Recommendations based on "Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux"

One of the world's great designers shares his vision of "the fundamental principles of great and meaningful design", that's "even more relevant today than it was when first published" (Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO).   Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.   The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.   The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.   The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.  

The Professional Product Owner's Guide to Maximizing Value with Scrum"This book presents a method of communicating our desires, cogently, coherently, and with a minimum of fuss and bother."―Ken Schwaber, Chairman & Founder, Scrum.orgThe role of the Product Owner is more crucial than ever. But it's about much more than mechanics: it's about taking accountability and refocusing on value as the primary objective of all you do. In The Professional Product Owner, two leading experts in successful Scrum product ownership show exactly how to do this. You'll learn how to identify where value can be found, measure it, and maximize it throughout your entire product lifecycle.Drawing on their combined 40+ years of experience in using agile and Scrum in product management, Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham guide you through all facets of envisioning, emerging, and maturing a product using the Scrum framework.McGreal and Jocham discuss strategy, showing how to connect Vision, Value, and Validation in ROI-focused agile product management. They lay out Scrum best-practices for managing complexity and continuously delivering value, and they define the concrete practices and tools you can use to manage Product Backlogs and release plans, all with the goal of making you a more successful Product Owner. Throughout, the authors share revealing personal experiences that illuminate obstacles to success and show how they can be overcome. Define success from the "outside in," using external customer-driven measurements to guide development and maximize value Bring empowerment and entrepreneurship to the Product Owner's role, and align everyone behind a shared business model Use Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt) to invest in the right places, make smarter decisions, and reduce risk Effectively apply Scrum's Product Owner role, artifacts, and events Populate and manage Product Backlogs, and use just-in-time specifications Plan and manage releases, improve transparency, and reduce technical debt Scale your product, not your Scrum Use Scrum to inject autonomy, mastery, and purpose into your product team's work Whatever your role in product management or agile development, this guide will help you deliver products that offer more value, more rapidly, and more often.Register your book for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available. See inside book for details.

  Capturing a wealth of experience about the design of object-oriented software, four top-notch designers present a catalog of simple and succinct solutions to commonly occurring design problems. Previously undocumented, these 23 patterns allow designers to create more flexible, elegant, and ultimately reusable designs without having to rediscover the design solutions themselves. The authors begin by describing what patterns are and how they can help you design object-oriented software. They then go on to systematically name, explain, evaluate, and catalog recurring designs in object-oriented systems. With Design Patterns as your guide, you will learn how these important patterns fit into the software development process, and how you can leverage them to solve your own design problems most efficiently.  

Design your networks to successfully manage their growing complexity     Network professionals have often been told that today’s modern control planes would simplify their networks. The opposite has happened: Technologies like SDN and NFV, although immensely valuable, are exacerbating complexity instead of solving it. Navigating Network Complexity is the first comprehensive guide to managing this complexity in both deployment and day-to-day operations.   Russ White and Jeff Tantsura introduce modern complexity theory from the standpoint of the working network engineer, helping you apply it to the practical problems you face every day. Avoiding complex mathematical models, they show how to characterize network complexity, so you can understand it and control it.   The authors examine specific techniques and technologies associated with network control planes, including SDNs, fast reroute, segment routing, service chaining, and cloud computing. They reveal how each of these affects network design and complexity and help you anticipate causes of failure in highly complex systems.   Next, they turn to modern control planes, examining the fundamental operating principles of SDNs, such as OpenFlow and I2RS, network and other service function virtualization, content distribution networks, Layer 2 fabrics, and service chaining solutions. You’ll learn how each of these might both resolve and increase complexity in network design and operations and what you can do about it.   Coverage includes:   Defining complexity, understanding its components, and measuring it Mastering a straightforward “state, speed, and surface” model for analyzing complexity Controlling complexity in design, deployment, operations, protocols, and programmable networks Understanding how complex network systems begin to fail and how to prevent failure Recognizing complexity tradeoffs in service virtualization and service chaining Managing new challenges of complexity in virtualized and cloud environments Learning why constructs such as hierarchical design, aggregation, and protocol layering work and when they work best Choosing the right models to contain complexity as your network changes   From start to finish, Navigating Network Complexity helps you assess the true impact of new network technologies, so they can capture more value with fewer problems.  

A guide to the strategic planning techniques used by Japanese business executives explains how to identify the customer's needs, evaluate the strengths of the company, and overcome competition

Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation's massive 12 year, $1 million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need payoff) strategy. In SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy to apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as “What makes success in major sales” and “Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones?” You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won't work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies and backed by hard research data SPIN Selling is the million dollar key to understanding and producing record breaking high end sales performance. Sales Behavior and Sales Success. Obtaining Commitment: Closing the Sale. Customer Needs in the Major Sale. The SPIN Strategy. Giving Benefits in Major Sales. Preventing Objections. Preliminaries: Opening the Call. Turning Theory into Practice.

"A rousing manifesto of mastery in a connected world." –GoogleThe Industrial Age has taught us how to break problems into parts, but not how to build parts into solutions. We’re baffled when we’re confronted with complex challenges like recession, political gridlock, climate change, childhood obesity, pollution, and failing schools. We see them as separate ills, each requiring a separate remedy—if we can imagine a remedy at all.Why are so many jobs disappearing? Why are a few people getting rich while the rest of us struggle? How can we pay for the costs of healthcare? Why can’t our trusted institutions behave ethically? What’s the cause of governmental gridlock? How can we afford to educate our children? How do we stop damaging the ecosystem? Why do we create ugliness?Author Marty Neumeier suggests that these problems are merely symptoms of a much larger problem–our inability to deal with interconnected, non-linear, and amorphous challenges. It’s not that our problems are too difficult, he argues, but that our skills are too basic. Success in the post-industrial era demands that we move our thinking from the static, the linear, and the step-by-step to the dynamic, the holistic, and the all-at-once.In this sweeping vision for personal mastery in a post-industrial era, Neumeier presents five metaskills–feeling, seeing, dreaming, making, and learning–that can help you reach your true potential. They’ll keep you two or three steps ahead of the machines, the algorithms, and the outsourcing forces of the “robot curve”. They’ll also bring you greater creativity, higher purpose, and a deeper sense of fulfillment.Metaskills is more than a manifesto. It’s a compass for visionary leaders, policymakers, educators, and planners. It’s a creative framework for designers, engineers, scientists, and artists. It’s a picture of the future that allows people from a wide range of disciplines, industries, and professions to envision new ways to create value together. Perhaps more important, it’s a long-overdue examination of what it means to be human in the 21st century.

A guide for research economists: how to write papers, give talks, navigate the peer-review process, advise students, and more.Newly minted research economists are equipped with a PhD’s worth of technical and scientific expertise but often lack some of the practical tools necessary for “doing economics.” With this book, economics professor Marc Bellemare breaks down the components of doing research economics and examines each in turn: communicating your research findings in a paper; presenting your findings to other researchers by giving a talk; submitting your paper to a peer-reviewed journal; funding your research program through grants (necessary more often than not for all social scientists); knowing what kind of professional service opportunities to pursue; and advising PhD, master’s, and undergraduate students.With increasing data availability and decreasing computational costs, economics has taken an empirical turn in recent decades. Academic economics is no longer the domain only of the theoretical; many young economists choose applied fields when the time comes to specialize. Yet there is no manual for surviving and thriving as a professional research economist. Doing Economics fills that gap, offering an essential guide for research economists at any stage of their careers.

This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day. Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programs really affect loyalty, How Brands Grow presents decades of research in a style that is written for marketing professionals to grow their brands. It is the first book to present these laws in context and to explore their meaning and application.The most distinctive element to this book is that the laws presented are tried and tested; they have been found to hold over varied conditions, time and countries. This is contrary to most marketing texts and indeed, much information provides evidence that much modern marketing theory is far from soundly based.

From Mike Michalowicz, the author of PROFIT FIRST, CLOCKWORK, and THE PUMPKIN PLAN, comes the ultimate diagnostic tool for every entrepreneur.The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is that they don't know what their biggest problem is. If you find yourself trapped between stagnating sales, staff turnover, and unhappy customers, what do you fix first? Every issue seems urgent -- but there's no way to address all of them at once. The result? A business that continues to go in endless circles putting out urgent fires and prioritizing the wrong things.Fortunately, Mike Michalowicz has a simple system to help you eradicate these frustrations and get your business moving forward, fast. Mike himself has lived through the struggles and countless distractions of entrepreneurship, and devoted years to finding a simple way to pinpoint exactly where to direct attention for rapid growth. He figured out that every business has a hierarchy of needs, and if you can understand where you are in that hierarchy, you can identify what needs immediate attention. Simply fix that one thing next, and your business will naturally and effortlessly level-up.Over the past decade, Mike has developed an ardent following for his funny, honest, and actionable insights told through the stories of real entrepreneurs. Now, Fix This Next offers a simple, unique, and wildly powerful business compass that has already helped hundreds of companies get to the next level, and will do the same for you. Immediately.