July 4, 2008

Business & Investing Best Sellers

  1. StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup's Now, Discover Your Strengths
    DO YOU HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO WHAT YOU DO BEST EVERY DAY?

    Chances are, you don't. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.

    To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in the 2001 management book Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book spent more than five years on the bestseller lists and ignited a global conversation, while StrengthsFinder helped millions to discover their top five talents.

    In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you'll use it as a reference for decades.

    Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself -- and the world around you -- forever.

    AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY IN THE NEW & UPGRADED EDITION OF STRENGTHSFINDER 2.0
    (using the unique access code included with each book)

    * A new and upgraded edition of the StrengthsFinder assessment

    * A personalized Strengths Discovery and Action-Planning Guide for applying your strengths in the next week, month, and year

    * A more customized version of your top five theme report

    * 50 Ideas for Action (10 strategies for building on each of your top five themes)

    * The more user-friendly StrengthsFinder 2.0 companion website, with a strengths community area, library of downloadable discussion guides and activities, a strengths screensaver, and a program for creating display cards of your top five themes

  2. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins
    Explores the way good organizations can be turned into ones that produce great, sustained results. To find the keys to greatness a 21 person research team read and coded 6000 articles, created 348 MB of computer data etc. in a 5yr proj
  3. The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
    What do you do? Tim Ferriss has trouble answering the question. Depending on when you ask this
    controversial Princeton University guest lecturer, he might answer:

    “I race motorcycles in Europe.”
    “I ski in the Andes.”
    “I scuba dive in Panama.”
    “I dance tango in Buenos Aires.”

    He has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.

    Whether you are an overworked employee or an entrepreneur trapped in your own business, this book is the compass for a new and revolutionary world. Join Tim Ferriss as he teaches you:

    • How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want

    • How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs

    • How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist

    • How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and freuent "mini-retirements"

    • What the crucial difference is between absolute and relative income

    • How to train your boss to value performance over presence, or kill your job (or company) if it’s beyond repair

    • What automated cash-flow “muses” are and how to create one in 2 to 4 weeks

    • How to cultivate selective ignorance—and create time—with a low-information diet

    • What the management secrets of Remote Control CEOs are

    • How to get free housing worldwide and airfare at 50–80% off

    • How to fill the void and create a meaningful life after removing work and the office

    You can have it all—really.
  4. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
    """The personal productivity guru"" (Fast Company) delivers powerful methods that vastly increase your efficiency and creative results-at work and in life In today's world, yesterday's methods just don't work. In Getting Things Done, veteran coach and management consultant David Allen shares the breakthrough methods for stress-free performance that he has introduced to tens of thousands of people across the country. Allen's premise is simple: our productivity is directly proportional to our ability to relax. Only when our minds are clear and our thoughts are organized can we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential. In Getting Things Done Allen shows how to: Apply the ""do it, delegate it, defer it, drop it"" rule to get your in-box to empty Reassess goals and stay focused in changing situations Plan projects as well as get them unstuck Overcome feelings of confusion, anxiety, and being overwhelmed Feel fine about what you're not doing From core principles to proven tricks, Getting Things Done can transform the way you work, showing you how to pick up the pace without wearing yourself down."
  5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

    • Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?

    • Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?

    • Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?

    • Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?

    • And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?

    When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?

    In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.

    Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same types of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable—making us predictably irrational.

    From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. Predictably Irrational will change the way we interact with the world—one small decision at a time.

  6. The Official Guide for GMAT Review, 11th Edition
  7. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
    This celebrated New York Times bestsellernow poised to reach an even wider audience in paperbackis a book that is changing the way North Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas. Gladwells new afterword to this edition describes how readers can constructively apply the tipping point principle in their own lives and work. Widely hailed as an important work that offers not only a road map to business success but also a profoundly encouraging approach to solving social problems.
  8. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni
    Once again using an astutely written fictional tale to unambiguously but painlessly deliver some hard truths about critical business procedures, Patrick Lencioni targets group behavior in the final entry of his trilogy of corporate fables. And like those preceding it, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team is an entertaining, quick read filled with useful information that will prove easy to digest and implement. This time, Lencioni weaves his lessons around the story of a troubled Silicon Valley firm and its unexpected choice for a new CEO: an old-school manager who had retired from a traditional manufacturing company two years earlier at age 55. Showing exactly how existing personnel failed to function as a unit, and precisely how the new boss worked to reestablish that essential conduct, the book's first part colorfully illustrates the ways that teamwork can elude even the most dedicated individuals--and be restored by an insightful leader. A second part offers details on Lencioni's "five dysfunctions" (absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results), along with a questionnaire for readers to use in evaluating their own teams and specifics to help them understand and overcome these common shortcomings. Like the author's previous books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, this is highly recommended. --Howard Rothman
  9. Now, Discover Your Strengths by Donald O. Clifton,Marcus Buckingham

    Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.

    Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.

    So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes -- such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic -- you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.

    With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.

  10. A Guide To The Project Management Body Of Knowledge (PMBOK Guides)(3rd Edition) by Project Management Institute
    A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—2000 Edition is now available in eight additional languages to help project managers around the world.

    Each of PMI's official translations includes a bilingual glossary of newly translated and standardized project management terminology. This allows candidates to study the guide in the same language in which they plan to take the Project Management Professional (PMP®) certification exam.

    PMI undertook a rigorous, year-long process to ensure the maximum effectiveness of each official translation. Each translation team included qualified bilingual PMPs as well as professional translators and editors.

    Official translations: Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Korean, German and Italian.