Erik Synnestvedt has narrated 63 audiobooks on Listento.it by 72 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 229 ratings. The most-rated is Built to Sell.
Built to Sell
Summary
A business parable about how to create a start-up that won't trap you when you want to sell it. According to John Warrillow, the number one mistake entrepreneurs make is to build a business that relies too heavily on them. Thus, when the time comes to sell, buyers aren't confident that the company-even if it's profitable-can stand on its own. To illustrate this, Warrillow introduces us to a fictional small business owner named Alex who is struggling to sell his advertising agency. Alex turns to Ted, an entrepreneur and old family friend, who encourages Alex to pursue three criteria to make his business sellable: Teachable: focus on products and services that you can teach employees to deliver. Valuable: avoid price wars by specializing in doing one thing better than anyone else. Repeatable: generate recurring revenue by engineering products that customers have to repurchase often.
©2011 John Warrilow (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp
The Values Factor
Summary
Based on his landmark research and teachings, Dr. John Demartini has discovered the key to fulfillment in all aspects of life. What is the most important step you can take to achieve the life you've always dreamed of? You might think the answer is something like start saving money, get a better job, find my soul mate, or improve my marriage. Solutions like these might offer temporary satisfaction, but none of them can provide true, lasting fulfillment or help you achieve your unique purpose in life. The Values Factor shows you how to create a life in which every minute can be inspiring and fulfilling. The first step is to identify what you find most meaningful - the values in life that are most important to you. Once you understand your own unique values and align your life accordingly, you can achieve fulfillment in every aspect of your life: deepening your loving relationships, creating an inspiring career, establishing financial freedom, and tapping into a rich spiritual life. Dr. Demartini's provocative 13-part questionnaire will reveal to you what you value most. The answers may surprise you! Then, each chapter of this audiobook explains how to align every aspect of your life with your true values, so that you can finally achieve the success that you were capable of all along.
©2013 John F. Demartini (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC
Flawless Consulting
Summary
When the landmark best-seller Flawless Consulting was first published more than three decades ago, it was quickly adopted as the "consultant's bible." With his legendary warmth and passion, Peter Block explained how to deal effectively with clients, peers, and others. The book continues to speak to people in a support function inside organizations as well as to external consultants. This thoroughly revised and updated third edition of Peter Block's groundbreaking book explores the latest thinking on consultation. It includes new insights about how we can organize our consulting around discovering the strengths, positive examples, and gifts of the client organization or community. The book remains a practical and specific guide for anyone who needs to develop a capacity for deeper relatedness and partnership - which means it is for all who wish to make a real difference in the world. This new edition covers the consulting challenges that have arisen from the way we routinely communicate electronically and live in the virtual world. Block suggests ways to overcome the distancing and isolating effects inherent in electronic connects. The book also includes practical guidance on how to ask better questions, gives suggestions for dealing with difficult clients, and contains expanded guidelines on more engaging forms of implementation. Flawless Consulting includes two new examples, taken from health care and educational reform efforts, to show how consulting skills can be useful (and often transformative) in a broader context. These illustrative examples point the way for achieving changes for leadership in business, government, religion, human services, and more.Like the first two editions, Flawless Consulting affirms the notion that authentic behavior and personal relationships are the key to technical and business success. By demonstrating their ability to be truly authentic at each step in the process, consultants can aim toward creating workplaces that are more collaborative and ultimately more successful.
©2011 Peter Block (P)2012 Gildan Media Corp
Secrets of World Class
Summary
Steve Siebold uncovers the "mental toughness" secrets of champions. You can learn them, too, and start dreaming bigger and achieving more. In Secrets of the World Class, Steve Siebold's shares his 20-year journey of studying peak performers and discovering the link that makes them champions. Each chapter finishes with an "Action Step for Today" that leads you down the path from mediocrity to greatness. Loaded with ideas you can immediately put into action to catapult yourself from mediocrity to greatness. Applications for use in business as well as athletics. Steve's straightforward, tell-it-like it is style, cuts to the core of what it takes to go from middle class to world class. Gildan Media is proud to bring you these uplifting and life-changing inspirational books from Simple Truths, which can be used throughout every facet of your life. These audiobooks may be short in length, but their words speak volumes.
©2009 Steve Siebold (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC
The Teachings of Napoleon Hill: The Law of Success, The Lost Prosperity Secrets of Napoleon Hill, The Magic Ladder to Success
Summary
Napoleon Hill was an American author who is widely considered to be one of the greatest writers on success. His works examined the power of personal beliefs, and the role they play in personal success. He became an advisor to President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933-36. "What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve" is one of Hill's hallmark expressions. How achievement actually occurs, and a formula for it that puts success in reach of the average person, were the focal points of Hill's books, 3 of which are included in this fantastic audio bundle. Hill’s Philosophy of Achievement was published as The Law of Success, a life-changing guide that has sold millions of copies. Now you can hear 24 hours of the incredible philosophy upon which success is built. The Lost Prosperity Secrets of Napoleon Hill consists of a series of magazine articles Hill wrote between 1919 and 1923 for Success Magazine. Discover the principles designed for putting these steps to success into action. It is in these articles that Hill honed his theories of the success philosophy for the ordinary person. This time-tested wisdom resonates as strongly and as appropriate today as when it was first written. A primer in success-building, The Magic Ladder to Success is Napoleon Hill's compact distillation of his lifetime of learning. He offers 17 factors that make up his "Law of Success" philosophy. These key principles capture the ethics and actions that empower all who harness them to become leaders in the field of their choice. Leaders are not born, Hill argues; they are molded by a remarkably similar, simple, and dynamic set of habits. This lost classic - long out of print, is newly available in this audio edition revised and updated for the 21st century. Be inspired to be all you can be with these 3 Napoleon Hill classics.
©2010 JMW Group, Inc (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp
Understanding Michael Porter
Summary
A Distillation of The Most Important Business Thinking of Our Time Michael Porter’s groundbreaking ideas on competition and strategy have unfolded over three decades and are spread across a dauntingly long list of publications. Every manager can name individual pieces of his work - competitive advantage, the value chain, five forces - but no one, not even Porter himself, has put the entire puzzle together to reveal it as an integrated whole. This lucid, concise audiobook does just that. Written with Porter’s full cooperation by Joan Magretta, his former editor at Harvard Business Review, this book provides an engaging summary of Porter’s ideas and an invaluable synthesis of this important body of work, making clear how each of Porter’s powerful concepts relates to the others and, most important, to the practical realities managers face. Modern thinking about competition and strategy begins with Porter’s frameworks. They are the most widely used in practice by managers around the world. But as Magretta points out, Porter is often misunderstood and his frameworks misapplied. Magretta’s own wide-ranging business experience allows her to identify the most common of these misconceptions - among them, the deeply held but dangerous belief that competition is about being the best. Understand Porter and you will see why competing to be the best sparks an inevitable race to the bottom. Understanding Michael Porter will enable all leaders throughout any organization to grasp Porter’s seminal ideas about competition and strategy and deploy them to achieve competitive success.
©2011 Joan Magretta (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp
Disciplined Entrepreneurship
Summary
Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to Success will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren't born with something special - they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the "F" word - focus - is crucial to a startup's success. Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face - and how to overcome them. How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd - it's not just about technology. Whether you're a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
©2013 Bill Aulet (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
The Education of Millionaires
Summary
The Myth: If you get into a good college, study hard, and graduate with excellent grades, you will be pretty much set for a successful career. The Reality: The biggest thing you won't learn in college is how to succeed professionally. Some of the smartest, most successful people in the country didn't finish college. None of them learned their most critical skills in an institution of higher education. And like them, most of what you'll need to learn to be successful you'll have to learn on your own, outside of school. Michael Ellsberg set out to fill in the gaps by interviewing a wide range of millionaires and billionaires who don't have college degrees, including fashion magnate Russell Simmons, Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz and founding president Sean Parker, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, and Pink Floyd songwriter and lead guitarist David Gilmour. Among the fascinating things he learned: How fashion designer Marc Ecko started earning $1,000 a week in high school with his own clothing business and later grew it into an empire. How billionaire Phillip Ruffin went from lowly department store clerk with no college degree to owner of Treasure Island on the Vegas Strip. How John Paul DeJoria went from homelessness to billionaire as the founder of John Paul Mitchell Systems hair care products. This book is your guide to developing practical success skills in the real world. Even if you've already gone through college, the most important skills weren't on the curriculum - how to find great mentors, build a world-class network, learn real-world marketing and sales, make your work meaningful (and your meaning work), build the brand of you, master the art of bootstrapping, and more. Learning the skills in this book well is a necessary addition to any education, whether you're a high school dropout or a graduate of Harvard Law School.
©2011 Michael Ellsberg (P)2012 Gildan Media Corp
The Science of Success
Summary
Charles Koch may well be the most successful businessman people have never heard of. Under his leadership, Koch Industries has become a dynamic and diverse enterprise that Forbes has called "the world's largest private company". This groundbreaking audiobook includes the same material used by leaders and employees of Koch companies to apply Marker-Based Management (MBM) to get results. Koch outlines this unique management methodology, developed and implemented by Koch Industries, which has experienced 2,000-fold growth since 1967. Today, Koch Industries has 80,000 employees in 60 countries; it had $90 billion in revenues in 2006. MBM is a scientific approach to management that integrates theory and practice while providing a framework for dealing with the ongoing challenges of growth and change. There really is a science behind success, and it can be applied to any organization. MBM is rooted in the Science of Human Action, and is defined by five dimensions: Vision: Determining where and how the organization can create the greatest long-term value Virtue and Talents: Helping ensure that people with the right values, skills, and capabilities are hired, retained, and developed Knowledge Processes: Creating, acquiring, sharing, and applying relevant knowledge, and measuring and tracking profitability Decision Rights: Ensuring the right people are in the right roles with the right authority to make decisions and are held accountable Incentives: Rewarding people according to the value they create for the organizationWhen these dimensions are applied in an integrated, mutually reinforcing manner, they create continuous transformation and positive growth. Any organization - corporation, small business, nonprofit, or government agency - can apply these proven principles.PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2007 Charles G. Koch (P)2007 Gildan Media Corp
From Eternity to Here
Summary
Time moves forward, not backward---everyone knows you can't unscramble an egg. In the hands of one of today's hottest young physicists, that simple fact of breakfast becomes a doorway to understanding the Big Bang, the universe, and other universes, too. In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time, pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to conditions before the Big Bang itself---a period of modern cosmology of which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like child's play. Carroll's scenario is not only elegant, it's laid out in the same easy-to-understand language that has made his group blog, Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net. From Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics to explore how properties of space-time before the Big Bang can explain the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in the opposite direction. It's an ambitious, fascinating picture of the universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History of Time.
©2009 Sean Carroll (P)2010 Tantor
Napoleon Hill's Positive Action Plan
Summary
More than 50 years after it was first published, Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich still inspires thousands of people each year to take charge of their lives and pursue success. Now, from The Napoleon Hill Foundation, comes this collection of 365 daily spurs to better and greater achievement.
©1997 Napoleon Hill (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
The Seed
Summary
A business fable to help you discover your purpose in work and life. New from Jon Gordon, the international and Wall Street Journal best-selling author of The Energy Bus, The Seed takes you on a quest for the meaning and passion behind work. Josh, an up-and-comer at a leading technology company, is disenchanted with his job. Challenged by his boss to take two weeks to decide if he really wants to work there, Josh takes off for the country, where he meets a wise farmer who gives him a seed and a promise: find the right place to plant the seed, and his purpose will be revealed. Through Josh's journey cross-country journey, you'll find surprising new sources of wisdom and inspiration in your own business and life. When he discovers where and how to plant the seed, you'll get a new sense of what it means to live and work with passion and purpose. This book offers practical wisdom on discovering your true purpose, professionally and in life in general, in the form of a business fable by Jon Gordon, the best-selling author of The Energy Bus and Soup. Nobody captures the deeper meaning of business like Jon Gordon, and The Seed is his most searching and significant book yet. Whatever your profession, take this insightful look at the purpose behind work, and plant the seed of inspiration in your life!
©2011 Jon Gordon (P)2011 Gildan Media Corp
The Laptop Millionaire
Summary
Go from ZERO to $10,000 a month in 28 days and discover financial freedom online! Every day thousands of people are losing their jobs, their income, and their security - perhaps you are one of them. And for others, a job alone might not be enough. With the right strategies, however, you can achieve financial independence - faster than you ever thought possible. The Laptop Millionaire provides 32 easy-to-follow step-by-step strategies proven to make real money online. You'll learn how you can replace your income in 90 days or less, and forget about having a job; instead, create your own economy! The Laptop Millionaire reveals the exact strategies author Mark Anastasi used to make millions, and includes the success stories of other millionaire internet entrepreneurs. Whether you need an extra hundred dollars a week or want to start an Internet empire, this audiobook gives you the tools and advice you need. His no-fluff, no-filler strategies provide a blueprint to online success, allowing you to discover the laptop entrepreneur lifestyle for yourself. You'll discover: How anyone can make $700 to $3,000 a week thanks to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube; How to turn $400 into a $10,000-a-month business thanks to eBooks; How to make $6,000 to $20,000 in 90 minutes thanks to joint venture webinars; How millions of people worldwide are making a full-time living from home, thanks to the internet; How your laptop can give you the freedom and ability to live anywhere you want in the world; How 7 simple millionaire secrets can transform your life; and How financial independence starts at just 400 clicks per day. If you apply the principles from The Laptop Millionaire, you will be well on your way to living the dream and mastering your financial destiny.
©2012 Mark Anastasi (P)2012 Gildan Media, LLC
How Chuck Feeney Made and Gave Away a Fortune
Summary
In 1988 Forbes magazine hailed Chuck Feeney as the 23rd richest American alive. No one knew until then that he was extremely wealthy. Or was he? Born during the Depression in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Feeney had made a fortune as co-founder of Duty Free Shoppers, the world's largest duty-free retail chain. How he did it is one of the great untold retail stories of modern times. The greater untold story is that Feeney had in fact given away his fortune, in its totality, to endow Atlantic Philanthropies - one of the most generous and secretive philanthropic funds in the world. Atlantic Philanthropies is committed to giving away all its assets - currently they stand at $4 billion - during the next decade, an unprecedented example of the "giving while living" philosophy. Through the achievements of Atlantic Philanthropies, Chuck Feeney's influence has become even more impressive than his wealth. Feeney is a frugal man who travels economy class and does not own a house or a car. He has largely kept out of the public eye - until now. He has revealed his secret life only because he hopes his story will encourage something in which he passionately believes: that rich individuals have a moral obligation to put their wealth to good use while they are alive.
©2013 Conor O'Clery (P)2013 Gildan Media, LLC
The Law
Summary
The Law was originally published as a pamphlet in French in 1850 by Frederic Bastiat. It is his most famous work and was written two years after the third French Revolution of 1848. It defines, through development, a just system of laws and then demonstrates how such law facilitates a free society. Bastiat was a French classical liberal theorist, political economist, and member of the French assembly. He was notable for developing the important economic concept of opportunity cost. He was the author of many works on economics and political economy, generally characterized by their clear organization, forceful argumentation, and acerbic wit. Born in Bayonne, Aquitaine, France, Bastiat was orphaned at nine and became a ward of his paternal grandparents. At 17, he left school to work in his family's export business. Economist Thomas DiLorenzo suggests that this experience was crucial to Bastiat's later work since it allowed young Frédéric to acquire first-hand knowledge of how regulation can affect markets. When Bastiat was 25, his grandfather died, leaving the young man the family estate, thereby providing him with the means to further his theoretical inquiries. After the middle-class Revolution of 1830, Bastiat became politically active and was elected justice of the peace in 1831 and to the Council General in 1832. He was elected to the national legislative assembly after the French Revolution of 1848. His public career as an economist began in 1844 and was cut short by his untimely death in 1850.
Public Domain (P)2012 Gildan Media, LLC
Coaching for Performance, Fourth Edition
Summary
Coaching is a way of managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being. Coaching has matured into an invaluable profession fit for our times and this fourth edition of the most widely read coaching book takes it to the next frontier. Good coaching is a skill that requires a depth of understanding and plenty of practice if it is to deliver its astonishing potential. This extensively revised and expanded new audio edition of Coaching for Performance clearly explains the principles of coaching and illustrates them with examples of high performance from business and sport. It continues to follow the GROW sequence (Goals, Reality, Options, Will) and clarifies the process and practice of coaching by describing what coaching really is, what it can be used for, when and how much it can be used, and who can use it well.
©2009 John Whitmore (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC
Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become
Summary
Who do you want your customers to become? According to MIT innovation expert and thought leader Michael Schrage, if you aren’t asking this question, your strategic marketing and innovation efforts will fail. In this latest HBR Single, Schrage provides a powerful new lens for getting more value out of innovation investment. He argues that asking customers to do something different doesn’t go far enough - serious marketers and innovators must ask them to become something different instead. Even more, you must invest in their capabilities and competencies to help them become better customers. Schrage’s primary insight is that innovation is an investment in your client, not just a transaction with them. To truly innovate today, designing new products or features or services won’t get you there. Only by designing new customers - thinking of their future state, being the conduit to their evolution - will you transform your business. Marketing executives, brand managers, strategic innovators, and entrepreneurs alike should understand how successful innovation rebrands the client and not the product. A requisite question for its time, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become will liberate you and your team from ‘innovation myopia’ - and turn your innovation efforts on their head.
©2012 Michael Schrage (P)2012 Gildan Media LLC
Topgrading, 3rd Edition
Summary
Great companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent: The more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers. But companies that have used Brad Smart’s Topgrading system over the past two decades have boosted their hiring success rates dramatically - sometimes even to 90%. Three huge problems account for the typical poor results in hiring: dishonesty (via deceptive résumés), incomplete information (via shallow interviews), and lack of verifiability (via biased references). Topgrading shows how to solve all three problems. Instead of hiring by your gut reactions to résumés and interviews, you can start using a scientifically honed process that compels candidates to be totally honest. Smart, one of the world’s foremost experts on hiring, has personally helped hundreds of companies double, triple, or even quadruple their hiring success rates. His clients have ranged from global giants to small businesses in every field imaginable. Hundreds of thousands of followers have applied the lessons and tools of the first two editions of Topgrading. The Topgrading system makes hiring easier, faster, and more successful than any other process. And it works at every level, from the front lines to senior management. For the first time in seven years, Smart has fully revised and updated Topgrading with many new tools, techniques, and case studies. Topgrading isn’t just about hiring and promoting - it’s also about developing talent. It enables leaders to reward their A Players, coach their Bs to become As, and weed out the Cs who are beyond improvement. Many great leaders know that Topgrading works. Find out how it can help your company gain a big competitive advantage. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2012 Bradford D. Smart Ph.D. (P)2012 Gildan Media LLC
The Self-Made Billionaire Effect
Summary
Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires. People like Mark Cuban, John Paul DeJoria, Sara Blakely, and T. Boone Pickens all built businesses - in some cases, multiple businesses - that are among today's most iconic brands. This fact raises two profound questions: Why couldn't their former employers hang on to these extraordinarily talented people? And why are most big companies unable to create as much new value as the world's roughly 800 self-made billionaires? John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen decided to look more closely at self-made billionaires because creating $1 billion or more in value is an incredible feat. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, the authors concluded that many of the myths perpetuated about billionaires are simply not true. These billionaires aren't necessarily smarter, harder working, or luckier than their peers. They aren't all prodigies, crossing the billionaire finish line in their 20s. Nor, most of the time, do they create something brand-new: More than 80 percent of the billionaires in the research sample earned their billions in highly competitive industries. The key difference is what the authors call the "Producer" mind-set, in contrast with the far more pervasive "Performer" mind-set. Performers strive to excel in well-defined areas, and are important. But Producers are critical to any company looking to create massive value because they redefine what’s possible, rather than simply meeting preexisting goals and standards. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio.
©2014 John Sviokla and Mitch Cohen (P)2014 Gildan Media LLC
The Six Secrets of Change
Summary
It is commonly acknowledged that successful organizations adjust quickly and intelligently to shifts in consumer tastes, political climate, and economic opportunity. But how are some able to succeed at change while so many others fail? Drawing on his acclaimed work in bringing about large-scale and substantial change in education reform in both public school systems and universities, as well as engaging in major change initiatives internationally, Michael Fullan lays out the key factors that allow an organization to sustain meaningful change and explores essential lessons for business and public sector leaders for surviving and thriving in today's complex environment.
©2008 John Wiley and Sons, Inc. (P)2008 Gildan Media Corp