Business & Economics

Adidas and Puma are two of the biggest global brands in sports, paying stars, clubs, and competitions to show off their labels in stadiums and across magazine pages. In Sneaker Wars, journalist Barbara Smit reveals the dramatic, character-driven story of these two powerhouses. Started in their mother’s laundry room in Germany, Adi and Rudi Dassler’s shoe business was an instant success. But a vicious feud soon pulled them apart: by the end of World War II, the brothers split the company, dividing their family and hometown.

Adidas and Puma then revolutionized the world of sport, their rivalry introducing behind-the-scenes deals and multimillion-dollar contracts. A page-turning narrative, Sneaker Wars is a riveting blend of family drama, business, sports, and history.

When customers complain, employees respond. The typical service model is riddled with holes. What about people and businesses who never speak up, but never come back? Learn to actively reach out, prevent problems, and resolve issues in ways that boost loyalty.

Strategic Customer Service is a data-packed roadmap that shows you how. This invaluable resource distills decades of research on the impact of great versus mediocre service. Complete guidelines and case studies explain how to:

– Gather and analyze customer feedback
– Empower employees to fix problems
– Track your impact on revenue
– Generate sensational word of mouth
– Tap opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell

Strategic Customer Service draws on over 30 years of research from companies such as 3M, GE, and Chick-Fil-A to teach you how to transcend a good business into a profitable word-of-mouth machine that transforms the bottom line.

Why settle for passive service? Make a business case for ramping up operations—and get the tools for making it pay off. Transform customer service into a strategic function, and reap benefits far exceeding investments.

A fascinating exploration of the world’s most effective bosses—and how they motivate, inspire, and enable others to advance their companies and shape entire industries, by the author of How Smart Executives Fail. A must-read for anyone interested in leadership and building an enduring pipeline of talent.

What do football coach Bill Walsh, restauranteur Alice Waters, television executive Lorne Michaels, technol­ogy CEO Larry Ellison, and fashion pioneer Ralph Lauren have in common? On the surface, not much, other than consistent success in their fields. But below the surface, they share a common approach to finding, nurturing, leading, and even letting go of great people. The way they deal with talent makes them not merely success stories, not merely organization builders, but what Sydney Finkelstein calls superbosses.

After ten years of research and more than two hundred interviews, Finkelstein—an acclaimed professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, speaker, and executive coach and consultant—discovered that superbosses exist in nearly every industry. If you study the top fifty leaders in any field, as many as one-third will have once worked for a superboss.

While superbosses differ in their personal styles, they all focus on identifying promising newcomers, inspiring their best work, and launching them into highly successful careers—while also expanding their own networks and building stronger companies.

By sharing the fascinating stories of superbosses and their protégés, Finkelstein explores a phenomenon that never had a name before. And he shows how each of us can emulate the best tactics of superbosses to create our own powerful networks of extraordinary talent.