Books

• Start with Why How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action

New York Times bestselling author Donald Miller uses the seven universal elements of powerful stories to teach readers how to dramatically improve how they connect with customers and grow their businesses.

Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services. Building a StoryBrand does this by teaching readers the seven universal story points all humans respond to; the real reason customers make purchases; how to simplify a brand message so people understand it; and how to create the most effective messaging for websites, brochures, and social media. Whether you are the marketing director of a multibillion dollar company, the owner of a small business, a politician running for office, or the lead singer of a rock band, Building a StoryBrand will forever transform the way you talk about who you are, what you do, and the unique value you bring to your customers.

Five years after this sleeper hit took on the world of IT and flipped it on it's head, the 5th Anniversary Edition of The Phoenix Project continues to guide IT in the DevOps revolution. In this newly updated and expanded edition of the bestselling The Phoenix Project, co-author Gene Kim includes a new afterword and a deeper delve into the Three Ways as described in The DevOps Handbook.

Bill, an IT manager at Parts Unlimited, has been tasked with taking on a project critical to the future of the business, code named Phoenix Project. But the project is massively over budget and behind schedule. The CEO demands Bill must fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced.

With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with a manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited.

In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.

• Basic Books AZ

Four-time New York Times bestselling author Gary Vaynerchuk offers new lessons and inspiration drawn from the experiences of dozens of influencers and entrepreneurs who rejected the predictable corporate path in favor of pursuing their dreams by building thriving businesses and extraordinary personal brands.

In his 2009 international bestseller Crush It, Gary insisted that a vibrant personal brand was crucial to entrepreneurial success, In Crushing It!, Gary explains why that’s even more true today, offering his unique perspective on what has changed and what principles remain timeless. He also shares stories from other entrepreneurs who have grown wealthier—and not just financially—than they ever imagined possible by following Crush It principles. The secret to their success (and Gary’s) has everything to do with their understanding of the social media platforms, and their willingness to do whatever it took to make these tools work to their utmost potential. That’s what Crushing It! teaches readers to do.

In this lively, practical, and inspiring book, Gary dissects every current major social media platform so that anyone, from a plumber to a professional ice skater, will know exactly how to amplify his or her personal brand on each. He offers both theoretical and tactical advice on how to become the biggest thing on old standbys like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat; podcast platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, and iTunes; and other emerging platforms such as Musical.ly. For those with more experience, Crushing It! illuminates some little-known nuances and provides innovative tips and clever tweaks proven to enhance more common tried-and-true strategies.

Crushing It! is a state-of-the-art guide to building your own path to professional and financial success, but it’s not about getting rich. It’s a blueprint to living life on your own terms.

“Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.” — Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and author of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

“If you want to be clued in to the unfolding future, then you have come to the right place. For decades, George Gilder has been the undisputed oracle of technology’s future. Are giant companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook the unstoppable monopolistic juggernauts that they seem, or are they dysfunctional giants about to be toppled by tech-savvy, entrepreneurial college dropouts?” — Nick Tredennick, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, QuickSilver Technology

The Age of Google, built on big data and machine intelligence, has been an awesome era. But it’s coming to an end. In Life after Google, George Gilder—the peerless visionary of technology and culture—explains why Silicon Valley is suffering a nervous breakdown and what to expect as the post-Google age dawns.

Google’s astonishing ability to “search and sort” attracts the entire world to its search engine and countless other goodies—videos, maps, email, calendars….And everything it offers is free, or so it seems. Instead of paying directly, users submit to advertising. The system of “aggregate and advertise” works—for a while—if you control an empire of data centers, but a market without prices strangles entrepreneurship and turns the Internet into a wasteland of ads.

The crisis is not just economic. Even as advances in artificial intelligence induce delusions of omnipotence and transcendence, Silicon Valley has pretty much given up on security. The Internet firewalls supposedly protecting all those passwords and personal information have proved hopelessly permeable.

The crisis cannot be solved within the current computer and network architecture. The future lies with the “cryptocosm”—the new architecture of the blockchain and its derivatives. Enabling cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether, NEO and Hashgraph, it will provide the Internet a secure global payments system, ending the aggregate-and-advertise Age of Google.

Silicon Valley, long dominated by a few giants, faces a “great unbundling,” which will disperse computer power and commerce and transform the economy and the Internet.

Life after Google is almost here.

 

For fans of "Wealth and Poverty," "Knowledge and Power," and "The Scandal of Money." 

• Wiley

Excel 2016 All-in-One For Dummies, the most comprehensive Excel reference on the market, is completely updated to reflect Microsoft's changes in the popular spreadsheet tool. It offers you everything you need to grasp basic Excel functions, such as creating and editing worksheets, setting up formulas, importing data, performing statistical functions, editing macros with Visual Basic—and beyond. In no time, your Excel skills will go from 'meh' to excellent.

Written by expert Greg Harvey, who has sold more than 4.5 million copies of his previous books combined and has taught and trained extensively in Microsoft Excel, this all-encompassing guide offers everything you need to get started with Excel. From generating pivot tables and performing financial functions to performing error trapping and building and running macros—and everything in between—this hands-on, friendly guide makes working with Excel easier than ever before.

• Serves as the ideal reference for solving common questions and Excel pain points quickly and easily
• Helps to increase productivity and efficiency when working in Excel
• Fully updated for the new version of Excel
• Covers basic and more advanced Excel topics

If working in Excel occasionally makes you want to scream, this will be the dog-eared, dust-free reference you'll turn to again and again.

An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs.

Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board. Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly-respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era―the Golden Age of Apple.

Ken Kocienda offers an inside look at Apple’s creative process. For fifteen years, he was on the ground floor of the company as a specialist, directly responsible for experimenting with novel user interface concepts and writing powerful, easy-to-use software for products including the iPhone, the iPad, and the Safari web browser. His stories explain the symbiotic relationship between software and product development for those who have never dreamed of programming a computer, and reveal what it was like to work on the cutting edge of technology at one of the world's most admired companies.

Kocienda shares moments of struggle and success, crisis and collaboration, illuminating each with lessons learned over his Apple career. He introduces the essential elements of innovation―inspiration, collaboration, craft, diligence, decisiveness, taste, and empathy―and uses these as a lens through which to understand productive work culture.

An insider's tale of creativity and innovation at Apple, Creative Selection shows readers how a small group of people developed an evolutionary design model, and how they used this methodology to make groundbreaking and intuitive software which countless millions use every day.

• Wiley

Whether you are just starting out or an Excel novice, the Excel 2016 Bible is your comprehensive, go-to guide for all your Excel 2016 needs. Whether you use Excel at work or at home, you will be guided through the powerful new features and capabilities by expert author and Excel Guru John Walkenbach to take full advantage of what the updated version offers. Learn to incorporate templates, implement formulas, create pivot tables, analyze data, and much more.

Navigate this powerful tool for business, home management, technical work, and much more with the only resource you need, Excel 2016 Bible.

• Create functional spreadsheets that work
• Master formulas, formatting, pivot tables, and more
• Get acquainted with Excel 2016's new features and tools
• Customize downloadable templates and worksheets

Whether you need a walkthrough tutorial or an easy-to-navigate desk reference, the Excel 2016 Bible has you covered with complete coverage and clear expert guidance.

• DUMMIES

Perplexed by PowerPoint? Looking to excel at Excel? From Access to Word—and every application in between—this all-encompassing guide provides plain-English guidance on mastering the entire Microsoft Office suite. Through easy-to-follow instruction, you'll quickly get up and running with Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Charts and Graphics, OneNote, and more—and make your work and home life easier, more productive, and more streamlined.

Microsoft Office is the leading productivity tool in the world. From word processing to business communication to data crunching, it requires a lot of knowledge to operate it—let alone master it. Luckily, Office 2016 All-in-One For Dummies is here to deliver the breadth of information you need to complete basic tasks and drill down into Office's advanced features.

• Create customized documents and add graphic elements, proofing, and citations in Word
• Build a worksheet, create formulas, and perform basic data analysis in Excel
• Create a notebook and organize your thoughts in Notes
• Manage messages, tasks, contacts, and calendars in Outlook

Clocking in at over 800 pages, Office 2016 All-in-One For Dummies will be the singular Microsoft Office resource you'll turn to again and again.