Back to Business makes returning to the workforce accessible for anyone who believes that finding a decent job after taking a career break is impossible. When on the hunt for a job, make sure your LinkedIn profile is just as polished and updated as your resume. If you aren’t getting responses from recruiters, chances are your profile is missing pertinent keywords that bots aren’t selecting. In addition, dress codes have changed too, so you’ll need to know new technologies such as Slack and Google+ Hangouts. If you have no idea what any of this means, YOU’RE NOT ALONE. You’re one of the forty-five percent of women who, after taking a career break, quickly discovered that the job search has changed rapidly in the last decade. With new modes of communication, rules of discoverability and expectations, this book lays out a clear path for anyone ready to re-enter the workforce. Getting started is much easier when you know what the first step should be. In Back to Business, career coaching and re-entry experts Nancy McSharry Jensen and Sarah Duenwald, have put together a guide for women returning to the workplace. Practical and easy to understand, Back to Business teaches you how to: Identify and talk about what you want. Understand your personal brand and how your skills translate to your new career. Become professionally relevant and gain confidence in returning to the workforce. Look for job opportunities while being productive and intentional with your time. Nancy and Sarah understand through first-hand experience the anxiety of returning to work. They have helped hundreds of women facing the job search process to overcome the anxiety of what is often overwhelming life change.

Modern Portfolio Theory has failed investors. A change in direction is long overdue. We are in a time of enormous risk. Economic growth is anemic, and political risk to the capital markets is on the rise. In the U.S., a generation of white collar baby-boomers is heading into retirement with insufficient assets in their 401(k) programs, and industrial workers are stuck with materially underfunded pension plans. Against that backdrop, the investing industry’s current set of practices and assumptions—Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT)—is based on a half-century old formula that is supposed to deliver the maximum amount of return for a given amount of risk. The trouble is that it doesn’t work very well. In Getting Back to Business, dividend-investing guru Daniel Peris proposes a radical new approach—radical in that it does away with MPT in favor of a more intuitive, common-sense approach practiced by business people in their own affairs everyday: cash returns on cash investments. “In a profession utterly lacking a historical sensibility,” Peris writes. “One periodically needs to ask why we do things the way we do, how we got here, and whether perhaps there is a better way.” Balancing detailed historical evidence with a practitioner’s real-world expertise, Peris asks the right questions—and provides a solution that makes sense in today’s challenging investing landscape.

Many strategic change efforts fail. And virtually all of them are harder than they need to be. Why is this? And what can we do to make change more likely to stick? Dr. Elsbeth Johnson, a former equity analyst and London Business School Professor now teaching at MIT, has spent a decade researching how to deliver strategic change in practice. Based on asking managers what they needed from leaders, rather than just asking leaders what they did, her resulting Step Up, Step Back approach challenges some of our most fundamental beliefs about how to lead change – and indeed, about what we even consider to be 'leadership'. The Step Up, Step Back approach suggests leaders need to step up and do more than they typically do in the early stages of the change – in specific ways and at specific times; and then step back and do less than they typically do in the later stages of the change – again, in specific ways, at specific times. The result is not only change that sticks, but empowered, motivated managers who can get on with delivering change, without needing ongoing input or cover from leaders. Using real-world examples of how to apply the science in practice, Step Up, Step Back gives you a roadmap for how to deliver strategic change in your organization.

If your heart's not in your business, why are you? In the flurry of everyday deadlines, fire fighting and all the pressing demands on our time, it's easy to forget the real reasons we started our own business in the first place. Soul Trader helps you connect with your personal mission, values and passion to create a 'stand out from the crowd' business that enriches you both financially and emotionally. Discover the seven essential principles that will help you build a business sensitive to today's economic and social realities, one that is profitable, customer-focused and in tune with your own beliefs, needs and goals. Rasheed Ogunlaru tears off the jargon and delves into the beating heart of what makes businesses really work. Throw your heart into your business, it will pay dividends.

Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage. You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources—and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results. Coverage includes Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects Reducing resistance to process improvements Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation Mitigating project risks more effectively—especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress

NCAA finalist University of Memphis men's basketball team coach John Calipari writes about turning life's setbacks into successes.

“Clever, surprisingly fast-paced, and enlightening.” —Forbes Most new products fail. So do most businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? What separates those who keep treading water from those who harness the lessons from their mistakes? One of our most popular business bloggers, Megan McArdle takes insights from emergency room doctors, kindergarten teachers, bankruptcy judges, and venture capitalists to teach us how to reinvent ourselves in the face of failure. The Up Side of Down is a book that just might change the way you lead your life.