Recommendations based on "DK Essential Managers"

Apply psychology and behavioral science to web, UX, and graphic designBehavioral science leader and CEO at The Team W, Inc., Susan M. Weinschenk, provides a guide that every designer needs, combining real science and research with practical examples on everything from font size to online interactions. With this book you'll design more intuitive and engaging apps, software, websites and products that match the way people think, decide and behave.Here are some of the questions this book will answer: What grabs and holds attention? What makes memories stick? What motivates people? How does listening to music make people feel? How do you engineer a decision? What line length for text is best? Are some fonts better than others?We design to elicit responses from people. We want them to buy something, read more, or take action of some kind. Designing without understanding what makes people act the way they do is like exploring a new city without a map: results will be haphazard, confusing, and inefficient. Increase the effectiveness of your designs by using science-backed examples on human behavior."Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so well-written, researched, and designed that I just can't put it down. That's how good 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People is!"―Lynne Cooke, Clinical Assistant Professor at Arizona State University

Economics is not a field that is known for good writing. Charts, yes. Sparkling prose, no.   Except, that is, when it comes to Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Her conversational and witty yet always clear style is a hallmark of her classic works of economic history, enlivening the dismal science and engaging readers well beyond the discipline. And now she’s here to share the secrets of how it’s done.   Economical Writing is itself economical: a collection of thirty-five pithy rules for making your writing clear, concise, and effective. Proceeding from big-picture ideas to concrete strategies for improvement at the level of the paragraph, sentence, or word, McCloskey shows us that good writing, after all, is not just a matter of taste—it’s a product of adept intuition and a rigorous revision process. Debunking stale rules, warning us that “footnotes are nests for pedants,” and offering an arsenal of readily applicable tools and methods, she shows writers of all levels of experience how to rethink the way they approach their work, and gives them the knowledge to turn mediocre prose into magic.   At once efficient and digestible, hilarious and provocative, Economical Writing lives up to its promise. With McCloskey as our guide, it’s impossible not to see how any piece of writing—on economics or any other subject—can be a pleasure to read.

Oren Klaff, sales and negotiating expert and bestselling author of Pitch Anything , reveals new playbook on persuasion in business.No one likes being pressured into making a purchase. Over decades of being marketed, pitched, sold (and lied) to, we've all grown resistant to sales persuasion. The moment we feel pressured to buy, we pull away. And if we're told what to think, our defenses go up. These days, it's just not enough to make a great pitch. That's why Oren Klaff says it's time to throw out the old playbook on persuasion.Instead, in Flip the Script , he devises a new approach based on a simple everyone trusts their own ideas. Instead of pushing your idea on your buyer, if you can guide them to discover it on their own, they will believe it, trust it, and get excited about it. Then they'll buy in and feel good about the chance to work with you. Klaff breaks down this insight into a series of actionable steps, for - Achieve Status Make sure that your potential buyer or investor recognizes you as a peer on the dominance hierarchy by using a status tip-off, a strategically placed remark that identifies you as an insider who can relate to your client's concerns.- Close the Certainty Allay your buyer's fears about going into business with you by delivering a flash roll, a practiced display of technical mastery that proves your expertise in the domain.- Present Your Idea as Plain You can go overboard trying to present your product as a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind solution. The more you emphasize the familiar, reliable elements of your product, showing that it's just "plan vanilla," the easier you make it for your buyer to say yes.Packed with examples and stories of the long-shot, often hilarious deals that Klaff has pulled off over the years, from training a team of motorcycle parts salesmen in the freezing reaches of North Dakota, to selling investors on a Chinese marketplace in Hawaii, Flip the Script is the most entertaining, informative masterclass in dealmaking you'll find anywhere.

In this timely manifesto, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework broadly reject the prevailing notion that long hours, aggressive hustle, and "whatever it takes" are required to run a successful business today.In Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson introduced a new path to working effectively. Now, they build on their message with a bold, iconoclastic strategy for creating the ideal company culture—what they call "the calm company." Their approach directly attack the chaos, anxiety, and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and hampers billions of workers every day.Long hours, an excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for modern professionals. But it should be a mark of stupidity, the authors argue. Sadly, this isn’t just a problem for large organizations—individuals, contractors, and solopreneurs are burning themselves out the same way. The answer to better productivity isn’t more hours—it’s less waste and fewer things that induce distraction and persistent stress.It’s time to stop celebrating Crazy, and start celebrating Calm, Fried and Hansson assert.Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. "Calm" has been the cornerstone of their company’s culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn’t a book telling you what to do. It’s a book showing you what they’ve done—and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis.Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Strategic Monoliths and Microservices helps business decision-makers and technical team members collaborate to clearly understand their strategic problems, and identify their optimal architectural approaches, whether those turn out to be distributed microservices, well-modularized monoliths, or coarse-grained services partway between the two. Writing for MBA and IT students alike, leading software architecture expert Vaughn Vernon and Tomasz Jaskua guide you through making balanced architecture compositional decisions based on need and purpose rather than popular opinion, so you can maximize business value and deliver systems that evolve more easily. Throughout, the authors provide realistic application examples, showing how to construct well-designed monoliths that are maintainable and extensible, and how to decompose massively tangled legacy systems into truly effective microservices.

In The Software Craftsman, Sandro Mancuso explains what craftsmanship means to the developer and his or her organization, and shows how to live it every day in your real-world development environment. Mancuso shows how software craftsmanship fits with and helps students improve upon best-practice technical disciplines such as agile and lean, taking all development projects to the next level. Readers will learn how to change the disastrous perception that software developers are the same as factory workers, and that software projects can be run like factories.

As commander of Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), General Stanley McChrystal played a crucial role in the War on Terror. But when he took the helm in 2004, America was losing that war badly: despite vastly inferior resources and technology, Al Qaeda was outmaneuvering America's most elite warriors. McChrystal came to realize that today's faster, more interdependent world had overwhelmed the conventional, top-down hierarchy of the U.S. military. Al Qaeda had seen the future: a decentralized network that could move quickly and strike ruthlessly. To defeat such an enemy, JSOC would have to discard a century of management wisdom, and pivot from a pursuit of mechanical efficiency to organic adaptability. Under McChrystal's leadership, JSOC remade itself, in the midst of a grueling war, into something entirely new: a network that combined robust centralized communication with decentralized managerial authority. As a result, they beat back Al Qaeda. In this book, McChrystal shows not only how the military made that transition, but also how similar shifts are possible in all organizations, from large companies to startups to charities to governments. In a turbulent world, the best organizations think and act like a team of teams, embracing small groups that combine the freedom to experiment with a relentless drive to share what they've learned. Drawing on a wealth of evidence from his military career, the private sector, and sources as diverse as hospital emergency rooms and NASA's space program, McChrystal frames the existential challenge facing today's organizations, and proposes a compelling, effective solution.

The Complete Guide to Writing More Maintainable, Manageable, Pleasing, and Powerful Ruby Applications Ruby's widely admired ease of use has a downside: Too many Ruby and Rails applications have been created without concern for their long-term maintenance or evolution. The Web is awash in Ruby code that is now virtually impossible to change or extend. This text helps you solve that problem by using powerful real-world object-oriented design techniques, which it thoroughly explains using simple and practical Ruby examples. Sandi Metz has distilled a lifetime of conversations and presentations about object-oriented design into a set of Ruby-focused practices for crafting manageable, extensible, and pleasing code. She shows you how to build new applications that can survive success and repair existing applications that have become impossible to change. Each technique is illustrated with extended examples, all downloadable from the companion Web site, poodr.info. The first title to focus squarely on object-oriented Ruby application design, Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby will guide you to superior outcomes, whatever your previous Ruby experience. Novice Ruby programmers will find specific rules to live by; intermediate Ruby programmers will find valuable principles they can flexibly interpret and apply; and advanced Ruby programmers will find a common language they can use to lead development and guide their colleagues. This guide will help you Understand how object-oriented programming can help you craft Ruby code that is easier to maintain and upgrade Decide what belongs in a single Ruby class Avoid entangling objects that should be kept separate Define flexible interfaces among objects Reduce programming overhead costs with duck typing Successfully apply inheritance Build objects via composition Design cost-effective tests Solve common problems associated with poorly designed Ruby code

The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets—now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketingIn Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle—which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards—there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment. This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.