Recommendations based on "Six Sigma Demystified: A Self-Teaching Guide"

'Worth far more than its cover price ... I wish I’d had it available to me when I was first looking for startup funding' -- Eric ReesEvery startup needs capital, and ambitious startups seek it on Sand Hill Road – Silicon Valley’s dream street for entrepreneurs. That’s where you’ll find the biggest names in venture capital, including the famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-VC Scott Kupor serves as managing partner.Whether you’re trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the first book that shows you exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest. It will help you get the best possible deal and make the most of your relationships with VCs. You’ll learn, for instance:-- Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category-- Why the talent you need most when raising venture capital is your storytelling ability-- How to handle a 'down round', when you have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in your previous round-- Why bridge financing (reopening your last round to existing investors) is generally a bad idea-- What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of your business-- Why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sellFilled with Kupor’s firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide you need to turn yourstartup into the next unicorn.

In It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of the trailblazing software company Basecamp, reveal a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture, directly attacking the chaos, anxiety and stress that hamper billions of workers every day.Enduring long hours, carrying excessive workloads and functioning with a lack of sleep have become badges of honour for modern professionals. But these realities should be marks of stupidity, the authors argue. The answer to better productivity isn't more hours – it's less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress. It's time to stop celebrating 'crazy' and start celebrating 'calm'.

When you trade, you're not just trading companies that deliver goods or services. You're trading against other traders who care about only one thing: taking your money. That's the #1 hard reality of trading - and most traders either don't know it, or don't act as if they do. In this book, top trader and hedge fund manager Quint Tatro shows how to win consistently in the "zero sum" game of trading, where there's a loser for every winner. You'll learn how to reflect your trading competition in every facet of trading and investing: choosing companies to invest in, knowing when to jump in and out of the market, and mastering the psychology and gamesmanship of trading. Coverage includes: Understanding the "other side of the trade": the thousands of pros you're trading against. Finding a technical edge with technical analysis you can exploit over and over again. Understanding sentiment and overcoming the human emotions and biases that cost you dearly. Utilizing the most essential strategies of fundamental analysis. Playing positions and probabilities, not P+Ls. Recognizing and capturing huge opportunities in down markets.

Oren Klaff, sales and negotiating expert and bestselling author of Pitch Anything , reveals new playbook on persuasion in business.No one likes being pressured into making a purchase. Over decades of being marketed, pitched, sold (and lied) to, we've all grown resistant to sales persuasion. The moment we feel pressured to buy, we pull away. And if we're told what to think, our defenses go up. These days, it's just not enough to make a great pitch. That's why Oren Klaff says it's time to throw out the old playbook on persuasion.Instead, in Flip the Script , he devises a new approach based on a simple everyone trusts their own ideas. Instead of pushing your idea on your buyer, if you can guide them to discover it on their own, they will believe it, trust it, and get excited about it. Then they'll buy in and feel good about the chance to work with you. Klaff breaks down this insight into a series of actionable steps, for - Achieve Status Make sure that your potential buyer or investor recognizes you as a peer on the dominance hierarchy by using a status tip-off, a strategically placed remark that identifies you as an insider who can relate to your client's concerns.- Close the Certainty Allay your buyer's fears about going into business with you by delivering a flash roll, a practiced display of technical mastery that proves your expertise in the domain.- Present Your Idea as Plain You can go overboard trying to present your product as a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind solution. The more you emphasize the familiar, reliable elements of your product, showing that it's just "plan vanilla," the easier you make it for your buyer to say yes.Packed with examples and stories of the long-shot, often hilarious deals that Klaff has pulled off over the years, from training a team of motorcycle parts salesmen in the freezing reaches of North Dakota, to selling investors on a Chinese marketplace in Hawaii, Flip the Script is the most entertaining, informative masterclass in dealmaking you'll find anywhere.

An Engaging Guide To Excelling In Today's Venture Capital Arenabeginning In 2005, Brad Feld And Jason Mendelson, Managing Directors At Foundry Group, Wrote A Long Series Of Blog Posts Describing All The Parts Of A Typical Venture Capital Term Sheet: A Document Which Outlines Key Financial And Other Terms Of A Proposed Investment. Since This Time, They've Seen The Series Used As The Basis For A Number Of College Courses, And Have Been Thanked By Thousands Of People Who Have Used The Information To Gain A Better Understanding Of The Venture Capital Field.drawn From The Past Work Feld And Mendelson Have Written About In Their Blog And Augmented With Newer Material, Venture Capital Financings Puts This Discipline In Perspective And Lays Out The Strategies That Allow Entrepreneurs To Excel In Their Start-up Companies. Page By Page, This Book Discusses All Facets Of The Venture Capital Fundraising Process. Along The Way, Feld And Mendelson Touch On Everything From How Valuations Are Set To What Externalities Venture Capitalists Face That Factor Into Entrepreneurs' Businesses. Includes A Breakdown Analysis Of The Mechanics Of A Term Sheet And The Tactics Needed To Negotiate Details The Different Stages Of The Venture Capital Process, From Starting A Venture And Seeing It Through To The Later Stages Explores The Entire Venture Capital Ecosystem Including Those Who Invest In Venture Capitalist Contain Standard Documents That Are Used In These Transactions Written By Two Highly Regarded Experts In The World Of Venture Capital The Venture Capital Arena Is A Complex And Competitive Place, But With This Book As Your Guide, You'll Discover What It Takes To Make Your Way Through It--provided By Publisher. The Players -- How To Raise Money -- Overview Of The Term Sheet -- Economic Terms Of The Term Sheet -- Control Terms Of The Term Sheet -- Other Terms Of The Term Sheet -- The Capitalization Table -- How Venture Capital Funds Work -- Negotiation Tactics -- Raising Money The Right Way -- Issues At Different Financing Stages -- Letters Of Intent : The Other Term Sheet -- Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know. Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson. Includes Index.

"The best book on change I've ever read..." (Bank CEO)"The best book on change in fifteen years, perhaps longer..." (Organization Development consultant)Leaders need guidance on leading change grounded in the latest science, not 20th-century myths. In this updated 2019 edition of The Science of Organizational Change, Paul takes us on a journey from change mythology, from New Age change ideas, from "reports in drawers", and from pop psychology up to the present. In the first comprehensive treatment of behavioral science in business, you'll learn which cognitive biases caused the 2008 Financial Crisis, Enron, and the Deepwater Horizon. Later in the book, you'll discover how evidence-based management is helping leading businesses including Google.The author's 30-year career, scholarly approach, but without dry academic writing make this book a must-read for all managers interested in change. Few authors incorporate findings from psychology, sociology, medicine, philosophy of science, ethics, public policy, economics, and mathematics into books on change. Fewer still do it in an interesting way.Read case studies from Cisco, Intel, Nokia, BP, Shell, Barclays, British Airways, Comcast, and PwC - all former clients of the author where he advised at C-suite level.

The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, renowned author Clayton M. Christensen.His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller, innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership. Read this international bestseller to avoid a similar fate.Clay Christensen—who authored the award-winning Harvard Business Review article “How Will You Measure Your Life?”—explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says a successful company with established products WILL get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.Sharp, cogent, provocative, and one of the most influential business books of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager or entrepreneur should be without.Published by Harvard Business Review Press.

C# has matured over the past decade: It's now a rich language with generics, functional programming concepts, and support for both static and dynamic typing. This palette of techniques provides great tools for many different idioms, but there are also many ways to make mistakes. In Effective C#, Second Edition, respected .NET expert Bill Wagner identifies fifty ways you can leverage the full power of the C# 4.0 language to express your designs concisely and clearly. Effective C#, Second Edition, follows a clear format that makes it indispensable to hundreds of thousands of developers: clear, practical explanations, expert tips, and plenty of realistic code examples. Drawing on his unsurpassed C# experience, Wagner addresses everything from types to resource management to dynamic typing to multicore support in the C# language and the .NET framework. Along the way, he shows how to avoid common pitfalls in the C# language and the .NET environment. You'll learn how to Use both types of C# constants for efficiency and maintainability (see Item 2) Employ immutable data types to promote multicore processing (see Item 20) Minimize garbage collection, boxing, and unboxing (see Items 16 and 45) Take full advantage of interfaces and delegates (see Items 22 though 25) Make the most of the parallel framework (see Items 35 through 37) Use duck typing in C# (see Item 38) Spot the advantages of the dynamic and Expression types over reflection (see Items 42 and 43) Assess why query expressions are better than loops (see Item 8) Understand how generic covariance and contravariance affect your designs (see Item 29) See how optional parameters can minimize the number of method overloads (see Item 10) You're already a successful C# programmer-this book will help you become an outstanding one.

The Complete Guide to Avoiding and Fixing Common Rails 3 Code and Design Problems As developers worldwide have adopted the powerful Ruby on Rails web framework, many have fallen victim to common mistakes that reduce code quality, performance, reliability, stability, scalability, and maintainability. Rails™ AntiPatterns identifies these widespread Rails code and design problems, explains why they’re bad and why they happen—and shows exactly what to do instead. The book is organized into concise, modular chapters—each outlines a single common AntiPattern and offers detailed, cookbook-style code solutions that were previously difficult or impossible to find. Leading Rails developers Chad Pytel and Tammer Saleh also offer specific guidance for refactoring existing bad code or design to reflect sound object-oriented principles and established Rails best practices. With their help, developers, architects, and testers can dramatically improve new and existing applications, avoid future problems, and establish superior Rails coding standards throughout their organizations. This book will help you understand, avoid, and solve problems with Model layer code, from general object-oriented programming violations to complex SQL and excessive redundancy Domain modeling, including schema and database issues such as normalization and serialization View layer tools and conventions Controller-layer code, including RESTful code Service-related APIs, including timeouts, exceptions, backgrounding, and response codes Third-party code, including plug-ins and gems Testing, from test suites to test-driven development processes Scaling and deployment Database issues, including migrations and validations System design for “graceful degradation” in the real world

The Complete Guide to Writing More Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Ruby Applications Ruby's widely admired ease of use has a downside: Too many Ruby and Rails applications have been created without concern for their long-term maintenance or evolution. The Web is awash in Ruby code that is now virtually impossible to change or extend. This text helps you solve that problem by using powerful real-world object-oriented design techniques, which it thoroughly explains using simple and practical Ruby examples. Sandi Metz has distilled a lifetime of conversations and presentations about object-oriented design into a set of Ruby-focused practices for crafting manageable, extensible, and pleasing code. She shows you how to build new applications that can survive success and repair existing applications that have become impossible to change. Each technique is illustrated with extended examples, all downloadable from the companion Web site, poodr.info. The first title to focus squarely on object-oriented Ruby application design, Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby will guide you to superior outcomes, whatever your previous Ruby experience. Novice Ruby programmers will find specific rules to live by; intermediate Ruby programmers will find valuable principles they can flexibly interpret and apply; and advanced Ruby programmers will find a common language they can use to lead development and guide their colleagues. This guide will help you Understand how object-oriented programming can help you craft Ruby code that is easier to maintain and upgrade Decide what belongs in a single Ruby class Avoid entangling objects that should be kept separate Define flexible interfaces among objects Reduce programming overhead costs with duck typing Successfully apply inheritance Build objects via composition Design cost-effective tests Solve common problems associated with poorly designed Ruby code