Recommendations based on "Death by Meeting A Leadership Fable...About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business"

One of the world's great designers shares his vision of "the fundamental principles of great and meaningful design", that's "even more relevant today than it was when first published" (Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO).   Even the smartest among us can feel inept as we fail to figure out which light switch or oven burner to turn on, or whether to push, pull, or slide a door.   The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.   The Design of Everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The goal: guide the user effortlessly to the right action on the right control at the right time.   The Design of Everyday Things is a powerful primer on how -- and why -- some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.  

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor offers insights on how to make the “new way of work” work for you, providing actionable steps to optimize your productivity, accomplish more, prevent burnout, and cultivate a harmonious work-life balance. Every day, tens of thousands of Google employees, from executives to interns, rely on Laura Mae Martin’s tips and best practices for how to make the most of their time. Now, with Uptime, Laura brings her unique approach to productivity and well-being to anyone who wants to be more effective and experience “calm accomplishment,” whether at work, at school, or in their own personal lives. Laura began her Google career in sales but quickly carved out a niche for herself as a productivity expert. For more than a decade, she’s been coaching Google executives and employees on how to achieve a state of “productivity Zen”—a holistic approach to conquering everything from the avalanche of emails in their inboxes to becoming the master of their own calendars and running excellent meetings. Her strategies have been widely adopted by many, including entry-level employees looking to amplify their individual impact, middle managers, and top executives working across global teams. As many of us have moved to a hybrid environment blending work and home, managing our time efficiently and remaining productive is more important than ever. In Uptime, Laura shows how to thrive no matter where you’re working, giving concrete steps that help you focus on your priorities and keep good systems, routines, and tactics in place. Uptime explains how to make technology work for you and make “feeling on top of it” your new normal. It’s a blueprint for operating at the highest levels of productivity while enhancing your own personal well-being.

Design your networks to successfully manage their growing complexity     Network professionals have often been told that today’s modern control planes would simplify their networks. The opposite has happened: Technologies like SDN and NFV, although immensely valuable, are exacerbating complexity instead of solving it. Navigating Network Complexity is the first comprehensive guide to managing this complexity in both deployment and day-to-day operations.   Russ White and Jeff Tantsura introduce modern complexity theory from the standpoint of the working network engineer, helping you apply it to the practical problems you face every day. Avoiding complex mathematical models, they show how to characterize network complexity, so you can understand it and control it.   The authors examine specific techniques and technologies associated with network control planes, including SDNs, fast reroute, segment routing, service chaining, and cloud computing. They reveal how each of these affects network design and complexity and help you anticipate causes of failure in highly complex systems.   Next, they turn to modern control planes, examining the fundamental operating principles of SDNs, such as OpenFlow and I2RS, network and other service function virtualization, content distribution networks, Layer 2 fabrics, and service chaining solutions. You’ll learn how each of these might both resolve and increase complexity in network design and operations and what you can do about it.   Coverage includes:   Defining complexity, understanding its components, and measuring it Mastering a straightforward “state, speed, and surface” model for analyzing complexity Controlling complexity in design, deployment, operations, protocols, and programmable networks Understanding how complex network systems begin to fail and how to prevent failure Recognizing complexity tradeoffs in service virtualization and service chaining Managing new challenges of complexity in virtualized and cloud environments Learning why constructs such as hierarchical design, aggregation, and protocol layering work and when they work best Choosing the right models to contain complexity as your network changes   From start to finish, Navigating Network Complexity helps you assess the true impact of new network technologies, so they can capture more value with fewer problems.  

Don't Take On A Problem If It Isn't Yours! This book, one of the most liberating in the extraordinary One Minute Manager library, teachers an unforgettable lesson; how to save time to do what you want and need to do. Step by Step, the authors show how mangers can free themselves from doing everyone else's job and ensure that every problem is handled by the proper person. By using the Four Rules of Monkey Management, Managers will learn to become effective supervisors of time, energy and talent-especially their own.

Unlike other dry business books, this refreshing, straightforward guide from Logo Design Love author and international designer David Airey answers the questions all designers have when first starting out on their own. In fact, the book was inspired by the many questions David receives every day from the more than 600,000 designers who visit his three blogs (Logo Design Love, Identity Designed, and DavidAirey.com) each month.   How do I find new clients? How much should I charge for my design work? When should I say no to a client? How do I handle difficult clients? What should I be sure to include in my contracts?   David’s readers–a passionate and vocal group–regularly ask him these questions and many more on how to launch and run their own design careers. With this book, David finally answers their pressing questions with anecdotes, case studies, and sound advice garnered from his own experience as well as those of such well-known designers as Ivan Chermayeff, Jerry Kuyper, Maggie Macnab, Eric Karjaluoto, and Von Glitschka. Designers just starting out on their own will find this book invaluable in succeeding in today’s hyper-networked, global economy.

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org--the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber--Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies. The NexusTM Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum's core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability. Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges Register your product at informit.com/register for convenient access to downloads, updates, and/or corrections as they become available.

Skilled at puncturing financial bubbles and other delusions of the Wall Street crowd, Burton Malkiel shows why a broad portfolio of stocks selected at random will match the performance of one carefully chosen by experts. Taking a shrewd look at the high-tech boom and its aftermath, Malkiel shows how to maximize gains and minimize losses in this era of electronic brokers, virtual gurus, and flashy investment vehicles. Learn how to analyze the potential returns, not only for stocks and bonds, but for the full range of investment opportunities, from money market accounts and real estate investment trusts to insurance, home owning, and tangible assets like gold and collectibles. Decode the rating game for mutual funds and discover the unique advantages of index mutual funds over the wide range of riskier alternatives. Year in and year out the best investing guide money can buy, this enhanced edition includes an update of Malkiel's famous "Life-Cycle Guide to Investing," showing how to match an investment strategy to your stage in life.

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BUILDING AN APP-BASED BUSINESS 'A must read for anyone who wants to start a mobile app business' Riccardo Zacconi, founder and CEO King Digital (maker of Candy Crush Saga) 'A fascinating deep dive into the world of billion-dollar apps. Essential reading for anyone trying to build the next must-have app' Michael Acton Smith, Founder and CEO, Mind Candy Apps have changed the way we communicate, shop, play, interact and travel and their phenomenal popularity has presented possibly the biggest business opportunity in history. In How to Build a Billion Dollar App, serial tech entrepreneur George Berkowski gives you exclusive access to the secrets behind the success of the select group of apps that have achieved billion-dollar success. Berkowski draws exclusively on the inside stories of the billion-dollar app club members, including Instagram, Whatsapp, Snapchat, Candy Crush and Uber to provide all the information you need to create your own spectacularly successful mobile business. He guides you through each step, from an idea scribbled on the back of an envelope, through to finding a cofounder, building a team, attracting (and keeping) millions of users, all the way through to juggling the pressures of being CEO of a billion-dollar company (and still staying ahead of the competition). If you've ever dreamed of quitting your nine to five job to launch your own company, you're a gifted developer, seasoned entrepreneur or just intrigued by mobile technology, How to Build a Billion Dollar App will show you what it really takes to create your own billion-dollar, mobile business.

C# has matured over the past decade: It's now a rich language with generics, functional programming concepts, and support for both static and dynamic typing. This palette of techniques provides great tools for many different idioms, but there are also many ways to make mistakes. In Effective C#, Second Edition, respected .NET expert Bill Wagner identifies fifty ways you can leverage the full power of the C# 4.0 language to express your designs concisely and clearly. Effective C#, Second Edition, follows a clear format that makes it indispensable to hundreds of thousands of developers: clear, practical explanations, expert tips, and plenty of realistic code examples. Drawing on his unsurpassed C# experience, Wagner addresses everything from types to resource management to dynamic typing to multicore support in the C# language and the .NET framework. Along the way, he shows how to avoid common pitfalls in the C# language and the .NET environment. You'll learn how to Use both types of C# constants for efficiency and maintainability (see Item 2) Employ immutable data types to promote multicore processing (see Item 20) Minimize garbage collection, boxing, and unboxing (see Items 16 and 45) Take full advantage of interfaces and delegates (see Items 22 though 25) Make the most of the parallel framework (see Items 35 through 37) Use duck typing in C# (see Item 38) Spot the advantages of the dynamic and Expression types over reflection (see Items 42 and 43) Assess why query expressions are better than loops (see Item 8) Understand how generic covariance and contravariance affect your designs (see Item 29) See how optional parameters can minimize the number of method overloads (see Item 10) You're already a successful C# programmer-this book will help you become an outstanding one.