Today's successful careers are not planned out in advance. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they have asked themselves the right questions and have rigorously assessed their unique characteristics. This article challenges listeners to take responsibility for managing their futures, both in and out of the office.

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money - the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction - at work, at school, and at home - is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

In late 2003, Peter Drucker invited Jeffrey Krames to his home in Claremont, California, for a rare interview. The 94-year-old Drucker who had amassed an unprecedented body of published work, comprised of many hundreds of thousands of pages, spent a full day sharing his insights from a lifetime of management consulting and writing. This resulting audiobook is a simple guide that distills the essential wisdom from Drucker's considerable body of work.

Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the 21st century and beyond.

From the visionary head of Google's innovative People Operations comes a groundbreaking inquiry into the philosophy of work - and a blueprint for attracting the most spectacular talent to your business and ensuring that they succeed. "We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing". So says Laszlo Bock, former head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

Jack Welch knows how to win. During his 40-year career at General Electric, he led the company to year-after-year success around the globe, in multiple markets, against brutal competition. His honest, be-the-best style of management became the gold standard in business, with his relentless focus on people, teamwork, and profits.

The Oz Principle is the groundbreaking work that demonstrates the vital role of accountability in the achievement of business results and the improvement of both individual and organizational performance. With more than a half million copies sold, The Oz Principle has emerged as one of the most influential and useful business ideas of recent times. The Oz Principle shows how to overcome The Blame Game that is so prevalent in organizations today.

The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses - the art of the entrepreneur - can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and start-up founders.

The Wall Street powerhouse and author of Expect to Win offers a new way to conceptualize career strategies and gives us proven tools for successful change. Whether we're starting out, striving toward a promotion, or looking for a new opportunity, the working world isn’t what it used to be. Wall Street veteran Carla Harris knows this, and in Strategize to Win she gives listeners the tools they need to get started.

Father of modern management, social commentator, and preeminent business philosopher Peter F. Drucker analyzed economics and society for more than 60 years. Now, for listeners everywhere who are concerned with the ways that management practices and principles affect the performance of organizations, individuals, and society, there is The Essential Drucker - an invaluable compilation of essential materials from the works of a management legend.

What if you knew the science behind the magic - a science so predictive and powerful that you could transform your organization? What if you could use cutting-edge psychology to unlock people's innate desires to innovate, experiment, and adapt? In Primed to Perform, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor show you how to do just that. The result: higher sales, more loyal customers, and more passionate employees.

In 7 Rules of Power, Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, provides the insights that have made both his online and on-campus classes incredibly popular—with life-changing results often achieved in 8 or 10 weeks. Rooted firmly in social-science research, Pfeffer’s 7 rules provide a manual for increasing your ability to get things done, including increasing the positive effects of your job performance.

Best-selling author Jason Jennings believes that urgency and speed are keys to the growth of any business. Leaders need to adapt and ignite their workplace cultures to prevent everyone from falling behind. Jennings draws on years of research and 11,000+ in-depth interviews with executives, business owners, and CEOs across the country to uncover how successful leaders build cultures that support constant innovation and growth.

In late 2003, Peter Drucker invited Jeffrey Krames to his home in Claremont, California, for a rare interview. The 94-year-old Drucker who had amassed an unprecedented body of published work, comprised of many hundreds of thousands of pages, spent a full day sharing his insights from a lifetime of management consulting and writing. This resulting audiobook is a simple guide that distills the essential wisdom from Drucker's considerable body of work.

The Wall Street powerhouse and author of Expect to Win offers a new way to conceptualize career strategies and gives us proven tools for successful change. Whether we're starting out, striving toward a promotion, or looking for a new opportunity, the working world isn’t what it used to be. Wall Street veteran Carla Harris knows this, and in Strategize to Win she gives listeners the tools they need to get started.

In Leadership BS Jeffrey Pfeffer shines a bright light on the leadership industry, showing why it's failing and how it might be remade. He sets the record straight on the oft-made prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest; tell the truth; build trust; and take care of others. By calling BS on so many of the stories and myths of leadership, he gives people a more scientific look at the evidence and better information to guide their careers.

Geoff Smart and Randy Street offer a simple, four-step method for hiring with confidence, designed for everyone from the CEO on down. Who shows you how to avoid the most common pitfalls of hiring, how to identify "A Players" - people who can perform their job better than 90 percent of the candidates in their field - and how to make sure the best candidate will be excited to join your organization.

The Oz Principle is the groundbreaking work that demonstrates the vital role of accountability in the achievement of business results and the improvement of both individual and organizational performance. With more than a half million copies sold, The Oz Principle has emerged as one of the most influential and useful business ideas of recent times. The Oz Principle shows how to overcome The Blame Game that is so prevalent in organizations today.

Big new ideas rarely make great businesses. Laboring on a business plan can be a waste of time. You are going to need dramatically more start-up money than you think you do. Counterintuitive concepts like these have helped the world's best entrepreneurs succeed. Yet most of us only learn them the hard way. Len Green, an experienced investor, entrepreneur, and business professor, shares inside secrets and proven tactics for launching a business.

They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom. They don’t believe that, with enough training, a person can achieve anything he sets his mind to. They don’t try to help people overcome their weaknesses. And, yes, they even play favorites. In this longtime management bestseller, Gallup presents the remarkable findings of its massive in-depth study of great managers.

In 1998, three Harvard Business School graduates - two men and one woman - turned down six-figure salaries at big corporations, bet on themselves, and launched their own new companies. By their 10-year reunion, their audacity had paid huge dividends. They'd made many millions of dollars, created hundreds of jobs and left their mark on the world. The Intelligent Entrepreneur tells the compelling and instructive story of how these three young founders did it.

In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.

Merger and acquisition activity across the globe continues to grow, and is also playing a major role in the development of expanding markets. A well-managed integration effort is essential to success, and failure means a tremendous waste in terms of time and money, as well as the rapid destruction of shareholder value. The Complete Guide to Mergers and Acquisitions: Process Tools to Support M&A Integration at Every Level, Third Edition is an invaluable resource to guide firms in managing M&A integration and maximize the value of their deals.

"Years ago, I wrote about a retail store in the Palo Alto environs—a good one, which had a box of two-cent candies at the checkout. I subsequently remember that 'little' parting gesture of the two-cent candy as a symbol of all that is Excellent at that store. Dozens of people who have attended seminars of mine have come up to remind me, sometimes 15 or 20 years later, of “the two-cent candy story,” and to tell me how it had a sizable impact on how they did business."

Drawing on case studies, many from client companies, the authors show how to establish clear expectations and manage the unmet expectations that inevitably occur. And they offer a positive, principled way that engages hearts and minds. This book can help people at every level---from senior executives to front-line workers---enjoy greater productivity, profitability, and job satisfaction.

Network marketing is one of the fastest-growing career opportunities in the United States. Millions of people just like you have abandoned dead-end jobs for the chance to achieve the dream of growing their own businesses. What many of them find, however, is that the first year in network marketing is often the most challenging---and, for some, the most discouraging.

The workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, cofounder of ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.

Built To Last, the defining management study of the 90s, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about companies that are not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?