What is the secret behind every successful product? Why are people willing to pay more for a BMW than a Chevrolet? How could Apple iPhones represent only 4% of the world’s cell phone market in 2011 but take in 50% of the profits? The answer is quality. In this provocative new book, bestselling author James L. Adams provides a brilliant, in-depth look at the powerful but elusive qualities that can make or break a product’s success. A must-read for managers, designers, manufacturers, and marketers, this groundbreaking approach will change the way you think about your product—and show you why it’s more important than ever to deliver the highest quality possible. In Good Products, Bad Products, you’ll learn how to: : Maximize your product’s performance—and minimize the cost Appeal to your customer’s emotions—with elegance and sophistication Make sure your product is a perfect fit—that’s human, cultural, and global With competition growing stronger and fiercer every year, product quality has become the number-one factor in a company’s success. Adams points out that there will always be a stable demand for a high-quality product. By addressing every aspect of product quality—from the technical to the practical to the aesthetic—you can develop a product that your company will be proud of and your customers will love. Along the way, you’ll hear fascinating case studies of famous brands that became victims of their own success—like Kodak, IBM, Zenith, and GM—and struggled to recover lost ground. You’ll see how some countries like Japan surged ahead by offering better products than anyone on the globe. You’ll learn how some U.S. manufacturers remained successful in spite of the foreign market’s lower wages. And you’ll discover the top industry secrets for prioritizing quality throughout the company, delivering products that are the best in their class. Now more than ever, quality matters. Good Products, Bad Products gives you the edge—so you can give your customers the best product possible. James L. Adams is professor emeritus at Stanford University, where he chaired several programs, taught courses on design and creativity, and participated in many executive programs. Trained as an engineer and artist, he has conducted corporate workshops around the world and has written the bestselling guide to creativity and innovation, Conceptual Blockbusting.

“This book is the most comprehensive discussion of all the elements that go into producing superior products that I have read. I have thought a lot about quality over many years, yet the thinking reflected throughout [this] discussion is a real eye-opener for me. For anyone seriously interested in quality, this is a must read.” —Donald E. Petersen, retired President and Chairman, Ford Motor Company “This is a book only a legend like Jim Adams could write. Based on a very popular course Jim taught at Stanford for many years, it should be required reading for every engineering student interested in designing great products. Great products lead to great companies that change the world. Every aspiring engineer wants to have an impact and this book will absolutely help. Read it!” —James D. Plummer, Dean, School of Engineering, Stanford University “Drawing on fifty years of engineering experience, ranging from car design to rocket science, Stanford professor Jim Adams takes us on an engaging and eclectic journey through the evolution of what makes good products tick. With the same irrepressible curiosity Adams displayed in Conceptual Blockbusting, he shares insights into the underlying characteristics that separate products into the good, the bad, and the ugly.” —Tom Kelley, General Manager, IDEO, and author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation “Adams has a high-level and holistic view of the design of everyday things and the issues confronting those who develop them. If you design things, you will enjoy this book and benefit from Jim’s wisdom and experience.” —Bill Moggridge, Director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and author of Designing Interactions and Designing Media “Jim Adams is a gift. He understands the true essence of quality, blending ‘what works’ with ‘what’s beautiful.’ Here this master teacher shares his special wisdom: how to create that magical experience of a product we love, one that evokes ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ His timeless, inspired message could not be more timely.” —Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and coauthor of Built to Last and Great by Choice About the Book: What is the secret behind every successful product? Why are people willing to pay more for a BMW than a Chevrolet? How could Apple iPhones represent only 4% of the world’s cell phone market in 2010 but take in 50% of the profits? The answer is QUALITY. In this provocative new book, bestselling author James L. Adams provides a brilliant, in-depth look at the powerful but elusive qualities that can make or break a product’s success. A must-read for managers, designers, manufacturers, engineers, and marketers, this groundbreaking approach will change the way you think about your product—and show you why it’s more important than ever to deliver the highest quality possible. In Good Products, Bad Products, you’ll learn how to: Maximize your product’s performance—and minimize the cost Appeal to your customer’s emotions—with elegance and sophistication Make sure your product is a perfect fit—that’s human, cultural, and global With competition growing stronger and fiercer every year, product quality has become the number-one factor in a company’s success. Adams points out that there will always be a stable demand for a high-quality product. By addressing every aspect of product quality—from the technical to the practical to the aesthetic—you can develop a product that your company will be proud of and your customers will love. Along the way, you’ll hear fascinating case studies of famous brands that became victims of their own success—like Kodak, IBM, Zenith, and GM—and struggled to recover lost ground. You’ll see how some countries like Japan surged ahead by offering better products than anyone on the globe. You’ll learn how some U.S. manufacturers remained successful in spite of the foreign market’s lower wages. And you’ll also discover the top industry secrets for prioritizing quality throughout the company, delivering products that are the best in their class. Now more than ever, quality matters. Good Products, Bad Products gives you the edge, so you can give your customers the best product possible.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.

Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.

People expect effortless, engaging interaction with desktop and web applications, but producing software that generates enjoyable user experiences is much harder than many companies anticipate. With Effective UI, you'll learn proven user-experience strategies that will satisfy your clients and customers, drive business value, and increase brand strength. This book shows you how to capture the collaborative and cooperative spirit among designers, engineers, and management required for building engaging software. You'll also learn valuable methods for maintaining focus throughout the process -- whether you're a product manager who needs a clear roadmap, a developer or designer looking for guidance and advocacy, or a businessperson who wants to understand and manage user-experience software initiatives. Learn how to build software that will: Generate engaging and interactive experiences between consumers and businesses, or between businesspeople and their information systems Account for how people work with, think about, and consume information Establish a richer means of collaboration and communication Reduce frustration by streamlining complex tasks and creating processes that are more intuitive Distinguish products, services, and brands to create a competitive advantage Create scalable systems that adapt to changing user needs and behaviors

This guide will help readers learn how to employ the significant power of use cases to their software development efforts. It provides a practical methodology, presenting key use case concepts.

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?