Business Organization

Everyone, regardless of their background and training, can improve their storytelling abilities. But what is a story? How can you tell it in a way that delights and informs your listeners? Take a journey into the keys to great storytelling with two of the country’s top experts on story presentation and speech writing.

With this indispensable guide, you'll cultivate a values-driven approach to building a culture of sustained authentic inclusion where everyone can thrive; learn how to improve the interview process to avoid missing game-changing talent; develop a hybrid office protocol that works for everyone and a support infrastructure that aligns with universal design principles; uncover and eliminate the destructive influence of unconscious cognitive biases; understand unique problem-solving abilities such as lateral thinking, visual-spatial thinking, multisensory thinking, and much more.

The Fieldbook is an intensely pragmatic guide. It shows how to create an organization of learners where memories are brought to life, where collaboration is the lifeblood of every endeavor, and where the tough questions are fearlessly asked. The stories here show that companies, businesses, schools, agencies, and even communities can undo their “learning issues” and achieve superior performance. If ever a work gave meaning to the phrase hands-on, this is it.

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a dirty word. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it? The truth is that our teams and organizations require conflict to get things done. But we avoid conflict and build up conflict debt by deferring and dodging the difficult decisions. Our organizations are paying the price - becoming less productive, less innovative, and less competitive.

The future of your nonprofit rests on successful fundraising: discover how to do it right. Being part of a nonprofit is one of the most inspiring and passionate lines of work someone can do. But as passionate as you are and as hard as you work, your nonprofit won’t be able to achieve its goals without enough funding. This is a struggle many nonprofits experience, and they end up wasting a lot of energy on ineffective strategies that just don’t seem to work. You need to understand the best practices out there that will help your organization access the funds it needs to keep going.

Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles, co-authors of the New York Times business best seller Raving Fans, are back with Gung Ho! Here is an invaluable management tool that outlines foolproof ways to increase productivity by fostering excellent morale in the workplace. It is a must-read for everyone who wants to stay on top in today's ultra-competitive business world.

It's no secret that continuous innovation is the key to seizing and maintaining the competitive edge in today's increasingly challenging business environment. Unfortunately, the process for achieving this holy grail of business has been a mystery - until now. Built to Innovate delivers a proven system for building relentless innovation into your company's DNA.

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring. Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

Emmy Award-winning speaker Clint Pulver - aka the Undercover Millennial - shares insights gleaned from more than 10,000 undercover interviews with employees across the country, revealing the best methods for identifying talent, building a sense of ownership, and developing a successful workplace culture that employees will love. You’ll also learn the number one driver of employee turnover (spoiler: it has everything to do with you!), what you can do to stop an exodus, and how to build a team that really works.

In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired by his then-employer, the World Bank. The White Man's Burden is his widely anticipated counterpunch - a brilliant and blistering indictment of the West's economic policies for the world's poor.

Scale collaboration, not process. If you're trying to use agile and lean at the program level, you've heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone's collaboration. With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program level people can decide how to apply agile and lean to their work.

The joy and vigor coming from a collective strength, intelligence, and skill in the community of leaders not only brings greater potency but better yields for your ministry. What would it be like to see this kind of healthy leadership reproduced into the second, third, and fourth generation, on multiple strands?

Artificial intelligence, or AI, can recognize a pattern from any set of data it is given, which is what makes it such an extraordinarily powerful tool. But because not all patterns are authentic or reliable, AI’s pattern-finding superpower can lead to spurious patterns. Hence the conundrum at the heart of AI: its greatest strength can also be its greatest weakness. Targeting the businessperson who needs to know how to use AI profitably and responsibly, Caleb Briggs and Rex Briggs offer a foundational understanding of AI that is easy to grasp yet thorough enough to be used effectively.

From fifty years working with leaders globally, I state with full confidence that leadership has never been more difficult. The perfect storm is here, created by the coalescence of climate and human-created catastrophes. As leaders dedicated to serving the causes and people we treasure, confronted by this unrelenting tsunami, what are we to do?

In this leadership book, renowned industry analyst Josh Bersin introduces a new way to think about organizational design, employee engagement, and employee development. Distilled from decades of research and management theory into seven practical yet profound management principles, Bersin outlines how business leaders can create enduring companies that thrive with improved customer satisfaction, employee retention, and business agility.

In The Forgotten Foundations of Fundraising, Jeremy Beer and Jeffrey Cain, cofounders of American Philanthropic, a leading consulting firm for nonprofit organizations, offer practical lessons and unconventional wisdom for both nonprofit leaders and novices in the art and science of raising money. Drawing upon a wealth of experience, deploying an army of anecdotes, and using eye-opening American Philanthropic survey data, the authors provide a brisk, irreverent, and supremely useful introduction to fundraising for charities and nonprofits.

Digital transformation has divided us all into two camps: the disruptor and the disrupted. The Anticipatory Organization gives you the tools you need to see disruption before it happens, allowing you to turn change into advantage. In The Anticipatory Organization, Burrus shows us that the future is far more certain than we realize, and finding certainty in an uncertain world provides a big advantage for those who know how and where to look for it.

Regarded as one of the most important sociological and business commentaries of modern times, The Organization Man developed the first thorough description of the impact of mass organization on American society.

That's Not How We Do It Here! is a business parable about a clan of meerkats who live in the Kalahari. Well-organised and efficient, the colony enjoys many years of successful growth until it suddenly comes under threat from a new form of predator and is forced to rethink its organizational structure. John Kotter uses this charming parable to explore why organizations often struggle no matter their past success and why they fall.