Act Like Its Your Business

Many actors treat their profession as a purely artistic endeavor, rarely conceding that there is more to making a living than simply showing up on stage or in front of a camera. By refusing to seriously acknowledge that self-promotion is vital to their livelihoods, many performers can get quickly discouraged by the vicious circle of audition and rejection. However, with a little foresight and planning, actors can learn how to become their own best advocates for a career in the business of show. In Act Like It’s Your Business:Branding and Marketing Strategies for Actors, Jonathan Flom helps actors and others in the arts understand the power of branding. This guide walks the reader through the process of creating a personal brand for a small business and then marketing that brand and broadcasting it through every step of the process—from choosing clothing, arranging headshots, and designing resumes to selecting a repertoire, building a website, obtaining business cards, and networking. Flom also offers advice on such real-world issues as goal-setting, finances, contracts, and day jobs and provides insight and guidance on how to approach agents, auditions, and casting directors. A book of empowerment meant to shift the balance of control to actors themselves, Act Like It’s Your Business is aimed atprofessional performers as well as students who are getting ready to transition from college to career. Structured logically and step by step, this accessible guide will become the standard for nearly anyone hoping to build an enduring career in the performing arts.

Act Like a Sales Pro was a finalist for TOP SALES AND MARKETING BOOK OF 2011 and featured on the cover of Ken Blanchard's Sales and Service Excellence Magazine and her articles have appeared across the globe. "In Act Like A Sales Pro, Julie Hansen challenges the reader to examine themselves honestly first, (strengths and weaknesses) then provides numerous methods on how to proceed with passion. Her writing style offers sage advice and smart nuances for those who will use it. Specifically, her insight on closing sales should not be missed. This is important work." --Mitchell Tilstra, Business Development Manager, Bunger Steel Acting is the ultimate form of persuasion. Now you can learn the methods that great actors use to engage and inspire clients and win more sales than you dreamed possible! Act Like a Sales Pro shows you how acting and improv skills can enhance your own selling style, make you stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace, and create a memorable buying experience. Easy-to-follow steps, exercises, and real-world coaching sessions help you move confidently from cold-calling to closing by applying techniques that have produced some of Hollywood's most compelling stars. A breakthrough approach to delivering the sales performance of your life!

Education plus experience once guaranteed a successful career, but no more! Today, success depends on your ability to adapt. You must be agile, willing to adjust your professional expectations, and able to respond quickly to opportunities and threats.“br> In Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO you will learn practical ways to handle vexing workplace challenges. Each chapter uses true stories to illustrate the answers to common questions, including: How to leave your old job smoothly and start your new one with confidence and flair. How to gracefully accept praise for your work. How to recover from stress, setbacks, or the upheaval of a major project. How to stay steady in the midst of endless change. It’s not enough to know how to manage common work-life challenges; you must also deal with the uncommon ones. Think Like an Entrepreneur, Act Like a CEO gives you proven, easy, go-to techniques for handling even the biggest career surprises, one step at a time.

The most dangerous move in business is the failure to make a move. Global business celebrity and prime-time Bloomberg Television host, Jeffrey W. Hayzlett empowers business leaders to tie their visions to actions, advancing themselves past competitors and closer to their business dream. Drawing upon his own business back stories including his time as CMO of Kodak and sharing examples from the many leaders featured on “The C-Suite with Jeff Hayzlett,” Hayzlett imparts ten core lessons that dare readers to own who they are as a leader and/or company, define where they want to go, and fearlessly do what it takes to get there—caring less about conventional wisdom, re-framing limitations, and steamrolling obstacles as they go.

A new edition of the bestseller that has helped aspiring leaders worldwide advance their careers and step up to larger leadership roles. You aspire to lead with greater impact. The problem is you're busy executing on today's demands. You know you have to carve out time from your "day job" to build your leadership skills, but it’s easy to let immediate problems and old mindsets get in the way. Herminia Ibarra—one of the world's foremost experts on leadership—shows how individuals at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in their jobs, their networks, and themselves. In Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader, Ibarra offers advice to: Redefine your job in order to make more strategic contributions Diversify your network so that you connect to, and learn from, a wider range of stakeholders Become more playful with your self-concept, allowing your familiar—and possibly outdated—leadership style to evolve Ibarra turns the usual leadership advice—generate insight about yourself through reflection and analysis of your strengths and weaknesses—on its head by arguing that you must first act and experiment your way into trying new things. The valuable external perspective you gain from direct experiences and experimentation—which Ibarra calls outsight—provides new and critical information on what kind of work is important to you, how you should invest your time, why and which relationships matter, and, ultimately, who you want to become. Updated with new examples and self-assessments, this book gives you the tools to start acting like a leader and advancing your career to the next level.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A memoir of leadership and success: The executive chairman of Disney, Time’s 2019 businessperson of the year, shares the ideas and values he embraced during his fifteen years as CEO while reinventing one of the world’s most beloved companies and inspiring the people who bring the magic to life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger—think global—and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets. Today, Disney is the largest, most admired media company in the world, counting Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox among its properties. Its value is nearly five times what it was when Iger took over, and he is recognized as one of the most innovative and successful CEOs of our era. In The Ride of a Lifetime, Robert Iger shares the lessons he learned while running Disney and leading its 220,000-plus employees, and he explores the principles that are necessary for true leadership, including: • Optimism. Even in the face of difficulty, an optimistic leader will find the path toward the best possible outcome and focus on that, rather than give in to pessimism and blaming. • Courage. Leaders have to be willing to take risks and place big bets. Fear of failure destroys creativity. • Decisiveness. All decisions, no matter how difficult, can be made on a timely basis. Indecisiveness is both wasteful and destructive to morale. • Fairness. Treat people decently, with empathy, and be accessible to them. This book is about the relentless curiosity that has driven Iger for forty-five years, since the day he started as the lowliest studio grunt at ABC. It’s also about thoughtfulness and respect, and a decency-over-dollars approach that has become the bedrock of every project and partnership Iger pursues, from a deep friendship with Steve Jobs in his final years to an abiding love of the Star Wars mythology. “The ideas in this book strike me as universal” Iger writes. “Not just to the aspiring CEOs of the world, but to anyone wanting to feel less fearful, more confidently themselves, as they navigate their professional and even personal lives.”

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together

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?

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

After spending the first 10 years of his career climbing the corporate ladder, Jeff Gothelf decided to change his approach to staying employed. Instead of looking for jobs, they would find him. Jeff spent the next 15 years building his personal brand to become a recognized expert, consultant, author and public speaker. In this highly tactical, practical book, Jeff Gothelf shares the tips, tricks, techniques and learnings that helped him become Forever Employable. Using the timeline from his own career and anecdotes, stories and case studies from other successful recognized experts Jeff provides a step-by-step guide to building a foundation based on your current expertise ensuring that no matter what happens in your industry you'll remain Forever Employable. This handy guide to your career and professional development shows you how to create your own content, use it to build your expertise and credentials and then scale it to build a continuous stream of income, interaction and community. As organizations seek to reduce costs, automate tasks and increase efficiency, how do you ensure you don't end up outside of those plans? Forever Employable shows you how so that you're always ready for the next step in your career. Reduce your stress, build your community, monetize your platform -- that's being Forever Employable.