A Multi-level Success
346992
Against Gravity powerfully portrays an Iranian exile living in Houston and her struggle to overcome a host of obstacles to living and loving authentically.  Like virtually all great literature, Against Gravity is deeply affecting on a character-plot level while at the same time operating on political and philosophical levels and intermeshing each with the other.  The love interests it portrays are triangular, as is the structure of the novel. It succeeds politically in exposing the horrors of religious fundamentalism without falling prey to the false allure of Pentagon-imposed democracy or Hollywood culture.  It's a profoundly sad book, but only because it expresses so concretely the perversity of the current world order.  At bottom, it offers hope that a secular society where our potential to live and love will not be stunted can be attained.
158279
As the owner of a small business, I recently needed to find a new bank.  Our current bank wouldn't give us the flexibility we needed to continue to grow the business.  Using the wisdom in this book, we contacted ten banks to compete for our business.  Some were small community banks while others were large, national banks.  We took the authors' advice and scheduled the meetings over two days at our offices so the banks could see our business in action.  In addition, we scheduled the meetings close together so the banks would realize they were competing.  Each meeting was 90 minutes.  We asked for a $3 million A/R loan with an 80% advance rate and a $150,000 term loan over three years.  We also asked for flexibility with some of our customers who can take up to 120 days to pay but are reliable payers.  As the book suggested, we also put together a large binder that organized all of the information well and provided 95%+ of what the bankers would want.  The result?  Nine of the ten banks agreed to meet with us.  All were impressed with our level of preparation and our presentation.  The questions we received after the presentation have been minimal given how prepared we were and how much information we gave them when we met.  Two banks have already given us strong proposals - better than we expected in terms of interest rate, flexibility and covenants.  Yesterday, we contacted the other seven banks to give them a deadline to submit a proposal.  Once we have all the proposals next week, we're going to compare all of them to identify ways we can negotiate with the bank who has given us the most favorable proposal.  We are very optimistic that we will have a new bank in place in the next few weeks and the flexibility we need to grow our business.  Thanks Rich and Mary!
3452834
Success in life depends on the level of leadership and guidance which you develop within yourself and then are able to express to others.  This book is beyond business principles and has many tried and true systems which can  be adopted for everyday peak performance and courageous attitude.  His  ventures have led him back to the essence of network marketing; help enough  people achieve their dreams, develop their talents, and listen to their  missions, your life will become richer, more rewarding and encompass  enhanced meaning.  As a manager and leader in Espial, USA I gift this book  to all my new enrollees.  Thank you Amazon.com for offering this title.
1872340
i try to read 50 - 100 books a year and when i read something exceptional, i want to make note of it.
I thought True Success was a brilliant book - well organized, well written, fun and substantive.
It is a road map for personal happiness and fulfillment.
Frankly, I was surprised that I had not heard of this book before.  I just grabbed it one day off a book shelf.  In my view, had this book been well promoted by the publisher, it could have been a big best seller - it has all the right elements.
Buy and read this book as quickly as you can.
17476
Microsoft is a company whose origins and leader, Bill Gates, are well documented.  The brand is one of the most recognized in the world, and countless millions use their products.  What is less known though is how the organization had to transform itself recently while never letting their collective foot off the gas.

The first hundred pages or so start with the history of how Gates founded the company.  I felt the author didn't go into too much detail or attempt to write an autobiography, just provide enough background to set the stage for the changes to come.

The catalyst according to the author is the DOJ lawsuit filed against Microsoft.  The impact on Gates is described as profound, and helped Bill and Steve Ballmer initiate some changes to a few company philosophies.

There are a few themes that emerged for me when reading.  Among them are the facts that the company has a (rare) focus on never standing still.  Always concerned about being out innovated, or beat in the marketplace, the company has created a culture where employees and leadership are relentless about improving.  Another (rare) organizational trait is the focus on hiring talented people.  Only GE in my personal experience understood that hiring the smartest, and best, at all levels is critical to success.  Microsoft leaders are legendary for their unusual interviewing techniques, all designed to hire the brightest thinkers.

While these traits made the company successful, according to the author they alone were not enough to take Microsoft forward after recent events.  One of the biggest changes was Bill Gates stepping out of the top role into a technology role, and Steve Ballmer taking on the CEO role.  This move may have been surprising from the outside, but it seems it allows both to do what they do best.  Further changes in focus were developed in two broad areas, values and customer focus.  Steve Ballmer sought to influence the talent inside Microsoft to better work together, be more respectful and self critical, and so on.  The book outlines a short list of these values.  The second area was an even stronger focus on customer orientation. These concepts are outlined in some detail.

Overall, the book is an easy read, and was not in any way dry in my opinion.  The author does a credible job at portraying the events and outside influences that led to the "reboot" or transition that companies must go through as they grow.  For anyone interested in Microsoft, the book provides an interesting overview of the life cycle of an organization that has had a profound impact on the world.
2557003
This book demonstrates for others from humble beginning high levels of success can be obtain.  I found it very interesting how the Author's life experences coincide with mine although my success doesn't come close to matching his.
1588379
Andy Fleming's work in helping organizations become deliberately developmental has proven helpful to a variety of organizations, including my own.  Any leadership team interested in learning to work together more effectively while at the same time finding their work together more satisfying and rewarding will find this book more than helpful.  The recommendations and ideas presented here recognize that we have limited time and attention in our work, but that small investments of time can yield more productive and successful teams.  We have employed the deliberately developmental approach and found great success as a result.
1252874
Build a Culture of Good was recommended by a trusted colleague who thought it might catch my interest.  It did.
Most books of this type seem to say everything they want to say by the third chapternot this one.  The first word is Introducing and the last word is salsa.  Each word in between is both intriguing and essential.
As a Director of Learning and Development for a large global organization, we are in constant search of those factors that bring employees a genuine spiritual connection to the job.  As those in the field know, the ultimate objective is to infuse a culture of emotional engagement throughout the workforce that then begins to extend out to customers.  Moorehead and McCarty have touched that nerve by bringing the why together with the what.  Not just in theory, but at a real-life business with real-life employees and real-life realities.
Corporate sponsored social responsibility programs are great and generally make everyone feel good. But Build a Culture of Good takes the feel good part to a new level.  As the title suggests, good becomes the why to the jobs what.  Corporate responsibility is no longer defined by programs or campaigns.  It is defined by the very culture of the organization.  Employees think more of their jobs than just being the source of their paycheck.  And that is big.
Bravo Moorehead and McCarty.
4287576
Many big companies choose their leaders by their proximity to big success...but that strategy lends itself to giving those leaders a huge blind spot in their training. More can be learned from failure than success, yet these same positions lend themselves to people who have never known what failure actually feels like.

Victor Lombardi's book affords an opportunity to look at the failures of projects you've likely heard of (Microsoft Zune, anyone?) and others you haven't. And in the process gives the reader a chance to learn in a dispassionate, unbiased (though thoroughly entertaining) way what separates groups of equally intelligent teams from success and failure.

Some cases highlight the ability to change tack and wrench success from previous missteps, and others let you witness what happens when good intentions pave the way to rapid demise.

To me, the most valuable part of the book comes toward the end. Instead of leaving these case studies to be interpreted by the reader, Lombardi puts his finger on the grand dichotomy that defines all successful tech leaders: the ability to simultaneously own the view of being the smartest guy in the room with the humility to accept that even the smartest person can be blinded by their experience and loyalties.

It's a lesson that few leaders learn, and that ability to simultaneously respect two opposite points of view is not just the sign of a first rate intelligence (to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald) but also the hallmark of a truly elite innovator.
562283
This book was very interesting to read, a litle bit like reading a novel about how you could become very happy and successful using a variety of new techniques coming straight from the information age we live in.  Most of these techniques did not exist ten years ago, so this is new content.

However, don't think you can learn and master all these topics just by reading this book. It will take time.  Over the past two years, I have been myself following many of his advices and have indeed increased substantially my income and quality of life using the multiple streams of income approach, but also by paying more attention to my own objectives in life and for my professional life.

This book is a good way to learn a litle bit about each main inceom sources (income streams)that are proposed.  From there, you can see which one would fit your style better, and then learn more using more specialized books or courses and give it a try.  Realize that each of these topics could take you a year or more to learn about and develop.

I myself have worked on the basic investing through mutual funds using best funds with 15 years returns of 15% or more, and these funds gave me a return of 20%-40% last year.

I also have started a business to write-off many of my business expenses and started working as a consultant instead of an employee, which allowed me to negotiate a much better rate.  My independance and time flexibility has also improved dramatically, and I can now spend more time exercising, enjoying life with my family and travelling.

I have also worked on investing in options, but did not get better results than mutual funds, and the volatility was too high for my liking (winning 50% one month, loosing 50% the next..)  I decided to stick to mutual funds and index funds.

I have also started writing a book about achieving more success,  and this should start providing some income in another 6 to 12 months.

Overall, very good book but don't underestimate the Planning and focused time and dedication it takes to reach you goals.  However, it is worth it as you reach them one by one!
700838
I like the affirmations that you can hyper learn.  And this book identifies a few key systems that make hyper-learning more manageable and effective.  Good job Tim.  Keep it up.
2191872
What a wonderful book this turned out to be.  Not only did it give me an insight into what these individuals key strengths were, but the book also had enough personal information about them that you came away from the book feeling you knew more about them as individuals.  The book starts off by making the assurance that great leaders are not only capable individuals, but they also have a desire to lead and chose to do so above all else.  They are not just great because of smarts or drive, but because they want to be and work at it continuously.  Thus the authors provide a book that is not a road map to greatness, but a review of these 25 leaders and what they do that has made them successful.  It is a broad group of people and it is interesting that the traits highlighted in the book are also wide spanning.  I had incorrectly assumed that the book was going to give me a simple list of the things I needed to get good at, no such luck.

The goal of the book is to help current day leaders observe proven and successful leaders to help them in coming better.  The purpose is not so much to imitate their qualities but really to discover which attributes resonate with yourself and the cultivate those traits to expand and improve your leadership skills.  There are so many good examples in the book that it is almost too much to take in with one reading, this is one of those books that you will find yourself highlighting and marking pages for further review.  It comes as close as possible to a how to guide for personal improvement.  Overall I not only enjoyed the book, but I learned a great deal from it.  This book as so many helpful bits of info that all managers and business owners can learn from it.  The book is not only worth the money, but also worth the time to read.
1879675
This was really cool. I was doubting it when I read success in a day. It seems so quick. I am by no means an expert after reading this but my C++ efforts have been successful so far.  There were a few key issues I was having programming and this book was really efficient at getting to the bottom of what was happening. I feel like I am well on my way.
3591073
Many writers have written about how businesses can do well by doing good.  In this addition to the literature, Mr. Melaver gives us his own take on the connection between doing good and doing well.

Early in his tenure as the new CEO of a 70 year old family-owned business, Mr. Melaver was confronted with this question:  Does it matter what our business does (especially if we're only doing what others in the industry are or have been doing), as long as we're giving back to the community?  Mr. Melaver's answer to this question is yes, and he tells us the whys and hows in this book.

According to Mr. Melaver, doing good and doing well are inseparable concepts;  a business that takes into heart the principles described in this book will do well without having to sacrifice its core values.

Mr. Melaver's world view is an integrative view:  Every person is the sum of many diverse parts -- land (place a person lives in), community, etc. -- and each of those individual parts is recursively the sum of many other diverse interconnected parts;  the challenge for each of us is to reflect on our values and how we want to conduct ourselves so that we can grow to our highest potential at a thoughtful pace, while simultaneously giving others the same opportunities to reach their own potentials without disturbing the natural order of the integrated whole.  This challenge requires, among other things, a willingness to change the way we view ourselves, competitors, knowledge sharing, partnering, etc. and is a daunting one.

The principles described in this book are supposed to help us rise to this challenge;  but principles, like good high-level plans, still require the translation of abstract, general matters to concrete, more specific actionable items, and this is where, I think, the book falls a little bit short.  While writing beautifully and passionately, Mr. Melaver sometimes tends to keep the level of discourse abstract for far longer than necessary, offering drawn-out nuanced discussions of ideas and concepts from many different angles and perspectives that sometimes borders on belaboring a point.  The few times that Mr. Melaver was able to work in real-life examples of the described principles in action (e.g., the risks his family took when they stood firm on their desegregation stance, the effort to understand a stressed out employee who left the company, the admission of error when someone failed to follow one or more of the principles advocated in this book and lessons learned, etc) were some of the best moments I've had with the book because they were moments of insights for me as well, and I wish Mr. Melaver had been able to work in a few more examples, because principles, like good plans, are only as good as how well they're executed.
3023994
Outstanding managers know intuitively that one can obtain more from practicing and enhancing our stengths than by trying to overcome our weaknesses. This is the principle of this excellent book and the result of a survey done to a pool of outstanding managers. I bought the book just because it was the result of a Gallup study and it did not dissapoint me. The book contains an interesting but brief explanation of how the study was conceived and performed.

The introduction of this book led my interest to neurosciences, since the author made an analogy between brain circuitry and roads. He mentioned that each brain has differently developed neuronal links, which are set in early childhood. Those links that are stronger (superhighways compared to small roads) represent our strengths. Access and communication using the superhighways will always be easier for us than struggling through unlevelled sidepaths (our weaknesses) or even to try to broaden these narrow roads, which requires tremendous effort and might be even imposible. Reading about neurosciences I found out about the plasticity of the brain's circuitry (which years ago was thought to be rigid and fixed), so with a lot of effort and practise we might overcome some weaknesses, but we would need to really evaluate the effort vs. the result. (See&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/A-User-s-Guide-to-the-Brain-Perception-Attention-and-the-Four-Theaters-of-the-Brain/dp/0375701079/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">A User's Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain</a>).

I recently found out that had I read the classics, and specifically Aristotle, the idea of devoting more effort to your strengths would not have appeared new to me (so apparently Aristotle broke the rules long time ago), but since I haven't read him, it was good to read this book.

The content of the book is so good, that it makes you forget about the management book writing style and its being repetitive. The sequel,&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Now-Discover-Your-Strengths/dp/0743201140/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Now, Discover Your Strengths</a>&nbsp;is also quite good, it makes a summary of the main strengths that people have and to what type of work they can best be applied. It even contains a test (both inside the book or online) to help you discover your strengths.&nbsp;<a data-hook="product-link-linked" class="a-link-normal" href="/Authentic-Happiness-Using-the-New-Positive-Psychology-to-Realize-Your-Potential-for-Lasting-Fulfillment/dp/0743222989/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_txt?ie=UTF8">Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment</a>&nbsp;also talks about a joyous state called "flow" that is achieved when you practise your strengths.
1671215
Initially the book was a little overwhelming, but as our development team's competence and familiarity with .NET increased, so the later chapters became more valuable. This is especially true of the iBank Case Study, which provides a great "How To..." reference in building a complete enterprise
application using all the elements of .NET based on multiple tiers (Presentation, Business, and Data Layers).
The book's highly professional structure and coding techniques demonstrates the authors' deep knowledge and experience in the SQL/VB.NET domain.
2969433
The book promises to `Simplify Strategic Planning and Management with the Balanced Scorecard'. It certainly lives up to its promise.

It is interesting to note that the authors acknowledge in the first chapter, entitled `It's Complicated' that this whole subject is sometimes considered so complicated it is occasionally avoided altogether. However, the book goes on to say that in reality, the subject is not complicated all. It is not easy, and no strategic planning activity is, but it is not complicated (provided you have a strategic planning process in place).

If you are familiar with the work of the Balanced Scorecard Institute then the book will provide a much needed reference source to the Institute's methodology, the Nine Steps to Success. The methodology, created by the Institute co-founder and CEO, Howard Rohm, provides a structured framework of activities to help medium to large organisations and companies through the process of creating, implementing and managing a strategic plan.

If you have not come across the Balanced Scorecard Institute or have only a superficial understanding of the Balanced Scorecard approach then don't worry. The Institute Way provides an excellent introduction in its initial chapter and follows up with detailed instructions that are clearly born out of many, many years of practice and involvement in hundreds of live situations. The book is sprinkled with anecdotes that bring the subject alive.

The Balanced Scorecard Institute has had a long history working with the George Washington University. Indeed, their courses are under-pinned by certification from the University itself. Jim Robinson, Director, George Washington University Centre for Excellence in Public Leadership wrote the forward for the book, in it he states:

"The Institute way is far more than another "how to" manual. The reader must be prepared to go on a journey of discovery which will provide them surprising insights about organisations, about our heart-brain connections, and, most importantly, about ourselves".

I thoroughly recommend this book as a good read that will almost certainly end up as a well-thumbed reference.  We have already started using it when working with our clients at Intrafocus.

Clive Keyte, Director, Intrafocus.