The Solution-Centric Organization

By: Keith M. Eades and Robert E. Kear

284 pp.

McGraw-Hill

Simply bundling products and services and targeting different market segments does not mean a company is selling solutions. Being solution-centric means that an organization defines itself by the problems solved for customers, rather than by the products or services it provides. Every activity within the company, from marketing to research and development to manufacturing, is undertaken with customers and their problems in mind. Value is gauged not just by revenue or earnings, but by the results and positive outcomes that customers achieve through the use of the company's products and services.Moving from product-centric to solution-centric requires a revolutionary new way of thinking and acting, and, according to the authors, requires four fundamental transformations. In The Solution-Centric Organization, Eades and Kear define these transformations and explore how companies can become solution-centric and more competitive in the global economy

The Innovation Killer

How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine...And What Smart Companies Are Doing About It

By: Cynthia Barton Rabe

Forget conventional wisdom. Forget the thought that the more you know, the better off you’ll be. Forget the idea that knowledge and expertise are the only true routes to success and innovation in business. Education meant to help a student master a subject might be completely at odds with fostering innovation in that subject. The tried and true models for generating original business solutions may never have worked that well, for the most knowledgeable sometimes know the least about how to change things for the better.In The Innovation Killer, Rabe, former Innovation Strategist for Intel Corporation, suggests that innovative ideas for one’s business may reside in the minds of outsiders, non-experts, and special thinkers who can look beyond internal boundaries. She offers a path away from stifling intellectual homogeny toward a future paved with better ideas, unique solutions to complex problems, and the keys to less painful innovating.

Succeed on Your Own Terms

Lessons from Top Achievers Around the World on Developing Your Unique Potential

By: Herb Greenberg and Patrick Sweeney

300 pp.
McGraw-Hill

All successful individuals maintain a defining quality that sets them apart, and often, a clear vision of their own success. Those who know what motivates people and who have a clear sense of purpose and meaning in what they do, are more likely to develop and recognize their own unique qualities, and become successful according to their own definition of the word. What makes top achievers successful is their ability to know themselves, assess their own potential, and play to their own strengths.In Succeed on Your Own Terms, people from many backgrounds discuss how they see themselves and their worlds, and how they have achieved their own brand of success. By encouraging readers to think in an entirely different way, authors Greenberg and Sweeney provide a road map for anyone in any field to navigate their own way to success, and on their own terms.

You Can Choose To Be Happy: "Rise Above" Anxiety, Anger, and Depression
Tom G. Stevens PhD

The biggest single factor controlling people's happiness and self-actualization is their choice of what the great philosopher Paul Tillich called our ultimate concern. Many people think that making human happiness a top goal is selfish or naive. But great philosophers such as the Buddha, Aristotle, Kant, and Bertrand Russell all said happiness should be number one for many reasons. Jesus also implied that happiness for self and others was of highest importance.
A powerful benefit of making your ultimate concern mental values like happiness, love, truth, beauty, and growth is that they automatically bring peace of mind. The choice of internal, mental values over external values is vital for overcoming anxiety because you can directly control only mental/spiritual values. As the Buddha recognized, becoming too attached to something you can't directly control-such as success, money, other people's opinions, or any external condition-is a major cause of anxiety. For example, the instant you make success a top goal, you will feel bolts of anxiety whenever anything threatens your success.
What causes our emotions? Our emotions measure the condition of higher brain states. Overarousal emotions like anxiety come from being overwhelmed with more input than we can cope with. Underarousal emotions like depression come from too little input-often because we have withdrawn to avoid anxiety and/or lack meaning in the situation. Happiness comes from input being optimally challenging and validating in such a way that maximum learning and inner harmony occur in the higher brain centers.
Victor Frankl found happiness even in Nazi concentration camps. He did it by getting mental control of the situation. Later he used this knowledge to form a new school of psychotherapy. You too can learn to overcome your past history, your biology, or any situation to find peace and happiness. My book presents six basic strategies for getting mental control of our emotions. You can learn to "get into the zone" of harmonious functioning for peak learning, performance, and happiness.
The center of your self-worth and unconditional love of self and others is your Higher Self. It is a cognitive system that develops naturally in childhood. A Higher Self raised in a negative, dysfunctional family may remain weak and underdeveloped. To make your Higher Self the strong, democratic executive over your other subparts, choose happiness for self and others over others' opinions, success, rules, coercion, or any other challenger. Develop a well-thought-out philosophy based upon your highest mental values to effectively cope with any situation. Then your Higher Self will become your inner core, your inner hero, and your inner conductor bringing harmony to all parts of your personality and life.
Another vital aspect of achieving happiness is facing and overcoming your worst fears and your most negative subparts. Many people can use the self-exploration method and other suggestions in the book to overcome these sources of unhappiness, although good psychotherapy may be necessary for others.
Other important aspects of learning to be happy covered by the book include learning how to be grateful for all that you have, learning how to overcome being too externally controlled by others, learning to forgive, learning how to develop a more positive-yet realistic-view of life, and improving your ability to accomplish more and have more fun through effective management of your life.

Bigger Isn't Always BetterThe New Mindset for Real Business Growth

By: Robert M. Tomasko

260 pp.
AMACOM

A big business is a successful business, or so goes contemporary thinking. In Bigger Isn’t Always Better, Robert M. Tomasko discusses his belief that growth does not necessarily mean getting bigger. He believes that growth is moving forward, making progress. Growth is the ability to generate effective action and to take what is best about a business and nurture it.Not everyone can do this. It takes someone with a different mindset – someone who has a discomfort with the status quo and who can visualize a better goal for a company or a better way to do things. In his book, Tomasko spells out the characteristics of this leader with the different mindset – the “grower.”

The Must-Have Customer
Steps to Winning the Customer You Haven't Got
By: Robert Gordman with Armin Brott
310 pp.
St. Martin's Press

Winning and keeping the right customers is the key to sustaining increased profitability and growth. According to Gordman, customers fall into one of two categories: core customers and opportunistic customers. Core customers are those who believe strongly enough in the service or product a particular business provides, while in contrast, opportunistic customers will make their purchases from whichever business offers the lowest price.Yet, the author introduces another classification: “must-have customers” -potential customers who have the same high-profitability characteristics of core customers, but buy from competition.In The Must-Have Customer, Gordman lays out seven steps, which, together, allow companies to identify and maintain their core customers, while at the same time, win over the elusive must-have customer. These steps can help any company create actionable, practical strategies to enable even healthy companies grow faster and become stronger.

The Culture Code
An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Buy and Live as They Do
By: Clotaire Rapaille
208 pp.
Broadway Books

For 30 years, Dr. Clotaire Rapaille has used a revolutionary idea to improve the bottom line of such diverse companies as Chrysler, Procter & Gamble, GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oreal. This groundbreaking revelation is that people acquire an unconscious system of “Codes” as they grow up within their cultures. And, these Culture Codes are what makes an individual distinctly American or British or Japanese, causing him or her to live, buy, and even make love in distinctly American, British, or Japanese ways.In The Culture Code, Rapaille deciphers a host of America’s most fundamental archetypes, from sex to money, health, alcohol, and America itself, to expose why Americans act distinctly as Americans. These serendipitous discoveries not only provide critical insights on how to conduct business in dramatically different ways, they also offer individuals the refreshing freedom of understanding how people predictably think as a culture and behave as a group.