Books about Sustaining from Amazon.com

Mega-bestselling author Ken Blanchard and celebrated business leaders Don Hutson and Ethan Willis present an inspiring story that reveals the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

In THE ONE MINUTE ENTREPRENEUR, Ken Blanchard (coauthor of the #1 bestselling business classic The One Minute Manager), Don Hutson, CEO of U.S. Learning, and Ethan Willis, CEO of Prosper Learning, tell the inspiring story of one man’s challenges in creating his own business. Through a powerful and engaging narrative, we confront many of the typical problems all entrepreneurs face in starting up their business, from finding new sources of revenue to securing the commitment of their people and the loyalty of their customers. More important, we learn the secrets to becoming a successful entrepreneur, including how to build a firm foundation, how to ensure a steady cash flow, and how to create legendary service. In addition, the book offers invaluable advice, delivered through One Minute Insights, from such entrepreneurs and thinkers as Sheldon Bowles, Peter Drucker, Michael Gerber, and Charlie “Tremendous” Jones.

Today, in the midst of the largest entrepreneurial surge in U.S. history, four out of five small businesses continue to fail. THE ONE MINUTE ENTREPRENEUR offers businesspeople and would-be entrepreneurs a treasure trove of wisdom on how to think, act, and succeed in creating and sustaining a business, no matter what their industry.

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Price: $9.97 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Daniel Amen, M.D., one of the world’s foremost authorities on the brain, has news for you: your brain is involved in everything you do—learn to care for it properly, and you will be smarter, healthier, and happier in as little as 15 days!

You probably run, lift weights, or do yoga to keep your body in great shape; you put on sunscreen and lotions to protect your skin; but chances are you simply ignore your brain and trust it to do its job. People unknowingly endanger or injure their brains, stress them by working at a frenzied pace and not getting enough sleep, pollute them with caffeine, alcohol, and drugs, and deprive them of proper nutrients. Brain dysfunction is the number one reason people fail at school, work, and relationships. The brain is the organ of learning, working, and loving—the supercomputer that runs our lives. It’s very simple: when our brains work right, we work right—and when our brains have trouble, we have trouble in our lives.

Luckily, it’s never too late: the brain is capable of change, and when you care for it, the results are amazing. Making a Good Brain Great gives you the tools you need to optimize your brain power and enrich your health and your life in the process. The principles and exercises in this book, based on years of cutting-edge neuroscience research and the experiences of thousands of people, provide a wealth of practical information to teach you how to achieve the best brain possible. You will learn:

•how to eat right to think right

•how to protect your brain from injuries and toxic substances

•how to nourish your brain with vitamins and do mental workouts to keep it strong

•the critical component of physical exercise, and which kinds work best

•how to rid your brain of negative thoughts, counteract stress, and much more

Full of encouraging anecdotes from Dr. Amen’s many years of experience, Making a Good Brain Great is a positive and practical road map for enriching and improving your own greatest asset—your brain.


From the Hardcover edition..
Price: $7.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the worldwide bestseller The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton M. Christensen exposed a crushing paradox behind the failure of many industry leaders. By doing what good companies were supposed to do-focus on pleasing their most profitable customers-leaders were paving the way for their own demise. How? By ignoring "disruptive technologies"-new, cheaper innovations that initially target small customer segments but evolve to displace the reigning product.

Now, Christensen and coauthor Michael E. Raynor cut the Gordian knot of the "innovator's dilemma" with The Innovator's Solution. This groundbreaking book reveals that innovation is not as unpredictable as most managers have come to believe. While the outcomes of past innovations seem random, the process by which innovations are packaged and shaped within companies is very predictable. By understanding and managing the forces that influence this process, companies can shape high-octane business plans that create truly disruptive growth.

Drawing on years of in-depth research and using new theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, the authors identify the processes that create successful innovations, and show managers how to tailor their strategies to the changing circumstances of a dynamic world.

Comprehensive yet practical, The Innovator's Solution is an actionable prescription for innovation-driven, profitable growth.

"A good business book makes managers stop and think. A great business book teaches managers how to stop and think. This is a great book. It is hard to imagine an executive team that would not benefit from devoting an entire day to discussing it."

-Geoffrey Moore, Chairman and Founder, TCG Advisors, and author, Crossing the Chasm and Living on the Fault Line

"In The Innovator's Solution, Christensen and Raynor address the holy grail of all organizations: how to generate growth and sustain it over long periods. Avoiding the temptation to provide simplistic formulas, they guide the reader through carefully constructed frameworks that teach how to think about the issues that limit-and provide-growth to organizations."

-Dr. Andrew S. Grove, Chairman of the Board, Intel

"Christensen and Raynor have done a superb job of creating a framework for helping to understand the industry dynamics and for planning your own growth alternatives."

-Pekka Ala-Pietilä, President, Nokia Corporation

"Singapore, as a small nation, needs to be innovative and sensitive to disruptive changes more than other countries. Christensen and Raynor have provided an excellent framework to reduce the randomness of the innovation process. This framework will help in our effort to nurture an environment conducive for enterprises to create and capitalize on disruptive innovations."

-Teo Ming Kian, Chairman, Singapore Economic Development Board

"The Innovator's Solution goes directly to the heart of why large companies have failed to sustain innovation. Christensen and Raynor have a deep insight into the challenges that innovative companies face, and they propose practical, realistic solutions to the dilemmas of innovation. This book will be extremely useful to all managers who are committed to using innovation to sustain their growth."

-Bill George, former Chairman and CEO, Medtronic, Inc.

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Price: $6.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The essential complement to the pathbreaking book Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. With over 30 printings in English and translated into thirteen languages, this second volume in Porter's landmark trilogy describes how a firm actually gains an advantage over its rivals. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into "activities," or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Now an essential part of international business thinking, Competitive Advantage takes strategy from broad vision to an internally consistent configuration of activities. Its powerful framework provides the tools to understand the drivers of cost and a company's relative cost position. Porter's value chain enables managers to isolate the underlying sources of buyer value that will command a premium price, and the reasons why one product or service substitutes for another. He shows how competitive advantage lies not only in activities themselves but in the way activities relate to each other, to supplier activities, and to customer activities. Competitive Advantage also provides for the first time the tools to strategically segment an industry and rigorously assess the competitive logic of diversification.

That the phrases "competitive advantage" and "sustainable competitive advantage" have become commonplace is testimony to the power of Porter's ideas. Competitive Advantage has guided countless companies, business school students, and scholars in understanding the roots of competition. Porter's work captures the extraordinary complexity of competition in a way that makes strategy both concrete and actionable..
Price: $23.06 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $10.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Earth's biodiversity-the rich variety of life on our planet-is disappearing at an alarming rate. And while many books have focused on the expected ecological consequences, or on the aesthetic, ethical, sociological, or economic dimensions of this loss, Sustaining Life is the first book to examine the full range of potential threats that diminishing biodiversity poses to human health.
Edited and written by Harvard Medical School physicians Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein, along with more than 100 leading scientists who contributed to writing and reviewing the book, Sustaining Life presents a comprehensive--and sobering--view of how human medicines, biomedical research, the emergence and spread of infectious diseases, and the production of food, both on land and in the oceans, depend on biodiversity. The book's ten chapters cover everything from what biodiversity is and how human activity threatens it to how we as individuals can help conserve the world's richly varied biota. Seven groups of organisms, some of the most endangered on Earth, provide detailed case studies to illustrate the contributions they have already made to human medicine, and those they are expected to make if we do not drive them to extinction. Drawing on the latest research, but written in language a general reader can easily follow, Sustaining Life argues that we can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world, nor assume that we will not be harmed by its alteration. Our health, as the authors so vividly show, depends on the health of other species and on the vitality of natural ecosystems.
With a foreword by E.O. Wilson and a prologue by Kofi Annan, and more than 200 poignant color illustrations, Sustaining Life contributes essential perspective to the debate over how humans affect biodiversity and a compelling demonstration of the human health costs..
Price: $20.87 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Love may be sweeter the second time around, but once the bliss of a newfound relationship wears off a little, the reality of being part of a stepfamily sets in. If you are one of the millions of remarried Americans facing the challenge of blending two existing families into one cohesive whole, you are part of a stepcouple—and you know all too well how hard it can be to make your marriage work in sometimes tough terrain.

Different parenting styles, finances, relationships with ex-spouses, legal matters, and even seemingly simple issues such as the kinds of chores assigned to children can chisel away at your union if you don’t always make your marriage a priority.

Stepcoupling offers advice for stepcouples on how to do just that—all the while strengthening their blended family with a healthy marriage. Susan Wisdom and Jennifer Green provide tips and strategies on dealing with the issues remarried couples face, with a wealth of advice from real-life stepcouples, such as:

* Learning to tailor your expectations of your spouse or children and remembering that no family is perfect
* Knowing where your boundaries are, whether involving a hostile ex-spouse or a stepchild who demands too much attention
* Realizing that traits like flexibility, tolerance, forgiveness, and openness are especially essential in a stepfamily situation
* Making “us” time for talking, problem-solving, weekends away, and enjoying your marriage to constantly renew and strengthen your bond as a couple

Let this invaluable remarriage manual help you make your stepcouple the foundation of a strong, happy, and successful stepfamily..
Price: $4.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]

When it was first published more than sixteen years ago, John Bryson's Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations introduced a new and thoughtful strategic planning model. Since then it has become the standard reference in the field. In this completely revised third edition, Bryson updates his perennial bestseller to help today’s leaders enhance organizational effectiveness. This new edition:

• Features the Strategy Change Cycle—a proven planning process used by a large number of organizations
• Offers detailed guidance on implementing the planning process and includes specific tools and techniques to make the process work in any organization
• Introduces new material on creating public value, stakeholder analysis, strategy mapping, balanced scorecards, collaboration, and more
• Includes information about the organizational designs that will encourage strategic thought and action throughout the entire organization
• Contains a wealth of updated examples and cases

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Price: $37.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Build a great financial services practice, AND a great life filled with passion, purpose and enthusiasm.

With more than one million financial services practitioners in the United States and Canada, competition for clients can be intense. While some professionals believe that working furiously around the clock at the expense of a personal life is the route to success, top-producing industry veterans Ron Carson and Steve Sanduski disagree. They believe that financial services is a commodity business, and as such, that performing better, delivering better financial plans, or having access to certain products doesn’t differentiate advisors effectively. Rather, differentiating through service, brand and relationship is the only sustainable way advisors can compete.

In Tested in the Trenches: A 9-Step Plan for Building and Sustaining a Million-Dollar Financial Services Practice the authors explain how securities representatives, insurance professionals, investment advisors and CPAs can do just that . . . and create great lives along the way. Based on concepts taught in professional coaching workshops worldwide, Tested in the Trenches outlines:

• The four ""foundation"" steps to success.
• Four ways to generate revenue.
• 15 habits of top achievers.
• Forms and checklists to organize your financial services practice.
• Online sources for additional business-building ideas and tools.

If you have the sincere desire to make significant improvements in your financial services business – and your life – clear your schedule, read Tested in the Trenches, then go back and implement each idea in the order it is presented. By doing so you'll be prepared to join the rarefied group of personally fulfilled and professionally successful top achievers..
Price: $18.15 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Since its release in 1990, Peter M. Senge's bestselling The Fifth Discipline has converted readers to its innovative business principles of the "learning organization," personal mastery, and systems thinking. Published nearly a decade later, Dance of Change provides a formidable response to businesspeople wondering how to make his programs stick. He outlines potential obstacles (such as initiating transformation, personal fear and anxiety, and measuring the unmeasurable) and proposes ways to turn these obstacles into sources of improvement. Senge--with considerable help from the team who worked on the follow-up development manual, The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook--presents an insider's account of long-term maintenance efforts at General Electric, Harley-Davidson, the U.S. Army, and others who are learning organization, along with experience-based suggestions and exercises for individuals and teams. "We are seeking to understand how people nurture the reinforcing growth processes that naturally enable an organization to evolve and change," Senge explains, "and how they tend to the limiting processes that can impede or stop that growth." --Howard Rothman.
Price: $10.99 [Notify me when price goes down.]