Love is Just Damn Good Business: Do What You Love in the Service of People Who Love What You Do


Book Description

From the bestselling author of The Radical Leap and Greater Than Yourself comes the first book to directly address love as a hard-core business principle that generates measurable results It’s time to toss aside the touchy-feely notions of love in business and acknowledge the real power that it holds. Love is not only appropriate in the context of business, it’s the foundation of great leadership. To put it bluntly: love is just damn good business. That’s the simple but profound truth that leadership consultant Steve Farber has discovered in his extensive work with Fortune 100 companies and other successful businesses. His game-changing approach to love as a practical business strategy will help you to: • Identify your passions—and share them with others • Create a culture of love at work—and spark innovation, productivity, and joy • Serve your customers, so they love how you treat them—and have them coming back for more • Invest time in making personal connections—that are mutually rewarding • Focus on serving the needs of others—they’re going to love it • Do what you love—and make it your business, so others love it, too The proven principles you’ll find in this book will help you lay the groundwork for a thriving, competitive enterprise. When love is part of your organization’s framework and operationalized in its culture, employees and customers feel genuinely valued. Employees who are passionate about the work that they do are more loyal, innovative, creative, and inspired, and that translates to great customer experience. They don’t serve others out of obligation, but because of a genuine desire to improve people’s lives. And when customers reciprocate by loving your products, your services, and your people, that’s when something great happens. That’s when you get loyalty. That’s when you get raving fans. It’s a refreshingly human way of doing business. In addition to Farber’s field-tested strategies, you’ll find inspiring case studies from a wide range of industries and leaders, revealing self-assessment quizzes, and practical pointers on how to build a corporate culture based on love, the ultimate competitive advantage. At the end of the day, it’s just damn good business.




Love as a Business Strategy


Book Description

To increase revenue, improve customer experience, and develop higher-performing teams, it's time for leaders to stop looking for quick fixes to complex business problems and start building a culture of love. Yes, love. Anchored by Softway's own transformational journey, Love as a Business Strategy offers a new, people-first framework for achieving any business outcome-written by folks that aren't fans of run-of-the-mill business books. As a matter of fact, Love as a Business Strategy is so chock-full of real-world examples of mistakes, heartbreak, and redemption that it reads more like a juicy exposé than a business book. Love as a Business Strategy steers clear from piety and theoretical concepts and instead shares grounded stories of resilient people running a real business. A business, as you'll come to find out, that was on the brink of disaster before 'love' took hold. Love As A Business Strategy doesn't preach or mislead, rather it lays out the blueprints for better business outcomes-like better employee engagement, enhanced patient experiences, and increased efficiency-then walks you through it step-by-step. A better way of doing business is possible. The workplace revolution has arrived. Love as a Business Strategy will help you ditch the status quo, embrace humanity, and achieve lasting success.




Big Business


Book Description

An against-the-grain polemic on American capitalism from New York Times bestselling author Tyler Cowen. We love to hate the 800-pound gorilla. Walmart and Amazon destroy communities and small businesses. Facebook turns us into addicts while putting our personal data at risk. From skeptical politicians like Bernie Sanders who, at a 2016 presidential campaign rally said, “If a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist,” to millennials, only 42 percent of whom support capitalism, belief in big business is at an all-time low. But are big companies inherently evil? If business is so bad, why does it remain so integral to the basic functioning of America? Economist and bestselling author Tyler Cowen says our biggest problem is that we don’t love business enough. In Big Business, Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions. According to a 2016 Gallup survey, only 12 percent of Americans trust big business “quite a lot,” and only 6 percent trust it “a great deal.” Yet Americans as a group are remarkably willing to trust businesses, whether in the form of buying a new phone on the day of its release or simply showing up to work in the expectation they will be paid. Cowen illuminates the crucial role businesses play in spurring innovation, rewarding talent and hard work, and creating the bounty on which we’ve all come to depend.




Love and Work


Book Description

A Wall Street Journal bestseller World-renowned researcher and New York Times bestselling author Marcus Buckingham helps us discover where we're at our best—both at work and in life. You've long been told to "Do what you love." Sounds simple, but the real challenge is how to do this in a world not set up to help you. Most of us actually don't know the real truth of what we love—what engages us and makes us thrive—and our workplaces, jobs, schools, even our parents, are focused instead on making us conform. Sadly, no person or system is dedicated to discovering the crucial intersection between what you love to do and how you contribute it to others. In this eye-opening, uplifting book, Buckingham shows you how to break free from this conformity—how to decode your own loves, turn them into their most powerful expression, and do the same for those you lead and those you love. How can you use love to reveal your unique gifts? How can you pinpoint what makes you stand out from anyone else? How can you choose roles in which you'll excel? Love and Work unlocks answers to these questions and others, so you can: Choose the right role on the team. Describe yourself compellingly in job interviews. Mold your existing role so that it calls upon the very best of you. Position yourself as a leader in such a way that your followers quickly come to trust in you. Make lasting change for your team, your company, your family, or your students. Love, the most powerful of human emotions, the source of all creativity, collaboration, insight, and excellence, has been systematically drained from our lives—our work, teams, and classrooms. It's time we brought love back in. Love and Work shows you how.




The Business Case for Love


Book Description

Love it? Hate it? Or, just don’t care? How we feel about something dramatically affects how we interact with it. When we feel, we care. When we care, things happen. Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes – they are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most. If you want your customers to be brand ambassadors and your employees to brag about you to their friends, you need them to not just think you’re great – you need them to feel you’re great. You need them to love you – and for that, you need them to feel that you love them. For over a decade Marc Cox has been helping companies whose toxic cultures, miserable employees, and angry customers have all but destroyed them to rebuild their company spirit, discover the business case for love and build an organization that is wonderful to work for, brilliant to do business with and has the mindset of creating memorable employee and customer experiences. Underpinned by fresh insights and perspectives, robustly tested and refined by the real world experience of working with a wide range of companies and over 2,000 senior executives drawn from all parts of the world, and filled with fascinating and illustrative “love stories” the book will help you to make the business case for love. It will help you to find a more rewarding and invigorating way of working – both emotionally and financially. In short, it shows what happens when the love is put back into business.




I Love Capitalism!


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller Iconoclastic entrepreneur and New York legend Ken Langone tells the compelling story of how a poor boy from Long Island became one of America's most successful businessmen. Ken Langone has seen it all on his way to a net worth beyond his wildest dreams. A pillar of corporate America for decades, he's a co-founder of Home Depot, a former director of the New York Stock Exchange, and a world-class philanthropist (including $200 million for NYU's Langone Health). In this memoir he finally tells the story of his unlikely rise and controversial career. It's also a passionate defense of the American Dream -- of preserving a country in which any hungry kid can reach the maximum potential of his or her talents and work ethic. In a series of fascinating stories, Langone shows how he struggled to get an education, break into Wall Street, and scramble for an MBA at night while competing with privileged competitors by day. He shares how he learned how to evaluate what a business is worth and apply his street smarts to 8-figure and 9-figure deals . And he's not shy about discussing, for the first time, his epic legal and PR battle with former NY Governor Eliot Spitzer. His ultimate theme is that free enterprise is the key to giving everyone a leg up. As he writes: This book is my love song to capitalism. Capitalism works! And I'm living proof -- it works for everybody. Absolutely anybody is entitled to dream big, and absolutely everybody should dream big. I did. Show me where the silver spoon was in my mouth. I've got to argue profoundly and passionately: I'm the American Dream.




48 Days to the Work You Love


Book Description

Practical instructions from leading vocational thinker Miller reveal how to approach work as more than just a paycheck, but as part of the calling God has placed on each life.




How to Love Your Business


Book Description

What does it mean to have a business that you love and that loves you back?As a business therapist, Nicole sees business owners and entrepreneurs every day who are stressed out by their businesses feel alone, unsupported and overwhelmed by their schedules. No one drops their personal baggage at the door when they start a business. In fact, starting a business means entering into a relationship, just like a friendship or romance. And just like in human-to-human relationships, if we don't set clear boundaries, and work to practice them mindfully, we're bound to default into toxic behaviors from our past. In other words, we bring our emotional challenges into our businesses with us, and when we ignore this, we get in trouble. In this book, Nicole shares her story of how she almost gave up on her business and dreams when she realized that she had created a business that was demanding and demeaning instead of loving and supportive. If you had trauma in your childhood it will impact all your relationships-and that includes the relationship that you're building with your business. We recreate patterns that we grow up with because they feel familiar and because we've been taught to compartmentalize our lives and drop our "baggage" at the door when we go to the office or start a business. There's no room for emotions, vulnerability, or mental health problems when it comes to workplaces. But the truth is, you will get more out of your business if you integrate all parts of yourself.Based on her experience of over 18-plus years as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and therapist, as well as her completion of Brené Brown's The Daring Way(TM) and Dare To Lead(TM) methodologies, Nicole outlines a process to redefine the relationship you have with your business. She'll walk you through how to identify your values so you know when you're in and out of integrity; craft an authentic mission and vision statement; make space for your business; create the boundaries needed for you and your business to thrive; love your inner critic; examine your relationship with money and create an Emotional Sustainability Plan that will act as a compass to help you make aligned daily decisions about your business. All of this so you can make more money, feel more connected to your business and clients as well as have a business that is emotionally sustainable.




Lovability


Book Description

Love is the surprising emotion that company builders cannot afford to ignore. Genuine, heartfelt devotion and loyalty from customers — yes, love — is what propels a select few companies ahead. Think about the products and companies that you really care about and how they make you feel. You do not merely likethose products, you adore them. Consider your own emotions and a key insight is revealed: Love is central to business. Nobody talks about it, but it is obvious in hindsight. Lovability: How to Build a Business That People Love and Be Happy Doing It shares what Silicon Valley-based author and Aha! CEO Brian de Haaff knows from a career of founding successful technology companies and creating award-winning products. He reveals the secret to the phenomenal growth of Aha! and the engine that powers lasting customer devotion — a set of principles that he pioneered and named The Responsive Method. Lovability provides valuable lessons and actionable steps for product and company builders everywhere, including: • Why you should rethink everything you know about building a business • What a product really is • The magic of finding what your customers truly desire • How to turn business strategy and product roadmaps into customer love • Why you should chase company value, not valuation • Surveys to measure your company’s lovability Brian de Haaff has spent the last 20 years focused on business strategy, product management, and bringing disruptive technologies to market. And in preparation for writing this book, he interviewed well-known startup founders, product managers, executives, and CEOs at hundreds of name brand and agile organizations. Their experiences, along with headline-grabbing case studies (both inspiring successes and cautionary tales), will help readers discover how to build something that matters. Much has been written about how entrepreneurs build innovative products and successful businesses, but the author's message is original and refreshing. He convincingly explains that there is a better path forward — a people-first way grounded in love. In a business world that has increasingly emphasized hype over substance and get-big-at-any-cost thinking over profitable and sustainable growth, it's time for a new recipe for company success. ​Insightful, thought-provoking, and sometimes controversial, Lovability is the book that you turn to when you know there has to be a better way.




Brand Admiration


Book Description

Brand Admiration uses deep research on consumer psychology, marketing, consumer engagement and communication to develop a powerful, integrated perspective and innovative approach to brand management. Using numerous real-world examples and backed by research from top notch academics, this book describes how companies can turn a product, service, corporate, person or place brand into one that customers love, trust and respect; in short, how to make a brand admired. The result? Greater brand loyalty, stronger brand advocacy, and higher brand equity. Admired brands grow more revenue in a more efficient way over a longer period of time and with more opportunities for growth. The real power of Brand Admiration is that it provides concrete, actionable guidance on how brand managers can make customers (and employees) admire a brand. Admired brands don't just do the job; they offer exactly what customers need (enabling benefits), in way that's pleasing, fun, interesting, and emotionally involving (enticing benefits), while making people feel good about themselves (enriching benefits). Providing these benefits, called 3 Es, is foundational to building , strengthening and leveraging brand admiration. In addition, the authors articulate a common-sense and action based measure of brand equity, and they develop dashboard metrics to diagnose if there are any 'canaries in the coal mine', and if so, what to do next. In short, Brand Admiration provides a coherent, cohesive approach to helping the brand stand the test of time. A well-designed, well-managed brand becomes a part of the public consciousness, and ultimately, a part of the culture. This trajectory is the fruit of decisions made from an integrated strategic standpoint. This book shows you how to shift the process for your brand, with practical guidance and an analytical approach.