Business

Best business and leadership books of 2018

Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges

Have you ever left a nerve-racking challenge and immediately wished for a do over? Maybe after a job interview, a performance, or a difficult conversation? The very moments that require us to be genuine and commanding can instead cause us to feel phony and powerless. Too often we approach our lives’ biggest hurdles with dread, execute them with anxiety, and leave them with regret.

By accessing our personal power, we can achieve “presence,” the state in which we stop worrying about the impression we’re making on others and instead adjust the impression we’ve been making on ourselves. As Harvard professor Amy Cuddy’s revolutionary book reveals, we don’t need to embark on a grand spiritual quest or complete an inner transformation to harness the power of presence. Instead, we need to nudge ourselves, moment by moment, by tweaking our body language, behavior, and mind-set in our day-to-day lives.

Amy Cuddy has galvanized tens of millions of viewers around the world with her TED talk about “power poses.” Now she presents the enthralling science underlying these and many other fascinating body-mind effects, and teaches us how to use simple techniques to liberate ourselves from fear in high-pressure moments, perform at our best, and connect with and empower others to do the same.

Brilliantly researched, impassioned, and accessible, Presence is filled with stories of individuals who learned how to flourish during the stressful moments that once terrified them. Every reader will learn how to approach their biggest challenges with confidence instead of dread, and to leave them with satisfaction instead of regret.

Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day

Is your focus on this page? Or is it roaming elsewhere, to the past or future, to a worry, to your to-do list, or to your phone?

Whether you’re simply browsing, talking to friends, or trying to stay focused in an important meeting, you can’t seem to manage to hang on to your attention. No matter how hard you try, you’re somewhere else. The consequence is that you miss out on 50 percent of your life—including the most important moments.

The good news: There’s nothing wrong with you—your brain isn’t broken. The human brain was built to be distractible.

The even better news: You can train your brain to pay attention more effectively.

Stay with me a little longer and soon you will be able to:

Focus without all the struggle.
Take back your attention from the pull of distraction.
And function at your peak, for all that truly matters in your life.

The Gap and The Gain: The High Achievers’ Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success

Most people, especially highly ambitious people, are unhappy because of how they measure their progress. We all have an “ideal,” a moving target that is always out of reach. When we measure ourselves against that ideal, we’re in “the GAP.” However, when we measure ourselves against our previous selves, we’re in “the GAIN.”

That is where the GAP and the GAIN concept comes in. It was developed by legendary entrepreneur coach Dan Sullivan and is based on his work with tens of thousands of successful entrepreneurs. When Dan’s coaching clients periodically take stock of all that they’ve accomplished-both personally and professionally-they are often shocked at how much they have actually achieved. They weren’t able to appreciate their progress because no matter how much they were getting done, they were usually measuring themselves against their ideals or goals.

In this book you will learn that measuring your current self vs. your former self has enormous psychological benefits. And that’s really the key to this deceptively simple yet multi-layered concept that will have you feeling good, feeling grateful, and feeling like you are making progress even when times are tough, which will in turn bolster motivation, confidence, and future success.

If you’re finding that happiness eludes you no matter how much you’ve achieved, then learning this easy mindset shift will set you on a life-changing path to greater fulfillment and success.

Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave

Almost every religion, spiritual practice, philosophy and person grapples with fear. The most repeated phrase in the Bible is “Be not afraid.” The ancient Greeks spoke of phobos, panic and terror. It is natural to feel fear, the Stoics believed, but it cannot rule you. Courage, then, is the ability to rise above fear, to do what’s right, to do what’s needed, to do what is true. And so it rests at the heart of the works of Marcus Aurelius, Aristotle, and CS Lewis, alongside temperance, justice, and wisdom.

In Courage Is Calling , Ryan Holiday breaks down the elements of fear, an expression of cowardice, the elements of courage, an expression of bravery, and lastly, the elements of heroism, an expression of valor. Through engaging stories about historic and contemporary leaders, including Charles De Gaulle, Florence Nightingale, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Holiday shows you how to conquer fear and practice courage in your daily life.

You’ll also delve deep into the moral dilemmas and courageous acts of lesser-known, but equally as important, figures from ancient and modern history, such as Helvidius Priscus, a Roman Senator who stood his ground against emperor Vespasian, even in the face of death; Frank Serpico, a former New York City Police Department Detective who exposed police corruption; and Frederick Douglass and a slave named Nelly, whose fierce resistance against her captors inspired his own crusade to end slavery.

In a world in which fear runs rampant—when pe

The Freedom Shortcut: How Anyone Can Generate True Passive Income Online

Most believe that ‘college – get a job – retire at 65’ is the only option in life, including us. So that’s what we “chose” to do.

About a week into working our first full-time jobs, something became extremely obvious.

This sucks.

We couldn’t envision a reality where we’d truly be happy spending the majority of our waking days working hard at a job to help someone else’s dreams come true. What do we get in exchange? A cute little paycheck that can just cover rent, food, and other bills we need to survive.

Call us naive and entitled, but we swore to ourselves that we’d never settle for a life like that.

A few years later, we’re here to share the tale of exactly how we escaped the rat race and how we’ve helped thousands of others do the same.

The Freedom Shortcut is your step-by-step guide to creating your own income online so you never have to rely on a job to get paid. And I’m not talking about the kind of income where you grind out 10 hours days behind your laptop to make a little bit of cash.

I’m talking about the kind of income where you don’t open your computer for 6 months to travel all around the world, yet deposits continue to hit your bank account every month on repeat. That’s passive income.

Warren Buffett said it best – “If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

The Freedom Shortcut walks you through 6 modules:

The Foundations – Everything you need to know about how passive income and the business model works.
Cho

The Smartest Person in the Room: The Root Cause and New Solution for Cybersecurity

#1 Bestseller by leadership & cybersecurity expert Christian Espinosa that unveils a simple powerful 7 step process that awakens your leadership and life skills.

“Swiss Army Knife of Cyber/IT/Business/Life help…there is something for everyone here!”

“I highly recommend that any cybersecurity leader, or aspiring leader, read this book from cover-to-cover.”

“Christian Espinosa unveils the hard-hitting truth and bad practices that companies face when they hire inexperienced and ego-centric cybersecurity staff to protect their company’s information.”

Cyberattack—an ominous word that strikes fear in the hearts of nearly everyone, especially business owners, CEOs, and executives. With cyberattacks resulting in often devastating results, it’s no wonder executives hire the best and brightest of the IT world for protection. But are you doing enough? Do you understand your risks? What if the brightest aren’t always the best choice for your company?

In The Smartest Person in the Room, Christian Espinosa shows you how to leverage your company’s smartest minds to your benefit and theirs. Learn from Christian’s own journey from cybersecurity engineer to company CEO. He describes why a high IQ is a lost superpower when effective communication, true intelligence, and self-confidence are not embraced. With his seven-step methodology and stories from the field, Christian helps you develop your team’s technical minds so they become better humans and strong leaders who excel in every role

The #1 Project Management Mistake, Plus 7 More Lessons

Do you experience problems and pain in your working life as a project manager? Is there a lack of progress with projects at work? Do you experience that there is a lack of useful information on project management that is especially aimed at beginners? Are you constantly frustrated by the lack of budgets to properly complete project tasks? Do you experience a constant worry about completing projects on time? Do you feel that you lack the experience to be confident in the role of a new project manager?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you require this book!
This book has been prepared as a guide for newly certified project-management professionals who are looking to learn the fundamental do’s and don’ts of project management, but it is also of interest to any person who is interested in making a career out of project management or just interested in the subject.
If you work through this book, you will feel that sense of anticipation, eagerness, and excitement for you, the newly qualified PM, to go out and face your first project with the knowledge that we provide, assisting you in making a success of your first and future projects.
Nothing will prepare you for that immense sense of achievement and success when you get this right. This prepares you for a massively rewarding career working with people and being rewarded accordingly through the continuous “rinse and repeat” of the lessons provided in the body of the book.
Do not delay, but take action; get the book now, and set yourself on the way to project-management success!

Logo Design Love: A guide to creating iconic brand identities

Completely updated and expanded, the second edition of David Airey’s Logo Design Love contains more of just about everything that made the first edition so great: more case studies, more sketches, more logos, more tips for working with clients, more insider stories, and more practical information for getting the job and getting it done right.

In Logo Design Love, David shows you how to develop an iconic brand identity from start to finish, using client case studies from renowned designers. In the process, he reveals how designers create effective briefs, generate ideas, charge for their work, and collaborate with clients. David not only shares his personal experiences working on identity projects – including sketches and final results of his own successful designs – he also uses the work of many well-known designers such as Paula Scher, who designed the logos for Citi and Microsoft Windows, and Lindon Leader, creator of the current FedEx identity, as well as work from leading design studios, including Moving Brands, Pentagram, MetaDesign, Sagmeister & Walsh, and many more.

In Logo Design Love, you’ll learn:
Best practices for extending a logo into a complete brand identity system
Why one logo is more effective than another
How to create your own iconic designs
What sets some designers above the rest
31 practical design tips for creating logos that last

Building Your Business from Heaven Down

Heaven wants you to succeed in business! Heaven is vitally interested in your business and has a myriad of resources to help you build and maintain your business. Understand how to function with Heaven to grow and maintain your business. Discover the Hall of Fame, the Creative Department, Finance Department, Personnel and more.

Whether your business is stagnant or flourishing you need the information in this book. Many have developed an idea, started a business and then asked for God’s blessings upon it. The Heaven Down paradigm is to first discover from Heaven what you should do and how you should do it, then implement it on the earth. That is a formula for success and the premise of this book.

Building Your Business from Heaven Down came out of a series of engagements with Heaven by the author and his team. Discover with them the resources available – even in times of crisis to grow your business and your life.

Logo: The Reference Guide to Symbols and Logotypes (Corporate Identity Book, Branding Reference for Designers and Design Students)

The next time you are tempted to design a logo, take a look at this book. Chances are, it has already been done. By raising the bar, this wonderful resource will make better designers of all of us.” Michael Bierut of Pentagram Design

The logo bible, this book provides graphic designers with an indispensable reference source for contemporary logo design. More than 1300 logos are grouped according to their focal form, symbol and graphic associations into 75 categories such as crosses, stars, crowns, animals, people, handwritten, illustrative type, etc. To emphasize the visual form of the logos, they are shown predominantly in black and white. Highlight logos are shown in colour.

By sorting a vast, international array of current logotypes – ranging from those of small, design-led businesses to global brands – in this way, the book offers design consultancies a ready resource to draw upon in the research phase of identity projects. Logos are also indexed alphabetically by name of company/designer and by industrial sector, making it easy to piece together a picture of the state of the identity art in any client’s marketplace.

Logo Modernism

Brand new: An unprecedented catalog of modern trademarks

Modernist aesthetics in architecture, art, and product design are familiar to many. In soaring glass structures or minimalist canvases, we recognize a time of vast technological advance which affirmed the power of human beings to reshape their environment and to break, radically, from the conventions or constraints of the past. Less well-known, but no less fascinating, is the distillation of modernism in graphic design.

This unprecedented TASCHEN publication, authored by Jens Müller, brings together approximately 6,000 trademarks, focused on the period 1940–1980, to examine how modernist attitudes and imperatives gave birth to corporate identity. Ranging from media outfits to retail giants, airlines to art galleries, the sweeping survey is organized into three design-orientated chapters: Geometric, Effect, and Typographic. Each chapter is then sub-divided into form and style led sections such as alphabet, overlay, dots and squares.

Alongside the comprehensive catalog, the book features an introduction from Jens Müller on the history of logos, and an essay by R. Roger Remington on modernism and graphic design. Eight designer profiles and eight instructive case studies are also included, with a detailed look at the life and work of such luminaries as Paul Rand, Yusaku Kamekura, and Anton Stankowski, and at such significant projects as Fiat, The Daiei Inc., and the Mexico Olympic Games of 1968. An unrivaled resource for graphic designers, advertisers, and branding specialists, Logo Modernism is equally fascinating to anyone interested in social, cultural, and corporate history, and in the sheer persuasive power of image and form.

How to Win at the Sport of Business: If I Can Do It, You Can Do It

Using the greatest material from his popular Blog Maverick, Cuban has collected and updated his postings on business and life to provide a catalog of insider knowledge on what it takes to become a thriving entrepreneur. He tells his own rags-to-riches story of how he went from selling powdered milk and sleeping on friends’ couches to owning his own company and becoming a multi-billion dollar success story. His unconventional yet highly effective ideas on how to build a successful business offer entrepreneurs at any stage of their careers a huge edge over their competitors.

Digital Marketing Simplified

If you are a smartphone user you should read this book. Because everyday you are contributing something to digital marketing industry. Know how digital marketing is useful for both the buyer and the product owner.

Startups Made Simple: How to Start, Grow and Systemize Your Dream Business

Imagine the perfect business for you. Not only a business that you love, but one that generates consistent wealth and is so well systemized that it mostly runs itself.

In Startups Made Simple, small business expert Matt Knee has created a complete guide that takes you from idea to systemized company as quickly and easily as humanly possible. This book is not for the stereotypical Silicon Valley-type of startup that get millions in venture capital. This book is for “the rest of us”—the 99% of entrepreneurs who bootstrap and start real businesses.

In this book, Matt Knee pulls back the curtain and guides you through a proven six-step process that he and other successful entrepreneurs have used to build multi-million dollar startups.

Whether you have a business now or are looking for an idea to start one, this book will systematically take you (and quickly, using lots of checklists and bullet points) through the process of perfecting and growing your business.

Equity Investment

Equity Investment contains Essential Formulas for Selecting and managing Equity Investment. It enable you to understand the financial decision-making process and to interpret the impact that financial decisions will have on value creation.

Do You Talk Funny?: 7 Comedy Habits to Become a Better (and Funnier) Public Speaker

Public speaking can be terrifying. For David Nihill, the idea of standing in front of an audience was scarier than cliff jumping into a thorny pit of spiders and mothers-in-law. Without a parachute or advanced weaponry. Something had to change.

In what doesn’t sound like the best plan ever, David decided to overcome his fears by pretending to be a comedian called “Irish Dave” for one full year, crashing as many comedy clubs, festivals and shows as possible. One part of the plan was at least logical: he was already Irish and already called Dave.

In one year, David went from being deathly afraid of public speaking to hosting a business conference, regularly performing stand-up comedy, and winning storytelling competitions in front of packed houses. He did it by learning from some of the best public speakers in the world: stand-up comedians.

Do You Talk Funny? shows how the key principles of stand-up comedy can be applied to your speaking engagements and presentations to make you funnier, more interesting, and better looking. (Or at least two of the three.) Whether you are preparing for a business presentation, giving a wedding toast, defending your thesis, raising money from investors, or simply want to take on something you’re afraid of, this book will take you from sweaty to stage-ready.

You’ll learn how to:

Craft a story and content that your audience will want to listen to

Find the funniest parts of your material and how to get to them faster

Deal with stage fright

Artificial Intelligence: The God of Future

AI is considered by many scholars as the 4th Industrial Revolution. Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google) claims that AI technology can be more transformative to the human race than even electricity. Perhaps the two most important milestone events in human evolution were the taming of fire and the invention of the wheel. However, considering its impact and potential, AI might even surpass fire and wheel to claim the throne of ‘The Greatest Invention Ever’.

This book dives into the fascinating world of Artificial Intelligence. Right from the basic definition to its applications in various fields including but not limited to self driving cars, personalised ads, identifying cancerous cells and even predicting the economy’s rise & fall.

I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Second Edition: No Guilt. No Excuses. No B.S. Just a 6-Week Program That Works.

Buy as many lattes as you want. Choose the right accounts and investments so your money grows for you—automatically. Best of all, spend guilt-free on the things you love.

Personal finance expert Ramit Sethi has been called a “wealth wizard” by Forbes and the “new guru on the block” by Fortune. Now he’s updated and expanded his modern money classic for a new age, delivering a simple, powerful, no-BS 6-week program that just works.

I Will Teach You to Be Rich will show you:
• How to crush your debt and student loans faster than you thought possible
• How to set up no-fee, high-interest bank accounts that won’t gouge you for every penny
• How Ramit automates his finances so his money goes exactly where he wants it to—and how you can do it too
• How to talk your way out of late fees (with word-for-word scripts)
• How to save hundreds or even thousands per month (and still buy what you love)
• A set-it-and-forget-it investment strategy that’s dead simple and beats financial advisors at their own game
• How to handle buying a car or a house, paying for a wedding, having kids, and other big expenses—stress free
• The exact words to use to negotiate a big raise at work

The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed

The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham’s philosophy of “value investing”—which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies—has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949.

Over the years, market developments have proven the wisdom of Graham’s strategies. While preserving the integrity of Graham’s original text, this revised edition includes updated commentary by noted financial journalist Jason Zweig, whose perspective incorporates the realities of today’s market, draws parallels between Graham’s examples and today’s financial headlines, and gives readers a more thorough understanding of how to apply Graham’s principles.

Vital and indispensable, The Intelligent Investor is the most important book you will ever read on how to reach your financial goals.

A Debt Owed (A Dark Billionaire Romance)

My enemy’s daughter … offered to me as payment towards a debt. Now she’ll become my wife … My pet.

I wasn’t always cold-hearted and vindictive.
She made me that way.
Charlotte Davis … the most beautiful and privileged princess there is.
I’d kill for her to be mine.We met by chance at her father’s wedding … And then again years later.
But she forgot about me. Ignored me. Enraged me.
Then her father did the unforgivable, and I made it my lifelong goal to ruin him…
By taking her as payment towards a debt he owed.
A debt she will repay by marrying me.
Until death do us part.

A Debt Owed is an enticing new Dark Billionaire Alpha Male Romance novel by New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Author Clarissa Wild.

WARNING: This book includes scenes that may be disturbing to some readers.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post • The McKinsey Business Book of the Year

The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the one-time multibillion-dollar biotech startup founded by Elizabeth Holmes—now the subject of the HBO documentary The Inventor—by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end.

“The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion.” —Bill Gates

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood testing significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work.

A riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a tale of ambition and hubris set amid the bold promises of Silicon Valley.

Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media

If you’ve ever scrolled through your Instagram feed and thought, I wear clothes, eat avocado toast and like sunsets, why can’t someone pay me to live my best life? this book is for you . . .

Every one of your favorite influencers started with zero followers and had to make a lot of mistakes to get where they are today—earning more money each year than their parents made in the last decade. But to become a top creator, you need to understand the strategies behind the Insta-ready lifestyle . . .

As nightlife blogger, then social media strategist, and now Senior Director of Influencer Strategy and Talent Partnerships at Hearst Magazines Digital Media, Brittany Hennessy has seen the role of influencers evolve and expand into something that few could have imagined when social media first emerged. She has unrivaled insight into where the branded content industry was, where it is, and where it’s going. In this book she’ll reveal how to: