C-Suite Network™

Menu
Search
Close this search box.

booktag: author

Shep Hyken

You must deliver an amazing customer experience. Why? It is the competitive edge of new-era business–in any market and any economy.

Renowned customer experience expert Shep Hyken explains how consistently amazing customers through stellar service can elevate your company from good to great. All transformations require a role model, and Shep has found the perfect role model to inspire your team: Ace Hardware. Ace was named as one of the top ten customer service brands in America by Businessweek and ranked highest in its industry for customer satisfaction. Through revealing stories from Ace’s over-the-top work with customers, Shep explores the five tactical areas of customer amazement: leadership, culture, one-on-one, competitive edge, and community.

Delivering amazing service requires everyone in your organization to step up and be a leader. It doesn’t take a title. It takes the right set of tools and principles. To help you empower employees at all levels, Shep brings the content to a deeply practical level. His 52 Amazement Tools–like ”Ask the extra question” and ”Focus on the customer, not the money”–are simple, clear, useful for almost anybody, and supported with compelling research and stories.

Between these covers, you will find the tools and tactics you need to transform your company into a seriously customer-focused operation that will amaze every customer every time.

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website

Kevin Popović

Inside 20YEARS Communications, 20 leaders from different corners of the industry answer 20 questions on the evolution of communications, providing insight to where communications was, is, and will go.

Based on the video series, 20YEARS Communications contextualizes discussion with scholarly research, creating a multi-layered experience for academics and professionals. A thought-provoking learning tool, 20YEARS Communications is designed to generate discussion and critical analysis–ideal for the classroom, for team building, and for the professional communicator looking to expand their perspective.

“Over the last 20 years we’ve seen dramatic advancements in the ways we communicate, from a traditional platform to digital environments. Integrating communications followed by engagement is key to taking advantage of how far we’ve come, and how far we are yet to go.”

“Communication remains the fundamental touchstone for business and education, and it always will. Over the last 20 years in particular, we have seen dramatic advancements in the ways in which we communicate, from a predominantly traditional platform, now to expanding digital environments that give customers a voice without the letters-to-the editors and telephone trees of yesteryear. But for business, communication is only half of the task; the other half is listening. Integrating communications followed by engagement is key to taking advantage of how far we’ve come, and how far we are yet to go.”

-Jeffrey Hayzlett, Global Business Celebrity, Bestselling Author, Sometime Cowboy

David Meltzer

There are seven interconnected principles that are applicable to our lives in general and just as relevant to more specific pursuits such as business. Each principle is supported by four key elements. The goal is to create an energy that scales itself by generating its own like-kind energy. Ultimately, we want to not only put things out into the universe in a certain way that will come back to us twofold, but also where what we empower creates a similar energy. We can manifest things individually, but if we scale or empower others and create collective energy, we can manifest things on a global scale. The most successful businesses thrive by putting energy out there in a specific way, creating additional salespeople because of the power of what they ve provided. Companies like Apple exceed expectations and have been able to thrive utilizing the scalability of this concept. Connected to Goodness provides the knowledge for life and business to enable you to thrive.

Tom Hopkins

This is a complete and practical guide which highlights the authors’ new strategic approaches to selling when the buyer initially declines or is resistant on a sales opportunity. Hopkins and Katt explain that most sales reps take a traditional linear approach to selling, but that the trick in closing is in taking a more creative and circular approach. That’s the key.

It all starts with how the buyer initially says, “No.” Too many sales reps don’t pay close attention as to how that’s presented. Hopkins and Katt point out that “no” may suggest all sorts of other options — avenues that can eventually lead to the buyer actually saying yes.

The authors introduce a novel concept called the Circle of Persuasion which offers sales reps a new approach in this potentially tricky process. Along the way, WHEN BUYERS SAY NO details prescriptive steps and even sample dialogues that will instruct and guide sales professionals on how to best cultivate buyer-seller relationships.

There’s particular emphasis on how to establish the kind of rapport that ultimately leads to a successful close.

Steven Overman

A generation of people around the world, from Boston to Bangkok, from New York to New Delhi, are making everyday choices in ways that defy traditional logic. They are judging where and how their clothes were made, not just how they fit. They are thinking global but buying local. They are spending their money and their time, forming loyalties, casting votes and even enjoying entertainment based increasingly upon their desire to make a positive impact on others and the world around them. This new generation believes they can and must make the world better, and they expect business and government to get with the program.

The implications of the Conscience Economy are not “soft.” Ignore it, and your consumer or voter base will rebel, using a host of free tools and cheap connectivity to spread their rejection to peers around the world in real time. Leverage it, and Conscience Culture is a wellspring of financial upside. The Conscience Economy is the must-read guide to this unprecedented shift in human motivation and behavior. Author Steven Overman provides context, inspiration and some basic tools to help readers reframe how they evolve and grow whatever it is they lead—whether it’s a community, a business, a product, or a marketing campaign. From the boardroom to the startup loft, from the State Department to the pulsing marketplaces of the developing world, The Conscience Economy will help international leaders, influencers, investors and decision-makers to manage, innovate and thrive in a new world where “doing good” matters as much as “doing well.”

Mindy Hall

Too often executives allow their functional roles to define who they are as leaders. Instead, they should focus on the type of leader they want to be, and let that knowledge guide deliberate choices and actions – to lead with intention. Hall argues that this is the most overlooked skill for those at the top, and often is the differentiator of great leadership and a source of long-term competitive advantage. She offers real world examples and a prescriptive plan for choosing your actions with care and discipline, day by day, moment by moment.

John Brubaker

The Coach Approach: Success Strategies From The Locker Room To The Board Room is a book designed to help business leaders and their teams achieve peak performance. John Brubaker shares his coaching experience and knowledge by applying it to the sport of business. Additionally, he shares techniques and strategies from some of the nation’s elite coaches, executives and athletes.
The Coach Approach will help you focus on the process not the product. You will learn how to obtain better results in business with straightforward tools that turbocharge performance. Coaching in the workplace is even more important than on the athletic field, because in the sport of business every day is gameday!

This book will be your coach to guide you through all four quarters of the fiscal year. It incorporates a combination of motivation, accountability and practical leadership skills to help you lead your team to victory.

Albert Dunlap

Al Dunlap is an original: an outspoken, irascible executive with an incredible track record of injecting new life into tired companies. The business media have coined a new verb–“to dunlap”–when describing a fast company turnaround. In April 1994 he became CEO and chairman of Scott Paper, which had lost $277 million in 1993, was on credit watch for excessive debt, and whose stock had been comatose for seven years. In a mere nineteen months, Scott had record earnings, the stock had increased in value by $6.5 billion (over 200 percent), and Dunlap merged Scott with Kimberly-Clark in a stock swap that valued Scott at $9 billion and created the second largest consumer-products company in the United States.

Mean Business combines Dunlap’s colorful personal history–his working-class background, employment, friendship with such people as Sir James Goldsmith and Kerry Packer, his views on why too many executives think of themselves as corporate royalty–and his provocative ideas on management and leadership. His specific, tested program on how to evaluate and choose a management team, get the lowest costs from suppliers, improve the balance sheet, and develop a real strategy make this an invaluable book.

The controversy about corporate performance and how to achieve it is near the boiling point, as executives face the hard fact of business life: What is good or even excellent today won’t be satisfactory tomorrow. Mean Business is absolutely essential for both companies in trouble as well as those at the top of their game.

Joel Trammell

Joel Trammell’s new book, The CEO Tightrope: How to Master the Balancing Act of a Successful CEO, prepares seasoned and aspiring CEOs for this very unique and unpredictable position—a job that most are unprepared for and at which many fail too soon.  This thought-provoking book by a long-time entrepreneur, IT-industry expert, investor and former instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power School delivers a proven approach for solving a CEO’s most difficult challenges.

In his new book, drawn from almost 30 years of study and experience, Trammell identifies over fifty daily struggles that pull CEOs off balance and offers modern techniques and approaches to help them regain balance. The CEO Tightrope also shares stories that help other CEOs assess their own strengths and weaknesses, and provides questions promoting self-analysis. Filling a void in the market for a clear, compelling guide for CEOs, The CEO Tightrope will likely become the go-to valued resource for current CEOs and even business students alike.

Paul Jankowski

Speak American Too: Your Guide to Building Powerful Brands in the New Heartland is the definitive field manual to marketing in the New Heartland, one of the nation’s largest and most powerful cultural segments representing nearly 60% of U.S. consumers.

This book combines new research findings from the first ever New Heartland Consumer Research Study, along with case study examples to familiarize you with the New Heartland consumer, and provides guidance on the principal channels of access through which we can be reached and influenced. Learn how the Core Values of Faith (not religion), Community and Family impact buying behavior and create a unique brand filter in the New Heartland. Discover the five key points of access that brands have the best opportunities to engage the New Heartland consumer: Music, Food, Sports, Outdoors and Social Media.

Finally, by examining current tools and strategies employed by brands today, you will be able to understand how to leverage these devices when designing your own New Heartland brand campaign, and read plenty of case studies that show just where brands went right or wrong.

This book gives every marketer the practical tools and know-how to make sure your brand campaign can Speak American, connect with New Heartlander core values, and be relevant in the places and spaces they live.

Speak American Too: Your Guide to Building Sustainable Brands in the New Heartland is not only a guide to understanding this culture, but a blueprint for brands to use in designing their effective New Heartland campaigns.