Recommendations based on "DK Essential Managers"

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Explaining Creativity is an accessible introduction to the latest scientific research on creativity. The book summarizes and integrates a broad range of research in psychology and related scientific fields. In the last 50 years, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have devoted increased attention to creativity; we now know more about creativity than at any point in history. Explaining Creativity examines research on thinking processes, personality, culture, mental health, groupwork, technology, self-beliefs, and more. It also reviews creativity across fields such as the arts, science, theater, music, and writing.This new edition maintains the broad and practical, yet still detailed approach of the previous editions, but it features updated coverage on the full landscape of creative cognition, creative practice, and social and cultural contexts for creativity. With three new chapters on Creativity and Technology, Creativity and Wellbeing, and Creativity and Self, this third edition provides a comprehensive understanding of creativity for anyone interested in the topic.

Economics is not a field that is known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no.   Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she’s here to share the secrets of how it’s done.   Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective. Proceeding from big-picture ideas to concrete strategies for improvement at the level of the paragraph, sentence, or word, McCloskey shows us that good writing, after all, is not just a matter of taste—it’s a product of adept intuition and a rigorous revision process. Debunking stale rules, warning us that “footnotes are nests for pedants,” and offering an arsenal of readily applicable tools and methods, she shows writers of all levels of experience how to rethink the way they approach their work, and gives them the knowledge to turn mediocre prose into magic.   At once efficient and digestible, hilarious and provocative, Economical Writing lives up to its promise. With McCloskey as our guide, it’s impossible not to see how any piece of writing—on economics or any other subject—can be a pleasure to read.

“Absolutely brilliant. Clayton Christensen provides an insightful analysis of changing technology and its importance to a company’s future success.”—Michael R. Bloomberg“This book ought to chill any executive who feels bulletproof —and inspire entrepreneurs aiming their guns.”—ForbesThe Innovator’s Dilemma is the revolutionary business book that has forever changed corporate America. Based on a truly radical idea—that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right—this Wall Street Journal, Business Week and New York Times Business bestseller is one of the most provocative and important business books ever written. Entrepreneurs, managers, and CEOs ignore its wisdom and its warnings at their great peril.

This completely updated volume presents the effective and practical tools you need to design great desktop applications, Web 2.0 sites, and mobile devices. You’ll learn the principles of good product behavior and gain an understanding of Cooper’s Goal-Directed Design method, which involves everything from conducting user research to defining your product using personas and scenarios. Ultimately, you’ll acquire the knowledge to design the best possible digital products and services.

A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech's most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem"--by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of "the network effect," where a product or service's value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they're messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them--much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries. The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

How to Reduce Code Complexity and Develop Software More Sustainably"Mark Seemann is well known for explaining complex concepts clearly and thoroughly. In this book he condenses his wide-ranging software development experience into a set of practical, pragmatic techniques for writing sustainable and human-friendly code. This book will be a must-read for every programmer."Scott Wlaschin, author of Domain Modeling Made FunctionalCode That Fits in Your Head offers indispensable, practical advice for writing code at a sustainable pace and controlling the complexity that causes projects to spin out of control. Reflecting decades of experience helping software teams succeed, Mark Seemann guides students from zero (no code) to deployed features and shows how to maintain a good cruising speed as they add functionality, address cross-cutting concerns, troubleshoot, and optimize. They'll find valuable ideas, practices, and processes for key issues ranging from checklists to teamwork, encapsulation to decomposition, API design to unit testing. Seemann illuminates his insights with code examples drawn from a complete sample project. Written in C#, they're designed to be clear and useful to anyone who uses any object-oriented language including Java , C++, and Python. To facilitate deeper exploration, all code and extensive commit messages are available for download.Choose mindsets and processes that work, and escape bad metaphors that don'tUse checklists to improve outcomes with skills already possessedGet past analysis paralysis by creating and deploying a vertical slice to an applicationCounteract forces that lead to code rot and unnecessary complexityMaster better techniques for changing code behaviorDiscover ways to solve code problems more quickly and effectivelyThink more productively about performance and securityRegister your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

Software development projects can be fun, productive, and even daring. Yet they can consistently deliver value to a business and remain under control. Extreme Programming (XP) was conceived and developed to address the specific needs of software development conducted by small teams in the face of vague and changing requirements. This new lightweight methodology challenges many conventional tenets, including the long-held assumption that the cost of changing a piece of software necessarily rises dramatically over the course of time. XP recognizes that projects have to work to achieve this reduction in cost and exploit the savings once they have been earned. Fundamentals of XP include: Distinguishing between the decisions to be made by business interests and those to be made by project stakeholders. Writing unit tests before programming and keeping all of the tests running at all times. Integrating and testing the whole system--several times a day. Producing all software in pairs, two programmers at one screen. Starting projects with a simple design that constantly evolves to add needed flexibility and remove unneeded complexity. Putting a minimal system into production quickly and growing it in whatever directions prove most valuable. Why is XP so controversial? Some sacred cows don't make the cut in XP: Don't force team members to specialize and become analysts, architects, programmers, testers, and integrators--every XP programmer participates in all of these critical activities every day. Don't conduct complete up-front analysis and design--an XP project starts with a quick analysis of the entire system, and XPprogrammers continue to make analysis and design decisions throughout development. Develop infrastructure and frameworks as you develop your application, not up-front--delivering business value is the heartbeat that drives XP projects. Don't write and maintain implementation documentation--communication in XP projects occurs face-to-face, or through efficient tests and carefully written code. You may love XP, or you may hate it, but "Extreme Programming Explained" will force you to take a fresh look at how you develop software. 0201616416B04062001

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects   The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber–Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies.   The Nexus™ Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum’s core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability. Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges

Known from its last editions as the "Bible of Forecasting", the third edition of this authoritative text has adopted a new approach-one that is as new as the latest trends in the field: "Explaining the past is not adequate for predicting the future". In other words, accurate forecasting requires more than just the fitting of models to historical data. Inside, readers will find the latest techniques used by managers in business today, discover the importance of forecasting and learn how it's accomplished. And readers will develop the necessary skills to meet the increased demand for thoughtful and realistic forecasts.