The Business Romantic


Book Description

In this smart, playful, and provocative book, one of today’s most original business thinkers argues that we underestimate the importance of romance in our lives and that we can find it in and through business—by designing products, services, and experiences that connect us with something greater than ourselves. Against the backdrop of eroding trust in capitalism, pervasive technology, big data, and the desire to quantify all of our behaviors, The Business Romantic makes a compelling case that we must meld the pursuit of success and achievement with romance if we want to create an economy that serves our entire selves. A rising star in data analytics who is in love with the intrinsic beauty of spreadsheets; the mastermind behind a brand built on absence; an Argentinian couple who revolutionize shoelaces; the founder of a foodie-oriented start-up that creates intimate conversation spaces; a performance artist who offers fake corporate seminars for real professionals—these are some of the innovators readers will meet in this witty, deeply personal, and rousing ramble through the world of Business Romanticism. The Business Romantic not only provides surprising insights into the emotional and social aspects of business but also presents “Rules of Enchantment” that will help both individuals and organizations construct more meaningful experiences for themselves and others. The Business Romantic offers a radically different view of the good life and outlines how to better meet one’s own desires as well as those of customers, employees, and society. It encourages readers to expect more from companies, to give more of themselves, and to fall back in love with their work and their lives.




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.




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.







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.




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.




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.




Married to the Business


Book Description

Why do so many businesses run by couples never give them the Lifestyle of their Dreams? With couples working too many hours for too little money, it is easy to see how a business can stress a personal relationship to breaking point, and make work/life balance all work and no play. Married to the Business follows the trials, tribulations and triumphs of husband and wife, Luke and Anna Taylor, who together run a building business. Their story is a fusion of real life experiences of many couples in business together with whom Dr Greg Chapman has worked, and how they overcame the difficulties they faced. Accompany the Taylor's on their journey as they learn how to turn the nightmare their business has become, back into one that could grow and give them the income they wanted without damaging their life together. Married to the Business will show you: Why so many businesses run by couples generate profitless turnover How to find the time to run a business and have a life together How disagreements between partners can be resolved without conflict How to re-organise a business in a way that produces results Included with this book is a workbook that can be used with the Action Steps in the text that you can use to make the business you run together achieve the potential you know it has. Married to the Business is an easy to read and easy to understand step-by-step guide presented as a Case Study that will enable couples in business together to realise their dreams. Discover how, by following the steps that Luke and Anna took to transform their business into one that could run without them, you too can have a business that delivers the lifestyle you seek with your partner, whether married, or just good friends. Anyone who knows about the emotions involved with running a business will also know that those real human traits are magnified by involvement of a life partner. This can be a wonderful experience, or not so. Dr Greg Chapman's book will help get more wonder and less thunder for all involved. I congratulate Greg on another quality publication. – Peter Strong, Executive Director Council of Small Business




Building a Small Business that Warren Buffett Would Love


Book Description

The guide to making money the Warren Buffett way The book that presents the same fundamentals that Warren Buffet used to turn an initial $105,000 investment into a $40 billion fortune in a way the general reader can apply, Building A Small Business that Warren Buffett Would Love is a succinct, logical, and straightforward guide to financial success. Highlighting one simple message: that Warren Buffett successfully invests in great businesses with strong fundamentals, it argues that these fundamentals can be replicated in a small business to yield outstanding results. Offering a solution for people wanting to start a business to provide additional income in today's uncertain economy, and designed to help entrepreneurs build fundamentally sound, small businesses using Warren Buffett's business investment perspective, the book covers: An overview of Warren Buffett's investment methodology and how it applies to small businesses The details of the Buffett investment criteria—a consumer monopoly, strong earnings, low long term debt, and high ROE with the ability to reinvest earnings—and the application of these fundamentals to both start-up and existing small businesses An approach to building a small business that applies the well respected principles of Warren Buffett, the book presents an exciting new look at the steps to success that have been proven trustworthy by one of the richest men in the world.




Shortcut Your Startup


Book Description

From the Reum brothers—former Goldman Sachs investment bankers, successful operators, and investors—comes Shortcut Your Startup, a practical playbook for both aspiring and seasoned entrepreneurs, filled with unconventional yet accessible advice for maximizing your business venture. Courtney and Carter Reum have years of experience in the field, from investing in over 130 companies, including Lyft, Pinterest, Warby Parker, and ClassPass, to driving the success of their own liquor brand, VEEV Spirits. The Reum brothers have learned from every triumph and tribulation, and over the years have developed an effective and easy-to-understand guide to help entrepreneurs through the startup journey from inception to sale. Complete with personal anecdotes and real-life advice from the business playing field, Shortcut Your Startup outlines Courtney and Carter’s ten key “Startup Switchups” that flip traditional advice on its head: · Get into the Trenches · Know if You’re a Speedboat or a Sailboat · Obsessively Take Advantage of Your Unfair Advantages · Do What You Do Best, and Outsource the Rest · Build in Flexibility and a Diversified Focus · Think Milestones, Not Time · Nail It Before You Scale It · 1 Percent Better Is 1000 Percent Better · Gain Buy-in with Heart-Based Momentum · Success Doesn’t Equate to a Successful Exit Whether you’re a veteran entrepreneur looking for new ways to boost performance and reinvent your brand, or an aspiring entrepreneur ready to take a leap of faith, Shortcut Your Startup is essential reading to speed up your success!