Business Problem Solving

Whether you run your own business or work for someone else, you’ve probably got a lot on your plate. Along with the portion of your work that you truly feel like doing comes a generous helping of things you’d rather not do. As consultants, Steve Levinson and Chris Cooper have seen countless clients struggle - and often fail - to do the many success-producing things they know they should do but don’t feel like doing. The Power to Get Things Done will teach you how to consistently turn your good intentions into action so that you can be as successful as possible.

Decades of research demonstrates that we often have an over-inflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe. Perfectly Confident is the first book to bring together the best psychological and economic studies to explain exactly what confidence is, when it can be helpful, and when it can be destructive in our lives.

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? You're probably thinking Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford - the usual suspects.

This book isn't about them. It's about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they're not in Silicon Valley. They're in the street markets of Sao Paulo and Guangzhou, and the rubbish dumps of Lagos. They are pirates, slum dwellers, computer hackers, dissidents, and inner city gang members.

Today, companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be agile. Lack of an overarching theory about how to expand the "Agile Manifesto" has led to many fragmented attempts to apply Agile company-wide. Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes.

No one wins at everything they try. But any setback, whether professional or personal, can become a step forward with the right tools and mind-set to turn loss into a gain. Drawing on nearly 50 years of leadership experience, Maxwell provides a roadmap for winning by examining the 11 elements that constitute the "DNA" of people who succeed in the face of problems, failure, and losses. Learning is not easy during down times. It takes discipline to do the right thing when something goes wrong.

Professor Sir David Omand, formerly both a director of GCHQ and the UK's Security and Intelligence Coordinator, shows how to manage crises in myriad forms, using methodologies employed by the British intelligence agencies. Through gripping examples from Professor Omand's storied career, this book will equip you with military intelligence techniques such as situational awareness and adaptive resilience that can be used in any crisis, from the professional to the personal.

Are you a Simplifier or a Multiplier? Every great entrepreneur is primarily one or the other, and identifying which you are adds deeper insight and meaning to the way you instinctively create value. Once you know who you are, you can find the perfect collaborator: your opposite. Simplier-Multiplier collaborations lead to unprecedented breakthroughs and results, and give you the freedom to focus exclusively on what you do best.

Our personal experience is key to who we are and what we do. We judge others by their experience and are judged by ours. Society venerates experience. From doctors to teachers to managers to presidents, the more experience the better. It's not surprising then, that we often fall back on experience when making decisions, an easy way to make judgements about the future, a constant teacher that provides clear lessons. Yet, this intuitive reliance on experience is misplaced.

Pig Wrestling is a simple story with a powerful message. Whenever we find ourselves wrestling with a sticky situation, we need to stop struggling and instead take the time to clean our thinking. Through a short story about a young manager who is struggling to create the change that he needs, the book introduces the principles of ‘Problem Cleaning’ in a truly memorable way. Based on the authors’ work with the world’s elite sports and business performers, Pig Wrestling gives us the tools to create change whenever and wherever we need it.

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown in a blender. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do? If you want to work at Google, or any of America's best companies, you need to have an answer to this and other puzzling questions. Are You Smart Enough to Work at Google? covers the importance of creative thinking, ways to get a leg up on the competition, what your Facebook page says about you, and much more.

Discover the practical, fail-proof tools that will help you to fine-tune your leadership skills, solidify respect among your workforce, and ensure your company's lasting success.

Though technology has evolved at hyper-speed over the past 100 years, management styles have mostly stayed the same. The higher-ups make the decisions, and the employees grind it out, often without knowing the endgame. In 1983, Jack Stack created a new game: the great game of business. Get in the Game further explains the rules of this game: To win, you must get everyone, at all levels of the business, as informed, involved, and engaged as the owner.

Social innovation and entrepreneurship are rising forces in the world. As stakeholder capitalism takes root, and as the extent of systemic challenges becomes clear - from climate change to income inequality to food security to health care and beyond - more and more of the best and brightest will hear the calling to become innovators and entrepreneurs who develop and deploy solutions to the world's thorniest problems.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

Did you know that 93 percent of CEOs agree that this skill is more important than your college degree? Amazon's market cap is 1.7 trillion dollars. And it all started when Jeff Bezos used this skill to see a market inefficiency back in the day, before anyone else. Having this skill in your back pocket is like shortcutting Malcom Gladwell's 10,000 hours rule to learning something (who's got time for that?). So, what is it? Nothing complex or fancy. It's critical thinking. This audiobook is dedicated to imparting to you the maxims of how to think critically.

Move is your guide to mobilizing your whole organization to take your business forward. Whatever your needed transformation may be - a new initiative, a new market, a new product, your fresh strategy is up against a powerful foe - an organization's tendency to stay very busy and completely engaged what it's already doing. Author Patty Azzarello draws on over 25 years of international business management experience to identify the chronic challenges that keep organizations from decisively executing strategy, and to give you a practical game plan for breaking through.

In The Slow Fix, best-selling author Carl Honoré delivers an exhilarating model for effective problem-solving, and provides brilliant insights on how you can solve problems, work smarter, and live better. Honoré decodes how we approach problems and paves the way to better decision-making and generating long-term solutions to life’s inevitable challenges.

All the War They Want presents counterintuitive problem-solving techniques, using as its case in point one of the most existential threats to our national security and American way of life: cyber warfare. Informed by Jeffrey Engle’s experience as a member of the U.S. military’s elite special ops community, his Brazilian jiujitsu training, and his leadership of a premier cyber defense company, All the War They Want offers an alternative perspective on overcoming tough leadership challenges—a perspective previously available only to those bearing the scars of a lifetime at war.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.