Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Business Etiquett: A Guide for the Indian Professional

Fast-paced globalization has put India in the centre of the business world. Indian executives fly frequently to different parts of the world and mingle with citizens from various cultures. Business Etiquette: A Guide for The Indian Professional explores the various aspects that are necessary for Indian businessmen to fit into the global business environment.

As rightly said, an organization is known by the kind of people running the show. The book explains how an individual's reputation is of prime importance for an organization to clinch deals in the global setting. How one unknowing mistake by an individual reflects on the organization's balance sheets needs to be understood by the personnel. The book tells us the importance of sharp people skills and highlights the basics of good mannerisms such as appearance, behavior and communication.

The chapters are divided into verbal communication, non-verbal communication and techno-etiquettes which are necessary to conduct businesses in a multicultural atmosphere. The book emphasizes on the importance of good language skills, advanced vocabulary, creative thinking, the power of voice, body language, smart humor and everything else that makes you a global ambassador for the business that you represent. It also discusses various other topics like networking, making a mark, handling a difficult boss, appropriate dressing. and sexual harassment.

Business Etiquette: A Guide for The Indian Professional teaches us how to create an impression for ourselves globally while keeping the racial, gender and cultural diversities in mind. The book was published by HarperCollins in 2012 and is available in paperback format.

Key Features:

The book emphasizes on the basics that need to be inculcated by every individual trying to make a mark in the global business platform.
The book has been declared as part of a Top Ten Business Bestseller list after having sold more than 15,000 copies.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

The lifeblood of your business is repeat customers. But customers can be fickle, markets shift and competitors are ruthless. So how do you ensure a steady flow of business? The secret - no matter what industry you're in - is finding and keeping automatic customers.

These days virtually anything you need can come through a subscription. Far beyond Spotify and Netflix, companies in nearly any industry, from home contractors to florists, can build subscriptions into their business.

Subscription is the key to increasing cash flow, igniting growth and boosting the value of your company. Whether you want to transform your entire business into a recurring revenue engine or just pick up an extra 5 per cent of sales growth, The Automatic Customer will be your secret weapon.

'Read, apply and watch your bank deposits grow every month' Chris Guillebeau, bestselling author ofThe $100 Startup

'If you have a business, or are thinking about starting one, this book will be the best investment you've ever made' Bo Burlingham, editor-at-large of Inc. and author of Small Giants and Finish Big

John Warrillow, the author of Built to Sell, is the founder of The Value Builder System™ where advisors help company owners increase the value of their business. Previously, he founded Warrillow & Co., a subscription-based research business dedicated to helping Fortune 500 companies market to small business owners. A sought-after speaker and popular Inc.com columnist, he lives in Toronto.

A LITTLE LIFE

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is an immensely graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome - but that will define his life forever.

Between the World and Me

“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Meclearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Freedom from the Known

Freedom From The Known is a book that provides much needed insight into the monotonous quality our lives have adapted into. The book does an in-depth exploration of the idea that life as we know it is a result of the pressure we are under to maintain and achieve what is expected of us by the society.

In Freedom From The Known, readers are provided with the opportunity to reflect on all of the achievements of their lives and analyze how much of it was what they truly wanted to do as opposed to what was expected of them. The author opines that people disillusion themselves into believing that societal expectations are norms that define the construct of their daily lives will bring them happiness. The book goes on to suggest that people have forgotten the true value and meaning of happiness.

The book talks about the importance of freeing ourselves from societal norms, values and expectations. It is suggested that only by doing so can we focus on the right way to find peace and happiness in our lives. The book was published by RHUK in 2010 and is available in paperback.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Change the World

The New York Times bestselling author determines how people can initiate creative, moral and constructive progress―and how leaders can inspire their societies.

How can we create new innovation, policies and performs without endangering it all? Adam Grant demonstrates how to improve the world by advocating novel ideas and ethics that go against the grain, battling conformity and kicking old-fashioned customs.

The book shows how by using amazing studies and stories the society can spread business, politics, sports and entertainment. And also shows how explorer can recognize a good idea, raise voice without getting silenced, build an alliance of allies, pick the accurate time to act and tackle fear and doubt. Parents will learn how to cultivate originality in youngsters and leaders will discover how to fight conspiracy to develop cultures that welcome dissent.

The book has mind boggling case studies of people going against the grain, you’ll meet an entrepreneur who shows the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who confronted Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who throw a challenge to secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial tycoon who sacks employees who don’t criticize him and the TV executive who saved Seinfeld from the cutting room floor. Originals will provide you groundbreaking visions about rejecting conformity and how to improve the world.

The book is written by Sheryl Kara Sandberg and Adam M and the book is available on Amazon India.

About the author:

Sheryl Kara Sandberg is an American technology executive, social activist and writer. She is the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook.

Adam M. Grant is a writer and a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Grant has been renowned as both the youngest tenured and high esteemed professor at the Wharton School.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

The Penny Pincher's Passport to Luxury Travel: The Art of Cultivating Preferred Customer Status

This new edition of The Penny Pincher's Passport to Luxury Travel provides readers with the secrets and wisdom necessary to travel first class on a tight budget. Engaging and entertaining true-life travel anecdotes demonstrate how the luxury travel experience is not impossible for most travelers, while, in down-to-earth, accessible language, the author tells travelers exactly what to do and not to do to travel in style. Quick Tips reinforce the most important information in each chapter, and Key Points provide a step-by-step summary at the each chapter's end. Over 30 pages of appendices provide listings of toll-free numbers, comparison charts of airline, hotel, and car rental frequent-user programs, as well as relevant Internet sites and software programs.

Friday, October 14, 2016

Tatalog: Eight Modern Stories from a Timeless Institution

From steel to beverages and from supercomputers to automobiles, TATA companies have broken new ground and set new standards of excellence over the past two decades. TATAlog presents eight riveting and hitherto untold stories about the strategic and operational challenges that TATA companies have faced, and the forward thinking and determination that have raised the brand to new heights.

Among the engaging and inspiring stories told here are those of Tata Indica, the first completely Indian car that succeeded in the face of widespread cynicism; the jewellery brand Tanishq that has transformed one of India’s largest industries; and Tata Finance, which underwent several tribulations yet demonstrated the principles which Tata stands for.

Written by a TATA insider, TATAlog reveals the DNA of every TATA enterprise—a combination of the virtues of being pioneering, purposive, principled and ‘not perfect’, along with tremendous human effort.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Secrets of the Soil

Explores scientific and mystical developments that renew and enhance the soil, among them rock dust fertilizer, biodynamic agriculture, and other highly unusual fertilizers.

Peter Tompkins was an American journalist, World War II spy, and best-selling author.
His best known and most influential books include The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, reprinted in paperback in 1997, and Mysteries of the Mexican Pyramids, published in 1976. He is the father of author Ptolemy Tompkins.

The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost

Over the past several years, as his ideas have caught increasing attention outside his native Japan. Fukuoka has turned to address such critical global issues as ecologically destructive farming practices, desertification and deforestation. In this collection of articles, lectures and essays, Fukuoka records for the first time his impressions and observations during those travels. Like a detective solving an ancient crime, he traces man's role in the creation of vast deserts and barren lands where fertile plains and forests once layand proposes way to reverse this tide of ecological devestation before it is too late. He recounts also how he developed a superhigh-yielding variety of rice, and his incredulity and despair at the petty international seed politics that prevent the use of this miracle grain where it could do the most good. And he goes on to lucidly demonstrate the interdependence of nature, God, and man.

India Uninc.

India Uninc. is a book that focuses on presenting its readers with an accurate picture of the Indian economy. This picture is far from the so-called truth and is a revelation of what many ‘experts' have to say on the Indian economy. Many of the country's leading newspapers, TV channels, business magazines and internet sources have voiced their views concerning India Inc.

On the contrary, the author highlights the important role played by partnership and proprietorship firms, small kirana stores, small manufacturing units, household enterprises and other such units in the economy of the country, over the years. Thanks to the research conducted over a number of years, these units are getting the respect and recognition that is rightly due to them, in this new book.

According to the author, entrepreneurs of small businesses need to be able to carve a niche in today's capitalistic economy. Providing you with a treasure of information and insight that is the result of the author's hard work, this book aims to give you a deep understanding of what the Indian economy is really all about. It is also ideal for those who want to understand India itself.

India Uninc. has been published by Westland, in the year 2014 and is available in paperback.

Key Features
The book is based on research that has been conducted by the author, over a span of several years.
The book clears countless misconceptions that people have, concerning the Indian economy.

The Healthy Workplace: How to Improve the Well-Being of Your Employees-and Boost Your Company's Bottom Line

Is your workplace working for you and your employees? Studies show that unhealthy work habits, like staring at computer screens and rushing through fast-food lunches are taking their toll in the form of increased absenteeism, lost productivity, and higher insurance costs--but it doesn't have to be that way.

Companies such as Google, Apple, Aetna, and Johnson & Johnson have used innovative techniques to incorporate healthy habits and practices into the workday and into their culture--with impressive ROI. Packed with real-life examples and the latest research, The Healthy Workplace proves that it pays to invest in your people's well-being and reveals how to:

Create a healthier, more energizing environment - Reduce stress to enhance concentration - Inspire movement at work - Use choice architecture to encourage beneficial behaviors - Support better sleep - Heighten productivity without adding hours to the workday

Filled with tips for immediate improvement and guidelines for building a long-term plan, The Healthy Workplace will boost both employee well-being and the bottom line.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century

This book, 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' addresses your thought provoking questions about various aspects of capital and its flow. It talks about many questions about long term evolution of basic social problems like inequality, the vast concentration of wealth amongst a minority population bracket and how the prospects of the economic growth of a developing nation lie at the heart of the political economy. Due to lack of data, satisfactory answers were scarce in the past. This book gives you the right answers with detailed and concise explanations.

Get into the depths of the 21st century capital flow

Thomas Piketty analyses the 21st century capital flow by taking up data from twenty countries that dates back to the eighteenth century, to uncover the key secrets behind social and economic patterns. His answers will set the goal for the next generation on the lines of wealth. He shows that the mix-up of modern economic growth and knowledge has allowed the world to get over the aspect of inequality on an apocalyptic scale which was predicted by Karl Marx. However, we have not been able to change the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought we will, during the 2nd World War.

Join Piketty tried to uncover the reasons of inequality

The main cause of this inequality is the return tendency on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth, which threatens to generate extreme gaps of inequality leading to public discontent. Political action has indeed curbed inequalities in the past. Capital in this new century reorients our understanding and confronts us with lessons.

About the Author

Thomas Piketty is an economist who was born and raised in France and who works on the principles of wealth and income inequality. He won the prize for the best young economist in France in 2002. He is a professor at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales and an associate chair at the Paris School of Economics.

The Economics of Inequality

The Economics of Inequality as an introduction to the conceptual and factual background necessary for interpreting changes in economic inequality over time. This concise text has established itself as an indispensable guide for students and general readers in France, where it has been regularly updated and revised. Translated byArthur Goldhammer, The Economics of Inequality now appears in English for the first time. Piketty begins by explaining how inequality evolves and how economists measure it. In subsequent chapters, he explores variances in income and ownership of capital and the variety of policies used to reduce these gaps. Along the way, with characteristic clarity and precision, he introduces key ideas about the relationship between labor and capital, the effects of different systems of taxation, the distinction between “historical” and “political” time, the impact of education and technological change, the nature of capital markets, the role of unions, and apparent tensions between the pursuit of efficiency and the pursuit of fairness. Succinct, accessible, and authoritative, this is the ideal place to start for those who want to understand the fundamental issues at the heart of one of the most pressing concerns in contemporary economics and politics.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization


Global Inequality takes us back hundreds of years, and as far around the world as data allow, to show that inequality moves in cycles, fuelled by war and disease, technological disruption, access to education, and redistribution. The recent surge of inequality in the West has been driven by the revolution in technology, just as the Industrial Revolution drove inequality 150 years ago. But even as inequality has soared within nations, it has fallen dramatically among nations, as middle-class incomes in China and India have drawn closer to the stagnating incomes of the middle classes in the developed world. A more open migration policy would reduce global inequality even further.
As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the world’s first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream first as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged an early partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later and against all odds, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever.

Since then, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner twenty-seven Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Now, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques, honed over years, that have made Pixar so widely admired―and so profitable.

Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation Studios―into the story meetings, the postmortems, and the ‘Braintrust’ sessions where art is born. It is, at heart, a book about how to build and sustain a creative culture―but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, ‘an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.’
In the international bestseller The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg explained why we do what we do. In Smarter Faster Better, he applies the same relentless curiosity, rigorous reporting and rich storytelling to explain how we can get better at the things we do. The result is a groundbreaking exploration of the science of productivity.

A group of data scientists at Google embark on a four-year study of how the best teams function, and find that how a group interacts is much more important than who is in the group.

A Marine Corps general, faced with low morale among recruits, reimagines boot camp – and discovers that instilling a ‘bias toward action’ can turn even the most directionless teenagers into self-motivating achievers.

The filmmakers behind Disney’s Frozen are on the brink of catastrophe – until they shake up their team in just the right way, spurring a creative breakthrough that leads to one of the highest-grossing movies of all time.

What do these people have in common?

They know that productivity relies on making certain choices. The way we frame our daily decisions; the big ambitions we embrace and the easy goals we ignore; the cultures we establish as leaders to drive innovation: these are the things that separate the merely busy from the genuinely productive.

At the core of Smarter Faster Better are eight key concepts – from motivation and goal-setting to focus and decision-making – that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology and behavioural eco­nomics – as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, air­plane pilots and Broadway songwriters – this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies and organizations don’t merely act differently.

They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.
A moral dilemma gripped Professor Gupta when he was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural sector in 1985. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. The gross injustice of this constant imbalance led Professor Gupta to found what would turn into a resounding social and ethical movement— the Honey Bee Network— bringing together and elevating thousands of grassroots innovators. For over two decades, Professor Gupta has travelled through rural lands unearthing innovations by the ranks—from the famed Mitti Cool refrigerator to the footbridge of Meghalaya. He insists that to fight the largest and most persistent problems of the world we must eschew expensive research labs and instead, look towards ordinary folk. Innovation—that oft-flung around word—is stripped to its core in this book. Poignant and personal, Grassroots Innovation is an important treatise from a social crusader of our time.
Finding India in China whisks the reader on a whirlwind journey through China’s margins. In part an intellectual travelogue, the voyage equally mixes in humorous anecdotes, oddball encounters, and thoughtful reflections on the vastness that is China.

With her distinct Indian perspective, Anurag Viswanath slices through preconceptions and shibboleths in her interactions with a motley set of characters—from Muslim housewives in Xinjiang to Mongols dressing up for tourism, from academics to party officials to migrant workers.
Thinkers50 Management Thinker of 2015 Whitney Johnson wants you to consider this simple, yet powerful, idea: disruptive companies and ideas upend markets by doing something truly different--they see a need, an empty space waiting to be filled and they dare to create something for which a market may not yet exist. As president and cofounder of Rose Park Advisors' Disruptive Innovation Fund with Clayton Christensen, Johnson used the theory of disruptive innovation to invest in publicly traded stocks and private early-stage companies. In Disrupt Yourself, she helps you understand how the frameworks of disruptive innovation can apply to your particular path, whether you are: a self-starter ready to make a disruptive pivot in your business a high-potential individual charting your career trajectory a manager looking to instill innovative thinking amongst your team a leader facing industry changes that make for an uncertain future We are living in an era of accelerating disruption; no one is immune. Johnson makes the compelling case that managing the S-curve waves of learning and mastery is a requisite skill for the future. If you want to be successful in unexpected ways, follow your own disruptive path. Dare to innovate. Do something astonishing. Disrupt yourself.
The book provides an insight into impact of the mechanizations of the Pakistanis ISI et al. That the Afghans continue to be manipulated gets presented and yet you get the feeling, that there are no great details to substantiate it. Reads more like a newspaper Sunday writing(s) than a researched presentation of a book. Yet for a novice to Afhanistan and all that has been happening there in the last fifteen years and wondering what is happening behind the scenes, it is an eye-opener. Sadly missing and in a big way is the 'thought processes' of the Americans in the canvas of Afghanistan. Either the author had much less access to know the minds of her American counterparts or it was a deliberate attempt not to expose her country's decision makers. Particularly lacking is any insight into the intricate relationships, struggles, and reactions between ISI and the American decision makers.
Wish the chapters were either chronological or subject oriented. Interleaving of dates and events leave the reader confused.
“This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.”

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Meclearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
http://www.kvkramanagara.com/krishi-mela-2016-to-be-held-from-18-21-november-2016-at-gkvk-bangalore/


Krishi Mela 2016 to be held from 18-21 November 2016 at GKVK Bangalore


Invitations for following Best farmer awards

  • District Level progressive farmer (Men)
  • District Level progressive farmer (Women)
  • Taluk Level Best Youth Farmer (Men)
  • Taluk Level Best Youth Farmer (women)
How do other countries create “smarter” kids? What is it like to be a child in the world’s new education superpowers? The Smartest Kids in the World “gets well beneath the glossy surfaces of these foreign cultures and manages to make our own culture look newly strange....The question is whether the startling perspective provided by this masterly book can also generate the will to make changes” (The New York Times Book Review).

In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they’ve never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy. Inspired to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embed­ded in these countries for one year. Kim, fifteen, raises $10,000 so she can move from Oklahoma to Finland; Eric, eighteen, trades his high-achieving Minnesota suburb for a booming city in South Korea; and Tom, seventeen, leaves a historic Pennsylvania village for Poland.

Through these young informants, Ripley meets battle-scarred reformers, sleep-deprived zombie students, and a teacher who earns $4 million a year. Their stories, along with groundbreaking research into learning in other cultures, reveal a pattern of startling transformation: none of these countries had many “smart” kids a few decades ago. Things had changed. Teaching had become more rigorous; parents had focused on things that mattered; and children had bought into the promise of education.
Why are some products and ideas talked about more than others? Why do some articles make the most emailed list? Why do some YouTube videos go viral? Word-of-mouth. Whether through face-to-face conversations, emails from friends, or online product reviews, the information and opinions we get from others have a strong impact on our own behaviour. Indeed, word-of-mouth generates more than two times the sales of paid advertising and is the primary factor behind 20-50% of all purchasing decisions.It is between 8.5 and 30 times more effective than traditional media.But want to know the best thing about word-of-mouth? It's available to everyone.Whether you're a Fortune 500 company trying to increase sales, a corner restaurant trying to raise awareness, a non-profit trying to fight obesity, or a newbie politician running for city council, word-of-mouth can help you succeed. And you don't have to have millions of dollars to spend on an advertising budget. You just have to get people to talk.The challenge, though, is how to do that. This book will show you how.
World-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck, in decades of research on achievement and success, has discovered a truly groundbreaking idea-the power of our mindset.

Dweck explains why it's not just our abilities and talent that bring us success-but whether we approach them with a fixed or growth mindset. She makes clear why praising intelligence and ability doesn't foster self-esteem and lead to accomplishment, but may actually jeopardize success. With the right mindset, we can motivate our kids and help them to raise their grades, as well as reach our own goals-personal and professional. Dweck reveals what all great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.
The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for "security," everything we thought was "safe," no longer is: College. Employment. Retirement. Government. It's all crumbling down. In every part of society, the middlemen are being pushed out of the picture. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself. New tools and economic forces have emerged to make it possible for individuals to create art, make millions of dollars and change the world without "help." More and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth). This book will teach you to do just that. With dozens of case studies, interviews and examples-including the author, investor and entrepreneur James Altucher's own heartbreaking and inspiring story-Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.
This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.

The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a young middle-class woman, Olanna, who has to confront the reality of the massacre of her relatives. And the third is a white man, a writer who lives in Nigeria for no clear reason, and who falls in love with Olanna's twin sister, a remote and enigmatic character.

As these people's lives intersect, they have to question their own responses to the unfolding political events. This extraordinary novel is about Africa in a wider sense: about moral responsibility, about the end of colonialism, about ethnic allegiances, about class and race; and about the ways in which love can complicate all of these things.
Freedom From The Known is a book that provides much needed insight into the monotonous quality our lives have adapted into. The book does an in-depth exploration of the idea that life as we know it is a result of the pressure we are under to maintain and achieve what is expected of us by the society.

In Freedom From The Known, readers are provided with the opportunity to reflect on all of the achievements of their lives and analyze how much of it was what they truly wanted to do as opposed to what was expected of them. The author opines that people disillusion themselves into believing that societal expectations are norms that define the construct of their daily lives will bring them happiness. The book goes on to suggest that people have forgotten the true value and meaning of happiness.

The book talks about the importance of freeing ourselves from societal norms, values and expectations. It is suggested that only by doing so can we focus on the right way to find peace and happiness in our lives. The book was published by RHUK in 2010 and is available in paperback.
One of the most exciting feelings in the world is at the moment when you take the leap to become an entrepreneur and launch your own start-up. But in doing so, what are the things you should plan ahead for and what are the pitfalls you need to watch out for?
In Entrepreneurship Simplified, Ashok Soota and S. R. Gopalan distil their decades of experience into a concise, comprehensive and practical guide for every aspiring entrepreneur as well as those who have already embarked on the entrepreneurial journey. From idea generation and validation to raising funds and dealing with VCs, building the organization and its mission, vision and values, defining a business and marketing strategy, creating and sharing wealth and finally, taking your company public through an IPO—Soota and Gopalan discuss the entire gamut of the entrepreneurial experience.
Full of anecdotes, practical wisdom and key takeaways, Entrepreneurship Simplified is a definitive book on the subject that replicates the passion, fun and sense of fulfilment that accompanies the start-up adventure.
Are we deranged? One of India’s greatest writers, Amitav Ghosh, argues that future generations may well think so. How else can we explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In this groundbreaking return to non-fiction, Ghosh examines our inability at the level of literature, history and politics to grasp the scale and violence of climate change.
The extreme nature of today’s climate events makes them peculiarly resistant to the contemporary imagination. In fiction, hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel and are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications. Ghosh suggests that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit culture and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all forms. The Great Derangement serves as a brilliant writer’s summons to confront the most urgent task of our time.
`Institutional Reforms in India Irrigation brings together perspectives from three scholars with research interests ranging from agricultural economics to participatory watershed management and collective action. Overall the book provides a useful overview of irrigation management in India and authoritavely reviews options for cost-recovery under irrigation management transfer programs' -Development and Change

Examining the nature and scope of large-scale surface irrigation in India, this book identifies the factors leading to poor performance from a political economy perspective and suggests viable options for institutional reforms.

Using empirical data on irrigation financing and farmer participation, the authors go beyond merely making policy recommendations. They make detailed calculations of the costs of irrigation development, including both capital expenditure and recurring costs. They also examine the performance of reform measures that are already in operation in Karnataka and Rajasthan, as well as evaluating the effectiveness of participatory irrigation management reforms.
This is the story of Bandhan, the only bank that emerged in eastern India after Independence. Founded by the son of a sweet vendor, with a mere Rs 2 lakh, the sum total of his life savings.
On 17 June, 2015, Chandra Shekhar Ghosh stepped out of the Reserve Bank of India building in Mumbai with the much-coveted banking licence, beating some of the country's top corporate houses. This moment compensated for all the frustrations that had come along the way. A year later, Bandhan Bank was launched with 6.7 million small borrowers. So, how did Ghosh build India's biggest MFI from scratch and then, along with his team, transform it into a universal bank? Bandhan: The Making of a Bank chronicles that journey.
This is also Ghosh's personal story-of a boy growing up in small-town Agartala struggling with poverty, but relentless in his ambition to make it big. He battles competition, hostile moneylenders, a tough economic climate and the perpetual lack of resources. Nobody in India perhaps knows better than him the psyche of a small borrower and the alchemy of doing business with the poor, profitably. This is one of India's biggest entrepreneurial stories.
It uses the John Kay’s famous IBAS framework (Innovation, Brands/Reputation, Architecture, Strategic Assets) to explain the success stories of seven companies: Asian Paints, Astral Poly, Berger Paints, Marico, Page Industries, Axis Bank and HDFC Bank. Why these seven? Mukherjea, who is the CEO of institutional equities for broking firm Ambit Capital, and has studied under Kay, a professor of economics at the London School of Economics, has applied a quantitative process to select great companies.

The process involved three steps. In step 1, Mukherjea and his team at Ambit created the basic set of companies to study. He limited himself to companies with at least Rs100 crore of market-cap. This surprisingly low barrier yielded a list of 1,500 companies. Step 2 was defining the time period. Great companies should be around for years. Here, Mukherjea chose a period of 10 years which is surprisingly short. Step 3 was defining superior financial performance as revenue growth of 10% and 15% return on capital employed (RoCE) for every year for the past 10 years. RoCE can’t be applied on financial firms and so, for them, Mukherjea used return on equity (RoE) of 15% and loan growth of 15% every year. Only eight companies have managed to fulfil both the growth and return criteria in each of the past 10 years, the eighth one being ITC (apart from the seven I mentioned earlier).

Having identified these eight, Mukherjea has then told their stories. (Inexplicably, Mukherjea did not discuss ITC at all. Maybe, he did not get access to them.) What is behind the seven decades of continuous excellence of Asian Paints? How has Berger Paints done so well ever since the unassuming Dhingra brothers (now among the 50 richest Indians) bought the controlling shares in 1991? How has Marico, which still gets most of revenues from a commodity product (coconut oil), been such an outstanding performer? Mukherjea tells their stories. That apart, the book has sections on the IBAS framework, more detailed explanations of long-term portfolio called Coffee Can portfolio (a buy and forget approach) and a chapter on checklist for long-term investors.


Monday, October 10, 2016

If you love 'Bones' and 'CSI', this book is your kind of candy' Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy

'Martin's best book to date. A personal, intuitive, powerful way to look at making an impact with your work' Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow

Martin Lindstrom, one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in The World and a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, harnesses the power of "small data" in his quest to discover the next big thing.

In an era where many believe Big Data has rendered human perception and observation 'old-school' or pass?, Martin Lindstrom shows that mining and matching technological data with up-close psychological insight creates the ultimate snapshot of who we really are and what we really want. He works like a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, accumulating small clues - the progressively weaker handshakes of Millenials, a notable global decrease in the use of facial powder, a change in how younger consumers approach eating ice cream cones - to help solve a stunningly diverse array of challenges. In Switzerland, a stuffed teddy bear in a teenage girl's bedroom helped revolutionise 1,000 stores - spread across twenty countries - for one of Europe's largest fashion retailers. In Dubai, a distinctive bracelet strung with pearls helped Jenny Craig offset its declining membership in the United States and increase loyalty by 159% in only one year. In China, the look of a car dashboard led to the design of the iRobot, or Roomba, floor cleaner - a great success story.

SMALL DATA combines armchair travel with forensic psychology in an interlocking series of international clue-gathering detective stories. It shows Lindstrom using his proprietary CLUES Framework - where big data is merely one part of the overall puzzle - to get radically close to consumers and come up with the counter-intuitive insights that have in some cases helped transform entire industries.

SMALL DATA presents a rare behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to create global brands, and reveals surprising and counter-intuitive truths about what connects us all as humans.
Many intelligent women tend to leave their professional careers and become homemakers for various reasons. One of the vital reasons is that women find it impossible to balance the growing career pressure and meeting increasing family demands. Sheryl Sandberg, in this book 'Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead' provides solution to this issue and guides women on how to find the perfect balance in life.

The solutions given in this book are pragmatic and are based on practical experience and academic research. Sandberg uses various personal anecdotes and thus allows readers to peek in her highly successful career. And during this discussion, she touches various pressing issues like race, class and sexual identity. The author backs her views with strong arguments and makes the book an engaging read. She also talks about other powerful women in the world like Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo and Peggy McIntosh. The narration is flawless and the personal touch enhances the value of this book.
'Thinking, Fast and Slow’ is an International Bestseller authored by the eminent economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The book takes the readers on a fascinating journey by dissecting the mind and goes onto explain two distinct systems that affects our way of thinking and making choices. Of these two systems, one is intuitive, emotional yet fast while the other one is more logical and deliberative.

In this book, Kahneman exposes certain extraordinary capabilities of fast thinking along with its flaws and biases and explains how it shapes a person’s behaviour and thoughts.

In simple yet engaging words, the book debates about the importance of taking risks, the proper ways to skill development, dangers of prediction, the cognitive biases and its effect, of people on how they view others and the real component of happiness.

The author also explains how the two systems should be understood properly so as to make proper and correct decisions concerning professional and personal growth that are mostly at conflict with each other.
In Differentiate or Die, bestselling author Jack Trout takes marketers to task for taking the easy route too often, employing high-tech razzle-dazzle and sleight of hand when they should be working to discover and market their products uniquely valuable qualities. He examines successful differentiation initiatives from giants like Dell Computer, Southwest Airlines, and Wal-Mart to smaller success stories like Straits Matzoh and Connecticut’s tiny Trinity College to determine why some marketers succeed at differentiating themselves while others struggle and fail.
More than just a collection of marketing success stories this book is an in-depth exploration of today’s most successful differentiation strategies. Marketing executives in all types of organizations, regardless of size, can learn how to achieve product differentiation through strategies including:

Revisiting the U.S.P. -- Rosser Reeves’s classic unique selling proposition approach, updated for today’s market
Positioning --Understanding how the mind works in the differentiating process
Owning an Idea -- Techniques to seize a differentiating idea, dramatize it, and make it your own

Competition -- How to use differentiating ideas against your competitors in the marketplace
Capitalism, or more precisely, the free market system, is the most effective way to organize production and distribution that human beings have found. Yet, financial markets are among the most highly criticized and least understood parts of the capitalist system. In Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists, Raghuram G. Rajan and Luigi Zingales argue that healthy and competitive financial markets are an extraordinarily effective tool in spreading opportunity and fighting poverty. Without vibrant, innovative financial markets, economies would invariably ossify and decline. Capitalism's biggest problem is the executive in pinstripes who extols the virtues of competitive markets with every breath while attempting to extinguish them with every action.

This is a groundbreaking book that will radically change our understanding of the capitalist system, particularly the role of financial markets. It breaks free of traditional ideological arguments of the right and left and points to a new way of understanding and spreading the extraordinary wealth-generating capabilities of capitalism.
The Case of the Bonsai Manager is the perfect antidote for every manager who feels they are not achieving their full potential. Effective leadership is not just about hard facts but also about listening to, and using, your intuition. Using anecdotes from Nature and the world of management, R.Gopalakrishnan explores how you can be more intuitive, inclusive and humane. With its easy to read anecdotal style, this edition adds additional material to re-enforce the key messages including a NEW Self-Help Workbook. ‘Gopal draws on ingenious insights and lessons from Nature to emphasize the importance of imbibing, developing, listening to and trusting your intuition—increasingly becoming a differentiator in senior circles—to develop the confidence to take that leap of faith which every risk-bearing decision entails
The book captures the life and achievements of South African interpreter and innovator, Elon Musk, the brain behind series of successful enterprises such as PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solarcity. The real-life inspiration of the Iron Man Series, Musk wants to be the saviour of the planet, send people into space and set up a colony on Mars.

Bullied in school and scolded tremendously by his father, Musk was actually a brilliant student and his life story is nothing less than a drama packed film. Ashlee Vance’s brilliant description of Musk's character, simple language and neat choice of words indeed makes this book a great read.

Considered by some as the innovation, entrepreneurial Steve Jobs of the present and future, Elon Musk became a billionaire early in life with his successful online ventures. One of the successful companies that he co-founded was the online payment gateway PayPal that was later acquired by e-Bay in 2002.

Getting sacked as the CEO, Musk did not cease to amaze friend and foes alike with his out of the box ideas, like investing in rockets! Needless to say, this deconstructed obsession with technology had his marital life go haywire.

The book 'Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and TESLA is Shaping Our Future’ is a brilliant and intelligent account of this genius young 'iron man’ told in a gripping manner. Available in paperback from Penguin Random House publication, the book was published in 2015.
For many aspects of how our countries are run—from social security and fair elections to communication, infrastructure and the rule of law—technology can play an increasingly positive, revolutionary role. In India, for example, where many underprivileged citizens are invisible to the state, a unique national identity system is being implemented for the first time, which will help strengthen social security. And throughout the world, technology is essential in the transition to clean energy. This book, based on the authors' collective experiences working with government, argues that technology can reshape our lives, in both the developing and developed world, and shows how this can be achieved.
Unfortunately, most of us have little sense of our talents and strengths, much less the ability to build our lives around them. Instead, guided by our parents, by our teachers, by our managers, and by psychology's fascination with pathology, we become experts in our weaknesses and spend our lives trying to repair these flaws, while our strengths lie dormant and neglected.
Marcus Buckingham, coauthor of the national bestseller First, Break All the Rules, and Donald O. Clifton, Chair of the Gallup International Research & Education Center, have created a revolutionary program to help readers identify their talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy consistent, near-perfect performance. At the heart of the book is the Internet-based StrengthsFinder® Profile, the product of a 25-year, multimillion-dollar effort to identify the most prevalent human strengths. The program introduces 34 dominant "themes" with thousands of possible combinations, and reveals how they can best be translated into personal and career success. In developing this program, Gallup has conducted psychological profiles with more than two million individuals to help readers learn how to focus and perfect these themes.
So how does it work? This book contains a unique identification number that allows you access to the StrengthsFinder Profile on the Internet. This Web-based interview analyzes your instinctive reactions and immediately presents you with your five most powerful signature themes. Once you know which of the 34 themes -- such as Achiever, Activator, Empathy, Futuristic, or Strategic -- you lead with, the book will show you how to leverage them for powerful results at three levels: for your own development, for your success as a manager, and for the success of your organization.
With accessible and profound insights on how to turn talents into strengths, and with the immediate on-line feedback of StrengthsFinder at its core, Now, Discover Your Strengths is one of the most groundbreaking and useful business books ever written.
Five years after We Are Like That Only, her seminal and best-selling study on the logic of Consumer India, Rama Bijapurkar takes stock of its evolution in her new book. She starts from the point that emerging markets, the queen of which is India are a never-before world and businesses approaching them need to understand the environment in which consumers live, how they think, how heterogeneous they are and how they are changing. All of these have key implications for correctly evaluating business opportunity and determining market strategy. India has entered the third decade after liberalization, buffeted by changes on all fronts. Consumption structures and consumer behavior are changing and consumer needs and desires are growing faster than incomes. The real war for the consumer rupee begins now the trick is to understand, without prejudice or preconceived notions, the new world of Consumer India. Setting consumerism in the context of society and people's lives, looking not just at how much money people have, what they spend it on and how, but at how businesses can be relevant to consumer's lives and life aspirations, A Never Before World explores widely yet sharply everything that businesses need to know and think about to win in the crucial Indian market.
The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results is a 2013 book written by authors Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. The book, The One Thing, explains how the habit to succeed can be incorporated in our life to overcome the hurdles like the lies that will block our success, the thieves that will steal our time and increase our concentration in the purpose, the way we prioritize and the productivity of our business. The book comes in handy for people indulged in business and helps them increase the efficiency of their work and remove the hindering factors. The book is easy to read and substantial in the ideas it conveys.

The One Thing is a book that focuses on how to avoid perplexing distractions that come on one's way. By doing this, they can concentrate on the one thing that is the most important at that point of time. The book says that one wants fewer distractions on their daily life, be it professional or personal, so that the most important thing can be heeded. Likewise, one also wants more productivity so that their work flourishes. The book says that one wants less and more at the same time and it can be had by following certain methods.

The book assists in reducing daily life stress, triggering one's motivation to get enthused in their actions targeted on their goals, overcome the feeling of exhaustion caused by overwhelming events and achieve better results in an effective time period. This edition was published in hardcover, on July 4, 2013.

Key Features
The book was chosen to be one of the Top 5 Business Books of 2013 by Hudson's Booksellers.
The book has been cited as a national best-seller in various newspapers and magazines.
‘The Lean Start up- How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses’ is a book that explains how to work on your innovative concepts as businessman through moments of anxiety and dilemma. The way to start a company has changed drastically over the time and this book will explain you how to utilize this change to our benefit. The book provides the plan, how a 'startup' is a company devoted to creating something innovative under circumstances of extreme uncertainty. As per author Every one of us has one thing in common and that is to clear the way of uncertainty and reach the target of having a sustainable, unbeaten and balanced company.

The book emphasizes on the developed companies that are both economically proficient and make use of human imagination more frequently. Influenced by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies depends on validate learning, rapid scientific testing, as well as a number of counter-intuitive exercises that shorten product growth cycles, measure actual development without resorting to vanity metrics and learn what consumers really want. Thereby, it a organization to move directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. The book make you learn entrepreneurship, in organization of all sizes, a way to judge their vision continuously and to adapt and adjust according to situation.
The book Zero To One is about nurturing the next big idea to build a valuable global company. If you are only following in the steps known entrepreneurs, then the authors believe that you are headed nowhere.

The book recalls how certain innovative ideas were incubated and how people behind them dared to dream big and even did realize some of them. But trying to replicate or improvise what Bill Gates achieved with developing an operating system or what Large Page got out of making a user friendly search engine is not going to help in realizing the dream for building the next global business empire.

This book also compiles the startups culture as discussed by Peter Thiel in his lecture for Stanford University students in 2012 with details about various other aspects of entrepreneurship.

The authors encourage to think out of the box, without delving too much into the lives of the great entrepreneurs for there are already many books on that. Thiel, himself a successful serial entrepreneur, instead motivates for chalking out ones own course, breaking conventions, changing the rules and about disruptive technologies that revolutionize the way business is conducted.

The book was well received and did get recommendations from notable authors and business enthusiasts. Written in a easy to understand language, the book attempts to describe the demands and stakes that drive the startup world.
From Newton's Law of Gravity to the Black-Scholes model used by bankers to predict the markets, equations, are everywhere -- and they are fundamental to everyday life.Seventeen Equations that Changed the World examines seventeen ground-breaking equations that have altered the course of human history. He explores how Pythagoras's Theorem led to GPS and Satnav; how logarithms are applied in architecture; why imaginary numbers were important in the development of the digital camera, and what is really going on with Schrödinger's cat.
Entertaining, surprising and vastly informative, Seventeen Equations that Changed the World is a highly original exploration -- and explanation -- of life on earth.
In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists. And that, no doubt, will only be the beginning.

In Silicon Valley the phrase "disruptive technology" is tossed around on a casual basis. No one doubts that technology has the power to devastate entire industries and upend various sectors of the job market. But Rise of the Robots asks a bigger question: can accelerating technology disrupt our entire economic system to the point where a fundamental restructuring is required? Companies like Facebook and YouTube may only need a handful of employees to achieve enormous valuations, but what will be the fate of those of us not lucky or smart enough to have gotten into the great shift from human labor to computation?

The more Pollyannaish, or just simply uninformed, might imagine that this industrial revolution will unfold like the last: even as some jobs are eliminated, more will be created to deal with the new devices of a new era. In Rise of the Robots, Martin Ford argues that is absolutely not the case. Increasingly, machines will be able to take care of themselves, and fewer jobs will be necessary. The effects of this transition could be shattering. Unless we begin to radically reassess the fundamentals of how our economy works, we could have both an enormous population of the unemployed-the truck drivers, warehouse workers, cooks, lawyers, doctors, teachers, programmers, and many, many more, whose labors have been rendered superfluous by automated and intelligent machines-and a general economy that, bereft of consumers, implodes under the weight of its own contradictions. We are at an inflection point-do we continue to listen to those who argue that nothing fundamental has changed, and take a bad bet on a miserable future, or do we begin to discuss what we must do to ensure all of us, and not just the few, benefit from the awesome power of artificial intelligence? The time to choose is now.

Rise of the Robots is a both an exploration of this new technology and a call to arms to address its implications. Written by a successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, this is a book that cannot be dismissed as the ranting of a Luddite or an outsider. Ford has seen the future, and he knows that for some of us, the rise of the robots will be very frightening indeed.

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.

This insight is the heart of WORK RULES!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto with the potential to change how we work and live.

Drawing on behavioral economics and human psychology, Bock provides teaching examples from a range of industries. He also reveals why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work, sharing counterintuitive principles that are easy to put into action.

WORK RULES! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken the joy in what you do.

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