Are you an entrepreneur about to create a new web application? If you want to maximize your chances of building something customers want, this book demonstrates ways to apply and test techniques for customer development, Lean Startup, and bootstrapping. Learn how to identify and engage customers throughout the development cycle so you can focus on building a product that people will actually buy and use. By rigorously following the techniques described in Running Lean, you can eliminate waste - whether it's time, money, effort, or all of the above - and get your product to market quickly. Refined through the real-world experiences of dozens of startup companies, these techniques are part of Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology. Principles covered in this book include: * Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution * Demo before building * Pricing is part of the product * Maximize for speed, learning, and focus * Build a continuous feedback loop with customers throughout the product development cycle * Right Action, Right Time * Build a path to customers from day one

Hidden Champions reveals the strategies and practices of hundreds of low-profile super-performers. While most of our role models for excellence are large or growing companies that create highly visible products and services, behind the headlines lies a group of global competitors-unknown even to the general business community-that have attained global market share of over 70 percent. These companies-small and mid-size niche firms that make products like buttons, harmonicas, and gummi bears-are all great innovators. Many have created their own markets. They avoid outsourcing, diversification, and strategic alliances. Instead, they have developed unmatchable internal competencies.

What do Tetra aquarium supplies, Elector-Nite sensors, and Nissha touch panels have in common? They are typical “hidden champions”, medium-sized, unknown companies that have quietly, under the radar, become world market leaders in their respective industries. Going deep inside more than a thousand hidden champions around the world, Hermann Simon reveals the common patterns, behaviors, and approaches that make these secretive companies successful by bucking today’s management fads, and pursuing such common-sense strategies as focusing on core capabilities, establishing long-term relationships with customers, innovating continuously, rewarding employees for performance, and developing a global presence. In turbulent economic times, the hidden champions represent an antidote to the short-sighted and excessive practices that have brought many corporate giants crashing down, and may well serve as the new role models for sustainable economic growth.

In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.
But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business—a business that would be dynamic, different.
Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream—along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.

What if the real key to a richer and more fulfilling career was not to create and scale a new start-up, but rather, to be able to work for yourself, determine your own hours, and become a (highly profitable) and sustainable company of one? Suppose the better—and smarter—solution is simply to remain small? This book explains how to do just that.
Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business. Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis.
Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth.
In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

From the bestselling author of The Everything Store, an unvarnished picture of Amazon’s unprecedented growth and its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, revealing the most important business story of our time.
Almost ten years ago, Bloomberg journalist Brad Stone captured the rise of Amazon, an internet pioneer quietly changing the way we shop online, in his bestseller The Everything Store. But ever since, Amazon has expanded exponentially, inventing novel products like Alexa and disrupting countless industries, while its workforce has quintupled in size and its valuation has soared to well over a trillion dollars. Jeff Bezos’s empire, once housed in a garage, now spans the globe. Between services like Whole Foods, Prime Video, and Amazon’s cloud computing unit, AWS, plus Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, it’s impossible to go a day without encountering its impact. We live in a world run, supplied, and controlled by Amazon and its iconoclast founder.
In Amazon Unbound, Brad Stone presents a deeply reported, vividly drawn portrait of how a retail upstart became one of the most powerful and feared entities in the global economy. With unprecedented access to current and former executives, employees, regulators, and critics, Stone shows how seismic changes inside the company over the past decade led to dramatic innovations, as well as to missteps that turned public sentiment against its sharp-elbowed business practices and gameshow treatment of its search for a second headquarters.
Stone also probes the evolution of Bezos himself—who started as a geeky technologist totally devoted to building Amazon, but who transformed to become a fit, disciplined billionaire with global ambitions; who ruled Amazon with an iron fist, even as he found his personal life splashed over the tabloids. As his empire expands, the book investigates how Bezos gradually pulled away from day-to-day activities at Amazon to focus on his many interests outside of it, announcing his momentous transition from CEO to executive chairman.
Definitive, timely, and revelatory, Stone has provided an unvarnished portrait of a man and company that we couldn’t imagine modern life without.

An immigrant's memoir recounting the life of a young Pakistani man who came to the U.S. with only a driving ambition to make a difference in his chosen industry, aviation. Through challenges and successes, he soared to the very heights of the airline business. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, he unleashed his passion, ultimately building a successful airline, Atlas Air Cargo.

Die Informationen in diesem Buch helfen Ihnen, subtilste und
schwierigste Situationen im Geschäftsleben Amerikas zu verstehen
und zu meistern. Verhandlungsführung, das Arbeiten in und mit
amerikanischen Organisationen, gesellschaftliche Umgangsformen,
Telefonetikette - dies sind nur wenige einer Vielzahl von
Themengebieten, die in diesem überaus praktischen Buch behandelt
werden. Regionale und branchenspezifische Unterschiede werden
präzise dargestellt, ihre zumeist verborgenen Zusammenhänge
sichtbar gemacht.
Max Otte, der namhafte deutsche Unternehmen in den USA vertritt,
stellt hier seine umfangreichen Erfahrungen zur Verfügung. Die
praktischen Hinweise zu vielen Themen sind ein Gewinn für jeden,
der sich geschäftlich in den USA aufhält. Humorvoll und
theoretisch fundiert beschreibt er die Eigenheiten des American
way of life und vor allem, welche Bedeutung sie für das
Geschäftsleben haben.
Auch wenn Sie schon häufiger geschäftlich in den USA zu tun
hatten: Dieses Buch wird Ihnen neue Erkenntnisse vermitteln. Eine
äußerst sachkundige Beschreibung verborgener Zusammenhänge und
ungeschriebener Regeln, die jeder kennen sollte, der
Geschäftsaktivitäten in Amerika unterhält oder plant.

It’s refreshing that this book does not simply look to advances in technology and artificial intelligence as the cause or the future of the Great Legal Reformation. Through in-depth case studies and vignettes, Mitch Kowalski takes us on a tour to meet some of the trailblazers breaking the legal service provider mould, allowing us to eavesdrop on his conversations with them. This is not a glimpse into the future of how he and others might see the legal world developing as the Great Legal Reformation unfolds. This is insight into the here and now - into what these innovators have already envisioned and achieved. These are the platforms from which yet further innovation and re-formation of the market will be driven. From the power and opportunity of regulatory change to enable structural change, access to capital and the participation of people who happen not to be lawyers; through the need to focus on efficiency, continuous improvement, process and project management; to the enduring value of vision, culture, values, leadership, energy and employee engagement, these studies and conversations inform, reveal and challenge. They do not present the new world through rose-tinted glasses or deny the existence of risk: the story of Slater & Gordon’s mixed fortunes is testament to that. But they do show a different way of thinking and acting. Whether lawyers like it or not, these are initiatives that buyers of legal services welcome. —Stephen Mayson ,strategic advisor to law departments, legal services providers and regulators “This is an indispensable handbook for any aspiring legal innovator—a well-researched, accessible, and fascinating collection of dispatches from the cutting edge of legal business.” —Professor Richard Susskind OBE, author of Tomorrow’s Lawyers “Mitch Kowalski … shows us what the new professional world actually does look like. He takes us on a tour of Great Britain, Australia, and the United States, and introduces us to lawyers in big firms and small, serving clients both private and public. The picture that emerges is of a new breed of legal service provider that embraces entrepreneurship, teamwork and technology in a way that seems both unfamiliar and obvious to all lawyers.” —Dr Ian Holloway PC QC, ,Professor and Dean of Law, The University of Calgary “This book will either give you hope or a much needed kick in the pants. Either way it's a win-win.” —Stephen Allen, , legal innovator, Hogan Lovells “Mitch Kowalski does it again. Diving deep inside some of the world’s most innovative legal providers Mitch discovers the future of law in the present. A must read for anyone involved in the legal profession.” —John Chisholm, leading Australian legal commentator and advisor

When Peter Thiel and Max Levchin launched an online payment website in 1999, they hoped their service could improve the lives of millions around the globe. But when their start-up, PayPal, survived the dot.com crash only to find itself besieged by unimaginable challenges, that dream threatened to become a nightmare. PayPal's history – as told by former insider Eric Jackson – is an engrossing study of human struggle and perseverance against overwhelming odds. The entrepreneurs that Thiel and Levchin recruited to overhaul world currency markets first had to face some of the greatest trials ever thrown at a Silicon Valley company before they could make internet history. Business guru Tom Peters, author of "In Search of Excellence," called the hardcover edition of The PayPal Wars "a real page turner" that featured what he called "the best description of business strategy unfolding in a world changing at warp speed." This new paperback edition features updated material and even more insights on the state of internet commerce.

Review
"Liftoff reads like something out of the golden age of Science Fiction but this isn't a novel by Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke. This is the true, astounding story of the men and women who spun those sci-fi dreams into reality. This is as important a book on space as has ever been written and it's a riveting page-turner, too! -- HOMER HICKAM, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Rocket Boys
“This might be the best space book I've ever read. Liftoff will prove to be a defining story not only for the commercial space industry, but for the Space Age writ large, and there's no one better than Eric Berger to tell it.” -- KELLIE GERARDI, author of Not Necessarily Rocket Science
“Eric Berger brings to life the passion and sacrifice of the early SpaceX team as they navigated through countless obstacles toward unlikely success. The skillfully described technical details, paired with a candid glimpse into individual personalities, makes Liftoff a must read for space enthusiasts and novices alike.” -- KAREN NYBERG, NASA Astronaut
"[Berger] depicts race-against-the-clock crises as fast-paced as a thriller, with moments reminiscent of Apollo 13 or The Martian. ... An exciting and insightful read." -- Booklist
"The elegant brilliance of the engineering that allows today’s space rockets to land themselves back on earth—or at sea—right way up, and on target to the inch, is all the doing of the teams assembled by Elon Musk—and the story of how he did it, and how for sure he will get us to Mars whether we like it or not, is told in appropriately stellar fashion by Eric Berger in a book that held me captive, in earth orbit, from prologue to epilogue, countdown to splashdown." -- SIMON WINCHESTER, New York Times Bestselling Author of The Perfectionists
“Eric Berger has followed the exploits of SpaceX and its founder, Elon Musk, from its very early days. In Liftoff, Eric relates the many personal accounts collected in one-on-one interviews with Musk and many of his key leaders and associates. He chronicles the frenetic pace of Falcon 1 development and the toll it took on many of the early employees. This is a book that will hold your rapt attention from start to finish.” -- CHARLES BOLDEN, Former NASA Administrator and Four-Time Astronaut