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Book Giveaways

The 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book Awards: Innovation & Creativity Book Giveaway

November 27, 2017

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We are giving away the five sets of the five best books on Innovation & Creativity published in 2017.

We have been dedicating our giveaways to the books on the longlist of the 2017 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year, and continue that work this week. 

We recognize 40 book on our longlist—five books in eight different categories. This week, we'll be giving away the books in the Innovation & Creativity category, which are listed below, along with the publisher's description of the book. (Check back with In the Books Wednesday for our take on each of these books.) Each of this week's winners will receive all five books in the category.

Designed Leadership by Moura Quayle, Columbia Business School Publishing

Corporate leadership can be myopic in its unwillingness to fail.

Education and experience can be limiting to executives—except for lessons learned from the world of design, which, when applied to management, can turn leaders into collaborative, creative, deliberate, and accountable visionaries. Design thinking loosens the mind and activates innovation. It creates the conditions for employees to thrive and for all kinds of businesses to succeed.

In Designed Leadership, the strategic-design scholar and urban-systems designer Moura Quayle shares her plan for integrating design and leadership, translating processes, principles, and practices from years of experience into tools of change for professional leaders. Quayle describes the key concepts of designed leadership, such as "make values explicit" and "learn from natural systems," showing how strategic design can spur individual creativity and harness collective energy. For managers at any level, Designed Leadership uses original visuals and examples of frontline leadership to teach the kind of thinking, theorizing, and practicing that results in long-lasting high performance in the workplace and beyond.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown, Crown Business

The definitive playbook by the pioneers/creators of growth hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond, which drove the rapid market-share growth of start-ups like Uber, Facebook, Airbnb, Dropbox, Yelp, LinkedIn, Pintrest, and more.

Growth hacking is a highly accessible and practical method for growth that focuses on the customer—how to attain, retain, engage, and monetize them. It does for market share what the Lean Startup did for product development and business model generation for strategy.

Written by it’s pioneers, this book is a comprehensive tool kit that any company in any industry can use to grow their customer base and increase market share. It is for anyone looking to repalce wasteful “spagehetti-on-the-wall” marketing initatives and achieve more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

Hunch: Turn Your Everyday Insights Into The Next Big Thing by Bernadette Jiwa, Portfolio

In a world where the smallest insight can spark a breakthrough idea, intuition is more valuable than ever.

What do the Dyson vacuum cleaner, Starbucks, Instagram, GoPro, Facebook, and Lululemon yoga pants have in common? Every one of them was the result not of data-driven analytics or corporate brainstorming sessions, but a hunch—the intuitive understanding of a deep, unmet need.

Anxiety over “being more innovative” leads entrepreneurs to create solutions in search of problems. But what if you could use your intuition to identify an existing problem that’s begging for a solution?

International bestselling author and business adviser Bernadette Jiwa shows how anyone can uncover the kind of insights that become breakthrough ideas. Combining hands-on exercises with inspiring stories of the killer hunches that brought us inventions like the first reusable coffee cup, Hunch is a guide to cultivating your intuitive powers, a roadmap to getting from insights to ideas that fly.

Every breakthrough idea starts not with knowing for sure, but by understanding why it’s safe to try. Intuition alone doesn’t tell you exactly where “x” marks the spot, but it can give powerful clues as to where you might begin to dig. This is the book you need if you’re ready to begin finding them.

Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell, McGraw-Hill

Innovate or die. This life-saving playbook reveals the proven process for driving innovation in any business, large or small

Mapping Innovation is a strategic guide for focusing your organization’s innovation efforts where it counts. It helps you ask the right questions, map the innovation space, and define which approach is most likely to solve the specific problems and opportunities you face. In essence, this book enables you to choose the right tools for the job and build a solid strategy based on sound principles, rather than conjecture.

In the end, readers will understand how to develop new models to disrupt the marketplace, expand their efforts to reach ever larger audiences and customers, and leverage digital space to their advantage.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant, Little, Brown and Company

The secret history of the invention that changed everything-and became the most profitable product in the world.

Odds are that as you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs introduced us to "the one device," as he called it, a cell phone was merely what you used to make calls on the go.

How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals the inside story you won't hear from Cupertino-based on his exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors, and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation.

This deep dive takes you from inside One Infinite Loop to 19th century France to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen's notorious "suicide factories." It's a firsthand look at how the cutting-edge tech that makes the world work-touch screens, motion trackers, and even AI-made their way into our pockets.

The One Device is a roadmap for design and engineering genius, an anthropology of the modern age, and an unprecedented view into one of the most secretive companies in history. This is the untold account, ten years in the making, of the device that changed everything.

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