The Growth Trap


Book Description

Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestselling author Ralph DiBugnara provides a guide for anyone seeking to avoid or move beyond setbacks for the sake of future personal and professional growth. “The Growth Trap is a Must-Read for anyone who is looking to achieve growth in their personal and business life and are ready to level up their game. We all experience Growth Traps throughout our careers and this book helps you overcome them.“ – Kevin Harrington, Inventor of the Infomercial and Original Shark on ABCs hit show Shark Tank This book is like a how-to manual on how to avoid the traps in life personal and professional. It also serves as a handbook on growth. Definitely a must read for any up and coming professional or anyone looking for personal growth. – Hovain, President of Cinematic Management, Hip Hop music executive manager Growth is a natural part of life between the ages of birth and adulthood, as human beings typically get bigger, stronger, smarter, and more functional with age. This growth is unintentional and requires little to no effort—but at some point, that growth stops, and an individual’s progress is then limited to whether or not they are actively seeking future development. The Growth Trap addresses a condition that Ralph DiBugnara has dealt with throughout his life—personally, professional, and directly with his brand. After seasons of stagnated growth, he’s learned the necessity of intentionally pursuing progress, rather than expecting goals to be accomplished without effort. Ralph explains how many get caught in a growth trap when they deem progress and change to be too much of a challenge. These individuals like to talk, reminisce, and ultimately identify with their “past selves,” because it’s easier than facing who they are now. And while it’s better to pursue growth and work towards the accomplishment of one’s goal, that doesn’t mean that it’s possible to avoid all growth traps along the way. Ralph DiBugnara’s The Growth Trap is an essential resource for those looking to achieve their goals and avoid pitfalls that will hinder their progress. He shares his personal experiences—as well as the strategies he learned along the way—so that readers can grow their brands and businesses while becoming true disruptors in every aspect of their lives.




Summary of Ralph DiBugnara's The Growth Trap


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I had to lose my confidence and then regain it in order to believe that there are no limits to what I can accomplish. I had completely lost my confidence on the field and the court. In 2003, my career was booming, and I decided to learn how to box like a professional. #2 I had started boxing again, this time with a friend who was a trainer. I had never heard of an intergym fight, but I had to fight a month later. I was nervous as hell. The guy I fought was a little bigger and stronger than me, and I was definitely outmatched. #3 I won my first boxing match, which gave me a new lease on my athletic ability that I enjoy to this day. I continued boxing for the next four or five years. I fought another fifteen or twenty times. Every time I went to fight someone, I was still uncomfortable, but I gained more confidence. #4 Monica Seles was a famous American tennis player who was once number one in the world. She was attacked by a crazy fan in 1993, and despite the traumatic attack, she worked her way back to regaining self-assuredness.




The Growth Trap


Book Description

Improvement is a trademark piece of life between the hours of birth and adulthood, as people get more prominent, more grounded, more splendid, and more useful with age. This improvement is incidental and expects close to zero effort - anyway ultimately, that improvement stops, and a particular's progression is then confined to whether they are searching for future new development. Many get found in an improvement trap when they believe progress and change to be beyond the ridiculous test. These individuals like to talk, recollect, and in the end connect with their "past selves," since it's more clear than facing who they are at present. Also, remembering that it's more brilliant to seek after improvement and work towards the accomplishment of one's goal, doesn't infer that it's attainable to avoid all advancement traps on the way. This book is a central resource for those wanting to achieve their targets and avoid traps that will obstruct their progression. Build a satisfying and critical presence with this helper and free yourself from hopelessness, disquiet, and shortcomings.




Escaping the Build Trap


Book Description

To stay competitive in today’s market, organizations need to adopt a culture of customer-centric practices that focus on outcomes rather than outputs. Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs




The Content Trap


Book Description

“My favorite book of the year.”—Doug McMillon, CEO, Wal-Mart Stores Harvard Business School Professor of Strategy Bharat Anand presents an incisive new approach to digital transformation that favors fostering connectivity over focusing exclusively on content. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education. Drawing on these stories and on the latest research in economics, strategy, and marketing, this refreshingly engaging book reveals important lessons, smashes celebrated myths, and reorients strategy. Success for flourishing companies comes not from making the best content but from recognizing how content enables customers’ connectivity; it comes not from protecting the value of content at all costs but from unearthing related opportunities close by; and it comes not from mimicking competitors’ best practices but from seeing choices as part of a connected whole. Digital change means that everyone today can reach and interact with others directly: We are all in the content business. But that comes with risks that Bharat Anand teaches us how to recognize and navigate. Filled with conversations with key players and in-depth dispatches from the front lines of digital change, The Content Trap is an essential new playbook for navigating the turbulent waters in which we find ourselves. Praise for The Content Trap “A masterful and thought-provoking book that has reshaped my understanding of content in the digital landscape.”—Ariel Emanuel, co-CEO, WME | IMG “The Content Trap is a book filled with stories of businesses, from music companies to magazine publishers, that missed connections and could never escape the narrow views that had brought them past success. But it is also filled with stories of those who made strategic choices to strengthen the links between content and returns in their new master plans. . . . The book is a call to clear thinking and reassessing why things are the way they are.”—The Wall Street Journal




Build, Borrow, Or Buy


Book Description

How should you grow your organization? Its one of the most challenging questions an executive team faces and the wrong answer can break your firm. So where do you start? By asking the right questions, argue INSEADs Laurence Capron and coauthor Will Mitchell, of Duke Universitys Fuqua School of Business and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Drawing on more than two decades of research and teaching, Capron and Mitchell have found that a firms aptitude for determining the best resource pathways for its growth has a defining impact on its success. Theyve come up with a helpful framework, reflecting practices of a variety of successful global organizations, to help you determine which path is best for yours.




How China Escaped the Poverty Trap


Book Description

WINNER OF THE 2017 PETER KATZENSTEIN BOOK PRIZE "BEST OF BOOKS IN 2017" BY FOREIGN AFFAIRS WINNER OF THE 2018 VIVIAN ZELIZER PRIZE BEST BOOK AWARD IN ECONOMIC SOCIOLOGY "How China Escaped the Poverty Trap truly offers game-changing ideas for the analysis and implementation of socio-economic development and should have a major impact across many social sciences." ― Zelizer Best Book in Economic Sociology Prize Committee Acclaimed as "game changing" and "field shifting," How China Escaped the Poverty Trap advances a new paradigm in the political economy of development and sheds new light on China's rise. How can poor and weak societies escape poverty traps? Political economists have traditionally offered three answers: "stimulate growth first," "build good institutions first," or "some fortunate nations inherited good institutions that led to growth." Yuen Yuen Ang rejects all three schools of thought and their underlying assumptions: linear causation, a mechanistic worldview, and historical determinism. Instead, she launches a new paradigm grounded in complex adaptive systems, which embraces the reality of interdependence and humanity's capacity to innovate. Combining this original lens with more than 400 interviews with Chinese bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, Ang systematically reenacts the complex process that turned China from a communist backwater into a global juggernaut in just 35 years. Contrary to popular misconceptions, she shows that what drove China's great transformation was not centralized authoritarian control, but "directed improvisation"—top-down directions from Beijing paired with bottom-up improvisation among local officials. Her analysis reveals two broad lessons on development. First, transformative change requires an adaptive governing system that empowers ground-level actors to create new solutions for evolving problems. Second, the first step out of the poverty trap is to "use what you have"—harnessing existing resources to kick-start new markets, even if that means defying first-world norms. Bold and meticulously researched, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap opens up a whole new avenue of thinking for scholars, practitioners, and anyone seeking to build adaptive systems.




The Future for Investors


Book Description

The new paradigm for investing and building wealth in the twenty-first century. The Future for Investors reveals new strategies that take advantage of the dramatic changes and opportunities that will appear in world markets. Jeremy Siegel, one of the world’s top investing experts, has taken a long, hard, and in-depth look at the market and the stocks that investors should acquire to build long-term wealth. His surprising finding is that the new technologies, expanding industries, and fast-growing countries that stockholders relentlessly seek in the market often lead to poor returns. In fact, growth itself can be an investment trap, luring investors into overpriced stocks and overly competitive industries. The Future for Investors shatters conventional wisdom and provides a framework for picking stocks that will be long-term winners. While technological innovation spurs economic growth, it has not been kind to investors. Instead, companies that have marketed tried-and-true products for decades in slow-growth or even declining industries have superior returns to firms that develop “the bold and the new.” Industry sectors many regard as dinosaurs—railroads and oil companies, for example—have actually beat the market. Professor Siegel presents these strategies within the context of the coming shift in global economic power and the demographic age wave that will sweep the United States, Europe, and Japan. Contrary to the popular belief that these economic and demographic trends doom investors to poor returns, Professor Siegel explains the True New Economy and how to take advantage of the coming surge in invention, discovery, and economic growth. The faster the world changes, the more important it is for investors to heed the lessons of the past and find the tried-and-true companies that can help you beat the market and prosper in the years ahead.




The Aid Trap


Book Description

Over the past twenty years more citizens in China and India have raised themselves out of poverty than anywhere else at any time in history. They accomplished this through the local business sector the leading source of prosperity for all rich countries. In most of Africa and other poor regions the business sector is weak, but foreign aid continues to fund government and NGOs. Switching aid to the local business sector in order to cultivate a middle class is the oldest, surest, and only way to eliminate poverty in poor countries. A bold fusion of ethics and smart business, The Aid Trap shows how the same energy, goodwill, and money that we devote to charity can help local business thrive. R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, two leading scholars in business and finance, demonstrate that by diverting a major share of charitable aid into the local business sector of poor countries, citizens can take the lead in the growth of their own economies. Although the aid system supports noble goals, a local well-digging company cannot compete with a foreign charity that digs wells for free. By investing in that local company a sustainable system of development can take root.




The Hero Trap


Book Description

Most companies today are firmly on the social and environmental issues ‘bandwagon’, like bees around a honey pot, from plastic in oceans through to diversity. As a result, people are increasingly distrustful of these efforts which they view as cheap marketing stunts meant to wow people into buying more. "Try to fly like a superman, and you will come down like a tin of soup." Market economists have long told us that we’re driven only by money and status, but the inherent human truth that cuts across age, culture and gender uncovers a stronger force: we wish to be in charge of our own lives and our own happiness. Through extensive growth and affinity research, world-renowned purpose-pioneer, Thomas Kolster, uncovers a simple answer that is key to driving marketing growth in the 21st century: if you put people in control of the marketing mix, from products to promotion, they can grow and in turn grow your organisation. This book explains the meteoric rise of a company like AirBnB, how a 20-something Swede, Maria de la Croix, built a global coffee empire like Wheelys in just a few years, and how a group of friends hanging out in a bar in Melbourne created one of the largest global non-profits fighting for men’s health, Movember – and how you can empower people to do the same. Today’s power no longer rests in the hands of the privileged few, but in the talented many. It is time for you to unleash that power, in numbers. Drawing on top-line marketing case studies and in-depth interviews, Kolster demonstrates how people are truly motivated to act when they’re in charge of their own life and happiness. ‘Who can you help me become?’ is the one essential question you need to be asking and acting on to chart a new course for your organisation, changing behaviours at scale and unlocking sustainable growth that benefits all.