This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.

Almost all thinking is reflexive (having an unconscious “reflex” in response) versus “reflective” (taking a moment to consciously reflect on how the past may have created a preexisting mental model keeping you from considering a new and different future).

One of the most common questions entrepreneurs and small business owners ask is, “how do I create a category if I’m not a heavily funded startup, or some massively successful company? How can someone like me create a category of my own?” This reveals maybe the single greatest benefit of category design: anyone can do it, at any stage of their life.

Category Pirates — Christopher Lochhead, Eddie Yoon, and Nicolas Cole — see a meaningful percentage of marketers, entrepreneurs, and executives trapped in what they like to call the "Brand Cult". These are professionals who have been taught the best (i.e., the most well known) brand wins. And this is a lie. The biggest brands in the world didn’t become successful because of their brand. They became successful by creating and dominating a new and differentiated category with which their brand became synonymous. Because categories make brands. Not the other way around.

Whether you are a writer, creator, entrepreneur, executive, public speaker, investor, or industry thought leader, Snow Leopard is your guide for becoming known for a niche you own.

By cutting out the noise and providing a clear and proven plan, this road map helps even brand-new entrepreneurs make decisions quickly, get their product up for sale, and launch it to a crowd that is ready and waiting to buy. This one-year plan will guide you through the three stages to your first $1 million: the Grind (months 0-4), the Growth (months 5-8), and the Gold (months 9-12). If your goal is to be a full-time entrepreneur, get ready for one chaotic, stressful, and rewarding year. If you have the guts to complete it, you will be the proud owner of a million-dollar business.

Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).

Bold is a radical, how-to guide for using exponential technologies, moonshot thinking, and crowd-powered tools to create extraordinary wealth while also positively impacting the lives of billions.

Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.

Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve and profitable. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level. By challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries, anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity.

It is a cold, hard fact of business life that most startups fail. Even many of those entrepreneurs who ultimately succeed have stories of personal challenges, unsuccessful companies, and difficulties along the way. The founders of TechStars, a mentorship-driven startup accelerator, have worked with entrepreneurs and companies over the past twenty-five years, and have seen a number of the same issues come up again and again.

Are you overwhelmed by the breathtaking rate of change in the business world? Are confusing consumer trends, the unrelenting pace of technology, and the breakneck speed of digital marketing making you feel irrelevant and lost? Path-finding author Mark Schaefer provides an achievable and realistic framework to help you stay ahead of the curve by re-imagining marketing in a world where hyper-empowered consumers drive the business results.

A game-changing audiobook that outlines the ways in which technology has transformed how brands and businesses innovate and connect with consumers. The DNA of business has changed. Forever. You can blame technology, smartphones, social media, online shopping, and everything else, but nothing changes this reality: We are in a moment of business purgatory. Mitch Joel, one of the world's leading experts in new media, warns that the time has come to "Ctrl Alt Delete". To reboot and to start re-building your business model.

Now more than ever, you don’t need a fancy office, Ivy League degree, or millions of dollars in venture capital to launch a business that matters for the communities you care most about. Software, the internet, and remote work have made it possible for entrepreneurs to start for free, make a customer of anyone, and grow a profitable, sustainable company from anywhere.

Stop marketing at people! Turn your ideas into epidemics - ideaviruses - by helping your customers do the marketing for you. So says Info Age marketing guru Seth Godin.

Winning today isn't about beating the competition at the old game. It's about inventing a whole new game - defining a new market category, developing it, and dominating it over time. You can't build a legendary company without building a legendary category. If you think that having the best product is all it takes to win, you're going to lose. In this farsighted, pioneering guide, the founders of Silicon Valley advisory firm Play Bigger rely on data analysis and interviews to understand the inner workings of "category kings".

New Marketing, whose tools include things like MySpace, You Tube, Web sites, permission marketing, cable TV, and viral techniques, is reshaping our world. But many companies try to use the tools without first getting their organization and products in sync with them. The result: what Seth Godin calls a "meatball sundae". A big, ineffective mess.

Three short years ago, when Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote their best seller, Trust Agents, being interesting and human on the Web was enough to build a significant audience. But now, everybody has a platform. The problem is that most of them are just making noise. In The Impact Equation, Brogan and Smith show that to make people truly care about what you have to say - you need more than just a good idea, trust among your audience, or a certain number of fol­lowers.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

Jeff Lawson, developer turned CEO of Twilio (one of Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 50 Companies to Watch in 2021), creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation.

In a book that's one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google, the fastest-growing company in history, to discover 40 clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by.

Now that 75 percent of screen time is spent on connected devices, digital strategies have moved front and center of most marketing plans. But what if that's not enough? What if most people ignore company messages? What if consumer engagement never goes further than the "like" button? A sobering reality is hitting marketers. Technology hasn't just reshaped mass media, it's altering behavior as well. And getting through to customers will take some radical rethinking.

Risky Is the New Safe is a different kind of book for a different kind of thinking - a thought-provoking manifesto for risk takers. It will challenge you to think laterally, question premises, and be a contrarian. Disruptive technology, accelerating speed of change, and economic upheaval are changing the game. The same tired, old conventional thinking won’t get you to success today. Risky Is the New Safe will change the way you look at everything!

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.

Master the art of what to say in your funnels to convert your online visitors into lifelong customers in this updated edition from the $100 million entrepreneur and cofounder of the software company ClickFunnels.

Purple Cow taught marketers the value of standing out from the herd, which is how companies like Krispy Kreme and JetBlue made it big. But it left readers hungry for more: How do you actually think up new Purple Cows? And how do you get them adopted by risk-averse Brown Cow companies? Free Prize Inside delivers those answers and much more.

Courtney and Carter Reum have years of experience in the field, from investing in over 130 companies, including Lyft, Pinterest, Warby Parker, and ClassPass, to driving the success of their own liquor brand, VEEV Spirits. The Reum brothers have learned from every triumph and tribulation and over the years have developed an effective and easy-to-understand guide to help entrepreneurs through the startup journey from inception to sale.

What if someone could guide you, step-by-step, as you identify, plan, and launch your dream career - in just one year. That's what Ben Arment does in his transformative coaching class, which has helped hundreds of people reinvent their lives to enjoy greater enthusiasm and fulfillment while also making a living. Now he's sharing his best insights, advice, and inspiring true stories in Dream Year. You'll find out how people just like you are discovering (or rediscovering) what they were truly born to do, then following a proven process to make it real.

Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.

In Design to Grow, a Coca-Cola senior executive shares both the successes and failures of one of the world's largest companies. In this rare and unprecedented behind-the-scenes look, David Butler and senior Fast Company editor Linda Tischler, use case studies to show how this works at Coca-Cola - and how other companies can use the same approach to grow their business. This audiobook is a must for managers inside large corporations as well as entrepreneurs just getting started.