As one of today’s most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin helps his army of fans stay focused, stay connected, and stay dissatisfied with the status quo, the ordinary, the boring. His books, blog posts, magazine articles, and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketing people, innovators, and managers around the world. Now, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short pieces from his pioneering blog—ranked #70 by Feedster (out of millions published) in worldwide readership. This book also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine, and several of the short e-books he has written in the last few years. A sample: • Bon Jovi And The Pirates • Christmas Card Spam • Clinging To Your Job Title? • How Much Would You Pay to Be on Oprah’s Show? • The Persistence of Really Bad Ideas • The Seduction of “Good Enough” • What Happens When It's All on Tape? • Would You Buy Life Insurance at a Rock Concert? Small is the New Big is a huge bowl of inspiration that you can gobble in one sitting or dip into at any time. As Godin writes in his introduction: “I guarantee that you'll find some ideas that don’t work for you. But I’m certain that you're smart enough to see the stuff you’ve always wanted to do, buried deep inside one of these riffs. And I’m betting that once inspired, you’ll actually make something happen.”

At some point today you will have to influence or persuade someone - your boss, a co-worker, a customer, client, spouse, your kids, or even your friends. What is the smallest change you can make to your request, proposal or situation that will lead to the biggest difference in the outcome? In The small BIG, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice -- Steve Martin, Noah Goldstein and Robert Cialdini -- describe how, in today's information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences. In the last few years more and more research - from fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and behavioral economics - has helped to uncover an even greater understanding of how influence, persuasion and behavior change happens. Increasingly we are learning that it is not information per se that leads people to make decisions, but the context in which that information is presented. Drawing from extensive research in the new science of persuasion, the authors present lots of small changes (over 50 in fact) that can bring about momentous shifts in results. It turns out that anyone can significantly increase his or her ability to influence and persuade others, not by informing or educating people into change but instead by simply making small shifts in approach that link to deeply felt human motivations.

Whether you inhabit a studio or a sprawling house with one challenging space, Maxwell Gillingham-Ryan, co-founder of the most popular interior design website, Apartment Therapy, will help you transform tiny into totally fabulous. According to Maxwell, size constraints can actually unlock your design creativity and allow you to focus on what’s essential. In this vibrant book, he shares forty small, cool spaces that will change your thinking forever. These apartments and houses demonstrate hundreds of inventive solutions for creating more space in your home, and for making it more comfortable. Leading us through entrances, living rooms, kitchens and dining rooms, bedrooms, home offices, and kids’ rooms, Apartment Therapy’s Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces is brimming with ingenious tips and ideas, such as: • Shifting the sense of scale through contrasting colors • Adding airiness by using transparent collections • Utilizing the area under a loft bed for a kitchen and mini-bar • Tucking an office with chic vintage doors into an unused bedroom corner In each dwelling Maxwell points out what makes the layout work and what adds style. Most of the “therapy” involves minor tweaks that can be accomplished on a limited budget, such as dividing a room with sheer curtains, turning a door into a desk, or disguising electrical boxes with art displays. An extensive resource guide, including Maxwell’s favorite websites for buying desks, open storage solutions, and much more, will help you turn even the tiniest residence into a place you are always happy to come home to.

During the past two decades, Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez have worked to deepen and improve mathematics instruction at schools around the country. Wherever they go, they find the raw ingredients for success already present: The potential for positive change lies within each school. Abundance is present in the form of capable children, teachers, coaches, and principals. Potential energy -- what can be -- transforms into kinetic energywhat will beonly when a force is accurately applied to move a school in the right direction. In' Small Steps, Big Changes: Eight Essential Practices for Transforming Schools Through Mathematics, the authors identify eight tested principles that transform what can be an overwhelming process into a set of comprehensible and concrete steps. Each phase of the change process is brought to life through the stories and perspectives of teachers, coaches, and principalsstories that will strike familiar chords for every educator. When teachers make sense of math, students learn to make sense of math, and that can profoundly change the entire culture of a school. In one vivid illustration, the authors tell the story of Pueblo Gardens Elementary School in Tucson, Arizona, where Marco, as principal, and Chris, as instructional coach, worked alongside a group of dedicated teachers. A few years into the change process, Pueblo Gardens -- a school with 96 percent of its students at the poverty level and a high percentage of English language learners -- had 94 percent of students meeting or exceeding state standards in third-grade mathematics. Over time, other grades achieved similarly high scores. And once the test scores rose, they were sustained at high levels.

Ideas are like buses, you wait forever and then 500 come along atonce. The Big Idea Book is 500 novel, ingenious anddownright crazy ideas designed to inspire, amuse and divert.Developed by the team behind the innovative website, Idea-a-Day atwww.idea-a-day.com, itcovers everything from business to travel, politics to money andeverything in between. Idea-a-Day has a vast network of followers and contributors -some famous, some infamous, some revered, some reviled – whopost ideas to be read, enjoyed, used or abused. Seth Godin, MalcolmMaclaren and Wayne Hemmingway are just a few of its fans. In TheBig Idea Book all this creative energy is mixed together withunpublished ideas, quotes, cartoons, illustrations andthought-pieces to give creatives and cool office types a visual andintellectual treat guaranteed to kickstart the imagination andcreative flair!

Technology and economics are transforming business in a completely unexpected way: suddenly, even the largest companies must compete as if they were small, local businesses. Suddenly, your customers can talk to everyone else across the nation, and people listen to them, not your carefully crafted advertising or branding. It's just like doing business in a small town, where "reputation is forever." Suddenly, communities and personal connections are critical to your success - just as they've always been in small towns. The best small-town and rural entrepreneurs have been successfully overcoming these challenges for centuries. Their lessons and techniques are suddenly intensely valuable to even the largest companies, most dominant brands, and most cosmopolitan businesses. Small Town Rules adapts these lessons and techniques for today's new "global small town": one knitted together through the Web, Facebook, and Twitter. Two pioneering entrepreneurs and social media experts show how to: * Survive seasonal cycles and year-to-year fluctuations the way rural farmers and businesses do * Use "small town entrepreneur secrets" for coping with limited access to people and capital * Reduce risk by "piecing together" multiple income sources * Start using customer-driven communication to your advantage * Interact with customers on a more human scale, no matter how big you are * Rediscover your company's local roots, and more