David Noonan believes it's time for a return to the time-tested maxims of yesteryear. Inside, he offers a fresh perspective on the universal truths embedded in Aesop's compact morality plays, including: Slow and steady wins the race. The overeager make bad decisions. It is wise to prepare today for the needs of tomorrow. No good deed, however small, is ever wasted. Using the experiences and writings of well-known industry and government notables, Aesop and the CEO illustrates powerful business insights-lessons of both success and failure-and draws a business moral from each. The world of business has changed enormously since Aesop's time, but people haven't. As the corporate culture cries out for strong, ethical leadership, this book confirms that integrity, reliability, honesty, and respect continue to be as essential to a business's long-term survival as is the bottom line. Book jacket.

It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of business books flooding the market today. Even more daunting is the task of weeding through them to find the "golden nugget" of wisdom inside. In Aesop and the CEO, David Noonan has simplified the process by providing this well-researched primer of the most essential advice from the greatest business books ever written. Further, in a clever melding of modern business sense and ancient wisdom, he has used the animal-based stories of Aesop as springboards to launch these 50 lessons. Both entertaining and informative, Aesop and the CEO includes advice from well-known leaders such as Bill Gates, Sam Walton, Donald Trump, and Lee Iacocca. The short, easy-to-read vignettes cover every aspect of corporate life: negotiations, hiring and firing, mergers and acquisitions, marketing and sales, and day-to-day management.

"Emmet Honeycut, a sniper during the Civil War, shoots a girl about to burn to death in a hotel fire. Although acquitted of murder, he becomes a pariah in town, but is reprieved by a telegram from Major Kingston, his former commander. Kingston's niece, Faith, has been abducted and he offers Emmet money to join his rescue party, which includes six other skilled men, and a beautiful woman whom Emmet comes to love. Enrique Salazar and Yago Garza are merciless cousins who control Santa Sabino and who plan to auction off young girls, including Faith, to wealthy landowners as sex slaves. When Kingston is betrayed and captured, Emmet leads the attack, kills the cousins, and frees the girls. The locals embrace him as their hero"--

What makes someone covet a Kelly bag? Why are Cirque Du Soleil or Grey Goose so successful despite breaking all the conventions of their categories? What does Gucci's approach to marketing have in common with Nespresso's? And why do some people pay a relative fortune for Renova toilet paper or Aesop detergent even though they hardly ever 'advertise' and seem to have none of the 'functional performance advantages' conventional marketers would seek to demonstrate? Prestige brand experts JP Kuehlwein and Wolfgang Schaefer have dedicated themselves to studying what drives the success of prestige brands. Rethinking Prestige Branding collects their insights. Uncovering the secrets of why and how some brands are created more equal than others, Rethinking Prestige Branding includes over 100 case studies from Apple and Abercrombie & Fitch to Tate Modern and Tesla. Rather than re-telling brand success stories or re-hashing long-standing marketing principles, it takes readers on a colourful journey behind the scenes of today's marketing pros. This book will fascinate marketing professional just as much as those who are simply curious as to how premium brands tick.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Heed Your Call is about embracing the power of and. It is for the person who has come to a place in life where toiling away at work in pursuit of the American dream just isn’t worth the punishment anymore. It is for the professional who wants to feel more connected and fulfilled, the spiritual seeker who believes gaining wealth diminishes the sacred, the innovator being stifled creatively, and the people who want to become the heroes of their own stories. This book is about following your path, creating a life of abundance and joy, and doing your part to repair the world. Through telling his own story, along with those of other modern-day entrepreneurial heroes, David M. Howitt shares the principles behind his and others’ successes in eleven real-world lessons on how we can apply sim­ple principles that help us weave business into our spiritual narratives and pour our souls into our professions. By uniting artistry and analytics and integrating intuition with intel­lect, we positively affect the way we live and the world around us. Through the activation of creative principles, living authentically, and absorbing new experiences, we evolve from the radical integration of so-called disparate worlds. We birth a new reality and build a road map for our future.

Don't let the customer get between you and building a strong valued brand If you want to stand out from the crowd, develop a clear and consistent brand voice, and ultimately build a fruitful business – listen to your brand. Stop Listening to the Customer offers insights into how consumers are driving homogeneity in brands and shares the proven strategies you can implement to amplify your own position in the world. The customer is not always right. In fact, our obsession with the customer risks devaluing brands by making them generic and forgettable. Brands have become too consumer-led, where they are driven by journey-mapping, customer-centric design, and an excessive focus on consumer-driven data. Instead try redressing the balance, and be brand-led, where brands and businesses can truly become unique, interesting and highly profitable. Multi-award-winning brand strategist and consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier shares his contrary approach to building a strong brand in Stop Listening to the Customer. Backed by science, real-world examples and extensive industry experience, Ferrier explores the dangers of listening to the consumer too much, shares lessons from successful businesses who prioritise their brand, and reveals the brand-building secrets of their success. With insights from Jules Lund, Lisa Ronson, John Newcomb, Rory Sutherland, and many more, this invaluable book will enable you to: Avoid the pitfalls of drowning in customer data Establish a strong, brand-led business Develop a unique brand by embracing and leveraging your weaknesses Define your brand Get your customers to invest into you Stop Listening to the Customer is ideal for those looking to grow their brands and businesses by defeating consumer-driven mediocrity, standing out from the crowd, and listening their own brand.

The more virtual your business, the more flexible the hours, the lower the overhead, and the greater the profit potential. Your Virtual Success will help a cash-poor entrepreneur, a small business scrambling for expansion capital, an existing business seeking to improve profits, or an independent professional in any service business. Alan Blume's virtual model has resulted in large six-figure deals with people he's never met face to face--and never will-- and small sales that would never be profitable in a traditional business environment. In Your Virtual Success, he demystifies the cost-effective, leading-edge, Internet-based tools that are available to almost everyone, as long as you know what questions to ask and where to look. Your Virtual Success shows any entrepreneur, sole proprietor, partnership, or existing business how to: Leverage new Internet tools to grow your business faster and more profitably. Utilize free or low-cost online resources to hire, manage and expand your business. Rapidly create a new, work-from-home virtual business while minimizing the risks of a traditional startup.

The 7 Qualities of Highly Secure Software provides a framework for designing, developing, and deploying hacker-resilient software. It uses engaging anecdotes and analogies-ranging from Aesop's fables, athletics, architecture, biology, nursery rhymes, and video games-to illustrate the qualities that are essential for the development of highly secure

In medieval literature, when humans and animals meet—whether as friends or foes—issues of mastery and submission are often at stake. In the Skin of a Beast shows how the concept of sovereignty comes to the fore in such narratives, reflecting larger concerns about relations of authority and dominion at play in both human-animal and human-human interactions. Peggy McCracken discusses a range of literary texts and images from medieval France, including romances in which animal skins appear in symbolic displays of power, fictional explorations of the wolf’s desire for human domestication, and tales of women and snakes converging in a representation of territorial claims and noble status. These works reveal that the qualities traditionally used to define sovereignty—lineage and gender among them—are in fact mobile and contingent. In medieval literary texts, as McCracken demonstrates, human dominion over animals is a disputed model for sovereign relations among people: it justifies exploitation even as it mandates protection and care, and it depends on reiterations of human-animal difference that paradoxically expose the tenuous nature of human exceptionalism.