Books Continued...

The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing
by Lisa Gansky

Traditional businesses follow a simple formula: create a product or service, sell it, collect money. But in the last few years a fundamentally different model has taken root-one in...

Success By Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers
by David Sherwin

In your career you may have been like me: Trying to keep projects on the rails and clients happy. Digging through blogs for useful advice. Wondering if there was a better way to handle all of the demands of being a design professional and running a creative business...

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Why is change so difficult and frightening? How do you create change when you have few resources and no title or authority to back you up? Chip and Dan Heath, the best-selling authors of Made to Stick, are back with a ground-breaking book that addresses one of the greatest challenges of our personal and professional lives...

Buy-In: Saving Your Good Idea from Getting Shot Down
by John P. Kotter, Lorne A. Whitehead

You've got a good idea. You know it could make a crucial difference for you, your organization, your community. You present it to the group, but get confounding questions, inane comments, and verbal bullets in return. Before you know what's happened, your idea is dead, shot down. You're furious. Everyone has lost: Those who would have benefited from your proposal...

Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
by Richard Rumelt

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader, whether the CEO at a Fortune 100 company, an entrepreneur, a church pastor, the head of a school, or a government official...

Content Strategy at Work: Real-world Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project
by Margot Bloomstein

Even if content strategy isn't your job, content's probably your problem--and probably more than you think. You or your business has a message you want to deliver, right? You can deliver that message through various channels and content types, from Tweets to testimonials and photo galleries galore, and your audience has just as many ways of engaging with it...

The Practice of Management
by Peter F. Drucker

The Practice of Management was the first book to look at management as a whole and being a manager as a separate responsibility. The Practice of Management created the discipline of modern management practices. Readable, fundamental, and basic, it remains an essential book for students, aspiring managers, and seasoned professionals...

Making Meaning: How Successful Businesses Deliver Meaningful Customer Experiences
by Steve Diller, Nathan Shedroff, Darrel Rhea

This is the essential guide that explains the phenomenon of the meaningful customer experience - a working strategy for business leaders...

Building Design Strategy: Using Design to Achieve Key Business Objectives
by Thomas Lockwood, Thomas Walton

How can design be used to solve business problems? That's the question answered, in many innovative ways, by Building Design Strategy. Mark Dziersk, EunSool Kwon, Arnold Levin, Laura Weiss, and many more top-name contributors share their experience and insights...

Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation, Customer Experience, and Brand Value
by Thomas Lockwood

Design Thinking is packed with intriguing case studies and practical advice from industry experts. This anthology is organized into three sections that focus on the use of design for innovation and brand-building, the emerging role of service design, and the design of meaningful customer experiences...

Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age
by Roman Pichler

If you are a Product Manager or must think about launching new products and services you must read this book. It focus on two important topics for Product Development: Strategy and Roadmapping. Pichler describes several techniques, authors and tools to think and describe your product strategy and your product roadmaps...

The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage
by Roger L. Martin

Most companies today have innovation envy. They yearn to come up with a game—changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results...

The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy and Design
by Marty Neumeier

THE BRAND GAP is the first book to present a unified theory of brand. Whereas most books on branding are weighted toward either a strategic or creative approach, this book shows how both ways of thinking can unite to produce a "charismatic brand"--a brand that customers feel is essential to their lives...

Bridging UX and Web Development: Better Results Through Team Integration
by Jack Moffett

The divide between UX and Web development can be stifling. Bridging UX and Web Development prepares you to break down those walls by teaching you how to integrate with your team's developers. You examine the process from their perspective, discovering tools and coding principles that will help you bridge the gap between design and implementation...

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

From three design partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems using design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers...

Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience...

The Art Of Innovation: Lessons In Creativity From IDEO
by Tom Kelley, Jonathan Littman

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation...

Six Thinking Hats
by Edward de Bono

The multi million-copy bestseller Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking and I Am Right You Are Wrong, teaches you how to run better meetings and make better decisions. Meetings are a crucial part of all our lives, but too often they go nowhere and waste valuable time...

Design is a Job
by Mike Monteiro

Co-founder of Mule Design and raconteur Mike Monteiro wants to help you do your job better. From contracts to selling design, from working with clients to working with each other, this brief book is packed with knowledge you can’t afford not to know...

Designing Together: The collaboration and conflict management handbook for creative professionals
by Dan M. Brown

WHAT IS THE ONE THING not taught in design school, but is an essential survival skill for practicing designers? Working with other people. And yet, in every project, collaboration with other people is often the most difficult part...

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind
by Jocelyn K. Glei

Do you work at a breakneck pace all day, only to find that you haven't accomplished the most important things on your agenda by the time you leave the office? With wisdom from 20 leading creative minds, 99U's Manage Your Day-to-Day will equip you with pragmatic insights for using your time wisely and making your best work...

Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
by Seth Godin

In bestsellers such as Purple Cow and Tribes, Seth Godin taught readers how to make remarkable products and spread powerful ideas. But this book is about you—your choices, your future, and your potential to make a huge difference in whatever field you choose...

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need
by Daniel H. Pink

There’s never been a career guide like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). Told in manga—the Japanese comic book format that’s an international sensation—it’s the fully illustrated story of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job...

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning
by Dan M. Brown

Most discussion about Web design seems to focus on the creative process, yet turning concept into reality requires a strong set of deliverables or the documentation (concept model, site maps, usability reports, and more) that serves as the primary communication tool between designers and customers...

Communicating the User Experience: A practical guide for creating useful UX documentation
by Richard Caddick, Steve Cable

A clear and focused guide to creating useful user experience documentation As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects...

Articulating Design Decisions: Communicate with Stakeholders, Keep Your Sanity, and Deliver the Best User Experience
by Tom Greever

Every designer has had to justify designs to non-designers, yet most lack the ability to explain themselves in a way that is compelling and fosters agreement. The ability to effectively articulate design decisions is critical to the success of a project, because the most articulate person often wins...

Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique
by Adam Connor, Aaron Irizarry

Conversations are a large part of how we work together as a team. Designers are no different, but there are not many resources available that concentrate on these necessary soft-skills. This book provides practical and actionable insights to help your team give and receive constructive criticism...

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works
by Janice Redish

Redish has done her homework and created a thorough overview of the issues in writing for the Web. Ironically, I must recommend that you read her every word so that you can find out why your customers won't read very many words on your website...

Content Strategy for the Web
by Kristina Halvorson, Melissa Rach

If your website content is out of date, off-brand, and out of control, you're missing a huge opportunity to engage, convert, and retain customers online. Redesigning your home page won't help. Investing in a new content management system won't fix it, either. So, where do you start...

Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
by Gerry McGovern

On the Internet, if you're not read, you're dead. Written by an internationally-acclaimed specialist in this field, Killer Web Content gives you the strategies and practical techniques you need to get the very best out of your Web content. Accessible, concise and practical, it will make your website really work for you...