Showing all 26 results
Now more than ever, people are desperate to save money without scrimping on every little purchase or sacrificing their lifestyle. Like most Americans, stay-at-home mom Chrissy Pate spent the lion’s share of her budget on what she assumed to be static costs such as groceries and utilities. But when using traditional couponing and cheapskate guides didn’t help her budget shrink by a dime, Chrissy decided to come up with her own way to save.
Within a few months, her household expenses dropped by more than half-from spending $800 per month to less than $350! Only a few years after developing the “be centsable” system, Chrissy has helped thousands of subscribers save money without spending hours finding and cutting coupons, or giving up “extras” like travel and entertainment. She shows how anyone can save thousands of dollars on cleaning supplies, pet care, toys, travel, and most importantly, groceries-without giving up healthy foods, favorite products, or the occasional splurge.
The perplexing state of the business landscape is beautifully summed up by journalist Bob Garfield and strategic consultant Doug Levy in their new book Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results. They write that the current era “is a confounding paradox: an economic revolution that in one critical aspect takes us backward.” Social media and other digital tools enable any business to reach tens of millions of people. Capturing the attention and purchasing power of those individuals in large quantities remains an almost unapproachable mountain for the majority of businesses. In the recently released Soundview Executive Book Summary of Can’t Buy Me Like, Garfield and Levy offer a better method to grow your business in the age they call the “Relationship Era.”
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When Bob Lutz got into the auto business in the early 1960s, CEOs knew that if you captured the public’s imagination with innovative car design and top quality craftsmanship, the money would follow. The “car guys” held sway, and GM dominated with bold, creative leadership and iconic brands like Cadillac, Buick, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, GMC, and Chevrolet. But then GM’s leadership began to put their faith in numbers and spreadsheets. Determined to eliminate the “waste” and “personality worship” of the bygone creative leaders and maximize profitability, management got too smart for its own good. With the bean counters firmly in charge, carmakers, and much of American industry, lost their single-minded focus on product excellence and their competitive advantage. Decline soon followed. In 2001, General Motors hired Lutz out of retirement with a mandate to save the company by making great cars again. As Vice Chairman, he launched a war against the penny-pinching number-crunchers who ran the company by the bottom line, and reinstated a focus on creativity, design, and cars and trucks that would satisfy GM customers. After emerging from bankruptcy in 2009, GM is finally back on track thanks in part to its embrace of Lutz’s philosophy with acclaimed new models like the Chevrolet Volt, Cadillac CTS, Chevrolet Equinox, and Buick LaCrosse. Lutz’s common-sense lessons, combined with a generous helping of fascinating anecdotes, will inspire readers in any industry. As he writes “It applies in any business. Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys, and software firms by software guys, and supermarkets by supermarket guys. With the advice and support of their bean counters, absolutely, but with the final word going to those who live and breathe the customer experience. Passion and drive for excellence will win over the computer-like, dispassionate, analysis-driven philosophy every time.”
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For every new investor overwhelmed by the different investment options, confounded by sophisticated financial jargon, and frightened by market volatility, Andrew Horowitz is here to help. Each week in his "Winning Investor" podcast, Horowitz distils the lessons he has learned from over two decades of making clients rich as a highly successful financial planner into accessible advice any investor can use. Now, in "The Winning Investor''s Guide to Making Money in Any Market", Horowitz presents the investing strategies that are the secret to his success. Readers will learn: what the best available investment vehicles are and how they work; which economic indicators to watch and why they matter for your investments; how to protect your investments in down times and make the most of your money in boom times; and, ways to apply the analysis the pros use to uncover good investment opportunities. In the same straight shooting, accessible style that is the hallmark of all his work, Horowitz helps readers identify their investment goals and map out a path to achieving them. Whether taking the first steps beyond a basic savings account or waiting to employ more sophisticated strategies to hedge their investments against a downturn or inflation, "The Winning Investor''s Guide to Making Money in Any Market" has the tools everyone needs to manage their money and grow their wealth in any market.
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The definitive guide for Main Street readers who want to make sense of what′s happening on Wall Street, and better understand how we got here and what we need to know to in days to come. Written by seasoned financial writer Dave Kansas, this official Wall Street Journal guide will be filled with practical information, revealing what the crisis means for reader′s financial lives, and what steps they should be taking now to inform and protect themselves.
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Looking for help making smarter, more profitable high-end investment decisions? Why buy ten books that cover each of the major topics you need to understand, when "High-Powered Investing All-In-One For Dummies" gives you ten expert guide for the price of one?
This hands-on resource arms you with an arsenal of advanced investing techniques for everything from stocks and futures to options and exchange-traded funds. You'll find out how to trade on the FOREX market, evaluate annuities, choose the right commodities, and buy into hedge funds. And, you'll get up to speed on using business fundamentals and technical analysis to help you make smarter decisions and maximize your returns. You'll also find ways to be as aggressive as your personality and bank account allow, without taking foolish or excessive risks. Discover how to: Conduct preliminary research Evaluate businesses Invest for growth and income Minimize your investing risk Read financial statements Understand your tax obligations Trade foreign currencies, futures, and options Get a feel for markets and react quickly to fluctuations Spot and forecast pricing trends Take advantage of online trading innovations
The key to expanding your investment opportunities successfully is information. Whether you're just beginning to explore more advanced investing or have been dabbling in it for a while, "High-Powered Investing All-In-One For Dummies" gives you the information, strategies, and techniques you need to make your financial dreams come true.
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Now, "Inside Apple," Lashinsky expands on the attributes that last year made Apple the world's most valuable company. It's an entertaining account that explains how other companies could emulate Apple's success - while also making clear how difficult that task would be.
By now Apple's approach to product development and marketing is well known. Lashinsky's chapter titles boil them down into succinct commands: "Embrace Secrecy." "Focus Obsessively." "Overwhelm Friends/Dominate Foes."
All of which is easier said than done. Lashinsky credits Apple's outsize success largely to co-founder Steve Jobs, a noted micromanager whom he likens to "a domineering orchestra conductor.
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Unlike the protagonists of Paulsen’s adventure novels, Lawn Boy faces complications that are chaotic rather than life-threatening. Picking up where the 2007 Lawn Boy left off, Lawn Boy Returns follows the eponymous main character’s adventures in corporate intrigue. Lawn Boy had inherited his grandfather’s riding mower, and, seeking to buy a new inner tube for his bicycle, started a lawn mowing service. With the help of Arnold, an aging hippie stockbroker, Lawn Boy turned his mowing earnings into a corporate empire with landscaping and cleaning franchises and the sponsorship of a prize-fighter named Joey Pow.
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No offense to app developers, but they’re not the most marketing savvy bunch. That’s OK because now there’s a book for that. Mobile marketing specialist Rana June Sobhany stresses that building a killer app comes first; selling it by applying solid marketing principles comes second. Apple’s App Store is less than three years old, and app developers have the tricky task of marketing in a new, evolving medium. Sobhany – who has been on the frontlines since the beginning – helpfully draws on her own experiences to create a roadmap to success. She also provides firsthand, useful accounts from bloggers, tech journalists and, especially, successful app developers themselves. And, she supplies worksheet templates for positioning, strategic planning, publicity and metrics. Excellent resource to developers, designers and marketers poised to enter the app frontier.
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Most of us graduate high school with a basic understanding of history, math, science, and literature, but when it comes to personal finance—arguably the topic that we use most in our daily lives—we feel lost or overwhelmed. No longer! Cast aside your fear of FICO scores and your confusion about credit cards, because Scott Gamm, founder of HelpSaveMyDollars.com and student at NYU Stern School of Business is here to help.
MORE MONEY, PLEASE is a comprehensive, easy-to-understand introduction to money management. Gamm walks readers through the basics of personal finance, from savings accounts to student loans, including:
•The rules for building a budget—and sticking with it
•How to pay for college without getting into tons of debt
•Why getting a credit card is a good thing—if you pick the right one
•How to use your smart phone to pay bills on time
•Why it’s important to save for retirement right now
A must-read for college students and recent grads, MORE MONEY, PLEASE will show you how to take control of your finances.
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Pay It Down has an interesting premise, which it broadcasts loudly on the cover: From Debt to Wealth on $10 a Day. I’m a believer in the $10 a day concept; in the past, I wrote about the Alexander Hamilton plan, which illustrates that you can wind up with almost $4,000 in your pocket after a single year if you just put away a ten dollar bill each day. This book basically argues that you can actually do much better than that by using that $10 effectively and surrounding it with rational behavior.
One thing I like about Chatzky is her writing style – it’s loose and breezy and feels very light, but actually has quite a bit of content to it. Does her style and this $10-a-day concept add up to a personal finance book worth reading?
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“the United States and in western Europe, the compromise between the plutocrats and everyone else worked. Economic growth soared and income inequality steadily declined. Between the 1940s and 1970s in the United States the gap between the 1 percent and everyone else shrank; the income share of the top 1 percent fell from nearly 16 percent in 1940 to under 7 percent in 1970. In 1980, the average U.S. CEO made forty-two times as much as the average worker. By 2012, that ratio had skyrocketed to 380. Taxes were high—the top marginal rate was 70 percent—but robust economic growth of an average 3.7 percent per year between 1947 and 1977 created a broadly shared sense of optimism and prosperity. This was the golden age of the American middle class, and it is no accident that our popular culture remembers it so fondly. The western Europe experience was broadly similar—strong economic growth, high taxes, and an extensive social welfare network.”
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Helaine Olen’s attack on the personal finance industry, Pound Foolish, is animated by a nice, original idea, which is that personal finance represents the downside of the empowerment society. Once upon a time, ordinary Americans had unions, pensions, predictably rising incomes, and government protections to look out for them. Global trade, with its corollary of stagnant middle-class incomes and declining political support for social spending, put an end to all that. So as the social safety net became frayed in the waning years of the 20th century, Americans were sold a bill of goods: The notion that by putting a few pennies into their 401(k)s each month, ordinary people could assure a comfortable retirement and maybe grow rich. “It was presented as empowering, an almost surefire way of avoiding economic catastrophe.” But the dream was a chimera.
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Anyone anxious about how best to protect aging parents and their assets will find this guide from veteran Wall Street Journal journalist Opdyke (Financially Ever After) a godsend. The author argues that aging parents have earned the right to rely on their children for help, and he assembles a sympathetic guide to supporting your parents financially when it becomes difficult for them to do so themselves. He explains how to handle wills and powers of attorney, pensions and annuities, insurance policies, and bills; how to navigate Social Security; and how to answer the hard questions: how much income does the parent need? how can you help make the money last? Perhaps more important, he provides scripts for the hardest conversations—about whether to stay at home or move to a facility, or how to manage health care necessities and the vagaries of Medicare and medicaid. A smart, comprehensive guide to helping children assist their parents through a difficult time with candor and compassion.
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Winner of the 2012 Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in JournalismHundreds of companies have slashed pensions and health coverage for millions of retirees, claiming that a "perfect storm" of stock market losses, aging workers, and spiraling costs have forced them to take drastic measures.
But this so-called retirement crisis is no accident. Ellen E. Schultz, an award-winning investigative reporter formerly of The Wall Street Journal, reveals how large employers and the retirement industry have all played a huge and hidden role in the death spiral of American pensions and benefits.
A little over a decade ago, pension plans were fat. But companies used slick accounting and dubious loopholes to turn their pension plans into piggy banks, tax shelters, and profit centers. As pensions weakened, companies slashed benefits for workers while doling out gargantuan pensions to their top executives.
Drawing on original analysis of company data, government filings, and confidential memos, Schultz uncovers decades of widespread deception during which employers exaggerated their retiree burdens while tricking employees, misleading shareholders, and lobbying for taxpayer handouts.
Art’s book, Smart Change: Five Tools to Create New and Sustainable Habits in Yourself and Others delves into how the motivational system works. Art explores how to utilize those brain mechanisms that affect behavior, either for good or for bad. Listen in for Art’s practical advice on how to make permanent changes in your life, and reach your business goals.
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While Americans easily welcome advice from wealthy men, could anything be more obnoxious than a rich guy telling the aspiring masses, as Simmons does, that "there's no difference between being broke and being a millionaire"? But Simmons knows this and spends the first passages of "Super Rich" front-loading his explanation: There's nothing shameful in enjoying the worldly fruits of your labor, he argues. But it's the labor, and not its fruits, that brings happiness.
This isn't some spiritual sleight-of-hand or mystical mumbo jumbo. Simmons may be a multimillionaire, but his real love has never been the dough; it has always been his work, which in his life has always seemed more like the yogic concept of "leela," or divine play. In "Super Rich," the philosophy is sound - articulated in simple prose with assistance from journalist Chris Morrow, but filled with anecdotes, humor and raw language that are unmistakably Simmons's.
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As a newspaper columnist in Detroit, Brian J. O'Connor didn't feel like he had much job security. "My paper had been sold, which automatically makes everybody nervous, and clearly Detroit was not doing well," O'Connor says of the bleak period in October 2009 when he launched his money-saving experiment.
That experiment involved cutting $1,000 a month from his budget, largely by focusing on recurring expenses. "Partly I wanted to fail as much as succeed because I wanted to illustrate how tough it can be if you really have to make big cuts in a family budget," O'Connor, 53, says. If parents went to work in the morning and came home unemployed, or suddenly lost overtime pay – as many workers did in Detroit during the recession – then they similarly needed to immediately transform their spending in order to stay afloat, he says.
His series of humorous columns on the experiment were so popular that he turned them into a book, "The $1,000 Challenge: How One Family Slashed Its Budget Without Moving Under a Bridge or Living on Government Cheese."
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Size doesn’t matter. But satisfaction does. Too many entrepreneurs are told and believe that bigger is always better. As a result they pursue a “growth for growth’s sake” business model and make steep compromises in the process. Instead we encourage entrepreneurs to be very clear about their own motivations and goals and then build a company that is big enough to achieve that. Only your specific goals can determine the right business size. Very small companies can be very successful and satisfying or limiting depending on those goals. But it’s misguided and unsustainable to think that success comes from having a bigger business – more employees, more customers, more locations, etc. You can’t measure success with external comparisons or by following “proven” business models. You can only achieve success by making sure you get what you want from entrepreneurship.
The picture that comes to mind when you think about devout Mormons may seem diametrically opposed to the idea of the ruthless and powerful corporate CEO, so it may come as some surprise that the heads of many leading corporations and organizations such as Dell, Deloitte & Touche USA, American Express, Black & Decker, JetBlue Airways, and Harvard Business School are Mormons. Investigative journalist Benedict (a Mormon himself) examines the lives of eight Mormon business executives, focusing on how their core values influence the way they do business. Flying in the face of the absolute pursuit of power and money, these execs put an emphasis on placing family first, keeping Sunday exclusively work-free, and not placing themselves above others or above their God. Not surprisingly, Benedict finds that the corporate environment and success rate under these leaders is outstanding. Religious beliefs notwithstanding, the examples here prove that leadership that values the human element and does not compromise integrity and the environment does not equate to a competitive disadvantage but rather the opposite.
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Jimmy Choo was a London shoemaker with clients including Princess Diana when Tamara Yeardye, a London society girl, convinced him to launch a factory-produced luxury shoe line. Twelve years later, Jimmy Choo is a household name, and Tamara still presides over what is now one of the most successful luxury brands in the world - one worth some 220 million. In 2008 she herself was on the Sunday Times Rich List. She has become one of the best-known business women in the country, but along the way she was tested at every turn. The story of how the Jimmy Choo brand got to where it is today is one of love, controversy, fashion, finance, celebrity, power, intrigue and, above all, intense ambition.
Compelling to followers of both fashion and business, and written with great panache and detailed insider knowledge, The Towering World of Jimmy Choo takes the reader into a complex and mysterious arena full of larger-than-life characters, one whose inner workings are rarely glimpsed by the world at large.
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Never waste a crisis - the current recession is a turning point into a new economic world, a world full of opportunity for those who understand what's happening, why it's happening, and what it means for them. Some businesses - and some people - will emerge from this downturn stronger and more dominant than when it started. Others will weaken and fade. It all depends on critical choices they make right now. Geoff Colvin, one of world's most respected business journalists, says even the scariest recession has an upside. The best managers know that conventional thinking won't help them win in these tough times. They're taking smart, practical steps that will not only keep them strong, but will also distance them from the pack for years to come. The dozens of top-performing leaders Colvin interviewed reject the common view that slashing costs and firing employees is all that matters.
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By the beginning of this century it was already commonplace to speak of the U.S. as a "hyperpower," to talk of its military, political, and economic clout as unprecedented in world history, and to assume that American dominance would continue at least throughout our lifetimes. It is conventional wisdom that America will have no serious rivals for at least a generation. But the American position is far more fragile and ephemeral than much of the world believes. Clyde Prestowitz shows the powerful yet barely visible trends that are threatening to end the six-hundred-year run of Western domination of the world. The trends include America's increasingly unsustainable trade deficits; the equally unsustainable (and dangerous) buildup of massive dollar reserves in places like Japan and China; the end of America's position as the world's premier center for invention and technological innovation; the sudden entrance of 2.5 billion people in India and China into the world's skilled job market; the role of the World Wide Web in permitting many formerly localized jobs to be done anywhere in the world; and the demographic meltdown of Europe, Japan, Russia, and, in later decades, even China. Three Billion New Capitalists is a clear-eyed and profoundly unsettling look at America's and the world's economic future, from an author with a history of predicting the important trends long before they become apparent to others.
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The title of Doug Fine’s Too High to Fail reflects its capitalist polemic. Fine spent a year in Mendocino County, Calif., where officials, with the help of the sheriff, offered $8,500-a-year permits for “ganjapreneurs” growing and selling the plant for medical purposes. Based on his experience in Mendocino, Fine argues that “anyone who crunches the numbers can see that the simple decriminalization of cannabis can almost immediately act as, if not a cornerstone, then at least a significant piece of a national economic recovery.”
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Tapscott (management, U. of Toronto) and Williams (resesarch, London School of Economics) explore the phenomenon of global collaboration demonstrated on YouTube, Wikipedia, The Human Genome Project, and other websites, offering insights to businesses on using open source strategies to expand research and development and marketing success. Sharing stories from Best Buy, Boeing, BMW, and other companies, the authors demonstrate that while the phenomenon is widely seen as undermining the right and need of a company to make a profit, online collaboration within and between firms, as well as with the greater public, holds great potential to boost business, not hinder it.
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