Business Organization

The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving—they show you how it’s really done.

Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don identified 16 habits that drive high-performing teams. Building on stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization.

The Wisdom of Teams is the definitive work on how to create high-performance teams in any organization. Having sold nearly a half million copies and been translated into more than 15 languages, the authors' clarion call that teams should be the basic unit of organization for most businesses has permanently shaped the way companies reach the highest levels of performance. Wisdom lies in recognizing a team's unique potential to deliver results and in understanding its many benefits.

If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.

Every leader and team can use Building Strategic Organizations to deepen their understanding of essential strategy topics. You can also use these five tools to quickly develop a robust strategic plan that aligns your on-the-ground work with your strategy, priorities, and vision. Build the strategic capacity and employee engagement of your entire workforce by making sure they know why they come to work, what is most important, and what progress is being made.

Incremental improvement is no longer sufficient in helping organizations navigate the complexity, uncertainty, and volatility of today's world. In Change, authors John P. Kotter, Vanessa Akhtar, and Gaurav Gupta explore how to create non-linear, dramatic change in your organization. You'll discover the emerging science of change that teaches us about how to build organizations - from businesses to governments - that change and adapt rapidly.

In his new audiobook, The Heart-Led Leader, Spaulding turns his focus to ourselves - to who we are. Authentic leaders, Spaulding says, live and lead from the heart. The values and principles that guide our lives and shape our ability to lead others is far more important than our titles or our ability to crunch numbers or the impressive degrees we display on our walls. To effect true transformational change, heart-led leaders draw on the qualities of humility, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, and love.

Harry Kraemer showed how self-reflection, balance, true self-confidence, and genuine humility are the traits of today's most effective leaders. In Becoming the Best, his highly anticipated follow-up, Kraemer reveals how, in practical terms, anyone can apply these principles to become a values-based leader and to help create values-based organizations. Drawing on his own experiences as the former CEO and chairman of Baxter International, as well as those of other notable leaders and organizations, Kraemer lays out a pathway for understanding the principles and putting them into practice.

Cross-functional Work: Getting Out of Our Siloes. Whether we are in a formal matrix structure, a matrix role or work through a web of people to get things done, today’s work requires us to work side to side, across the organization. For our own careers and for the success of the organization, we can’t remain in the comfortable confines of our functional, geographical or product siloes. The complex solutions and decisions that move businesses forward are found in the lateral work—with partners scattered across the organization and around the globe.

Many organizations are facing the uphill battle of modernizing their legacy IT infrastructure. Mirco Hering, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, lays out a road map to success for IT managers and tells them how to create the right ecosystem, how to empower people to bring their best to work every day, how to put the right technology in the driver's seat to propel their organization to success, and addresses the different challenges that legacy organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments.

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.

This audiobook is for anyone, ranging from senior leaders to the front line, charged with leading continuous improvement efforts for their organization. Regardless of the improvement program or tools your organization chooses, it is a must-listen for successful implementation, sustainability, and growth. We describe our learnings from decades of field work, and why improvement initiatives in some organizations do extremely well, but in others struggle and die out. Discover what is most necessary to foster and sustain a culture that is nimble, able to continually improve and innovate.

Managing Brilliant Jerks provides resources to help you work more effectively with difficult leaders. As you listen, you’ll find detailed information on the flow of coaching sessions, sample correspondence to use with key stakeholders, and questions that encourage you to reflect on the issues presented in each chapter. The story of Peter will clarify for you the complex processes at work in the mind of an abrasive leader—and empower you to forge a productive and cooperative relationship with the brilliant jerks you encounter.

How to stop spending money impulsively, pay off debt fast, and empower yourself and the world!

Daniel Siegel, bestselling author and one of the leading researchers on the neuroscience of mindfulness, talks about creating adaptive, resilient organizations.

Corporate culture is ground zero for your organization. If left to chance, corporate culture will fall to the lowest common denominator or the loudest voice, resulting in inconsistency at best and volatility at worst. Scaling your company means scaling your culture first. You need a clear playbook with actionable steps to foster alignment and a results-driven team of passionate stakeholders. In Scaling Culture, Ron Lovett provides you with the key components you need to create a successful organization that lasts.

It's time to get intentional about your organizational culture, to shape it yourself and make it strong. This book shows you how, with a proven framework and deeply practical advice for doing the work. By combining design-thinking principles with inclusive-leadership best practices, Culture Design teaches you how to shape a culture that is resilient, inclusive, powerful, and effective.

This is the first book to offer detailed guidance on how scenarios can be used to help organizations make their toughest decisions in a world of ever-escalating crisis and opportunity. To reap the full benefits of scenarios, you have to be able to apply them in the real world. This groundbreaking audiobook goes beyond the theoretical to clearly explain different ways scenarios can be used in business decision-making - from strategic planning and financial modeling to crisis response.

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.

Do you wonder why your organization struggles with morale? Perhaps it's time to dive into the dark arts of destructive leadership! In this unapologetically satirical audiobook, leadership expert John T. Gordon humorously uncovers the toxic practices that can turn a thriving workplace into a nightmare. With tongue-in-cheek "how-to" guides and cringe-worthy scenarios, this audiobook explores leadership missteps that squash motivation, halt innovation, and send talent running.