently before you transform your career and company by mastering how to: • Create a demand-space map and predict how big a share of a demand space you can win with the proper mix of emotional and functional benefits satisfying the attributes of that space • Determine a strategic direction for where to place investment bets, identify which brands are best suited to win, and which are most responsive to investment • Deliver all the core benefits of a particular demand space in your product—from packaging, shelving, pricing, and promotion to message development, store operations, delivery, and employee engagement • Maintain a long-term vision to continuously quantify and modify for ongoing improvement, while using your successes to convert more champions along the way With Rocket, you can rise into a cycle of renewal, energy, and power that can launch startups to phenomenal success and turn around the fate of multinational corporations.

40 leading venture capitalists come together to teach entrepreneurs how to succeed with their startup The Entrepreneurial Bible to Venture Capital is packed with invaluable advice about how to raise angel and venture capital funding, how to build value in a startup, and how to exit a company with maximum value for both founders and investors. It guides entrepreneurs through every step in an entrepreneurial venture from the legalities of raising initial capital to knowing when to change tactics. Andrew Romans is the co-founder and general partner of Rubicon Venture Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in privately held technology companies and enables its investors to co-invest along side the fund on a deal-by-deal basis via innovative sidecar funds right up to IPO or M&A exit. Romans is also the founder and general partner of The Founders Club, a venture capital equity exchange fund and investor in later stage liquidity transactions.

The winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. Figuring out how to deal with today's critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it. Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change--these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there--what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable. In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

Businesses can plateau, stall, OR stagnatewithout the owners or key executives even realizing it. A business might be achieving incremental year-on-year growth and yet still be in a situation of stagnation or stall. Why? Because entrepreneurs and ...

A Detailed Roadmap for Companies at Various Stages of Development on How to Get to the Next Level. Leaders and employees of growing firms want ideas and tools they can implement immediately to improve some aspect of their business. Verne Harnish, serial entrepreneur, advisor, and venture investor, brings to business leaders the fundamentals that produce real wealth—the same habits that typified American business magnate John D. Rockefeller’s disciplined approach to business. Harnish masterfully intertwines the legendary business philosophy of Rockefeller with lessons to be learned from ten extraordinary organizations. Aiming to empower present-day business leaders, this remarkably successful book includes invaluable lessons from real-world case studies. A treasure trove of practical situations teeming with insights and actionable recommendations, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits will help you unlock the secrets to scaling up your enterprise while simultaneously sidestepping the pitfalls that plague new ventures. From seasoned industry titans to ambitious start-up founders, anyone can swiftly implement these teachings for immediate impact.

Three generations of English merchant adventurers-not the Pilgrims, as we have so long believed-were the earliest founders of America. Profit-not piety-was their primary motive. Some seventy years before the Mayflower sailed, a small group of English merchants formed "The Mysterie, Company, and Fellowship of Merchant Adventurers for the Discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and Places Unknown," the world's first joint-stock company. Back then, in the mid-sixteenth century, England was a small and relatively insignificant kingdom on the periphery of Europe, and it had begun to face a daunting array of social, commercial, and political problems. Struggling with a single export-woolen cloth-the merchants were forced to seek new markets and trading partners, especially as political discord followed the straitened circumstances in which so many English people found themselves. At first they headed east, and dreamed of Cathay-China, with its silks and exotic luxuries. Eventually, they turned west, and so began a new chapter in world history. The work of reaching the New World required the very latest in navigational science as well as an extraordinary appetite for risk. As this absorbing account shows, innovation and risk-taking were at the heart of the settlement of America, as was the profit motive. Trade and business drove English interest in America, and determined what happened once their ships reached the New World. The result of extensive archival work and a bold interpretation of the historical record, New World, Inc. draws a portrait of life in London, on the Atlantic, and across the New World that offers a fresh analysis of the founding of American history. In the tradition of the best works of history that make us reconsider the past and better understand the present, Butman and Targett examine the enterprising spirit that inspired European settlement of America and established a national culture of entrepreneurship and innovation that continues to this day.