Business Performance

James King draws on his 15 years of experience as a trusted advisor to some of the world's most elite and exclusive organizations, combined with cutting-edge scientific research, to reveal the foundational principles that are proven to drive elite performance. Accelerating Excellence will revolutionize the way you perceive excellence, potential, and talent, crushing some of the most entrenched assumptions along the way. You will emerge inspired about the possibility that exists before you, enriched with purpose, structure, and direction.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Great companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent: The more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers. But companies that have used Brad Smart’s Topgrading system over the past two decades have boosted their hiring success rates dramatically - sometimes even to 90%.

Most people associate performance management with the annual review, which is universally dreaded by employees, management, and HR professionals alike. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives and stifles healthy career conversations. It's never been shown to motivate anyone to do anything but try to avoid it, but nobody feels like they have any alternative. Tamra Chandler has one - and it works.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

A humorous yet practical five-step guide to ridding ourselves - and our companies - of the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that plague every office.

The age of the distributed team is upon us. Teams can now operate and collaborate from locations other than a central office, and events surrounding the 2020 COVID pandemic have thrown its practicality into sharp relief. Managing a team whose members are distributed across several locations requires a different mindset and will remain a must-have for all areas of business from this point forward. Building and Managing High-Performance Distributed Teams explains what the distributed teams concept means to the future of your company.

Legendary magician Penn Jillette was approaching his 60th birthday. Topping 330 pounds and saddled with a systolic blood pressure reading over 200, he knew he was at a dangerous crossroads: If he wanted to see his small children grow up, he needed to change. And then came Crazy Ray. A former NASA scientist and an unconventional, passionate innovator, Ray Cronise saved Jillette's life with his wild "potato diet". Outspoken, frank, and bitingly clever, Presto is an incisive, rollicking listen.

Researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings.

There's no shortage of advice out there on how to perform better, and better than others, at work. The problem is knowing which methods are actually proven to work-and how you should act on them to get the best results.

With Results, Not Reports, Peter Follows, CEO of Carpedia International, provides business leaders with a framework for lasting improvements in performance and profitability. Carpedia has a remarkable success rate in large-scale improvement programs, helping clients achieve their improvement goals over 90 percent of the time. In this book, Peter explains how to achieve sustainable improvement through the dynamic management of process, performance, and people, emphasizing that all three components have an interdependent relationship and that the key is to address them concurrently.

Great business leaders understand that acceptance of greater personal accountability and responsibility leads individuals, teams, and organizations back on the path to success. But with the evolving nature of 21st century business, the practical steps that go into creating a high performance culture of accountability have become more muddled than ever.

This user-friendly audiobook is filled with guidelines to help you write performance objectives, reviews, appraisals, and other performance documentation. The audiobook's tips and tools help you find language that's clear, descriptive, objective, and acceptable in today's workplace. Examples, questions, and activities will help you learn on your own, with your team, or with others in your organization.

Daniel Amen, MD, one of the world's foremost authorities on the brain, has news for you: your brain is involved in everything you do - learn to care for it properly, and you will be smarter, healthier, and happier in as little as 15 days!

Authors Bill Eckstrom and Sarah Wirth have spent a decade researching the activities, behaviors, and performance of leaders. After studying more than 100,000 coaching interactions in the workplace, primarily of sales teams, they have been able to determine how coaching affects team outcomes and growth. The authors share three critical performance drivers, along with the four high-growth activities that coaches must execute to build a team that is motivated to achieve at the highest levels.

Are your people excited to come to work? Are they passionate about your team's purpose? In Engaging the Hearts and Minds of All Your Employees, leadership expert Lee J. Colan reveals the necessary steps to inspire and engage everyone on your team. By fully engaging your employees, you'll ignite stellar team performance and customer service.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Your entire career depends on communication. When you can communicate effectively, you already have the foundation for being not just a good leader, but a great one…. A leader who inspires…. A leader who motivates…. A leader who is remembered. Whether you’re leading an entire organization, you’re an entry-level manager, or you’re considering beginning your journey into leadership, it all starts with communication.… And you’re about to uncover its secrets.

Business profitability and growth are primary factors in determining business strategy and goals. By utilizing and integrating the two power tools of risk management and key performance indicators you can position your organization to move toward a proactive management style that supports these goals. This book provides practical guidance on how your company can incorporate this approach without utilizing large dollar expenditure for consulting fees and/or internal resources.

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.