Business & Economics

The Go-Giver Influencer is a story about two young, ambitious businesspeople: Gillian Waters, the chief buyer for Smith & Banks, a midsized company that operates a national chain of pet accessory stores; and Jackson Hill, the founder of Angels Clothed in Fur, a small but growing manufacturer of all-natural pet foods.

Each has something the other wants. To Jackson, Smith & Banks represents the possibility of reaching more animals with his products–if he can negotiate terms and conditions that will protect his company’s integrity. To Gillian, Angels Clothed in Fur could give her company a distinctive, uniquely high-quality line that will help them stand out from their competitors–if Angels Clothed in Fur can be persuaded to give them an exclusive.

At first, the negotiations are adversarial and frustrating. Then, coincidentally, Gillian and Jackson each encounter a mysterious yet kindly mentor. Over the next week, while neither one realizes the other is doing the same, both Gillian and Jackson learn the heart of both mentors’ philosophies: The Five Secrets of Genuine Influence.

The story ends in a way that surprises everyone–and with lessons we can all apply in our efforts to resolve conflicts and influence others.

Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, shares the epic inside story of how a working-class kid from the Nebraska prairie took on Wall Street’s clubby brokerage business, busted it open, and walked away a billionaire.

Joe Ricketts always had the gift of seeing what others missed. The son of a house builder, he started life as a part-time janitor, but by the age of thirty-three he saw the chance to challenge the big brokerage firms by offering Americans an inexpensive way to take control of their own stock trading. Nowadays, we take for granted that Main Street is playing right there on Wall Street, but Ricketts made that happen. His company, begun with $12,500 borrowed from friends and family, took off like a rocket thanks to an early embrace of digital technology and irreverent marketing. But Ameritrade also faced a series of near-disasters: the SEC almost shut him down; his partners tried to force him out because of his relentless risk-taking; penny brokers swindled the company; the crash of 1989 nearly cost him everything; and he was almost shut down again when a customer committed massive fraud. By the time of the dot-com bust, he had proven that his strategy based on frontier values could survive just about anything.

The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get offers a view inside Joe Ricketts’ mind, giving readers a visceral understanding of how entrepreneurs think and act differently from the rest of us—how they see the horizon where we just see a spreadsheet. As unvarnished as the prairie he comes from, Ricketts also talks honestly about his shortcomings as a manager, the career sacrifices his wife made for his business, the complexity of being a father, and the pain of splitting with his mentor and of his brother’s death from AIDS. Overcoming these and other challenges, he built a company now worth $30 billion.

A must-read for anyone who’s ever dreamed of starting their own business, The Harder You Work, The Luckier You Get is the ultimate only-in-America story.

In 2009, a St. Louis glassblowing artist and recovering computer scientist named Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn’t accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. With no expertise or experience in the world of payments, they approached the problem of credit cards with a new perspective, questioning the industry’s assumptions, experimenting and innovating their way through early challenges, and achieving widespread adoption from merchants small and large.

But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? These questions motivated McKelvey to study what Square had done differently from all the other companies Amazon had killed. He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack.

McKelvey’s fascinating and humorous stories of Square’s early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable.

The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that’s much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems–one crazy idea at a time.

We all know about driverless cars, automated production lines and chatbots but how do you ensure your business keeps up and where do you start? Bestselling author and strategy guru, Bernard Marr, argues that AI absolutely applies to your business and explains how to design an AI strategy that will guarantee its success. The Intelligence Revolution explores the opportunities and challenges that come with this monumental new taskforce that is defining the new standards of business.

Guiding us through intelligent products, services and work processes, The Intelligence Revolution illustrates how new technologies are impacting customer experience, product and service design and work efficiency. Bernard Marr delights us with fascinating case studies of businesses excelling at maximizing the potential of AI like Netflix, Autodesk, Disney, Rolls Royce and Amazon.

Don’t be left behind. Instead, discover how to turbocharge your business.