'Little Bosses Everywhere' looks into the Wild West of multilevel marketing

Business Model Generation, a contemporary guide to systematic business innovation, provides a template for brainstorming and visualizing the overarching elements that make up a successful, holistic business model.

The authors analyze the different ways you can combine these elements to create the most successful business model patterns. In addition, they provide techniques you can use to generate your own innovative business models, as well as strategies you can incorporate to regularly analyze and optimize your existing business models.

This guide supplements each key concept and strategy with up-to-date examples and commentary, and we suggest complementary processes to effectively incorporate their concepts into your own business models.

When it comes to training the next generation of leaders, most organizations are fundamentally misguided. They hire and promote people indiscriminately, judging them based on arbitrary personality traits or how well they’ve done an unrelated job in the past. Consequently, most businesses end up full of unqualified managers at every level—managers who bungle their jobs in ways that nobody notices. Luckily, management experts Ram Charan, Stephen Drotter, and Jim Noel have a solution: the Leadership Pipeline, a management structure that continuously trains workers for bigger and better leadership roles.

In this guide, you’ll learn about the six different levels of management necessary to run any large organization, as well as the distinct mindset and skills required for each. These requirements indicate which types of unique training each employee needs to prepare them for their next promotion, adding clarity and direction to the leadership development process. In our commentary, we’ll explore some alternative management structures and add relevant management advice from other books like When They Win, You Win and High Output Management.

In The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes argues that the secret to sales success is relentless discipline, determination, and above all, repetition of just a few steps. For Holmes, sales mastery is intensive, not extensive—it’s about being an expert in a relative handful of practices, not being adequate or average at many things.

But you and your entire team have to be fully committed to refining and perfecting every aspect of your new sales strategy. By implementing effective time management across your company, honing your sales team with interactive training, hiring people with the right personality traits, and relentless marketing that presents your company’s value to the customer, you can significantly boost your sales figures and put your team on the path to permanent success.

This guide takes you through Holmes’s key ideas about building a first-rate sales operation and supplements them with more up-to-date information and commentary (the book was published in 2008)—while also offering counterpoints to some of his more outdated or controversial suggestions.

Published in 1969, Business Adventures is a collection of essays about the unpredictability of corporations and Wall Street—and the people behind them. Longtime New Yorker contributor John Brooks explores how businesses and economies can rise and fall based on people’s behavior, which is often driven by emotions, habits of thinking, and human tendencies. Brooks’s essays are so insightful and engaging that Microsoft’s Bill Gates has called Business Adventures the “best business book ever.”

In this guide, you’ll find out how human nature led to corporate scandals, stock market setbacks, and major events that shaped the financial world as we know it. As the book was published half a century ago, we also include updates and commentary about the lasting impact of these case studies and connect them to contemporary events and issues.

Marketing seems like a simple task: Have a great product, tell people about it, and they’ll buy it. But it’s not that straightforward. In fact, the success of your business depends less on the quality of your product than on consumers’ perception of your product—and that’s where skillful marketing comes in. In The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, advertising experts Al Ries and Jack Trout explain the universal laws that govern what works and what doesn’t in marketing. Ries and Trout spent more than 25 years studying the successes and failures of countless well-known and little-known brands, and they boiled their findings down to these 22 principles.

In this summary, you’ll learn:

• Why it’s better to own up to your shortcomings than to gloss over them.
• How Marlboro sold more cigarettes to women by marketing to cowboys.
• Why trying to be everything to everyone will sink your sales.

“Sex, drugs, and stock manipulation” are the words that describe the world of Jordan Belfort and his brokerage firm, Stratton Oakmont. Belfort and his staff of young traders became incredibly rich via illegal trading practices, then used their wealth to indulge their every hedonistic whim. The Wolf of Wall Street is Belfort’s confessional memoir of his illegal actions, which led to a self-destructive spiral into drug addiction and life-threatening behavior.

In this guide, we’ll explain how Belfort grew his wealth through stock manipulation and money laundering, how he attempted to evade prosecution for his crimes, and how his lifestyle of drug abuse and self-indulgence almost killed him before he accepted the need to change. This guide will also examine whether Belfort’s crimes are still commonplace in modern finance, how the acquisition of wealth affects people, and how drug addiction and recovery can alter a person’s self-awareness and sense of accountability.

In When Genius Failed, financial journalist Roger Lowenstein explores the spectacular rise and catastrophic 1998 collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Lowenstein explains how LTCM, initially hailed as a financial genius, used complex mathematical models and sophisticated trading strategies to generate massive profits. The fund's founders and managers believed that they’d discovered a way to eliminate or at least greatly minimize market risk through their strategies. Their overconfidence in their models ultimately led them to make highly leveraged—that is, debt-financed—bets on various financial instruments.

In this guide, we’ll explore the history of LTCM, how its models operated, how it achieved such dizzying success, and how it suffered such a crushing and ignominious fall. Throughout the guide, we’ll supplement Lowenstein’s account with commentary from other financial experts and analysts, including commentators who wrote after the book’s initial publication in 2000—adding insights to the LTCM story in light of subsequent events.

The Millennial generation was already in a vulnerable economic position. Now, the COVID-19 recession has hit them harder than anyone and put them on track to be the first generation in US history to end up worse off than their parents.

As we emerge from the Covid-19 crisis, the economy looks set to follow the trajectory of previous post-pandemic economic recoveries—a booming economy, rising wages, and altered business structures. We'll also see more reliance on technology and e-commerce; a distributed workforce; and a travel industry that never fully recovers.

In The Millionaire Next Door, authors Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko skewer the myths about how (and where) most millionaires live, and what it takes to become one. Their extensive research published in 1996 identified the sometimes surprising characteristics and habits shared by many millionaires. For instance, millionaires are often bargain shoppers (they buy used cars and off-the-rack clothing), pay only a small percentage of their wealth in income taxes, and shun the lavish lifestyles we often associate with being rich.

The book explains how to determine what your net worth should be, according to your age and income, and how you can build wealth over time and become a millionaire—if you have the discipline.