Business - Management - Audio-Books

About the Author Stephen R Covey: 

Stephen R. Covey (born October 24 1932 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is the author of the bestselling book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, as well as other books (First Things First, Principle -Centered Leadership). He is the founder of the Covey Leadership Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is the "Covey" of the Franklin-Covey Corporation, which makes planners and organizers and does management consulting. He has his BS in Business Administration from University of Utah in Salt Lake City, his MBA in Business Administration from Harvard University, and his DRE in Church History and Doctorate from Brigham Young University.

The Seven Habits, Covey's most well-known book, was extremely successful and has sold over 15 million copies since first publication in 1989. In this book, Covey argues against what he calls "The Personality Ethic", something he sees as prevalent in many modern self-help books. He instead promotes what he labels "The Character Ethic," which is based largely upon one's principles and code of conduct, specifically:

* Habit 1: Be Proactive: Principles of Personal Vision
* Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind: Principles of Personal Leadership
* Habit 3: Put First Things First: Principles of Personal Management
* Habit 4: Think Win/Win: Principles of Interpersonal Leadership
* Habit 5: Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
* Habit 6: Synergize Principles of Creative Communication
* Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw: Principles of Balanced Self-Renewal

Follow-up titles to The Seven Habits are meant to both add to the original and form a cohesive philosophy on personal, principle-based leadership. They are available as audio books as well. Covey has also written a number of learning books for children.

Covey's aim is to help others gain proficiency in their lives, especially within the context of business and management and make money doing it. However, his books also emphasize family and personal leadership. They are marketed to a wide-ranging audience, from high-powered executives to stay-at-home moms. Similar authors might include Peter Drucker or David Allen, as well as other more business-centered writers. Covey’s works also exhibit a central philosophical ideal, which some would interpret as right of center or conservative, although he was for a time a consultant to President Bill Clinton.

Advocates of Covey's methods point out that the author consistently opposes "quick-fix" solutions to life or business problems and insists that changes in paradigm or mindset to align with natural principles are the true source of solutions. Covey points out, for example, that the paradigm that produces short-term results in business inevitably leads to an inability to produce results for the long term. He calls this "killing the golden goose." The most effective mindset for the business person is to balance short- and long-term productive capacities.

Good to Great - Jim Collins

Read by the Author

Author of Built to Last

The Challenge

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, 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 the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study

For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards

Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the worldŐs greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons

The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

* Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
* The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
* A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.
* Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
* The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Some of the key concepts discerned in the study, comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people. Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

About The Author Jim Collins

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies -- how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. Having invested over a decade of research into the topic, Jim has authored or co-authored four books, including the classic BUILT TO LAST, a fixture on the Business Week best seller list for more than six years, and has been translated into 25 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company.

Jim’s most recent book, GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t attained long-running positions on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller lists, has sold 2.5 million hardcover copies since publication and has been translated into 32 languages.

Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the corporate and social sectors.

Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at over a hundred corporations. He has also worked with social sector organizations, such as: Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Leadership Network of Churches, the American Association of K-12 School Superintendents, and the United States Marine Corps. In 2005 he published a monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

Jim invests a significant portion of his energy in large-scale research projects -- often five or more years in duration -- to develop fundamental insights and then translate those findings into books, articles and lectures. He uses his management laboratory to work directly with executives and to develop practical tools for applying the concepts that flow from his research.

In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made free ascents of the West Face of El Capitan and the East Face of Washington Column in Yosemite Valley.

The Tipping Point Abridged - read by Malcolm Gladwell

3 Hours 3CDs

THE TIPPING POINT is the biography of an idea, and the idea is quite simple. It is that many of the problems we face - from crime to teenage delinquency to traffic jams - behave like epidemics. They aren't linear phenomena in the sense that they steadily and predictably change according to the level of effort brought to bear against them. They are capable of sudden and dramatic changes in direction.

Years of well-intentioned intervention may have no impact at all, yet the right intervention - at just the right time - can start a cascade of change. Many of the social ills that face us today, in other words, are as inherently volatile as the epidemics that periodically sweep through the human population: little things can cause them to 'tip' at any time and if we want to understand how to confront and solve them we have to understand what those 'Tipping Points' are.

In this revolutionary new study, Malcolm Gladwell explores the ramifications of this. Not simply for politicians and policy-makers, his method provides a new way of viewing everyday experience and enables us to develop strategies for everything from raising a child to running a company.
Contents of The Tipping Point (Audio CD)
1. The Three Rules of Epidemics

2. The Law of the Few: Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen

3. The Stickiness Factor: Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, and the Educational Virus

4. The Power of Context
(Part one) : Bernie Goetz and the Rise and Fall of New York City Crime

5. The Power of Context
(Part Two): The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty

6. Case Study: Rumors, Sneakers, and the Power of Translation

7. Case Study: Suicide, Smoking and the Search for the Unsticky Cigarette

8. Conclusion: Focus, Test and Believe

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