Grant Cardone is a best-selling book on the New York Times, a worldwide sales guru, a sales trainer, and a motivational speaker. Cardone Training Technologies, Cardone Group, and Twin Capital Management are three multimillion-dollar enterprises he founded. His wife Elena Lyons and their daughter Sabrina live in Los Angeles.

While most people only have three levels of activity—no action, retreat, or standard action—if you want to achieve huge things, you don't want to settle for the usual. To advance, you must comprehend the sought 4th degree of action. The fourth degree, commonly known as the 10X Rule, is the level of activity that ensures businesses and individuals achieve their goals and dreams.

The 10X Rule reveals the notion of "Massive Action," which allows you to break past business cliches and risk-aversion while taking tangible measures to achieve your goals. It also shows why people get stuck in the first three activities and how to make the 10X Rule a discipline. Learn where to begin, what to do, and how to follow up on each action you take with further action to reach Massive Action results.

• Learn how to calculate "Estimation of Effort" to ensure you exceed your goals.
• Embrace the Fourth Degree and defy mediocrity.
• Learn about the time management myth.
• Discover the precise reasons why some people fail and others succeed.
• Understand the exact formula for problem solving.

Extreme success is, by definition, out of the ordinary. Instead of acting like everyone else and settling for ordinary outcomes, use The 10 X Rule to eliminate luck and chance from your business equation and lock in tremendous success.

Author: Grant Cardone

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/10X-Rule-Difference-Between-Success/dp/0470627603/

Ratings: 4.7 out of 5 stars (from 7993 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #1,885 in Books

#1 in Strategic Business Planning

#3 in Systems & Planning

#38 in International Mystery & Crime (Books)

Patrick Bet-David went from fleeing war-torn Iran to launching his own financial services company, raising tens of millions of dollars, and launching Valuetainment, the #1 YouTube channel for entrepreneurs. His unconventional approach to business and life has resulted in fascinating talks with Ray Dalio, Kevin Hart, the late Kobe Bryant, President George W. Bush, and a slew of other notables. His social media post has been seen over a billion times. Patrick never attended college and worked his way up from the army to selling health club memberships before entering the financial services industry. He created PHP, a financial services firm, when he was thirty years old.

Both successful businesspeople and chess grandmasters can see the pieces in front of them and predict their next five moves. By converting this expertise into a beneficial methodology, Patrick Bet-David "helps entrepreneurs realize exactly what they need to do next" (Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog!) in this book. Your Next Five Moves contains the solutions if you've struck a brick wall, lost your fire, or are seeking for fresh ideas to take your business to the next level.

You will gain:

• CLARITY on your desires and who you want to be.
• STRATEGY for reasoning in the battle room and the boardroom.
• GROWTH TACTICS for good times and bad.
• SKILLS for building the right team based on strong values.
• INSIGHT into power moves and the art of leveraging.

Your Next Five Moves is a must-read for any serious executive, strategist, or entrepreneur, combining these concepts and revelations drawn from Patrick's own journey to successful CEO.

Author: Patrick Bet-David

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Next-Five-Moves-Business/dp/1982154810/

Ratings: 4.8 out of 5 stars (from 4158 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #1,948 in Books

#2 in Strategic Business Planning

#4 in Systems & Planning

#25 in Entrepreneurship (Books)

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of what makes successful firms tick, as well as a Socratic counselor to business and social sector leaders. He has spent more than a quarter-century conducting rigorous research and has produced or coauthored six books, which have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Good to Great, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice are among them.

Built to Last, the seminal management study of the 1990s, demonstrated how great firms triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be integrated into an enterprise's DNA from the start.

But what about the corporation that was not born with stellar genetics? How can good, middling, or even disastrous companies reach long-term greatness?

This question plagued Jim Collins' mind for years. Is it possible for a company to defy gravity and transform long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And, if true, what are the universal defining features that propel a company from good to great?

Collins and his research team found a group of exceptional organizations that made the leap to great outcomes and maintained those accomplishments for at least fifteen years using challenging benchmarks. How fantastic? Following the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that outperformed the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, outperforming a composite index of the world's greatest companies, which included Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The research team compared the good-to-great companies against a carefully chosen collection of comparative companies that did not make the transition from good to outstanding. What was different this time? Why did one group of companies become truly exceptional performers while the other group stayed mediocre?

The team spent five years researching the history of all twenty-eight companies in the study. Collins and his team discovered the key determinants of greatness after sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews. They discovered why some companies make the leap and others don't.

Many readers will be surprised by the Good to Great study's findings, which will shed light on practically every aspect of management strategy and practice. Among the findings are:

• Level 5 Leaders: When the research team discovered the type of leadership required to reach greatness, they were astounded.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To progress from excellent to great, one must overcome the curse of expertise.
• A Disciplined Culture: When you combine a disciplined culture with an entrepreneurial mentality, you obtain the magical alchemy of excellent outcomes. Accelerators of Technology: Good-to-great companies have a different perspective on the importance of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who embark on major reform programs and traumatic restructurings are practically destined to fail.

Author: Jim Collins

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Some-Companies-Others/dp/0066620996/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 5597 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #2,052 in Books

#1 in Library Management

#3 in Strategic Business Planning

#3 in Company Business Profiles (Books)

Verne Harnish is the founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO), which has over 14,000 members worldwide. He chaired EO's premier CEO program, "Birthing of Giants," which was held at MIT for fifteen years and which he still teaches today. Verne has spent the last three decades as the founder and CEO of Scaling Up, a global executive education and coaching firm with over 180 partners on six continents.

Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first published over a decade ago. The first major revision of this business classic, Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0), details practical tools and tactics for developing an industry-dominating business. This book was developed so that everyone — from frontline staff to senior executives — may get aligned in contributing to a company's progress.

Among the best books on strategic business planning, Scaling Up focuses on the four primary decision areas that every business must address: people, strategy, execution, and cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools, including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which have been used by over 40,000 businesses around the world to successfully scale their businesses — many to $10 million, $100 million, and $1 billion and beyond — while having fun along the way!

Author: Verne Harnish

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Scaling-Up-Mastering-Rockefeller-Habits/dp/0986019593/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 1660 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #3,167 in Books

#1 in Nonprofit Organizations & Charities (Books)

#2 in Strategy & Competition

#5 in Strategic Business Planning

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne are Codirectors of the INSEAD Blue Ocean Strategy Institute and Professors of Strategy at INSEAD. They are the authors of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers BLUE OCEAN SHIFT and BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, which is widely regarded as one of the most iconic and influential strategy books ever published. Blue Ocean Strategy has sold over 4 million copies, is available in 46 languages, and is a best-seller on five continents.

The global phenomenon that has sold over 4 million copies, has been published in 46 languages, and is a bestseller on five continents—now updated and expanded with additional content. Fast Company named this book to its Leadership Hall of Fame as one of the most impactful leadership books. A traditional strategy.

W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, global premier management thinkers, challenge everything you thought you understood about the requirements for strategic success in this perennial classic, embraced by businesses and sectors worldwide. BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY, widely regarded as one of the most classic and influential strategy books ever written, contends that ruthless competition culminates in nothing more than a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a decreasing profit pool. Based on a review of 150 strategic movements (covering more than 100 years and 30 industries), the authors believe that developing "blue oceans"—untapped new market spaces ripe for growth—is the key to long-term success.

Blue Ocean Strategy provides ideas and methods that any firm may utilize to construct and capture their own blue seas, as well as a methodical approach to rendering the competition obsolete. This enlarged edition contains:

• The writers have added a new preface: Help! My Ocean Is Shifting Red
• Updates on all of the instances and examples in the book, bringing their stories up to date.
• Two new chapters, as well as an extended third, address the most pressing topics readers have posed over the last decade: Alignment, Renewal, and Red Ocean Traps.
• This bestseller book charts a bold new path to winning the future, upending standard thinking about strategy. Consider this your road map to establishing uncontested market space and rendering the competition obsolete.

Visit blueoceanstrategy.com to learn more about the power of Blue Ocean Strategy. You'll find everything you need there, from practical ideas and case studies from government and private sector to training materials, mobile apps, real-time updates, and tips and tools to help you succeed on your blue ocean voyage.

Author: W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Expanded-Uncontested/dp/1625274491/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 3603 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #4,225 in Books

#1 in Industrial Marketing (Books)

#2 in Industrial Management & Leadership

#2 in Global Marketing (Books)

John Doerr is an engineer, entrepreneur, and the chairman of Kleiner Perkins. He was an early investor and board member at Google and Amazon, where he helped to establish over 500,000 employment and the world's second and third most valuable firms. He is passionate about inspiring leaders to rethink the future, from revolutionizing healthcare to advancing machine learning applications. Outside of Kleiner Perkins, John collaborates with social entrepreneurs to address issues such as public education, climate change, and global poverty.

In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up to whom he had recently committed $12.5 million, his largest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin possessed incredible technology, entrepreneurial zeal, and lofty goals, but no solid business model. Page and Brin had to learn how to make difficult decisions on priorities while keeping their team on track if Google was to change the world (or even survive). They'd have to know when to abandon losing bets and fail quickly. And they required timely, relevant data to track their progress—to quantify what was important.

Doerr educated them about a tried-and-true method for achieving operational excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He encountered OKRs as an engineer at Intel in the 1970s, where the renowned Andy Grove led the best-run firm Doerr had ever seen. Doerr later shared Grove's idea with almost fifty companies as a venture capitalist. It worked whenever the approach was faithfully followed.

In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we want to achieve; key results indicate how those top priorities will be met with specific, measurable actions inside a defined time frame. Everyone's objectives, from entry level to CEO, are visible to the entire organization.

The advantages are enormous. OKRs highlight the most important work of a company. They concentrate effort and promote coordination. They help staff stay on track. They connect objectives across silos in order to unite and strengthen the entire organization. OKRs improve workplace satisfaction and retention along the way.

Doerr provides a wide range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies in Measure What Matters, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to highlight the focus, agility, and rapid development that OKRs have spurred at so many great businesses. Among the best books on strategic business planning, this book will assist a new generation of leaders in capturing the same enchantment.

Author: John Doerr

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Measure-What-Matters-Google-Foundation/dp/0525536221/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 5522 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #4,304 in Books

#6 in Strategy & Competition

#9 in Strategic Business Planning

#13 in Systems & Planning

Alexander Osterwalder works with businesses in 20 countries across all continents as a speaker, workshop facilitator, and strategy consultant. Dr. Osterwalder, in addition to his speaking engagements, focuses on executive training in the areas of business model development and innovation.

Yves Pigneur, PhD is a management professor and the director of the University of Lausanne's Information Systems Institute. He has taught at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver as a visiting professor. Dr. Pigneur has chaired a number of conferences (IFIP, ISDSS, AIM).

Business Model Generation is a how-to guide for visionaries, game changers, and challengers who want to defy outdated business models and create tomorrow's firms. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities but lacks a strategy to stay ahead of your competition, you need Business Model Generation.

The book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It was co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries. It discusses the most common Business Model patterns and helps you reinterpret them for your particular environment, based on insights from top business thinkers. You will learn how to understand, build, and implement a game-changing business model—or how to assess and renovate an existing one. Along the route, you'll have a far better understanding of your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and core value offer.

Business Model Generation includes practical innovation approaches utilized by major consultants and corporations around the world, such as 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. It is intended for those who are willing to forsake old ways of thinking and embrace new methods of value creation: executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders from all organizations. If you're willing to break the rules, you're part of "the business model generation!"

Author: Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Business-Model-Generation-Visionaries-Challengers/dp/0470876417/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 3411 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #5,352 in Books

#8 in Strategy & Competition

#11 in Strategic Business Planning

#17 in Systems & Planning

Gino Wickman, an entrepreneur from the age of 21, has dedicated his life to discovering what makes firms grow. At the age of 25, he took over the family firm, which was heavily in debt and in desperate need of assistance. He and his partners successfully sold the company after turning it around and running it for seven years. Gino created the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) based on his years of real-world experience. It is a practical method for assisting businesses in achieving greatness.

Do you have a firm hold on your business, or does it have a firm grip on you?

Employee friction, earnings troubles, and insufficient development are all common frustrations for entrepreneurs and business executives. Decisions never seem to be taken, or if they are, they are not adequately implemented. But there is a way out. It's not difficult or theoretical. The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a hands-on approach to achieving the company success you've always desired. Over 80,000 businesses have discovered what EOS can achieve.

Among the best books on strategic business planning, Traction will teach you how to strengthen the six important components of your business. You'll learn basic yet effective strategies to run your business that will provide you and your leadership team greater focus, growth, and fun. Every day, successful organizations use Traction to run lucrative, stress-free businesses—and you can, too.

Author: Gino Wickman

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Get-Grip-Your-Business-ebook/dp/B007QWLLV2/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 5585 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #9,653 in Kindle Store

#1 in Organizational Learning

#1 in Business Systems & Planning

#2 in Business Production & Operations

Chip Heath is a professor of strategy and organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has assisted over 450 startups in refining their company strategy and messaging. He currently resides in Los Gatos, California. Dan Heath is a senior fellow at Duke University's CASE program, which assists social entrepreneurs. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina.

Chip and Dan have collaborated on three New York Times best-selling books: Made to Stick, Switch, and Decisive. Their works have been translated into thirty-three languages, including Thai, Arabic, and Lithuanian, and have sold over two million copies worldwide. The Power of Moments is their most recent book.

Chip and Dan Heath explore the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain how to make ideas stickier, such as employing the human scale principle, the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps in Made to Stick. We discover along the way that sticky messages of all kinds—from the famed "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's instructions on sportsmanship to Sony's vision for a new product—draw their potency from the same six features.

Made to Stick will alter your communication style. It's a fast-paced tour of success (and failure) stories: the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to show a point about stomach ulcers; organizations that employ the Mother Teresa Effect; and the elementary-school teacher whose simulation truly averted racial discrimination.

Made to Stick is a provocative, eye-opening, and often shockingly amusing look at the essential principles of winning ideas—and how we might use these guidelines to make our own messages stick.

Author: Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Made-Stick-Ideas-Survive-Others/dp/1400064287/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 3323 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #5,947 in Books

#3 in Epistemology Philosophy

#11 in Communication Reference (Books)

#14 in Strategic Business Planning

Snowflake Inc's Chairman and CEO is FRANK SLOOTMAN. Frank has over 25 years of experience in the corporate software market as an entrepreneur and executive. Mr. Slootman was the CEO and President of ServiceNow from 2011 to 2017, growing the company from about $100 million in revenue to $1.4 billion through an IPO. Prior to that, Frank served as President of EMC's Backup Recovery Systems Division following an acquisition of Data Domain Corporation/Data Domain, Inc., where he served as Chief Executive Officer and President, leading the firm through an IPO to its $2.4 billion acquisition by EMC.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the most accomplished leaders in enterprise growth in the tech world, having led Snowflake to the greatest software IPO ever after previously leading ServiceNow and Data Domain to exponential growth and the public market. For the first time, he exposes his leadership method in Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity.

Amp It Up provides a thorough examination of what it takes to restructure an organization for maximum development and scalability. Slootman demonstrates that most executives can significantly increase their organization's performance without making costly changes to its people, structure, or core business model—and they don't need an army of consultants to accomplish it. What they do require is for people to be aligned around what matters and to execute with urgency and intensity every day.

Leading for extraordinary development entails declaring war on mediocrity, challenging the status quo, and making difficult decisions on a daily basis, all while remaining relentlessly focused on the purpose. Amp It Up offers the first principles to drive such transition, as well as pragmatic suggestions for constructing a business around them.

Amp It Up is a must-read resource for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all types who want to unlock a company's growth potential and scale it to heights they never dreamed imaginable. It is regarded as one of the best books on strategic business planning you should read.

Author: Frank Slootman

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Amp-Unlocking-Hypergrowth-Expectations-Intensity/dp/1119836115/

Ratings: 4.5 out of 5 stars (from 484 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #7,153 in Books

#4 in Business Management (Books)

#11 in Strategy & Competition

#17 in Strategic Business Planning

Annie Duke is a World Series of Poker bracelet winner, the 2004 Tournament of Champions champion, and the only female winner of the NBC National Poker Heads Up Championship. As a professional speaker and decision strategist, she combines her poker knowledge with her PhD study in cognitive psychology at UPenn. She is the founder of How I Decide, a non-profit that develops courses and resources to help underserved middle school students improve their decision-making and critical thinking skills.

Even the finest option does not always result in the best outcome. There is always an element of luck that you cannot control, as well as information that is hidden from view. So, the secret to long-term success (and avoiding death by anxiety) is to think in terms of bets: "How certain am I? What are the various outcomes that could occur? Which decision has the best chance of success? Did I fall into the unlucky 10% on a method that succeeds 90% of the time? Is my success due to dumb luck rather than wise decision-making?"

In Thinking in Bets, Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker winner turned consultant, uses examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to teach readers how to embrace uncertainty and make smarter decisions. In a world that emphasizes and even promotes the appearance of certainty, most people find it difficult to express "I'm not sure." Professional poker players, on the other hand, are aware that good judgments do not always result in good outcomes, and bad ones do not always result in terrible outcomes.

You'll be less subject to reactionary emotions, knee-jerk biases, and detrimental patterns in your decision making if you alter your thinking from a desire for certainty to a goal of accurately assessing what you know and what you don't. In the long term, you'll grow more confident, calm, compassionate, and successful.

Author: Annie Duke

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Bets-Making-Smarter-Decisions/dp/0735216371/

Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars (from 2363 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #8,108 in Books

#22 in Strategic Business Planning

#28 in Systems & Planning

#39 in Medical Cognitive Psychology

"Value Proposition Design's" writers are fascinated with introducing practical tools and procedures to the domains of strategy, innovation, and entrepreneurship. They all have a passion for simplifying, beautifying, and applying business principles so that they become practical and vital in the lives of business people and companies.

Value Proposition Design assists you in addressing the fundamental difficulty of every business: generating compelling products and services that people want to buy. This extremely practical book, along with its online companion, will teach you the methods and skills required to produce sellable items.

This sequel shows how to utilize the "Value Proposition Canvas" to design, test, manufacture, and manage products and services that customers genuinely desire, using the same spectacular visual format as the authors' global bestseller, Business Model Generation.

Anyone who has been annoyed by new product discussions based on hunches and intuitions; anyone who has witnessed an expensive new product launch fail in the market should read Value Proposition Design. The book will assist you in understanding the patterns of excellent value propositions, gaining a better relationship with clients, and avoiding spending time on ideas that will not succeed. You'll learn how to create and test value propositions that properly match the requirements and desires of your clients.

Furthermore, the book provides you with exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to evaluate your work, learn from your peers, and get pdfs, checklists, and other resources.

Value Proposition Design is a necessary companion to the "Business Model Canvas" from Business Model Generation, a tool widely used by startups and major organizations alike, including MasterCard, 3M, Coca-Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more.

Value Proposition Design provides you with a tried-and-true technique for success, with sellable value propositions embedded in successful business models.

Author: Alexander Osterwalder, Gregory Bernarda and Yves Pigneur

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Value-Proposition-Design-Customers-Strategyzer/dp/1118968050/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 1872 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #9,004 in Books

#2 in Business Marketing

#4 in Business Entrepreneurship

#5 in Industrial Product Design

Bland, David J. Author and entrepreneur headquartered in Silicon Valley who assists businesses in achieving growth through "Lean Startup" methodology, design thinking, and business model innovation. Alex Osterwalder is the author of the international best-sellers Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design, as well as the number seven spot on the "Thinkers 50" list, a passionate entrepreneur, and a sought-after speaker.

Seven out of ten new goods fail to meet expectations. The goal of Testing Business Ideas is to change that statistic. This practical guide, in the vein of Alex Osterwalder's global blockbuster Business Model Generation, provides a library of hands-on strategies for swiftly evaluating new business concepts.

Testing Business Ideas describes how testing company ideas systematically decreases risk and increases the likelihood of success for every new endeavor or business effort. It adds Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments to the internationally recognized Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas.

Testing Business Ideas employs an eye-catching four-color format to:

• Increase the likelihood of a venture's success while lowering the danger of spending time, money, and resources on bad ideas.
• Bridge the information gap that exists between strategy and experimentation/validation.
• Using the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas, you may identify and test your core business assumptions.

This book is a complete field reference to business model testing, with practical strategies for making key decisions that are not reliant on intuition and guesswork. Testing Business Ideas teaches leaders how to instill an experimental mindset in their organizations and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

Author: David J. Bland and Alex Osterwalder

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Testing-Business-Ideas-Customer/dp/1119551447/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 907 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #9,750 in Books

#6 in Market Research Business (Books)

#26 in Starting a Business (Books)

#26 in Strategic Business Planning

William N. Thorndike is the founder and managing director of private equity firm Housatonic Partners. He graduated from Harvard College and the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and he has lectured at both Harvard and Stanford. He serves on the boards of eight corporations and two non-profit organizations.

What characteristics distinguish a successful CEO? Most people recall a well-known definition: "a seasoned manager with extensive industry knowledge." Others may point to the characteristics of today's "celebrity CEOs," such as charm, virtuoso communication abilities, and a confident managerial style. But what actually matters when it comes to running a business? What distinguishes great CEO performance? Simply said, it is the long-term returns for the company's stockholders.

Will Thorndike puts the analytical insight of a successful investing career to bear in The Outsiders, meticulously assessing the performance of firms and their executives. You'll meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms' average returns beat the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty—that is, a $10,000 investment with each of these CEOs would have been worth more than $1.5 million twenty-five years later. General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne are just a few of the companies. In The Outsiders, you'll discover the characteristics and tactics that enabled these outstanding leaders to accomplish such exceptional success (notable for their constancy and rigorous logic).

These "outsiders" avoided Wall Street and the press, as well as the hottest new management ideas, because they were humble, quiet, and often frugal. Instead, they shared certain characteristics that propelled them and the companies they led to success: a laser-sharp focus on per share value rather than earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.

Thorndike shares eye-opening anecdotes, extracting lessons and offering a compelling alternative paradigm for anyone interested in running or investing in a company—and reaping spectacular results.

Author: William N. Thorndike

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Outsiders-Unconventional-Radically-Rational-Blueprint/dp/1422162672/

Ratings: 4.6 out of 5 stars (from 1480 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #10,724 in Books

#27 in Strategic Business Planning

#34 in Systems & Planning

#286 in Leadership & Motivation

Judea Pearl is a computer science professor at UCLA. He is the author of three books and has received various honors, including the Alan Turing Award. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California.

Dana Mackenzie is a PhD mathematician turned science writer who has contributed to publications such as Science, New Scientist, and Scientific American. He currently resides in Santa Cruz, California.

"Correlation does not imply causality." This phrase, repeated by scientists for more than a century, has resulted in a virtual ban on causal discussion. That is no longer a taboo. The causal revolution, led by Judea Pearl and his colleagues, shattered a century of ambiguity and established causality (the study of cause and effect) on a firm scientific foundation. His work explains how we can tell if it was rain or a sprinkler that made a sidewalk wet, as well as how to answer difficult issues, such as whether a medicine healed an ailment. Pearl's study allows us to investigate not only whether one thing causes another, but also the worlds that could have been. It demonstrates the nature of human mind and is crucial to artificial intelligence. Anyone who wishes to comprehend either requires The Book of Why.

Author: Judea Pearl

Link to buy: https://www.amazon.com/Book-Why-Science-Cause-Effect/dp/1541698967/

Ratings: 4.4 out of 5 stars (from 1451 reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #10,818 in Books

#1 in Biostatistics (Books)

#2 in Discrete Mathematics (Books)

#4 in Computer Neural Networks