C-Suite Network™

Menu
Search
Close this search box.

booktag: author

Keith Ferrazzi

The bestselling business classic on the power of relationships, updated with in-depth  advice for making connections in the digital world.

Do you want to get ahead in life? Climb the ladder to personal success?

The secret, master networker Keith Ferrazzi claims, is in reaching out to other people. As Ferrazzi discovered in early life, what distinguishes highly successful people from everyone else is the way they use the power of relationships—so that everyone wins.

In Never Eat Alone, Ferrazzi lays out the specific steps—and inner mindset—he uses to reach out to connect with the thousands of colleagues, friends, and associates on his contacts list, people he has helped and who have helped him. And in the time since Never Eat Alone was published in 2005, the rise of social media and new, collaborative management styles have only made Ferrazzi’s advice more essential for anyone hoping to get ahead in business.

The son of a small-town steelworker and a cleaning lady, Ferrazzi first used his remarkable ability to connect with others to pave the way to Yale, a Harvard M.B.A., and several top executive posts. Not yet out of his thirties, he developed a network of relationships that stretched from Washington’s corridors of power to Hollywood’s A-list, leading to him being named one of Crain’s 40 Under 40 and selected as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the Davos World Economic Forum.

Ferrazzi’s form of connecting to the world around him is based on generosity, helping friends connect with other friends. Ferrazzi distinguishes genuine relationship-building from the crude, desperate glad-handing usually associated with “networking.” He then distills his system of reaching out to people into practical, proven principles. Among them:

  • – Don’t keep score: It’s never simply about getting what you want. It’s about getting what you want and making sure that the people who are important to you get what they want, too.
  • – “Ping” constantly: The ins and outs of reaching out to those in your circle of contacts all the time—not just when you need something.
  • – Never Eat Alone: The dynamics of status are the same whether you’re working at a corporation or attending a social event—“invisibility” is a fate worse than failure.
  • – Become the “King of Content”: How to use social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to make meaningful connections, spark engagement, and curate a network of people who can help you with your interests and goals.

 

In the course of this book, Ferrazzi outlines the timeless strategies shared by the world’s most connected individuals, from Winston Churchill to Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan to the Dalai Lama.

Chock-full of specific advice on handling rejection, getting past gatekeepers, becoming a “conference commando,” and more, this new edition of Never Eat Alone will remain a classic alongside alongside How to Win Friends and Influence People for years to come.

Jim Collins

The Challenge: 
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study: 
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards: 
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons: 
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.

The Findings:
 The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

  • – Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
  • – The Hedgehog Concept: (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
  • – A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
  • – The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Mildred Talabi

Successful job hunting isn’t about luck, chance, or hope… Successful job hunting is a SCIENCE!

In her ground-breaking book, The Science of Successful Job Hunting, Mildred Talabi draws on many years of careers experience and some of her best blog posts to bring you 35 chapters and over 180 pages of practical, easy-to-read content you can use in your job hunting.

You will discover:

  • 51 quick and easy ways to improve your CV and double your chances of hearing back from the employer;
  • How to make recruitment agencies your allies to accelerate your job hunt and boost your employment prospects;
  • How to confidently handle the 10 most common interview questions that most jobseekers fear;
  • 3 killer reasons to include Twitter and other social media platforms in your job hunt;

 

…and much, much more!

The Science of Successful Job Hunting is your bullet-proof blueprint for job hunting success.

Judy Robinett

“Other people have the answers, deals, money, access, power, and influence you need to get what you want in this world. To achieve any goal, you need other people to help you do it.” — JUDY ROBINETT

As anyone in business knows, strategic planning is critical to achieving long-term success. In How to Be a Power Connector, Power Connector Judy Robinett argues that strategic relationship planning should be your top priority.

When you combine your specific skills and talents with a clear, workable path for creating and managing your relationships, nothing will stop you from meeting your goals. With high-value connections, you’ll tap into a dynamic “power grid” of influence guaranteed to accelerate your personal and professional success.

Robinett uses her decades of experience connecting the world’s highest achievers with one another to help you build high-value relationships. She reveals all the secrets of her trade, including proven ways to:

  • – Find and enter the best network “ecosystem” to meet your goals
  • – Reach even the most unreachable people quickly and effectively
  • – Get anyone’s contact information within 30 seconds
  • – Create a “3-D connection” that adds value to multiple people at the same time
  • – Access key influencers through industry and community events
  • – Subtly seed conversation with information about interests and needs
  • – Use social media to your best advantage

 

Robinett has based her methods on solid research proving that social groups begin to break up when they become larger than 150 people, and that 50 members is the optimal size for group communication. As such, she has developed what she calls the “5+50+100” method: contact your top 5 connections daily, your Key 50 weekly, and your Vital 100 monthly. this is your power grid, and it will work wonders for your career.

Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington’s personal wake-up call came in the form of a broken cheekbone and a nasty gash over her eye — the result of a fall brought on by exhaustion and lack of sleep. As the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post Media Group — one of the fastest growing media companies in the world — celebrated as one of the world’s most influential women, and gracing the covers of magazines, she was, by any traditional measure, extraordinarily successful. Yet as she found herself going from brain MRI to CAT scan to echocardiogram, to find out if there was any underlying medical problem beyond exhaustion, she wondered is this really what success feels like?

As more and more people are coming to realize, there is far more to living a truly successful life than just earning a bigger salary and capturing a corner office. Our relentless pursuit of the two traditional metrics of success — money and power — has led to an epidemic of burnout and stress-related illnesses, and an erosion in the quality of our relationships, family life, and, ironically, our careers. In being connected to the world 24/7, we’re losing our connection to what truly matters. Our current definition of success is, as Thrive shows, literally killing us. We need a new way forward.

In a commencement address Arianna gave at Smith College in the spring of 2013, she likened our drive for money and power to two legs of a three-legged stool. They may hold us up temporarily, but sooner or later we’re going to topple over. We need a third leg — a third metric for defining success — to truly thrive. That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success. They don’t commemorate our long hours in the office, our promotions, or our sterling PowerPoint presentations as we relentlessly raced to climb up the career ladder. They are not about our resumes — they are about cherished memories, shared adventures, small kindnesses and acts of generosity, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

In this deeply personal book, Arianna talks candidly about her own challenges with managing time and prioritizing the demands of a career and raising two daughters — of juggling business deadlines and family crises, a harried dance that led to her collapse and to her “aha moment.” Drawing on the latest groundbreaking research and scientific findings in the fields of psychology, sports, sleep, and physiology that show the profound and transformative effects of meditation, mindfulness, unplugging, and giving, Arianna shows us the way to a revolution in our culture, our thinking, our workplace, and our lives.

Gary Vaynerchuk

New York Times bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk shares hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition. A mash-up of the best elements of Crush It! and The Thank You Economy with a fresh spin, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really works.

When managers and marketers outline their social media strategies, they plan for the “right hook”—their next sale or campaign that’s going to knock out the competition. Even companies committed to jabbing—patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships crucial to successful social media campaigns—want to land the punch that will take down their opponent or their customer’s resistance in one blow. Right hooks convert traffic to sales and easily show results. Except when they don’t.

Thanks to massive change and proliferation in social media platforms, the winning combination of jabs and right hooks is different now. Vaynerchuk shows that while communication is still key, context matters more than ever. It’s not just about developing high-quality content, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices—content tailor-made for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr.

Sheryl Sandberg

Thirty years after women became 50 percent of the college graduates in the United States, men still hold the vast majority of leadership positions in government and industry. This means that women’s voices are still not heard equally in the decisions that most affect our lives. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg examines why women’s progress in achieving leadership roles has stalled, explains the root causes, and offers compelling, commonsense solutions that can empower women to achieve their full potential.

Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook and is ranked on Fortune’s list of the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business and as one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the World. In 2010, she gave an electrifying TEDTalk in which she described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which became a phenomenon and has been viewed more than two million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.

In Lean In, Sandberg digs deeper into these issues, combining personal anecdotes, hard data, and compelling research to cut through the layers of ambiguity and bias surrounding the lives and choices of working women. She recounts her own decisions, mistakes, and daily struggles to make the right choices for herself, her career, and her family. She provides practical advice on negotiation techniques, mentorship, and building a satisfying career, urging women to set boundaries and to abandon the myth of “having it all.”  She describes specific steps women can take to combine professional achievement with personal fulfillment and demonstrates how men can benefit by supporting women in the workplace and at home.

Written with both humor and wisdom, Sandberg’s book is an inspiring call to action and a blueprint for individual growth. Lean In is destined to change the conversation from what women can’t do to what they can.

D. Keith Pigues

Do your customers make more money doing business with you? 

Knowing the answer can help you build measurable and valuable customer relationships, outperform the competition, and unlock profitable growth.

Companies are blind to opportunities for profitable customer relationships without a deep understanding of how they create customer value relative to competitors. With a rigorous and measurable understanding of how customers make more money today and in the future with you, combined with supporting plans and tools to align the entire organization for success, a company can win and win big. Winning with Customers offers a step-by-step playbook to help companies develop this capability for themselves, act on it, build a culture around it and sustain it over time. The playbook includes case studies, interviews, and tools from leading B2B companies who have demonstrated success. Written by recognized business thought leaders and practitioners, this book will guide you to profitable growth. The book also serves as a launch point into a community of like-minded executives. Learn more about the book and the author at http://www.dkeithpigues.com and view Keith speaking about the topic. View the endorsements for the book here, and learn more about Keen Strategy: http://www.keenstrategy.com/

bizcast

 

Steven Haines

Every day, thousands of new products and innovations are brought to market.   Amid much fanfare, they struggle for shelf-space, mind-share, and market share.   Most studies on the subject suggest that products fail more often than they should.   CEOs, CMOs, and other C-Suite executives expect more from their product leaders and marketers!

Whatever your business sells, Product Management is one of the most important functions in the firm’s pursuit of profits.   With globalization and fierce competition, the stakes are higher than ever, and the room for error narrower than ever!   Therefore, leaders need a reliable resource for their product managers, brand managers, and category managers so these people know what to do, when, and with whom.  This resource is The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (2nd edition) — the most comprehensive book in the world on the subject of Product Management.   Designed for product managers and the leaders who support them, the book clearly explains how:

  • 1)     To conduct the research that lead to valuable market insights
  • 2)     To create the strategies required to drive innovation
  • 3)     To select and justify which products to build
  • 4)     To plan for their profitable creation and development
  • 5)     To launch them to the right markets at the right time
  • 6)     To manage them like businesses across their life cycles
  • 7)     To gracefully retire them
  • 8)     To align people across the organization so everyone’s moving in the same direction

The Product Manager’s Desk Reference (2nd edition) embodies everything “Product.”  Written by Steven Haines, one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic, it’s a comprehensive, versatile, must-have resource for any business person who works in any company, in any industry, who seeks to successfully innovate, market, and manage products and services.

bizcast

Dov Baron

Everything you’ve been told about leadership over the past thirty years no longer applies. The world has changed, and so has everything we know about becoming—and remaining—an effective leader particularly when it comes to keeping your top talent!

The effective leaders of tomorrow will do one thing–Keep Top Millennial Talent. Finding and keeping extraordinary talent will be what determines which organizations thrive and which ones fade off into oblivion in the immediate future.

Don’t believe it? Then consider that the average company spends 1.5 to 2 times the annual salary of an employee in training and development. Meanwhile, the average millennial employee is only looking at a tenure of two and a half years… at the outside. That employee will walk away before your investment ever pays off! What’s worse–the employee you have invested in will take the skills and training that you paid for, and leverage them into a better position with your competitor.

In this book Dov Baron lays out the strategies for not only keeping your top talent, but have them become Fiercely Loyal. It could likely be the most important thing to happen to leadership and human resources in a hundred years…read it and use it!

This groundbreaking book will give your and your company the edge you need to thrive in today’s rapidly changing corporate climate.

Bizcast-for-CSBC-Website