Brilliant Mistakes: Finding Success on the Far Side of Failure

Named #1 Best Business Book of 2011, by Patriot-NewsPennLive.com If you have ever flown in an airplane, used electricity from a nuclear power plant, or taken an antibiotic, you have benefited from a brilliant mistake. Each of these life-changing innovations was the result of many missteps and an occasional brilliant insight that turned a mistake into a surprising portal of discovery. In Brilliant Mistakes, Paul Schoemaker, founder and chairman of Decision Strategies International, shares critical insights on the surprising benefits of making well-chosen mistakes. Brilliant Mistakes explores why minimizing mistakes may be the greatest mistake of all, situations when mistakes are most beneficial and when they should be avoided, the counter-intuitive idea that we should deliberately permit errors at times, and how to make the most of brilliant mistakes to improve business results. Brilliant Mistakes is based on solid academic research and insights from Schoemaker’s work with more than 100 organizations, as well as his provocative Harvard Business Review article with Robert Gunther, The Wisdom of Deliberate Mistakes.” Schoemaker provides a practical roadmap for using mistakes to accelerate learning for your organization and yourself.

Business & Money

Schoemaker, Paul J.H.

Management & Leadership

Wharton School Press

Peter Cappelli confronts the myth of the skills gap and provides an actionable path forward to put people back to work. Even in a time of perilously high unemployment, companies contend that they cannot find the employees they need. Pointing to a skills gap, employers argue applicants are simply not qualified; schools aren't preparing students for jobs; the government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants; and even when the match is right, prospective employees won't accept jobs at the wages offered. In this powerful and fast-reading book, Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources, debunks the arguments and exposes the real reasons good people can't get hired. Drawing on jobs data, anecdotes from all sides of the employer-employee divide, and interviews with jobs professionals, he explores the paradoxical forces bearing down on the American workplace and lays out solutions that can help us break through what has become a crippling employer-employee stand-off. Among the questions he confronts: Is there really a skills gap? To what extent is the hiring process being held hostage by automated software that can crunch thousands of applications an hour? What kind of training could best bridge the gap between employer expectations and applicant realities, and who should foot the bill for it? Are schools really at fault? Named one of HR Magazine's Top 20 Most Influential Thinkers of 2011, Cappelli not only changes the way we think about hiring but points the way forward to rev America's job engine again.

Why Good People Can't Get Jobs: The Skills Gap and What Companies Can Do About It

Cappelli, Peter

Job Hunting & Careers

The language of business In order to understand how your business is performing right now and to evaluate, assess, and devise new strategies to boost future performance, you need information. Financial statements are a critical source of the information you need. In direct and simple terms, Richard A. Lambert, Miller-Sherrerd Professor of Accounting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demystifies financial statements and concepts and shows you how you can apply this information to make better business decisions for long-term profit. You will learn to use and interpret financial data; find out what we can learn from Pepsi, Krispy Kreme, General Motors, and other companies; learn how to evaluate investment strategies; and apply your financial know-how to develop a coherent business strategy.

Financial Literacy for Managers: Finance and Accounting for Better Decision-Making (Wharton Executive Essentials)

Lambert, Richard A.

Finance

The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent

A 2012 ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEAR Many of the United States' most innovative entrepreneurs have been immigrants, from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Charles Pfizer to Sergey Brin, Vinod Khosla, and Elon Musk. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies and one-quarter of all new small businesses were founded by immigrants, generating trillions of dollars annually, employing millions of workers, and helping establish the United States as the most entrepreneurial, technologically advanced society on earth. Now, Vivek Wadhwa, an immigrant tech entrepreneur turned academic with appointments at Duke, Stanford, Emory, and Singularity Universities, draws on his new Kauffman Foundation research to show that the United States is in the midst of an unprecedented halt in high-growth, immigrant-founded start-ups. He argues that increased competition from countries like China and India and US immigration policies are leaving some of the most educated and talented entrepreneurial immigrants with no choice but to take their innovation elsewhere. The consequences to our economy are dire; our multi-trillion dollar loss will be the gain of our global competitors. With his signature fearlessness and clarity, Wadhwa offers a concise framework for understanding the Immigrant Exodus and offers a recipe for reversal and rapid recovery.

Wadhwa, Vivek

Take your business to the next level—for the win Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that gamemakers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter are lawyers and World of Warcraft players who created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking—addressing problems like a game designer—can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more. In this illuminating guide, Werbach and Hunter reveal how game thinking can yield winning solutions to real-world business problems. Let the games begin!

For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business

Werbach, Kevin

Hunter, Dan

The branding bible for today's globalized world Today, brands have become even more important than the products they represent: their stories travel with lightning speed through social media and the Internet and across countries and diverse cultures. A brand must be elastic enough to allow for reasonable category and product-line extensions, flexible enough to change with dynamic market conditions, consistent enough so that consumers who travel physically or virtually won't be confused, and focused enough to provide clear differentiation from the competition. Strong brands are more than globally recognizable; they are critical assets that can make a significant contribution to your company's bottom line. In Global Brand Power, Kahn brings brand management into the 21st century, addressing how branding contributes to the purchase process and how to position a strong global brand, from identifying the appropriate competitive set, offering a sustainable differential advantage, and targeting the right strategic segment. This essential guide also covers how customer ownership of your brand affects marketing strategy, methods for assessing brand value, how to manage a brand for long-term profitability, effective brand communications and repositioning strategies, and how to manage a brand in a world of total transparency—where one slip-up can go around the world via social media instantaneously. Filled with stories about how Coca-Cola, The Estée Lauder Companies Inc., Marriott, Apple, Starbucks, Campbell Soup Company, Southwest Airlines, and celebrities like Lady Gaga are leveraging their brands, Global Brand Power is the only book you will need to implement an effective brand strategy for your firm.

Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth (Wharton Executive Essentials)

Kahn, Barbara E.

Marketing & Sales

A framework for achieving superior rates of organic growth Achieving superior growth through innovation is a top strategic priority for all companies. Yet most management teams struggle to reach their firm’s ambitious growth targets and suffer slow growth. What distinguishes these growth laggards from growth leaders like IBM, Nike, LEGO, American Express, Amazon, and Samsung that realize their full potential for growth? Wharton professor George S. Day shows that growth leaders use their innovation prowess to accelerate their growth at a faster rate. In this essential guide, Day reveals how to build this prowess by combining discipline in growth-seeking activities with an organizational ability to innovate. Day shows managers how to set a growth strategy that is realistic while still stretching the organization; search for the best growth opportunities along the full spectrum of 14 growth pathways; aim their growth-seeking activities toward the creation of new customer value; learn to profit from the uncertainty of innovation by successfully assessing and containing risk; build the organizational muscle to implement an ambitious growth strategy; and move faster from ideas to impact. With the strategies, processes, and methods discussed in Innovation Prowess, leaders can build a tested and comprehensive strategy for driving organic growth year after year. The Wharton Executive Essentials Series The Wharton Executive Essentials series from Wharton Digital Press brings the ideas of the Wharton School’s thought leaders to you wherever you are. Inspired by Wharton’s Executive Education program, each book is authored by globally renowned faculty and offers a quick-reading, penetrating, and comprehensive summary of the knowledge leaders need to excel in today’s competitive business environment and capture tomorrow’s opportunities.

Innovation Prowess: Leadership Strategies for Accelerating Growth (Wharton Executive Essentials)

Day, George S.

Available for the First Time: The Complete Social Entrepreneur's Playbook Covers all three phases of the start-up to scale-up process, developed with reader feedback from "one of the more unusual ebook...experiments of the year" (ThinReads) Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs. MacMillan and Thompson used their own systematic framework to publish The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook. To test the market, they offered the first phase in their start-up method (step 1) as a free ebook. Readers were invited to join The Social Entrepreneur's Advisory Group, and nearly 300 aspiring and active social entrepreneurs shared feedback that helped shape the complete edition of the book, which covers all three steps in the start-up to scale-up process. Based on this crowd-sourced feedback from readers of the free ebook and drawing on the authors' more than 26 years' combined experience developing and studying social enterprises in the field across Africa and in the United States, this new edition provides guidance for each phase: Phase One: Pressure Test Your Start-Up Idea. Based on the free ebook, this expanded section now includes advice on setting revenue and social impact goals, how to navigate the sociopolitical landscape, and how to develop a strong concept statement. In addition, MacMillan and Thompson provide advice on how to identify and test a proposed revenue-generating solution and define and segment your target population. Phase Two: Plan Your Social Enterprise. All new to this edition, this critical phase shows you how to frame and scope the venture, determine what it will take to actually deliver a sustainable enterprise, identify the key assumptions that have been made, and design checkpoints to test those assumptions before making major investments. Phase Three: Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise. Available for the first time in this edition, you will learn how to effectively launch your enterprise, manage upside potential and downside risk, and strategically scale up. Filled with accessible frameworks and tools, as well as inspiring stories of social entrepreneurs, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook is a must-read for any aspiring or active social entrepreneur, as well as philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofits interested in doing more good with fewer resources. Includes access to downloadable planning documents, including user-friendly spreadsheets

The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook, Expanded Edition: Pressure Test, Plan, Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise

MacMillan, Ian C.

Thompson, James D.

Business Development & Entrepreneurship

Sport Matters: Leadership, Power, and the Quest for Respect in Sports

Donald Sterling. Ray Rice. The Washington Redskins. The Miami Dolphins. NCAA Athletes. These names, among countless others, have blanketed the headlines as the media has brought global attention to several recent sports controversies. Now, Kenneth L. Shropshire, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics and Director of the Wharton Sports Business Initiative, uses these stories as a prism for exploring the leadership challenges facing team owners, management, players, and fans. In Sport Matters: Leadership, Power, and the Quest for Respect in Sports, Shropshire examines the need for diversity, inclusion, respect, and equality in sports, focusing on the need for leadership to embrace and deliver these principles in a real and tangible way within the sports industry. He also introduces the Sports Power Matrix, a framework for understanding power within the sports industry. Sport Matters addresses what the Donald Sterling drama can teach us about race and the need for inclusion at the ownership level; the lessons learned from the NFL and Ray Rice case; the Washington Redskins name and the economics of change; what the Miami Dolphins matter tells us about respect in the workplace and beyond; and compensation and equality in amateur” sports. Sport Matters, filled with disturbing revelations and uncomfortable truths, also provides hope, revealing how obstacles to achieving an ideal culture of equality and respect within the sports industry can be removed. Shropshire argues that while change matters, continued emphasis on diversity, inclusion and respect is needed to create true progress.

Shropshire, Kenneth L.

Sports & Outdoors

The Engaged Leader: A Strategy for Your Digital Transformation

NYT and WSJ bestselling author Charlene Li guides business leaders deeper than ever before into the uncomfortable and ever-changing terrain of the digital era Technology has revolutionized the very idea and nature of relationships between leaders and their followers. Yet, many leaders remain stuck at arms-length from those they lead and serve, relying on specialized teams to interact with customers, their direct reports to keep tabs on how employees are doing, and on the digital natives in their organization to stay abreast of new technologies. Now, in The Engaged Leader: A Strategy for Your Digital Transformation, Li helps leaders adapt to the demands, and opportunities of digital leadership. To be a true digital leader requires a metamorphosis: you must connect directly by listening, sharing, and engaging using digital technologies. This metamorphosis is not easy, comfortable, or painlessif your palms aren’t sweaty or your stomach isn’t churning, then you probably aren’t really practicing digital leadership. The Engaged Leader addresses why leaders need to master a new way of developing relationships, which begins by stepping out of traditional hierarchies; how to listen at scale, share to shape, and engage to transform; the art of making this transformative mind shift; and the science of applying the right tools to meet your strategic goals. This transformation is not optional. Those who choose not to make this change will be abandoned for those who inspire people to follow them. The Engaged Leader provides leaders with the skills and confidence they need to transform their leadership, and in turn, their organizations. The Engaged Leader also provides guidance to institutionsbusinesses, communities, and schoolson how to develop and nurture digital leadership. It is a must read for anyone who values a deeper connection between leaders and those they serve.

Li, Charlene

Industries

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Wharton School Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wharton School Press