The Innovator's Dilemma

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Jerry Acuff with Wally Wood

Get the relationship edge The Relationship Edge shows you exactly how to build valuable business relationships with people you don't naturally connect with. It presents a straightforward, three-step process that is easy to apply to your work and business. Jerry Acuff provides real-world principles for developing strong and lasting personal relationships with the key people in your business life, helping you become more effective and persuasive while maintaining meaningful, truthful dialogues with those around you. Acuff shows how the more truthful and direct you are with customers and colleagues, the more truthful they'll be with you-and the more likely you are to find meaningful solutions to the business challenges you share. This revised edition includes new information on building and leveraging healthy business relationships, especially how to maintain them over the long term. With real case studies and step-by-step guidance, The Relationship Edge offers the tools and advice you need to develop strong, rewarding relationships with customers, coworkers, and managers. With practical, concrete information on the mechanics of interpersonal relationships in the business world, you'll be well on your way to doing business better and more productively. "A great coaching tool for every sales manager-finally, a book that outlines step by step how to build both strong customer and personal relationships." --John M. Woychick, Senior Vice President, Training, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals "Time and time again, Jerry Acuff's approach to selling has been proven to work. A must-read for those who believe that successful selling is a part of their everyday life." --Georges Gemayel, Executive Vice President, Genzyme Corporation

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Michael J.C. Martin

"While innovation may be the lifeblood of technology based industry, it does not guarantee success to the individual firm within it. The ability to bring useful and desirable products to market in a timely, cost-effective fashion requires the unique talents of managers armed with an arsenal of modern principles and methodologies specifically geared to the technology invention and innovation process. But even in technology based firms, many managers have only scant technical background, while scientists and engineers may have little or no management training. And courses on managing technology based firms are currently taught only in a meager handful of universities." "This book grew out of Michael J.C. Martin's experiences developing and teaching courses in managing technological innovation-entrepreneurship to business, engineering, and science students. It provides a dynamic framework within which managers from virtually any professional background can develop efficient, highly productive work systems guaranteed to maximize a high-tech firm's competitive edge. Throughout, the emphasis is on leveraging a company's strategic advantage. To that end, the author provides a host of "battle-tested" tools of the trade, including technology development programs, industry- and market-specific strategic plans, R & D project planning techniques, socioeconomic forecasting and market analysis techniques, and techniques for matching company capabilities with customer and product demands." "All of the tools and techniques presented are applicable to the development of a broad range of products, from small high-tech consumer goods to large and complex systems such as aircraft and heavy weapons technology." "An indispensable survival tool in today's hypercompetitive international high-tech marketplace, Managing Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Technology Based Firms is must reading for industrial engineers, project managers, and R & D managers."--Jacket.

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Joseph Turow

"We have all been to Web sites that welcome us by name, offering us discounts, deals, or special access to content. For the most part, it feels good to be wanted--to be valued as a customer. But if we thought about it, we might realize that we've paid for this special status by turning over personal information to a company's database. And we might wonder whether other customers get the same deals we get, or something even better. We might even feel stirrings of resentment toward customers more valued than we are. In Niche Envy, Joseph Turow examines the emergence of databases as marketing tools and the implications this may have for media, advertising, and society. If the new goal of marketing is to customize commercial announcements according to a buyer's preferences and spending history--or even by race, gender, and political opinions--what does this mean for the twentieth-century tradition of equal access to product information, and how does it affect civic life? Turow shows that these marketing techniques are not wholly new; they have roots in direct marketing and product placement, widely used decades ago and recently revived and reimagined by advertisers as part of "customer relationship management" (known popularly as CRM). He traces the transformation of marketing techniques online, on television, and in retail stores. And he describes public reaction against database marketing-- pop-up blockers, spam filters, commercial-skipping video recorders, and other ad-evasion methods. Polls show that the public is nervous about giving up personal data. Meanwhile, companies try to persuade the most desirable customers to trust them with their information in return for benefits. Niche Envy tracks the marketing logic that got us to this uneasy impasse."--Publisher's website.

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Dee McCrorey

"A step-by-step guide to the 10 essential and practical skills a business needs to innovate and thrive in uncertain timesThe reinvented world of business will profoundly impact America's leaders and workers in the decade ahead. Companies capable of transforming their organizations during this period of "Great Disruption" will thrive in the reinvented world however, the reverse holds true as well. Innovation in a Reinvented World reveals how transformation occurs when business leaders and their organizations apply these 10 Essential Elements, providing both a road map and definitive blueprint for companies of any size looking to bridge the old world with the new world of business. Discusses the "new courage" required for innovating in a reinvented world Looks at 10 Essential Elements winning companies count on today Innovation in a Reinvented World helps executives and leadership teams navigate and manage their organizations' inflection points in designing, building, and sustaining innovation--even through the post-recession playing field"--