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There isn’t a business that doesn’t want to be more creative in its thinking, products and processes. In The Art of Innovation, Tom Kelley, partner at the Silicon Valley-based firm IDEO, developer of hundreds of innovative products from the first commercial mouse to virtual reality headsets and the Palm hand-held, takes readers behind the scenes of this wildly imaginative company to reveal the strategies and secrets it uses to turn out hit after hit.

Kelley shows how teams:
-Research and immerse themselves in every possible aspect of a new product or service
-Examine each product from the perspective of clients, consumers and other critical audiences
-Brainstorm best when they are focussed, being physical and having fun

The Art of Innovation will provide business leaders with the insights and tools they need to make their companies the leading-edge top-rated stars of their industries.

The New York Times bestseller, is now completely revised and updated. In this edition, internationally recognized executive coach Lois P. Frankel reveals a distinctive set of behaviors–over 130 in all–that women learn in girlhood that ultimately sabotage them as adults.
She teaches you how to eliminate these unconscious mistakes that could be holding you back and offers invaluable coaching tips that can easily be incorporated into your social and business skills. Stop making “nice girl” errors that can become career pitfalls, such as:

Mistake #13: Avoiding office politics. If you don’t play the game, you can’t possibly win.
Mistake #21: Multi-tasking. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should do it.
Mistake #54: Failure to negotiate. Don’t equate negotiation with confrontation.
Mistake #70: Inappropriate use of social media. Once it’s out there, it’s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
Mistake #82: Asking permission. Children, not adults, ask for approval. Be direct, be confident.

Decline can be avoided. Decline can be detected. Decline can be reversed.

Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?

In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course. Collins’ research project—more than four years in duration—uncovered five step-wise stages of decline:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
By understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom. Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.

Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins’ research emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover—in some cases, coming back even stronger—even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.

Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.