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Talbot Stark

Are you ready to take control of your career, life, and destiny by becoming an elite performer?

This isn’t just another career book. Elite Performance for Managers is a guide that delivers on its promise to revolutionize your professional journey. Talbot A. Stark uses his unique triad of experience in international finance, the US military, and Silicon Valley to share life-changing knowledge that challenges you to be accountable for your career and take control of your destiny.

Whether you’re a newly appointed manager or a senior executive, Stark has incredible insights and tactics that you can use to accelerate your career and lead your team to unparalleled levels of productivity. His pioneering Elite Performance Pillars™ methodology provides an unprecedented way for managers to become best-in-class by mastering three powerful concepts:

  • Pillar I: Being a Better You means recognizing that accountability is everything, yet relying solely on results is no longer enough.
  • Pillar II: Being a Better Manager requires replacing the traditional concept of delegation with the symbiotic process of partnering.
  • Pillar III: Managing Your Manager enables you to change your relationship with your manager by being “amazingly predictable” in their world of uncertainty.

These concepts are mission-critical to becoming an elite performer, yet often slip through the cracks of typical career guides and executive coaching programs. Elite Performance for Managers fills those gaps so you can unleash your full potential and transform your career into a dynamic journey aligned with your greatest aspirations.

Larry Mandelberg

How Healthy Is Your Successful Business?

Do constant disruptions and distractions make you feel like the business is managing you rather than you’re managing the business? Do the Board and senior managers disagree on major decisions? Is one department or department head the source of most problems? Is conflict within the leadership team undermining staff morale?

If your business is suffering from any of the above problems then it’s time to do something about it.

No business ever failed because they ran out of money. Most businesses fail because their success brings unfamiliar problems that leaders and managers do not know how to solve. Running out of money is simply a lagging indicator of prior bad decisions and a failure to anticipate change.

This book shows you how to anticipate change, manage internal conflict, and leverage it to your advantage.

With real-life stories that explore common situations, angst, and humor in ways that are understandable and insightful, Mandelberg delivers:

  • The problems that come with success and how to manage them
  • The infallible crystal ball that lets you see change coming before it’s too late
  • Eight operational must-haves and how your organization ranks
  • Exiting the ‘whack-a-mole’ cycle with problems that don’t get fixed
  • Turning change done unto you into change done unto others, and of course,
  • Why businesses fail

Based on over 40 years of experience and interviews with over 250 business leaders, Mandelberg explains how to avoid failure and build a strong, successful business that lasts.

Brady Brim-DeForest

Small is the next big thing.

When working for a large organization, weeks can pass before leadership makes important decisions that affect you and your team. Meanwhile, you’re on the hook to deliver products that don’t actually serve the customer—products you know you could improve, if given the opportunity.

After years of consulting for Fortune 1000 companies, Brady Brim-DeForest understands the drawbacks of working in giant, siloed environments. His book, Smaller is Better, shows you how to use the small, empowered teams model to radically recharge your workplace, make better products, and deliver a phenomenal customer experience. All with better employee engagement and retention!

Smaller is Better uses real-world examples of companies who have saved billions and shaved years off their development cycles through small teams. Discover how to form nimble, autonomous teams, optimize them for mission, and scale across your organization.

Improve both innovation and delivery while amping up customer satisfaction. Best of all, learn ways to get full buy-in from company leaders—and how you can “start small” today, with or without C-suite support.

4. Robin Sharma

Legendary leadership and elite performance expert Robin Sharma introduced The 5am Club concept over twenty years ago, based on a revolutionary morning routine that has helped his clients maximize their productivity, activate their best health and bulletproof their serenity in this age of overwhelming complexity.

Now, in this life-changing book, handcrafted by the author over a rigorous four-year period, you will discover the early-rising habit that has helped so many accomplish epic results while upgrading their happiness, helpfulness and feelings of aliveness.

Through an enchanting—and often amusing—story about two struggling strangers who meet an eccentric tycoon who becomes their secret mentor, The 5am Club will walk you through:

  • How great geniuses, business titans and the world’s wisest people start their mornings to produce astonishing achievements
  • A little-known formula you can use instantly to wake up early feeling inspired, focused and flooded with a fiery drive to get the most out of each day
  • A step-by-step method to protect the quietest hours of daybreak so you have time for exercise, self-renewal and personal growth
  • A neuroscience-based practice proven to help make it easy to rise while most people are sleeping, giving you precious time for yourself to think, express your creativity and begin the day peacefully instead of being rushed
  • “Insider-only” tactics to defend your gifts, talents and dreams against digital distraction and trivial diversions so you enjoy fortune, influence and a magnificent impact on the world

Part manifesto for mastery, part playbook for genius-grade productivity and part companion for a life lived beautifully, The 5am Club is a work that will transform your life. Forever.

4. Jordan Belfort

From the “raw and frequently hilarious” (The New York Times) investment guru and New York Times bestselling author of The Wolf of Wall Street who inspired the Oscar-winning film of the same name, a witty and clear-eyed guide for anyone who wants to play the stock market to their advantage and learn the secrets of a top Wall Street investor.

From Jordan Belfort, author of The Way of the Wolf and subject of the hit movie The Wolf of Wall Street, comes his long-anticipated guide for mastering the stock market. The Wolf of Investing teaches you when to buy, sell, hold, and cash out; how to make smarter (and safer) investments; and how to build significant wealth over both the short- and long-term. Unlike traditional investment books, each page of Jordan’s lessons, colorful stories, and principles entertains you with the charismatic swagger portrayed so famously on the silver screen by Leonardo DiCaprio.

When Belfort’s brother-in-law, Fernando, lost nearly $100,000 dollars in investments in under sixty days, Jordan sat him down for some tough love. Using the financial acumen and insider’s knowledge he learned during his time working on Wall Street, Jordan taught Fernando how to turn his portfolio around. Along the way, he explained which decisions were bad and why, as well as how to pivot from failure to success.

Belfort teaches you everything you need to know about savvy investing—even if, like Fernando, whatever stock you’ve touched has turned to yesterday’s trash. As you read this guide, you will not only learn life’s most profitable lessons, but you’ll also laugh out loud at Belfort’s brazen honesty and salty wit. After being enraged by watching big banks steal money from individual investors, and determined to right the wrongs of his own infamous past, Belfort now shows regular investors how we can use Wall Street to our advantage.

Whether you’re new to investing or want to take your portfolio to the next level, you will learn everything Belfort knows about the stock market from The Wolf of Investing.

6. Walter Isaacson

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.

At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

It was a wistful comment, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

7. Mark Harmon

A U.S. naval counterintelligence officer working to safeguard Pearl Harbor; a Japanese spy ordered to Hawaii to gather information on the American fleet. On December 7, 1941, their hidden stories are exposed by a morning of bloodshed that would change the world forever. Scrutinizing long-buried historical documents, NCIS star Mark Harmon and co-author Leon Carroll, a former NCIS Special Agent, have brought forth a true-life NCIS story of deception, discovery, and danger.

Hawaii, 1941. War clouds with Japan are gathering and the islands of Hawaii have become battlegrounds of spies, intelligence agents, and military officials – with the island’s residents caught between them. Toiling in the shadows are Douglas Wada, the only Japanese American agent in naval intelligence, and Takeo Yoshikawa, a Japanese spy sent to Pearl Harbor to gather information on the U.S. fleet.

Douglas Wada’s experiences in his native Honolulu include posing undercover as a newspaper reporter, translating wiretaps on the Japanese Consulate, and interrogating America’s first captured POW of World War II, a submarine officer found on the beach. Takeo Yoshikawa is a Japanese spy operating as a junior diplomat with the consulate who is collecting vital information that goes straight to Admiral Yamamoto. Their dueling stories anchor Ghosts of Honolulu’s gripping depiction of the world-changing cat and mouse games played between Japanese and US military intelligence agents (and a mercenary Nazi) in Hawaii before the outbreak of the second world war.

Also caught in the upheaval are Honolulu’s innocent residents – including Douglas Wada’s father – who endure the war’s anti-Japanese fervor and a cadre of intelligence professionals who must prevent Hawaii from adopting the same destructive mass internments as California.

Ghosts of Honolulu depicts the incredible high stakes game of naval intelligence and the need to define what is real and what only appears to be real.

8. Dolly Alderton

The wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking internationally bestselling memoir about growing up, growing older, and learning to navigate friendships, jobs, loss, and love along the ride.

When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, journalist and former Sunday Times columnist Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, realizing that Ivan from the corner shop might just be the only reliable man in her life, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.

Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age—making you want to pick up the phone and tell your best friends all about it. Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true, Everything I Know About Love is about the struggles of early adulthood in all its terrifying and hopeful uncertainty.

9. Mike Michalowicz

It’s never been harder building successful teams. With challenges of work-from-anywhere, flex-schedule and generational divides, business leaders bend over backwards searching for solutions that work. They’ve tried everything from food perks and ping pong tables to endless team-building exercises and training—but nothing sticks.

Now, in his long-awaited book for leaders at all levels, bestselling author Mike Michalowicz reveals his proven formula to build an unstoppable team for any work environment:

All In shows readers how to:

  • Recruit the right talent
  • Transform struggling employees into superstars
  • Match individual abilities to client and company needs
  • Elevate your company to where every employee cares as much as an owner

You want a thriving workforce that shines and sticks around. One that takes full responsibility for their work and outcomes. A community of employees who love your organization and are invested in its growth. With All In you will discover how to build a team where everyone flourishes–including you.

10. James Clear

No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving–every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.

If you’re having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn’t you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don’t want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you’ll get a proven system that can take you to new heights.

Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field.

Learn how to:

  • make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy);
  • overcome a lack of motivation and willpower;
  • design your environment to make success easier;
  • get back on track when you fall off course;

…and much more.

Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits–whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.