A straightforward, valuable guide to reduce effort and raise profits Step inside any organization, even a very successful one, and you’ll probably find a lot of waste if you know where to look. From providing a feature that consumers don’t care about to exhausting efforts on tasks that only require adequate attention, there are countless areas where resources go down the drain. In Low-Hanging Fruit, Jeremy Eden and Terri Long provide seventy-seven of their most effective techniques for improvement, each drawn from their success working with major companies. For more than twenty years, Jeremy Eden and Terri Long have helped companies of all sizes make millions by harvesting their low-hanging fruit. In this practical guide, Eden and Long share valuable, refreshing insights in entertaining chapters that get straight to the point. This book shows you how to smoothly shift your approach, your priorities, and your mindset to reveal the hidden potential in your organization. Whether you are a member of a small team or a global executive, you will learn how to identify and solve hidden problems, improve productivity, and increase profits. Many people don’t realize that there are dozens of quick, easy, and affordable ways to make things better. Don’t buy into the myth that only some people have creative ideas. Typically, the people closest to the work (from the factory floor to the C-Suite) and the people closest to the customer know the best ways to improve business. We can pluck this “low-hanging fruit” every day to save time and money right away. Need to grow your company’s earnings but don’t know where to find the low-hanging fruit? The answer is right in front of you, but harvesting it takes skill. Eden and Long show you seventy-seven clever ways to discover possibilities and make meaningful changes. Low-Hanging Fruit shows you how to easily improve your job satisfaction, your team’s performance, and your company’s earnings.

Are you interested in baking someone into a process at work? Leading a paradigm shift? Or maybe you just feel like drilling down after a nice data dump so you can flesh out a straw dog to help everyone get their ducks in a row and sing from the same song-sheet. Whether you understood any of that or had no idea what you just read, you've probably heard these expressions lobbed around the corporate world with some regularity. What does all of this mean? In meetings on his first job out of college, James Sudakow found himself struggling to pick up a bizarre new language: corporate-speak. He pretended to know what they were saying, but in actuality, he had no idea what expressions like "singing from the same song sheet" or "picking the low hanging fruit" meant or why strange phrases like these were being used to talk about business operations. Had he missed something important in his education that would have prepared him for this? With time, Sudakow adapted to the language; and much to his own embarrassment, he found himself actually using many of these same expressions. For his own sanity, he came up with a plan to combat this corporate-speak language - and it all started with a whiteboard in his office. He listed all of the words and phrases his colleagues, even superiors, were not allowed to use in his office - less they allowed themselves to be subjected to some form of office hazing. "I wondered if we all knew how ridiculous we sounded using these generally weird phrases, instead of just speaking in plain English." Sudakow says."I wanted to call attention to the way we were all communicating and see if we could change it." Ironically, not only did his experiment not deter their use of any of the expressions on his whiteboard, Sudakow found that his colleagues put up with the hazing with seemingly far too much enjoyment and also began to actually, if not enthusiastically, add additional phrases to his whiteboard, taking great pride in their contributions. That whiteboard became the premise for his new book, "Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit... and Other Stupid Stuff We Say in the Corporate World," a humorous corporate glossary that sheds an irreverent light on the weird things we say in the corporate world every day.

Low Hanging Fruit-Highly Placed Vegetables describes what's wrong with modern leadership practices and philosophies and what needs to be done to get them right. Written as a critical, edgy but humorous critique and commentary on popular practices, assumptions and programs of modern day management. this book gets existing managers to rethink their approaches, and new managers to know what pitfalls to avoid.

Tyler Cowen’s controversial New York Times bestseller—the book heard round the world that ignited a firestorm of debate and redefined the nature of America’s economic malaise. America has been through the biggest financial crisis since the great Depression, unemployment numbers are frightening, media wages have been flat since the 1970s, and it is common to expect that things will get worse before they get better. Certainly, the multidecade stagnation is not yet over. How will we get out of this mess? One political party tries to increase government spending even when we have no good plan for paying for ballooning programs like Medicare and Social Security. The other party seems to think tax cuts will raise revenue and has a record of creating bigger fiscal disasters that the first. Where does this madness come from? As Cowen argues, our economy has enjoyed low-hanging fruit since the seventeenth century: free land, immigrant labor, and powerful new technologies. But during the last forty years, the low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau. The fruit trees are barer than we want to believe. That's it. That is what has gone wrong and that is why our politics is crazy. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen reveals the underlying causes of our past prosperity and how we will generate it again. This is a passionate call for a new respect of scientific innovations that benefit not only the powerful elites, but humanity as a whole.

Grabbing the low-hanging fruit is no longer acceptable. ZICO Coconut Water founder Mark Rampolla argues that when you choose to reach higher, you can build an incredible business, be profitable, and maybe even change the world. In 2004, Mark Rampolla was successful by most standards. There was just one problem: He wasn’t inspired in his job and believed he had something more to contribute to the world. When he asked himself, "What do I have to offer that will improve the world?" Rampolla realized that his big idea was hanging right overhead. From his time living in Central America, he and his family came to love drinking coconut water, just like the locals. But no one was really selling coconut water in the United States. So Rampolla chased a very ambitious goal: introducing coconut water to the American beverage market dominated by a few big players. He wasn’t just starting a business; he was creating a whole new industry. ZICO Coconut Water brought a healthy beverage alternative to American consumers while also helping developing-world growers and suppliers profit from this resource. It was a win-win-win—good for Rampolla, his customers, and the world. So good, in fact, that in 2013 the Coca-Cola Company purchased ZICO and is scaling the brand around the globe. Rampolla wrote High-Hanging Fruit for others who want to succeed because of, not in spite of, their values. This book is for people who believe that it’s their duty to reach higher than just the bottom line to build businesses driven by passion, purpose, and integrity. Above all, it’s a call to arms for a new generation of entrepreneurs who want to disrupt the old model and do good by doing business.

Energy Fables: Challenging Ideas in the Energy Sector takes a fresh look at key terms and concepts around which energy research and policy are organised. Drawing on recent research in energy and transport studies, and combining this with concepts from sociology, economics, social theory and technology studies, the chapters in this collection review and challenge different aspects of received wisdom. Brief but critical introductions to classic notions like those of ‘energy efficiency’, ‘elasticity’, ‘energy services’ and the ‘energy trilemma’, together with discussions and analyses of well-worn phrases about ‘low hanging fruit’ and ‘keeping the lights on’, articulate aspects of the energy debate that are often taken for granted. In re-working these established themes and adding twists to familiar tales, the authors develop a repertoire of new ideas about the fundamentals of energy demand and carbon reduction. This book presents a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students, researchers and policy-makers interested in energy demand, politics and policy.

Ian Whitworth built national companies from nothing. Coronavirus hammered some of them flat. Yet he’s fine with that. Because when the chaos is swirling and shit is getting real, there’s opportunity. Now is the time to put yourself in control – where no boss or virus can take you down. So many talented people want to give it a shot, yet they’re held back by the big business myths. But success is simpler than your crusty CEO wants you to think. Ian built his businesses on simple rules, Year 6 maths, basic decency and no jargon. It generated profits that made the bank people say: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before.’ Ian’s advice is so readable that many of his readers have no interest in commerce, they just like his dry humour and guidance on living a better life. He takes you step-by-step through the whole entrepreneur experience, from the day you open the doors through to when you pay others to run the place for you. There are 60 short and often surprising chapters in the trademark style of his popular 'Motivation for Sceptics' blog, from ‘Your Success Goals Are Built on Lies’ to ‘Business Whack-A-Mole Skills’ and ‘Remote Work Sucks Unless You're Old’. Whether you’re running your own business, leading someone else’s or freelancing, Undisruptable is the only handbook you need. And one you’ll actually enjoy reading to the end.

This is a book for managers who know that their organisations are stuck in a mindset that thrives on fashionable business theories that are no more than folk wisdom, and whose so-called strategies that are little more than banal wish lists. It puts forward the notion that the application of uncommon sense - thinking or acting differently from other organisations in a way that makes unusual sense - is the secret to competitive success. For those who want to succeed and stand out from the herd this book is a beacon of uncommon sense and a timely antidote to managerial humbug.

A comprehensive, year-round guide to jellies, jams, conserves, preserves, and marmalades, featuring over 100 recipes. If you love to cook, are crazy for fruit, or have even a passing interest in jam or marmalade, Rachel Saunders’s James Beard Award–nominated Blue Chair Jam Cookbook is the book for you. Rachel’s legendary Bay Area jam company, Blue Chair Fruit, earned instant fame for its intensely flavored preserves when it launched in 2008. Rachel’s passion for fruit shines through every part of this lavishly illustrated book, which is the culmination of nearly ten years of research. The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook is the essential jam and marmalade book of the twenty-first century, one in which Rachel’s modern yet nostalgic vision of cooking takes center stage. Rachel offers an in-depth exploration of individual fruits, a comprehensive technical section, and nearly 120 original recipes organized around the seasons. In offerings ranging from Plum Jam to Strawberry–Blood Orange Marmalade with Rosemary and Black Fig and Candied Citrus Jam, she vividly captures the joyful essence of fruit and of the preserving process. The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook is not only an exciting and vibrant exploration of fruit and of the seasons, but also one of the few books that clearly explains and illustrates preserving techniques. Each recipes includes clear and detailed directions to help ensure success, and Rachel explores a wide range of technical questions as they relate to individual fruits and types of preserves. Whether you make jam or marmalade once a year or every week, and whether you are a home or professional cook, The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook is sure to claim a special place in your cookbook library. Praise for The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook “A complete and exquisite guide to making jam and marmalade at home. In addition to sharing 100+ recipes, Saunders walks you step-by-step through the process with in-depth explanations as well as photos of the various steps so you see exactly what each phase looks like.” —Epicurious “Blue Chair could well become the jam maker’s quintessential reference book.” —SFGate.com “Rachel Saunders . . . is quite possibly the high priestess of jam making. [The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook] . . . belongs in the kitchen of anyone interested in keeping their pantry stocked with delicious and unique fruit preserves. And Rachel’s instructions are so thorough and clear, even beginners are assured success.” —The Splendid Table’s “Weeknight Kitchen” newsletter

Cutting through the hype, a practical guide to using artificial intelligence for business benefits and competitive advantage. In The AI Advantage, Thomas Davenport offers a guide to using artificial intelligence in business. He describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them for business benefits and competitive advantage. He cuts through the hype of the AI craze—remember when it seemed plausible that IBM's Watson could cure cancer?—to explain how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. His key recommendation: don't go for the “moonshot” (curing cancer, or synthesizing all investment knowledge); look for the “low-hanging fruit” to make your company more efficient. Davenport explains that the business value AI offers is solid rather than sexy or splashy. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better informed—important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won't replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines to work alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work; provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning (“analytics on steroids”), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Companies should experiment with these technologies and develop their own expertise. Davenport describes the major AI technologies and explains how they are being used, reports on the AI work done by large commercial enterprises like Amazon and Google, and outlines strategies and steps to becoming a cognitive corporation. This book provides an invaluable guide to the real-world future of business AI. A book in the Management on the Cutting Edge series, published in cooperation with MIT Sloan Management Review.