Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, United States - A Free Book Gifting Program

In 1995, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new effort, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee, USA.

Dolly’s vision was to foster a love of reading among her county’s preschool children and their families. The new program gave each child a specially selected book each month. By mailing high quality, age appropriate books directly to their homes, Dolly wanted children to be excited about books and to feel the magic that books can create. Moreover, she could ensure that every child would have books, regardless of their family’s income.

Since its launch, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library has set and surpassed many goals and milestones. National replication, which started in 2000, allowed more and more communities to adopt the program. State-wide coverage was established in Tennessee in 2004. Furthermore, international growth provided expansion in Canada (2006), United Kingdom (2007) and Australia (2014).

The first book order in 1995 totaled just over 1,700. Today, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sends more than one million books per month to children around the world inspiring them to Dream More, Learn More, Care More and Be More.

How It Works

Each month, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library mails a high quality, age appropriate book to all registered children, addressed to them, at no cost to the child’s family. Countless parents have shared how excited their child is when their new book arrives each month. Many groups and individuals work hard behind the scenes to make that special moment possible for each child.

The Imagination Library provides the infrastructure of the core program including managing the secure central database for the Book Order System and coordinating book selections and wholesale purchasing. It also incurs the cost of the program’s administrative expenses and coordinates the monthly mailings.

Local Affiliates/Partners

The Imagination Library partners with Local Affiliates and Partners who help bring the program to cities, towns and communities around the world. Local Affiliates can be businesses, school districts, small or large organizations, or simply individuals who share in the mission and purpose of the Imagination Library.

Local Affiliates are responsible for enrolling children who live within the geographical area they offered the program in. They promote their local programs online and at events. While the Imagination Library negotiates wholesale pricing for the books, the Local Affiliates and Partners are responsible for securing funds to cover that cost. Books are 100% free to enrolled children because their Local Affiliate has secured funds to cover the cost of the books and the shipping fees.

Learn more about Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library here.

The Venture Mindset is a new book that explains the extraordinary ability that venture capitalists have to spot opportunities.

VCs know how to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. 

Their unique mindset has made venture capital the force behind world-changing companies such as Amazon, Google, Moderna, SpaceX, and Zoom.

Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev has devoted two decades to studying VCs' counterintuitive approaches to decision-making and the reasons behind the successes and failures of corporate innovations. Alex Dang has witnessed up close how VCs' thinking and mechanisms can create successful businesses at companies like Amazon and McKinsey.

Combining the authors' insight and extensive experience, their new book, The Venture Mindset, presents nine distinct principles that will help you make better decisions, transform your business, and achieve remarkable results, no matter your industry.

In The Venture Mindset, you'll learn:

• One question VCs ask that will change the way you evaluate opportunities
• Why you should encourage dissent and be wary of consensus
• The number one killer of innovation in traditional corporate environments
• Why it's crucial to learn when to 'pull the plug' on initiatives
• Why failure is not just an option, but a necessity

Packed with entertaining stories and scientific precision, The Venture Mindset is a must-read for anyone who wants to be better equipped for the era of uncertainty when industry, company, and career can be disrupted overnight. 

The Venture Mindset will teach you more than how to simply survive. It'll teach you how to win big.

Learn more and order the new book now to receive great launch bonuses!

Order on Amazon.com here.

The Unsold Mindset - coming 2/21/23

USC Professors Write New Book About the Surprising Mindset of Great Sellers

In their new book, The Unsold Mindset: Redefining What it Means to Sell, Colin Coggins & Garrett Brown explore why great sellers aren’t great because of what they do, but because of what they think.

Through deep research and interviews with sellers from all walks of life (from entrepreneurs and CEOs to chefs, army generals, lawyers, artists…even Snoop Dogg!), they break down the mindset of the greatest sellers on the planet – with and without “sales” in their title – and show why they’re the opposite of who most people think they are.

Colin and Garrett are longtime sales leaders and practitioners who built and led the sales team for enterprise software startup Bitium from its inception until it was acquired by Google in 2017. After the acquisition, they worked with startups and founders to share the lessons they learned as successful startup executives. Garrett, an Orange County resident, was an active member of Tech Coast Angels OC, and still serves as an investor and advisor to several local companies.

Nearly five years ago, they created the curriculum for their class, Sales Mindset for Entrepreneurs, which has quickly become one of the most popular courses at USC’s Marshall School of Business. They are highly sought-after keynote speakers, and co-founded their company, Agency18, in an effort to help mission-driven companies transition to a revenue-forward mindset without sacrificing why the company was created to begin with.

The Unsold Mindset will be published by HarperCollins on February 21 and is now available for preorder.

Endorsed by Adam Grant, Dan Pink, and Robert Cialdini, it will have an impact on anyone who realizes they sell every day, whether selling themselves, their ideas, or a product.

Please support Colin & Garrett on their mission to change the way the world thinks about SALES by changing the way salespeople think about themselves.

For more information, and to purchase copies for yourself or your team (valuable presale bonuses available), visit www.colinandgarrett.com/presales.

SOURCE: The Unsold Mindset

UCI Professor Neil Sahota has published his first book, a guide to unlocking the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help grow your business.  

From McGraw-Hill; May 24, 2019:

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) is bettering the human condition. It can review a patient's medical tests and instantly produce an accurate diagnosis; serve as "eyes" for the blind and vision-impaired; provide expert legal advice in seconds; act as an ever-energetic personal consiglieri, handling everything from booking theater tickets to cooking meals based on voice commands; help avoid biases in decision-making; accurately predict stock market activity based on the sociopolitical zeitgeist, and more. 

You need to know how to navigate and leverage A.I. in practical terms, so you can “Uber” yourself or your company before you get Kodaked—in short, disrupt yourself (and reap the benefits) so you are not disrupted by a competitor.

In their new book OWN THE A.I. REVOLUTION: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition (McGraw-Hill; May 24, 2019; hardcover $30.00), Neil Sahota and Michael Ashley demystify A.I., providing a future-forward look at the multitude of business opportunities it will offer, as well as the risks. It is a definitive primer on everything you need to
be a leader in this revolution.

Sahota, IBM Master Inventor and former World Wide Business Development Leader (Watson Group), and the A.I. expert who helped create the A.I. ecosystem that famously won Jeopardy, has been an A.I. subject matter expert to the United Nations for the past four years and helped co-found their A.I. for Good initiative. This spring, he is speaking at the UN’s “A.I. for Good Global Summit” in Geneva, and China’s Future Sci-Tech City and Alibaba hosted him in A.I. Town in March to share some of OWN THE A.I. REVOLUTION’s important themes.

In addition to providing an in-depth tutorial on A.I., the authors focus on nuts-and-bolts business practicalities: how to find off-the-shelf A.I. solutions, assemble the best team, perform a cost/benefit analysis of implementing it into business strategies, train/test the A.I., and ensure you remain current and ahead of the curve.

Among the topics the new book discusses are:

• The A.I. Consiglieri - Imagine a right-hand assistant that is super smart and predictive, an outsourced artificial mind that can help create new ideas, predict market trends, and negotiate on your behalf.
• Business Intelligence - Want to know the price of oil futures in Q4? How about the success of an upcoming IPO? Turn to artificial intelligence for answers. Informed by data, it can predict what is likely to happen, no matter the industry.
• Want to Know Your Ideal Partner? Ask a Robot - Privy to our personal data, A.I.-based applications can make better predictions as to whom we should date and marry than even our family, closest friends, and yes, ourselves.
• Smart Marketing - A.I. marketing can predict who is going to buy, what they’re going to buy, when they’re going to buy, and how much they’re going to buy better than any person or focus group.
• Travel (Intelligent) Agent - Top resort and hospitality organizations have seized on A.I. to offer more customized, fulfilling customer experiences, beginning with understanding and predicting users’ behavior when it comes to travel, accommodation, entertainment, dining, and night life.
• Agro A.I. - Today’s farmers use A.I. to consider soil content, develop market prognostications, and offer long-range weather forecasts to determine what crops to plant and when. A.I. can also use more complex developments, like geopolitical trends, to offer a Butterfly Effect view of what’s coming next.
• 10th Man A.I. - An antidote to detrimental organization-wide group think, named for the policy that if ten people hypothetically agreed to a particular course of action, it is the sworn duty of the tenth person to disagree. Group think’s danger lies in conformity and its ability to muck up the facts. 10th Man A.I. is a potent procedure to counter group think and avoid biases in decision-making.

OWN THE A.I. REVOLUTION also features exclusive interviews with today's cutting-edge experts and thought leaders in diverse industries including Peter Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE; New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer-Prize nominee Steven Kotler; David Hanson, founder and chairman of Hanson Robotics; founder and CEO of blockchain-based AI marketplace SingularityNET, Ben Goertzel; serial entrepreneur and futurist Stephen Ibaraki, chairman of REDDS Capital; Michael Gerber, called by Inc. Magazine the World’s #1 Small Business Guru, and one of the five all-time bestselling authors on business; renowned civil litigator Tom Girardi of Girardi Keese, regarded as one of the nation’s top trial lawyers; and others on the myriad ways the business world is transforming through A.I.

Compelling, thought provoking, and easy to follow, OWN THE A.I. REVOLUTION is a must-read for individuals who want to know how A.I. will shape our futures and jobs, and how to harness the potential of this transformative technology.

###

About the Authors

Neil Sahota is a sought-after business consultant, pioneer in business-applied A.I., and has been an A.I. subject matter expert for the United Nations for the past four years. He helped co- found the UN’s A.I. for Good initiative. A TED speaker and UC Irvine professor, as an IBM Master Inventor and former World Wide Business Development Leader (Watson Group), he helped create the AI system that famously won Jeopardy.
 
Michael Ashley is a former Disney screenwriting consultant and coauthor of several bestsellers. A guest contributor to Forbes on issues concerning A.I. and tech, Michael is a regular keynote speaker and radio talk show guest on cultural matters and thought leadership.

OWN THE A.I. REVOLUTION: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition
By Neil Sahota and Michael Ashley

Contact:

Hilsinger-Mendelson / 212-725-7707
Sandi Mendelson; smendelson@hmieast.com
David Kass; dkass@hmieast.com