Business Problem Solving

Have you ever come up with an idea for a new product or service, but didn't take any action because you thought it would be too risky? Or at work, have you had what you thought could be a big idea for your company - perhaps changing the way you develop or distribute a product, provide customer service, or hire and train your employees? If you have, but you haven't known how to take the next step, you need to understand what the authors call the innovator's method.

Based on his work at some of the world's largest companies, including Ford, Adidas, and Chanel, Christian Madsbjerg's Sensemaking is a provocative stand against the tyranny of big data and scientism, and an urgent, overdue defense of human intelligence. Christian Madsbjerg argues that our fixation with data often masks stunning deficiencies, and the risks for humankind are enormous. Blind devotion to number crunching imperils our businesses, our educations, our governments, and our life savings.

The Ponzo Trap offers a deep dive into the fascinating world of human perception and decision-making. Inspired by the well-known visual illusion, the book uses the Ponzo metaphor to explore how our minds often misinterpret the world around us—leading to flawed judgments, unconscious biases, and distorted thinking.

With rapid technological innovation leading the charge, today's world is transforming itself at an extraordinary and unprecedented pace. As jobs become more multifaceted, as information streams multiply, and as myriad devices place increasing demands on our attention, we are confronted every day with a plethora of new challenges. Fortunately, as Leonard Mlodinow shows, the human brain is uniquely engineered to adapt.

Most new products fail. So do most small businesses. And most of us, if we are honest, have experienced a major setback in our personal or professional lives. So what determines who will bounce back and follow up with a home run? If you want to succeed in business and in life, Megan McArdle argues in this hugely thought-provoking book, you have to learn how to harness the power of failure. McArdle has been one of our most popular business bloggers for more than a decade, covering the rise and fall of some the world' s top companies and challenging us to think differently about how we live, learn, and work.

Sebastian Bailey and Octavius Black, founders of Mind Gym, help you change your mental default settings through a series of workouts; that have been tested and experienced by more than one million people from around the world and from companies such as Google, NBCUniversal, Shell, Pfizer, and PepsiCo. This hands-on guide presents a fitness program for the mind that tackles the most common challenges at work and home.

Tired of making decisions that seem to only work against you? It starts with understanding your brain and the decision-making process. Cognitive biases and heuristics have developed over thousands of years of evolution and can lead to serious damages in multiple areas of life if you don’t recognize them and stop them dead in their tracks. How Our Brains Betray Us has everything you need to know with examples, tools, and strategies to identify the most powerful cognitive biases that impair all types of decisions, how to avoid them and also use them to your advantage.

Workplace stress is not the weakness of individuals; it's caused by systemic problems. Armed with the insights in this book, you can identify, analyze, and systematically reduce the factors that lead to poor health, low productivity, and personal burnout. This book gives you a framework for understanding stress, and a vocabulary to make it easier to discuss it among colleagues. Stress can be fixed; find out how.

When faced with new challenges, it’s easy to feel our solutions need to be equally unprecedented. We think we need a revolution. But what if this is a big mistake? In Evolutionary Ideas, Sam Tatam shows how behavioral science and evolutionary psychology can help us solve tomorrow’s challenges, not by divining something the world has never seen, but by borrowing from yesterday’s solutions–often in the most unexpected ways.

From the best-selling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new edition of Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process - including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world.

You want to pursue meaningful work and succeed professionally, and you know that personal pursuits matter and fuel your happiness, too. But in today's world, the pressure to do it all can leave you stretched thin and questioning everything—your direction, your choices, and even your ambitions themselves. Time-management techniques and productivity hacks aren’t enough. The endless search for balance feels like chasing a mirage.

Most people hate and fear uncertainty. It causes such stress and anxiety that we often choose certain surrender over doubt, becoming passive, dependent, addicted—and more anxious than ever. Doubling down on the certainties promised by technology and micro-management only makes things worse, leaving no opportunity for innovation, adaptation or invention. Artists live with uncertainty constantly—but instead of waiting for the future, they run towards making it, with agency and freedom. What can we learn from them, about facing into a future that grows more uncertain daily?

How can we learn to deal with uncertainty at work? The answer is to learn from the adaptive behaviors of entrepreneurs. Play, the authors show, is a crucial component of this. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and curiosity, while it also challenges established practices and orthodoxies. It facilitates change in people and organizations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators, this audiobook explains why we should incorporate play into work, what play looks like, and how to encourage playfulness in individuals and organizations.

International risk expert David Ropeik takes an in-depth look at our perceptions of risk and explains the hidden factors that make us unnecessarily afraid of relatively small threats and not afraid enough of some really big ones. This audiobook is a comprehensive, accessible, and entertaining mixture of what's been discovered about how and why we fear—too much or too little. It brings into focus the danger of The Perception Gap: when our fears don’t match the facts, and we make choices that create additional risks.

Belonging brings out the best in everyone. Whether you’re a parent, teacher, community organizer, or leader of any sort, your group is unlikely to thrive if the individuals don’t feel welcomed, included, and valued for who they are. The good news is that you can use design to create feelings of inclusion in your organization: rituals that bring people together, spaces that promote calm, roles that create a sense of responsibility, systems that make people feel respected, and more.

Master the art of thinking with Mental Models: An AI's Guide to 100 Thinking Tools Humans Overlook. This audiobook transforms complex concepts into actionable strategies, making life’s toughest decisions easier to tackle. Ever felt stuck in a problem, unsure how to navigate the noise? Or missed opportunities because you didn’t see all the angles? This audiobook is your shortcut to clarity and creativity.

A "brilliant, fun, and wise" (Cass R. Sunstein) tour of nine common business decision-making traps - and practical tools for avoiding them - from a professor of strategic thinking.

Are you tired of being manipulated by faulty logic and hidden biases? Do you want to sharpen your ability to think clearly and make sound decisions? What if you could spot hidden fallacies and challenge flawed arguments effortlessly? Whether you're navigating daily challenges, handling complex decisions, or just seeking to sharpen your mind, this book equips you with essential techniques that shape the way you think and see the world.

Author Nigel Cumberland distills all the wisdom and knowledge of a lifetime of starting and selling businesses and coaching hundreds of wealthy leaders into 100 short chapters of advice on building and retaining sustainable wealth. Every chapter features a habit, mindset, or technique that’s common to wealthy people and instructions for how to use them in your own life. 100 Things Millionaires Do unpacks the habits, tools, techniques, and mentality of self-made millionaires and shows you how to begin your own journey to a wealthy future.

You are a vessel in the sea of life. Whether you like it or not, whether you float or sink, stand still or move forward, you are always anchored or searching for an anchor. And it’s better to know your anchor points than to be anchored without knowing. If you think you are floating freely, think again. Do you know your anchor points?