Building Insanely Great Products: Some Products Fail, Many Succeed...This is their Story is dedicated to one goal: To help you learn how you can enhance the chances of product success and reduce product failure. Steve Jobs coined the term “Building Insanely Great Products” and this book with many real-life examples tells the story of what he meant by that phrase and how every organization can build insanely great products and services. Building Insanely Great Products covers the six keys to success, how to do market research, the importance of customer loyalty, innovation and design, using personas for development and not just marketing, determining the product’s value proposition, the correct way to prioritize product features, market sizing that works, market segmentation, product positioning, distribution strategy, product lifecycle framework and process, and the customer journey and digital transformation. As Steve Johnson, the grandfather of product management training says: “... we’ve learned that companies often don’t know why they succeed and why they fail. Many rely on luck; too many rely on “HIPPO”—the highest paid person's opinion. And if you don’t know why you succeed, you won’t know how to succeed again.
In this guide, Harnish and his co-authors share practical tools and techniques to help entrepreneurs grow an industry -- dominating business without it killing them -- and actually have fun. Many growth company leaders reach a point where they actually dread adding another customer, employee, or location. It feels like they are just adding more weight to an ever-heavier anchor they are dragging through the sand. To make matters worse, the increased revenues have not turned into more profitability, so at some point they wonder if the journey is worth the effort. This book focuses on the four major decisions every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. The book includes a series of One-Page tools including the One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully.
There are many distinct pleasures associated with computer programming. Craftsmanship has its quiet rewards, the satisfaction that comes from building a useful object and making it work. Excitement arrives with the flash of insight that cracks a previously intractable problem. The spiritual quest for elegance can turn the hacker into an artist. There are pleasures in parsimony, in squeezing the last drop of performance out of clever algorithms and tight coding. The games, puzzles, and challenges of problems from international programming competitions are a great way to experience these pleasures while improving your algorithmic and coding skills. This book contains over 100 problems that have appeared in previous programming contests, along with discussions of the theory and ideas necessary to attack them. Instant online grading for all of these problems is available from two WWW robot judging sites. Combining this book with a judge gives an exciting new way to challenge and improve your programming skills. This book can be used for self-study, for teaching innovative courses in algorithms and programming, and in training for international competition. The problems in this book have been selected from over 1,000 programming problems at the Universidad de Valladolid online judge. The judge has ruled on well over one million submissions from 27,000 registered users around the world to date. We have taken only the best of the best, the most fun, exciting, and interesting problems available.
The study edition of book the Los Angeles Times called, "The most extensive review of U.S. intelligence-gathering tactics in generations." This is the complete Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into the CIA's interrogation and detention programs -- a.k.a., The Torture Report. Based on over six million pages of secret CIA documents, the report details a covert program of secret prisons, prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies, as well as the CIA's efforts to hide the details of the program from the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the American people. Over five years in the making, it is presented here exactly as redacted and released by the United States government on December 9, 2014, with an introduction by Daniel J. Jones, who led the Senate investigation. This special edition includes: • Large, easy-to-read format. • Almost 3,000 notes formatted as footnotes, exactly as they appeared in the original report. This allows readers to see obscured or clarifying details as they read the main text. • An introduction by Senate staffer Daniel J. Jones who led the investigation and wrote the report for the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a forward by the head of that committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein.
WHAT IF YOU HAD AN ANGEL ON YOUR SIDE? "Terrific advice from a master of the angel investing game. Brian Cohen reveals the art and craft of raising angel money. An investment in this book will pay off a thousandfold." -- DR. HOWARD MORGAN, founder and partner at First Round Capital When you connect with the right angel investor, it's like finding a new best friend--you just have to know what makes him or her happy. Smart funding is waiting for smart founders. Raising funds is all about connecting with the investor who's right for you--and What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know shows you exactly how to succeed. Veteran early-stage investor Brian Cohen knows how to spot a great company destined for success, and in this groundbreaking book he offers soup-to-nuts guidance for any entrepreneur seeking to launch an invention, a product, or a great new idea into a receptive marketplace. As chairman of the board of directors of the New York Angels, Cohen is one of the most engaged angel investors out there today. The first investor in Pinterest, he describes exactly what angels want to see, hear, and feel before they take out their checkbooks: A clear exit strategy before the startup even launches Facts that turn "due" diligence into "do" diligence Authenticity--"save your spinning for the fitness center" Proof that you "live inside the customer's head" Cohen gives invaluable insight into how the most successful angels view due diligence, friends and family money, crowdfunding, team building, scalability, iteration, exit strategies--and much more. This one-of-a-kind book provides a rare look inside the minds of people who are in the business of funding businesses just like yours. Read What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know to get your best shot at funding for your product after your very first pitch. PRAISE FOR WHAT EVERY ANGEL INVESTOR WANTS YOU TO KNOW: "Brian Cohen is truly the entrepreneur's best friend. Cohen and Kador haven distilled their first-hand experiences into an intensely personal, highly readable journey into the mind of angels that should be kept at the bedside of every startup CEO." -- DAVID S. ROSE, founder, New York Angels, and CEO, Gust "Meet one of the fundamental building blocks of the entrepreneurial scene. In one easy-to-read package, readers now have the wisdom of Brian Cohen, perhaps the most well-connected investor/entrepreneur in New York." -- MURAT AKTIHANOGLU, founder and managing director, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator "What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know gives you an actionable checklist for success in fund-raising and entrepreneurship. Cohen and Kador provide an exhilarating ride for those who want to pilot their own business." -- REED HOLDEN, serial entrepreneur and author of Negotiating with Backbone "Personal insights from a seasoned angel investor. An important addition to the reading list for today's entrepreneurs." -- SCOTT CASE, CEO, Startup America Partnership "What Every Angel Investor Wants You to Know is a must-read for entrepreneurs and investors who want to fi nance startup dreams--an accessible, jargon-free, practical primer." -- WHITNEY JOHNSON, author of Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream and cofounder, Rose Park Advisors
Much of the devastation caused by the recent earthquake in Turkey was the result of widespread corruption between the construction industry and government officials. Corruption is part of everyday public life and we tend to take it for granted. However, preventing corruption helps to raise city revenues, improve service delivery, stimulate public confidence and participation, and win elections. This book is designed to help citizens and public officials diagnose, investigate and prevent various kinds of corrupt and illicit behaviour. It focuses on systematic corruption rather than the free-lance activity of a few law-breakers, and emphasises practical preventive measures rather than purely punitive or moralistic campaigns.
"Citizen Kane does Adventureland." —The Washington Post The outlandish, hilarious, terrifying, and almost impossible-to-believe story of the legendary, dangerous amusement park where millions were entertained and almost as many bruises were sustained, told through the eyes of the founder's son. Often called "Accident Park," "Class Action Park," or "Traction Park," Action Park was an American icon. Entertaining more than a million people a year in the 1980s, the New Jersey-based amusement playland placed no limits on danger or fun, a monument to the anything-goes spirit of the era that left guests in control of their own adventures--sometimes with tragic results. Though it closed its doors in 1996 after nearly twenty years, it has remained a subject of constant fascination ever since, an establishment completely anathema to our modern culture of rules and safety. Action Park is the first-ever unvarnished look at the history of this DIY Disneyland, as seen through the eyes of Andy Mulvihill, the son of the park's idiosyncratic founder, Gene Mulvihill. From his early days testing precarious rides to working his way up to chief lifeguard of the infamous Wave Pool to later helping run the whole park, Andy's story is equal parts hilarious and moving, chronicling the life and death of a uniquely American attraction, a wet and wild 1980s adolescence, and a son's struggle to understand his father's quixotic quest to become the Walt Disney of New Jersey. Packing in all of the excitement of a day at Action Park, this is destined to be one of the most unforgettable memoirs of the year.
The superabundance of data that is created by today's businesses is making storage a strategic investment priority for companies of all sizes. As storage takes precedence, the following major initiatives emerge: Flatten and converge your network: IBM® takes an open, standards-based approach to implement the latest advances in the flat, converged data center network designs of today. IBM Storage solutions enable clients to deploy a high-speed, low-latency Unified Fabric Architecture. Optimize and automate virtualization: Advanced virtualization awareness reduces the cost and complexity of deploying physical and virtual data center infrastructure. Simplify management: IBM data center networks are easy to deploy, maintain, scale, and virtualize, delivering the foundation of consolidated operations for dynamic infrastructure management. Storage is no longer an afterthought. Too much is at stake. Companies are searching for more ways to efficiently manage expanding volumes of data, and to make that data accessible throughout the enterprise. This demand is propelling the move of storage into the network. Also, the increasing complexity of managing large numbers of storage devices and vast amounts of data is driving greater business value into software and services. With current estimates of the amount of data to be managed and made available increasing at 60% each year, this outlook is where a storage area network (SAN) enters the arena. SANs are the leading storage infrastructure for the global economy of today. SANs offer simplified storage management, scalability, flexibility, and availability; and improved data access, movement, and backup. Welcome to the cognitive era. The smarter data center with the improved economics of IT can be achieved by connecting servers and storage with a high-speed and intelligent network fabric. A smarter data center that hosts IBM Storage solutions can provide an environment that is smarter, faster, greener, open, and easy to manage. This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides an introduction to SAN and Ethernet networking, and how these networks help to achieve a smarter data center. This book is intended for people who are not very familiar with IT, or who are just starting out in the IT world.
This IBM® Redbooks® publication will help you design and manage an end-to-end, extended distance connectivity architecture for IBM System z®. This solution addresses your requirements now, and positions you to make effective use of new technologies in the future. Many enterprises implement extended distance connectivity in a silo manner. However, effective extended distance solutions require the involvement of different teams within an organization. Typically there is a network group, a storage group, a systems group, and possibly other teams. The intent of this publication is to help you design and manage a solution that will provide for all of your System z extended distance needs in the most effective and flexible way possible. This book introduces an approach to help plan, optimize, and maintain all of the moving parts of the solution together.
