Many businesspeople wisely focus on polishing their leadership skills or taking courses to expand their knowledge of how people think, but they often forget that relationships are even more important to success.  In fact, all of life’s successes come from initiating relationships with the right people, and then strengthening those relationships by using good people skills.  Fortunately, you can learn to become a "people person" and to succeed in the things that matter the most. 

Our summary of Winning with People, by John C. Maxwell, will provide you with the tools you need to immediately improve your existing relationships as well as cultivate new, strong, and exciting ones. 

Maxwell is an internationally respected leadership expert, speaker, and author who has sold more than 20 million books.  He is the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization that has trained more than 5 million leaders in 126 countries worldwide.  A New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Business Week best-selling author, Maxwell has written three books that have sold more than a million copies each: 

• The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, 
• Developing the Leader Within You, and 
• The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader. 

In this summary, you will learn the People Principles that will help make you a success in life – and become the kind of person who makes others successful, too.

The days when you could plan out your marketing and public relations programs well in advance and execute them on your timetable are gone. News now breaks in “real time” — over minutes, not days. This means that companies must now be the first to see an opportunity, and the first to act on it. And they must develop or refine their products or services instantly, based on feedback from customers or events in the marketplace.

In our summary of the Revised and Updated edition of Real-Time Marketing and PR, David Meerman Scott reveals the proven, practical steps to take your business into the "real-time era."

Scott is the author of:

• The New Rules of Marketing & PR,
• World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers That Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories,and
• Marketing Lessons From The Grateful Dead: What Every Business Can Learn From The Most Iconic Band In History.

He served as VP of marketing for two publicly traded technology companies and was also Asia marketing director for Knight-Ridder, which at the time was one of the world's largest newspaper and electronic information companies. His blog is at www.WebInkNow.com.

Real-Time Marketing and PR clearly explains why scale and media buying power are no longer decisive competitive advantages. What counts today is speed and agility. While your competitors scramble to adjust, you can seize the initiative, open new channels, and grow your brand. Master the ideas in this summary and become the first to act, the first to respond, and the first to win.

Charles G. Koch may very well be the most successful businessman you’ve never heard of.  Under his leadership, Koch Industries has become a dynamic enterprise that Forbes magazine called “the world’s largest private company.”

Koch is chairman of the board and CEO, a position he has held since 1967.  He credits the company’s success to a unique management methodology that he developed called Market-Based Management®, or MBM®. 

MBM is a holistic approach to management that integrates theory and practice, and provides a framework for dealing with the ongoing challenges of growth and change. 

Our summary of Koch’s book, The Science of Success:  How Market-Based Management Built the World’s Largest Private Company, explains the proven principles used by the leaders and employees of Koch companies to get results.  As you will discover, there really is a science behind success, and it can be applied to any organization, including yours.

With so many different philosophies and methods of leadership, as well as a rapidly changing workplace, it can seem like a major challenge to convey your personal approach to leading others. 

Our summary of One Piece of Paper provides a simple yet powerful model for doing just that.  Based on leadership expert Mike Figliuolo’s popular “Leadership Maxims” training course, One Piece of Paper guides you through a practical approach for creating, articulating, and living your personal leadership philosophy – one that can be shared with others on a single piece of paper.

Figliuolo is the founder and managing director of thought LEADERS, LLC, a professional services firm specializing in leadership development.  Before founding his own company, he was a consultant at McKinsey & Company and an executive at Capital One and Scotts Miracle-Gro.

The unique approach involves answering a series of questions that will help you to develop a set of personal leadership maxims.  These maxims, in turn, enable you to build a concise living document that communicates the passions, goals, and standards that define your leadership style. 

The result is one sheet of paper that provides an accessible touchstone for you and your team, enabling you to:

• work together effectively,
• grow the organization,
• and get great results,

while achieving your full potential as a leader.

Today, stakeholders expect business owners, CEOs, and general managers to deliver breakthroughs in overall business performance – and fast.  Those who don’t make visible progress toward that goal within the first year or two invariably find themselves looking for another job.

It is precisely because of this “breakthrough imperative” that today's managers today need to get off to a fast start.  They don’t have time for mistakes, or for going back and redoing what they should have done right in the first place.

But, despite these high expectations and short time-frames, some CEOs and general managers turn in truly exceptional results.  How do they do it?  To answer this question, two of the world's top management consultants, Mark Gottfredson and Steve Schaubert, interviewed more than 40 CEOs, conducted an intensive study of what successful managers do right, and drew on their own combined 50-plus years of experience at Bain & Company.  Together, they came up with four simple yet powerful laws that everyone must follow to achieve success.

Our summary of The Breakthrough Imperative:  How the Best Managers Get Outstanding Results will show you how to apply these four laws in your business for spectacular results.  Whether you’re managing a small work group or a multi-national corporation, a single division or an entire non-profit, this summary will help put you on the road to stellar results.

In 1991, Geoffrey Moore’s classic book Crossing the Chasm presented an innovative framework to address the make-or-break obstacle confronting all high-tech companies:  how to leverage disruptive innovations to break into established markets protected by strong incumbents.

Now, 20 years later, with the publication of Escape Velocity, Moore has turned the tables to advise the top leaders of many of the world’s most successful enterprises on how to break out of established markets in order to find renewed growth in new categories.  Moore is chairman emeritus of the consulting firms The Chasm Group, Chasm Institute, and TCG Advisors, which provide marketing strategy and organizational advice to leading high-tech companies, as well as a venture partner in Mohr Davidow Ventures, where he continues to help their start-ups cross the chasm

As he worked with senior management teams in search of breakout growth, Moore repeatedly found that executives were trapped by short-term performance-based compensation schemes that kept them bound to their current businesses.  The result is that many critical decision-makers today put too many resources behind their legacy commitments, yielding an embarrassingly low success rate in new-product launches.

Our summary of Escape Velocity provides a pragmatic plan to confront the most critical challenge that established enterprises face in the 21^st century economy:  how to move beyond past success and drive next-generation growth from new lines of business.  Whether your organization is in the high-tech sector or any other industry, you’ll discover how to create a powerful and sustainable foundation for a long-term competitive advantage.

What, exactly, makes one person more successful than another?  What explains why two people can be equally intelligent and perform equally excellent work, but only one advances to the next level, while the other faces the frustration of being overlooked for a promotion time after time?

The answer:  While some people leave the fate of their careers in someone else’s hands, others determine their future by using three critical skills:  perception, visibility, and influence.

In our summary of Getting Ahead:  Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level, by Joel A. Garfinkle, you’ll learn how to create the right image, increase your profile across the organization, and exert influence by driving change and inspiring other people. 

Garfinkle is recognized as one of the top 50 coaches in the U.S., and has worked as a consultant for Ernst & Young and Accenture.  His clientele includes Oracle, Google, Amazon, Deloitte, Ritz-Carlton, Bank of America, and many others.

This summary will teach you the effective tools and tactical approaches that will immediately make you an invaluable and visible resource for your company.  When you're finished, you'll be equipped with a step-by-step program that will enable you to deal with whatever is in your way and remove the blind spots that may be limiting your career.

In today’s fast-paced, chaotic, and global marketplace, businesses must constantly battle to cut through the clutter -- and most of them are woefully inept.  Today's sophisticated consumers want products that meet an emotional need, have added value, and come with no purchase risk.  They want to buy from like-minded businesses, and they expect to receive their information through a wide array of new media. 

And yet, despite these marketplace demands, effective marketing still comes down to the fundamentals:  knowledge, logic, empathy, and communication.

Our summary of Kick-Ass Business and Marketing Secrets, by Bob Pritchard, gets back to the basics of marketing:  To succeed, you must do your homework, know your client, and examine every single thing that you do. 

Pritchard is an internationally renowned businessman, marketer, and speaker.  As the CEO of Marketforce One, a business and marketing strategy firm, his clients include many of the world’s leading companies, including the Coca-Cola Company, Citibank, Anheuser-Busch, Mercedes-Benz, and Frito-Lay. 

This summary delivers step-by-step advice on how to thoroughly research and understand your product, marketplace, and competitors, and drive sales.  By learning to differentiate your business and create a powerful Consumer Purchasing Benefit, you'll instantly rise above the vast majority of businesses that fail to do so.