C-Suite Network™

Dan Veitkus

Straight Talk Your Way to Success

Are you tired of “smart talk” that leads to no good outcome?

Do you really want to endure another meeting, conversation or planning session that wastes your time and leads to no meaningful conclusion?

If you’ve had enough overdose on management consulting jargon, political double-talk, pointless meetings and friendly fire masked as boardroom banter this is the book for you.

We are living in the midst of a smart talk epidemic and Straight Talk your Way to Success will point the way to a universal cure. Get ready to spot the traps and shed the smart talk trash so you can effectively rekindle the “Straight Talk” sense you were born to practice.

Straight Talk your Way to Success delivers value for everyone regardless of age, experience, or profession. And if you’re deep in the corporate and professional trenches, please take note! When Morgan Stanley recently analyzed the most successful public technology companies, they found three overwhelming attributes of all top performers – a simple and focused mission, an effective management team and a great culture. This book will help you understand why no individual or organization can achieve these enduring characteristics without a firm commitment to practice Straight Talk.

In his best selling book, Good to Great, author Jim Collins proclaimed, “Good is the enemy of great.” This book will set another maxim for our time: “Smart Talk is the enemy of Smart Execution.”

Straight Talk Your Way to Success will remind you how to achieve success, happiness and fulfillment by simplifying your life with a commitment to Straight Talk. You’ll learn a set of Straight Talk Principles that will give your conversations and communications renewed credibility and help you deliver better clarity regarding your intentions, your requirements and your desired outcomes.

It’s brief. It’s bright. It’s your guide to accelerate success!

John Zaleski

Within a healthcare enterprise, patient vital signs and other automated measurements are communicated from connected medical devices to end-point systems, such as electronic health records, data warehouses and standalone clinical information systems. Connected Medical Devices: Integrating Patient Care Data in Healthcare Systems explores how medical device integration (MDI) supports quality patient care and better clinical outcomes by reducing clinical documentation transcription errors, improving data accuracy and density within clinical records and ensuring the complete capture of medical device information on patients.

The book begins with a comprehensive overview of the types of medical devices in use today and the ways in which those devices interact, before examining factors such as interoperability standards, patient identification, clinical alerts and regulatory and security considerations. Offering lessons learned from his own experiences managing MDI rollouts in both operating room and intensive care unit settings, the author provides practical guidance for healthcare stakeholders charged with leading an MDI rollout. Topics include working with MDI solution providers, assembling an implementation team and transitioning to go-live. Special features in the book include a glossary of acronyms used throughout the book and sample medical device planning and testing tools.

Phil Weinzimer

Based on interviews with more than 150 CIOs, IT/business executives, and academic thought leaders, The Strategic CIO: Changing the Dynamics of the Business Enterprise provides insight, success stories, and a step-by-step methodology to transform your IT organization into a strategic asset that drives customer value, increases revenues, and enhances shareholder wealth.

The book details how strategic CIOs from FedEx, Procter & Gamble, McKesson, and other leading companies transformed their organizations. It illustrates the methods these CIOS used to become strategic partners that collaborate effectively within their organizations to leverage information and technology for a competitive advantage.

The text will help you assess the key competencies and skills required by IT personnel to partner with your business teams to create new and enhanced products and services that create customer value, increase margin, and enhance shareholder wealth.

The book includes powerful methodologies, time-saving templates, proven best practices, and helpful assessments. It also details a four-phase methodology, along with the associated activities and tools, to help your IT organization successfully transform into a strategic IT organization.

Gain insight into the four domain competencies and twelve associated skills required to build effective strategic IT organizations. Build your roadmap to success using the transformation methodology described in the text and you will be on your way to making your organization a strategic IT organization.

Neen James

Folding Time™ by Neen James is about being accountable for our time, engaging our attention and leveraging our energy. In this practical book, you will find easy to digest, implementable strategies you can apply at work and home. Each chapter features an ‘Accelerate’ page with a summary of the main points in the chapter (designed for people who don’t have time to read). Time management is out the window! It’s an old way of thinking. Time is the new currency and Neen shares how you can achieve twice as much in half the time! You will enjoy her Aussie fun attitude and her global perspective. Read it, apply it and share it with your team, this book is guaranteed to help you and your team get more done and create more moments in life that truly matter.

Paul Axtell

America has become a nation “stuck in a meeting.” Between corporate boardrooms, all hands meetings, and conference calls, few of us can claim our time is meeting-free. Even fewer can claim every “mandatory session” was worth it. But Paul Axtell – a consultant with more than 30 years of experience in personal and professional organization – says meetings themselves aren’t the problem. In his new book, he defends the importance of meetings, explains how they’ve gone horribly wrong, and offers eight ways to fix our meeting problems so they stop wasting time, and instead build and boost valuable relationships.

Steven Rosen

52 Sales Management Tips is written for sales managers who struggle within a corporate environment that doesn’t always support them or their development needs. Whether you are a sales executive, senior sales leader or a new, experienced or aspiring sales manager I’m confident you will find this book to be a valuable guide to consult whenever you are experiencing problems.

Front line sales managers are facing unprecedented change. Managers are dealing with increased demands to do more with less and are still expected to drive sales performance. With little support from the next-line of sales management and a lack of relevant courses and ongoing development you may feel stretched to the limit.
Overworked and under-supported front line sales managers are desperately looking for resources to improve their performance. This book was written for sales managers who understand the need to develop themselves. They have figured out that they must take charge of their own success.
Steven Rosen has distilled over 20 years of my sales management, sales executive and sales executive coaching insights into one simple reference guide. He is always amazed at the positive reaction he continually receive when he shares these tips with the sales leaders that he coaches. Once you begin, you will immediately begin to benefit from his experience coaching mediocre managers into “star sales leaders.” You, yourself will become a sales leader to follow.

Robbie Kellman Baxter

In today’s business world, it takes more than a website to stay competitive. The smartest, most successful companies are using radically new membership models, subscription-based formats, and freemium pricing structures to grow their customer base—and explode their market valuation—in the most disruptive shift in business since the Industrial Revolution. This is The Membership Economy from Robbie Kellman Baxter. Written by an expert consultant, this groundbreaking book will show you how to turn ordinary customers into members for life. Learn how to:

  • Turn digital subscriptions into forever sales
  • Build an online community your customers will love
  • Develop new loyalty programs that really pay off
  • Transform freemium users into superusers
  • Create a self-generating revenue stream
  • Keep memberships and profits growing for years to come

Whether you’re a small business with limited resources, an established company using a traditional business model, or a hungry start-up who wants a bigger bang for your buck, this comprehensive guide provides a wealth of membership-building options to suit every need. You’ll learn the best-kept secrets of top industry leaders, from global giants like Am Ex and Weight Watchers to smaller dot-com successes like SurveyMonkey and Pandora. You’ll find proven strategies for creating membership programs for everything from vacation timeshares and car rentals to video streaming and Software-as-a-Service. Most importantly, you’ll discover what works, and what doesn’t, from some of the key players in the new membership economy. It’s not about ownership; it’s about access, options, and freedom. When you join forces with your customers, membership has its rewards—for you, your company, and your continued success.

Daniel Kahneman

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions.

Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.

Eric Schmidt

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary–and frequently contrarian–principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

Today, Google is a global icon that regularly pushes the boundaries of innovation in a variety of fields. HOW GOOGLE WORKS is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub “smart creatives.” Covering topics including corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims (“Consensus requires dissension,” “Exile knaves but fight for divas,” “Think 10X, not 10%”) with numerous insider anecdotes from Google’s history, many of which are shared here for the first time.

In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. HOW GOOGLE WORKS explains how to do just that.