What If They Listened to Entrepreneurs? by Henry R. Nothhaft

“Before any significant and sustained increase in the creation of good middle-class jobs can take place, the voice of the entrepreneur who is the source of all breakthrough innovation and job growth must be heard.

Sadly, however, entrepreneurs are just about the only Americans without a voice in Washington”

TouchPoints: Why the Interruptions That Drive Us Crazy Just Might Be the Most Productive Opportunities We Have Every Day
by Douglas Conant & Mette Norgaard

“Some days it feels like the information age has morphed into the interruption age. But what if those interruptions turned out to be our best opportunity to make a difference in our workplaces?”

Brains, Bones, and Nerves: The Only Three Things an Enterprise Leader Should Focus On by Rajeev Peshawaria

“Just as the human body needs all three systems—the brain, bones, and nerves—functioning in perfect harmony to maximize longevity and performance, a business needs its strategy, architecture, and culture to work in harmony in order to maximize results.”

It’s All About Them: Marketing to the Digitally Empowered Buyer
by Rebel Brown

“Thanks to the digital age, today’s buyers can research, select and purchase their products without getting you involved in the decision. You won’t even know they were buying. Everything shifted. Your choices: shift, too—or get left in the past.”

Your CQ: Why It Might Be the Most Important Number You Don’t Know!
by David Livermore

“How do we move beyond mantras about cultural sensitivity and global awareness to successfully adapting to various cultures while simultaneously remaining true to ourselves? Both sides of the equation are essential—being true to ourselves and adapting to different cultures.”

We First: How Consumers and Brands Can Partner to Build a Better World
by Simon Mainwaring

“We First capitalism posits that we can no longer accept the myopic, short-term, profit-for-profit’s sake practice of capitalism we invite corporations and consumers to engage in today.”

Why a Corrupted Service Covenant Has Made Customers Wired and Dangerous by Chip R. Bell & John R. Patterson

“Today’s customers are already picky (all about value), fickle (reluctant to show loyalty), vocal (quick to comment on poor or indifferent service) and vain (only interested in tailor-made offerings). Armed with a computer and a network, the new normal customer becomes wired and dangerous if frustrated.”

Put Your Mindset to Work: The Secret Weapon in Winning, Keeping, and Flourishing in the Best Jobs by Paul G Stoltz & James Reed

“What does it really take to win, keep, and flourish in the best jobs? Let’s begin by shattering a sacred assumption. If you want a good job, it’s all about qualifications. Put another way, the best way to increase your chances of getting a great job is by upgrading your skills. Right? Wrong!”

Reputation Rules: Don’t Neglect Your Company’s Most Precious Asset by Daniel Diermeier

“Trust is now an essential part of business success. [...] Companies have not responded to these changes. Their reputational risk has increased dramatically, but their capabilities have stayed the same. The result is one crisis chasing another and the long-term erosion of public trust in private enterprise.”

CLEARED HOT! by Vernice “Flygirl” Armour

“You HAVE permission to Engage! Notice, the emphasis is on the word ‘have.’ That’s because you already possess your own permission to engage. I’m not giving it to you. In fact, I can’t. You’ve always had it; you just have to release it. It’s up to YOU to make the decision to engage. Once you have given yourself permission, you are Cleared Hot to create realities from possibilities beyond your expectations.”

The Third Screen: Why Mobile Is a Game Changer by Chuck Martin

“We’re in the midst of a revolution bigger than the TV or PC and businesses of all types and sizes will be faced with how to deal with it. Not only are many businesses not ready, others are totally unaware.

The new market is mobile and it’s about to change everything. Mobile is a game changer.”

Change In a Leader Can Change the World by Jeremie Kubicek

“Our world is in trouble. We need leaders who lead for the benefit of others.

I believe we need to systematically transform the leadership culture from a dominating system to a liberating system. I believe it starts one leader at a time. Each leader must play a part in this transformation by thinking differently about the way they lead if we are to ever see true ‘Change in the World.’”

Little Bets: Think Differently by Peter Sims

“Our education system places great emphasis on teaching us about facts that are already known, such as historical information or scientific tables, and then testing us in order to measure how much we’ve retained about that body of knowledge. Those skills work perfectly well for many situations, but not when doing something new. Or creative. Or original. They certainly won’t help us invent the future.

As education and creativity researcher and author Sir Ken Robinson puts it, ‘We are educating people out of their creativity.’ But it’s still there. And unleashing our creativity, however deeply it’s hidden, begins with little bets.”

Don’t Let the Sidewalk End: How To Create a Revolution by Patrick J. Howie

“This manifesto is about creating revolutions. Not big political revolutions, although it could help there too, but revolutions of any size and in any field or industry. It is also about innovating, and how to be better at it and how innovations, properly nourished, are the catalysts of revolutions.”

To start with, we should all recognize that innovation is a process, not an event. When the process results in dramatic change, it is called a revolution.”

Happiness Advocacy, Or, How Positive Psychology Will Save Us From Zombies by Annie Passanisi

“Happiness. That feeling you get from StuffOnMyCat.com or Skyping with a far away friend. Side effects include: joy, contentment, glee, elation, and surges of confidence, hope, and gratitude. That happiness. If you’re ready to throw in the towel (or this in the garbage), kindly allow me to clarify something. This ain’t yo’ momma’s (or for that matter my momma’s*) self-help book so don’t get all judgmental. If MacGyver can stop a bomb with a toothpick, we can save the world with happiness. ‘Fiction!’ you say? It’s even been scientifically proven. You see, it’s all in the technique, my friends.”

The Four Strands: Creating Companies Aligned With Human DNA by Henry Cloud, Ph.D

“There are universal developmental issues and milestones in the construction of all people, which like gravity, must be obeyed. They are like the laws of physics, non-negotiable. Break these laws and dysfunction occurs. But, obey these laws and people thrive. They will be what we call “healthy.”

So, when a company is designed and operates in ways that are aligned with how people are constructed, it will be like an airplane aligned with the laws of physics that govern force or torque.”

How to Sharpen Your Sales Strengths by Tony Rutigliano, Brian Brim

“There is no single right way to sell. In fact, we believe there are as many ways to sell as there are salespeople.

Does that feel liberating? We hope so. If you enjoy sales, if you’re good at it, and if you’re finding some of the success you want, you possess a rare ability—and you should celebrate it. You’re someone who can do this job. And if you’re trying to follow a method or emulating a sales hero and it’s not working, it might not be your fault. Who you are is who you should be. You’ll be most successful at sales if you make the most of who you are.”

Make It Happen: Turning Good Ideas Into Great Results by Peter Sheahan

“The world is not short of ideas. It’s not. It is short of people who can execute on them. It is short of people who know how to take their aspirations and make a real impact on the world with them.

What differentiates the great ideas that end up on the cutting room floor from those that wind up changing the world? There are five steps, or rather five competencies you can build that separate the haves from the have-nots, the doers from the talkers … They are not a mantra for meditation, they are not positive affirmations that you chant to yourself in the mirror, they are actions.”

Why “Free” Is the Wrong Price for Water—Even If You Live on $1 a Day
by Charles Fishman

“Free turns out to be exactly the wrong price for water—whether that water is being used by huge global corporations, farmers, ordinary middle-class citizens, or the poorest people living in developing countries. Water that is so cheap provides no incentive for big users—corporations, farmers, even cities—to spend money necessary to better manage their water. [...] And poor people—who have to stand in line for water, or walk to get it from suspect ground-water wells—pay the highest cost for ‘free’ water of all, sacrificing time, good jobs, and even the educations of their children in order to secure their daily ration of water.”

This Sentence Has 5ive Words: Eigen Values, Creating Truisms and the Future of Marketing by Stephen Denny

“Our first sentence—“This sentence has five words—is an eigen value: a self-referencing, self-defining concept. The thing itself is its own definition. Our last rambling sentence is not an eigen value. It isn’t self-defining and frankly lacks meaning to anyone but its author. This is an important distinction, because the casual reader of this sentence frankly doesn’t care one way or another about the message or the messenger.

[...] Why is this concept important to your idea, your brand or your movement? Because creating eigen values is what marketers do when they’re doing their very best work. The concept of eigen values should change how you look at the marketing discipline completely.”

Shine: Brain Science, Practical Psychology, Ancient Wisdom and the Cycle of Excellence by Edward M. Hallowell, MD

“How do we draw the best out of people when so many of the rules and practices in life have changed? How in today’s new world can people reach their best at their best, given the speed of life and the torrent of information and obligation? Is there a coherent, evidence-based plan that every person can use to bring the best out of themselves or the people they manage? With the help of Dr. Shine, I offer a theory here of how to do just that. It includes 5 steps. I call it the Cycle of Excellence.”

The Mistake Manifesto: How Making Mistakes Can Make Us Better
by Alina Tugend

“While I am not advocating that we all run around blundering and goofing up all the time—and certainly none of us like dealing with people who make the same mistake over and over—our fear of mistakes has a very high cost.

We exert enormous energy blaming each other when something goes wrong rather than finding a solution. Defensiveness and accusations take the place of apologies and forgiveness. Mistake-avoidance creates workplaces where making changes and being creative while risking failure is subsumed by an ethos of mistake-prevention at the cost of daring and innovation.”

The Three Gaps Between Goals and Greatness by Pelè Raymond Ugboajah, PhD

“In the global race to achieve faster, better, cheaper business greatness, most leaders face a huge gap between the goals they set and the actual results achieved by the people in their organizations. This phenomenon is not a failure to plan, but rather, a failure to execute. […]

While there are many possible explanations for the root cause of the gap, the one common, recurring element is a stubborn, nagging blind spot: People issues.

Social Sharing Manifesto: The Arguments For and Against The Rise of the Sharing Consumer by Simon Salt

“Nothing has really changed, even with the popularity of terms like social consumer, sharing consumer etc. people have always shared. Whether sitting around the campfire, standing at the water cooler, or chatting over the garden fence, human beings share their opinions with others. If those opinions prove to be useful, that person will be sought out for an opinion about other things and on a more frequent basis.”

A Call Against Complacency by Dambisa Moyo

“Given the evidence and importance of positive incentives, why, over the past 50 years, have policymakers embarked on a systematic and deliberate strategy of putting in place a catalog of policies that dis-incentivise citizens from acting in a manner that could be beneficial to their economies, and the world at large?”

The Reinvention Imperative by Daniel Burrus & John David Mann

“In the good old twentieth century, you could reinvent your company, product category or industry once, and then go for a decade before doing anything especially innovative again. That doesn’t work anymore. The world has changed, and more importantly, change itself has changed.”

The Micropreneur Manifesto: How to Stay Solo, Bleed Passion, and Build Products that Matter by Rob Walling

“Micropreneurs are agile, inspired, independent, knowledge seekers who can’t live with the 9-to-5 status quo.

If this resonates with you, read on. This manifesto attempts to distill the key points you’ll need as you begin your micropreneur journey. I learned every one of them the hard way.”

Lizards & Leaders: How Meditation Accelerates Change by Eric Klein

“The goal is to cross your learning edge. […] To do this you have to let go of the structures, beliefs, and habits that constituted your old sense of self–without losing awareness. It takes a resilient awareness to remain at your learning edge without being overtaken by the inner lizard. ”

The Maxwell Fallacy: There’s More to Leadership than Influence
by David Burkus

“John Maxwell, billed often as America’s foremost authority on leadership, has made his career around the phrase: ‘Leadership is influence; nothing more, nothing less.’ This is the key phrase has guided the writing of the most prolific leadership author in America and influences the work of countless others. As a result it is perhaps the commonly accepted definition of leadership.

It’s brief. It’s pithy. It’s wrong.”

Ending Ephebiphobia: Young People Deserve More by Sarah Newton

“The stereotypes of young people and the irrational fear we have of them have no place in modern society.

Pliny the Elder was on to something when he said, “What we do to our children, they will do to society.” If his words are to ring true, then we are in for a whole lot of trouble.”

Six Reasons Why the Sharing Society (aka the Mesh) Will Trump the Ownership Society by Lisa Gansky

“Get out of your chairs and into the streets, kids—the Internet has come to town. Literally. The IT revolution started by moving data around. Now mobile devices have spread the revolution to physical things—to the street. [...] Convenient access means you don’t have to own something in order to have a pulse on its exact location and availability; you can use it—share it—save money while sparing hassles.”

As One: A Manifesto for Individual Action and Collective Power
by James Quigley & Mehrdad Baghai

“As One. Five letters that make all the difference between a group of individuals and a unified team. Two words that transform individual action into collective power. One idea that can help you realize the full power of your people.

[…]

Adding the phrase “as one” to another word changes its entire meaning. Imagine the possibilities: Working versus Working As One. Competing versus Competing As One. Winning versus Winning As One. The sources of inspiration are endless. Believing As One. Stronger As One. Succeeding As One.”

Disciplined Dreaming: How to Build Your Organization’s Creativity Mojo
by Josh Linkner

“I developed the Disciplined Dreaming system to give creativity its own place and practice, to provide everyone in the organization a structure for developing their own creative ideas, and to bring creativity back to the heart of business—where it belongs.

Disciplined Dreaming isn’t a stifling, rigid “innovation process”, but an open system. It provides a strong and flexible framework that frees individuals and organizations to improvise and explore—and, in the process, develop their creative chops. The ideas, processes, and practices of Disciplined Dreaming will help you build your chops by expanding your creative capacity and targeting your creative energy.”

Activating the Entrepreneur Within by Jeffrey Weber

“So you, dear reader, want to know if you are an entrepreneur. It would be so easy to draw your blood and see the entrepreneurial DNA floating about and qualitatively state, “Yes, he is an entrepreneur!” But what good would this do? There still would be so much lacking outside the control of simple DNA to activate the entrepreneur within you.”

How to Turn around Problem Performance in Five Questions or Less
by Jim Bolton

“Underperformers suck. They suck the productivity out of a team or organization. They suck the morale out of your high performers. […]

That begs a question that is central to this manifesto: What are underperformers costing you? How much time do you spend reacting to problems related to underperformance? Think of the things you could do with that time if you could only get it back.”

The Seven Myths of Hyper-Social Organizations: Why Human 1.0 is Key
by Francois Gossieaux

“With the rise of social media, which provides a massive platform of participation and a social infrastructure that is finally catching up with the conference infrastructure, the social element is reentering commerce and business with a vengeance. People can now claim a share of voices that is equal or larger than that of companies, employees can now develop support networks that cross the traditional hierarchical organization charts, and people can once again behave the way they were hardwired to behave in business and commerce–tribally, humanly, and socially.

To understand the changes that are afoot in the world of business you are better off understanding Human 1.0, which took tens of thousands of years to develop, rather than Web 2.0, which took merely a decade.”

The Era of Jack Welch is Over: Create Real Value Now, or Perish
by Douglas Rushkoff

“Yes, the net has changed business as profoundly as anything since central banking. But instead of seizing the opportunity, most businesses are still so addicted to the old way of doing things that they do the very opposite: they use the net to entrench themselves even further into the Industrial Age landscape that is fast disappearing.”

Radical Management: Mastering the Art of Continuous Innovation
by Stephen Denning

“Radical management focuses the entire organization on the goal of constantly increasing the value of what the organization offers to its clients. Once a firm commits to this goal, traditional command-and-control bureaucracy ceases to be a viable organizational option.”

Don’t You Want to Do Real Marketing? by Ernan Roman

“I define real marketing as follows: treating customers and prospects the way we want to be treated, and earning the sale and the long term relationship through the value we provide.

Traditional marketing based on ‘Spray and Pray’ blasts of mail, email, phone calls, and so on, not only doesn’t work, but is also obscenely wasteful.”

Principles Under Pressure: Working in Adversarial Relationships
by Aryanne Oade

“This manifesto is about how to work with such an adversarial character, whether they are your boss, peer or team member. It is about how to use the specific behavior you need to use to help you manage the unclear boundaries, ambivalent motives and occasional duplicitous conduct that characterizes adversarial working relationships.”

O Brave New World: Driving Profitable Growth in the New Demand Economy
by Rick Kash

“For the first time in the memory of most working people, we now live in a world of contracting markets, diminished consumer demand and anemic pricing power. And that in turn means that our current and widely adopted formula for growth is now obsolete.”

Forget Cinderella, Find Fred Astaire by Avivah Wittenberg-Cox

“Most companies would like to become more gender balanced at all levels, with women and men dancing together in a smooth and natural way. They have been trying for decades to attract, retain and promote more women. They have tried to grow their female customer bases. […]

But nobody ever bothered checking if the prince can actually dance.”

Make Your Web Site a Real-Time Machine by David Meerman Scott

“So ubiquitous have Web sites become that it’s hard to believe they’ve been with us for less than 20 years. It was the 1994 introduction of the browser-enabled World Wide Web that gave birth to the Web site. Since then they have gone through about four stages of evolution: […]

Now, we’re entering a fifth era of the evolution: transformation of the Web site into a real-time marketing (and sales) machine. This is the natural evolutionary outcome of a process that started with a new way to slip brochures under people’s doors.”

Turning Social Capital Into Financial Capital by Marcia Conner

“Social media has the potential to dramatically improve the inner workings of every company. The interstitial connections can quickly cross business silos, inform decision making, educate people at all levels, and allow employees—especially new entrants—to pick up the natural rhythms of how people around them work. But only if the company allows access to social networks. And most companies don’t.”

Through the Fog: Solving Health Care in Companies by John Torinus Jr.

“Major change usually comes off a platform of crisis, and I think everyone can agree that crisis conditions surely exist in health care economics. The nation’s health care bill has been doubling every eight years for the last four decades. The runaway costs have been busting the budgets of federal, state and local governments, and they have bled the bottom lines of corporations.”

The Amish and the Case for Humility by Erik Wesner

“When they’re not around you or me, the Amish speak a language called Pennsylvania German. Demut is their word for humility. And Demut isn’t just for the Amish.

Why does humility matter?

It matters in business. It matters in life. It matters in our relationships.”

Change is the New Constant: Leading Organizations
That (Can) Thrive in Crises by Alan Lewis

“Most organizations believe they are not working as well as they used to. They blame the rapid and unpredictable changes that are going on around them. But many of them have failed to grasp one fundamental truth: CHANGE IS THE NEW CONSTANT. To be successful in the 21st century requires an approach that change is here to stay, so one of the most critical components for success is now the ability to build a culture to adapt and thrive in change.”