Career Skills

A leadership book by former Navy SEAL and New York Times best-selling author Mark Divine, Staring Down the Wolf focuses on harnessing the principles of purpose and discipline in life to achieve success. What does it take to command a team of elite individuals? It requires a commitment to seven key principles: Courage, Trust, Respect, Growth, Excellence, Resiliency, and Alignment. All of these are present in an elite team which commits to them deeply in order to forge the character worthy of uncommon success.

As a White House speechwriter, Terry Szuplat helped craft hundreds of speeches for President Obama. But when it came to public speaking himself, Szuplat—like many people—was gripped by anxiety and preferred to stay in the shadows. When he was invited to give the first major speech of his life, he faced a choice: keep hiding from what scared him, or finally face his fears.

Being a manager can be an intimidating and challenging task. Managing involves teaching new skills to employees, helping land a new customer, accomplishing an important assignment, increasing performance, and much more. The process of management can be very challenging at times, but it can also bring you a sense of fulfillment that you never imagined possible.

Communication should be clear and concise, and we should get to the point quickly. The problem is we don’t always know how to do this. What does it mean to be concise? How can a complex topic be summarized in just a few lines? This award-winning book is a step-by-step guide for clear, concise communication in everyday work conversations. Being concise is not about trying to condense all the information into 60 seconds. It is about having clear intent, talking about one topic at a time, and focusing on solutions instead of dwelling on problems.

Negotiation is not a zero-sum game. It’s an essential skill for your career that can also improve your closest relationships and your everyday life. Still, people often shy away from it, feeling defeated before they’ve even started. In this groundbreaking new book on negotiation, Alexandra Carter - Columbia law professor and mediation expert who has helped students, business professionals, the United Nations, and more - offers a straightforward accessible approach anyone can use to ask for and receive more.

Every day there are moments when you must persuade, inform, and motivate others effectively. Each of those moments requires you, in some way, to play a role, to heighten the impact of your words, and to manage your emotions and nerves. Every interaction is a performance, whether you're speaking up in a meeting, pitching a client, or walking into a job interview.

Business is just like any sector or topic, with its own language, customs, codes, and terminologies. Different aspects of business can have their own distinctive terminology, which can also overlap. In 30 Days to a More Powerful Business Vocabulary, author Dan Strutzel presents over 500 words and short expressions from a variety of different business categories.

Take Command offers powerful tools and time-tested methods to help you live an intentional life by transforming how you approach your thoughts, emotions, relationships, and future. Filled with stories of everyday people and based on expert research and interviews with more than a hundred high-performing leaders, Take Command is a “must-read” (Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford and Boeing) that gives you the strategies you need to unlock your full potential and create the life you want.

In Joel's Schwartzberg's 10-plus years as a strategic communications trainer, the biggest obstacle he's come across - one that connects directly to nervousness, stammering, rambling, and epic fail - is that most speakers and writers don't have a point. They typically have just a title, a theme, a topic, an idea, an assertion, a catchphrase, or even something much less. This book shows you how to identify your point, leverage it, stick to it, and sell it and how to train others to identify and successfully make their own points.

Speak Easy is a framework to help anyone who is struggling with communication to learn the three A’s. They will learn how to be Articulate, Assertive, and Audacious when presenting their message and interacting with others. Eliminate hesitancy and build a voice full of power. In Speak Easy, you will learn: The traits that make up a confident communicator, how to use your thoughts, words, tonality, and body language effectively, strategies on how to develop an interesting personality, processes to create your own voice, ideas, and insights, and much more.

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell". All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions - it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.

The nation's premier communications expert shares his wisdom on how the words we choose can change the course of business, of politics, and of life in this country. In Words That Work, Luntz offers a behind-the-scenes look at how the tactical use of words and phrases affects what we buy, who we vote for, and even what we believe in. With chapters like "The 10 Rules of Successful Communication" and "The 21 Words and Phrases for the 21st Century", he examines how choosing the right words is essential.

Peter Cappelli confronts the myth of the skills gap and provides an actionable path forward to put people back to work. Even in a time of perilously high unemployment, companies contend that they cannot find the employees they need. Pointing to a skills gap, employers argue applicants are simply not qualified; schools aren't preparing students for jobs; the government isn't letting in enough high-skill immigrants; and even when the match is right, prospective employees won’t accept jobs at the wages offered.

More than a decade ago, The Gallup Organization combed through its database of more than one million employee and manager interviews to identify the elements most important in sustaining workplace excellence. These elements were revealed in the 1999 best-seller First, Break All the Rules. 12: The Elements of Great Managing is that management classic's long-awaited sequel.

Wealth? Fitness? Career success? How can we possibly place these above true and lasting well-being? Drawing from works of fiction and poetry, Western philosophy, Buddhist beliefs, scientific research, and personal experience, Ricard weaves an inspirational and forward-looking account of how we can begin to rethink our realities in a fast-moving modern world. With its revelatory lessons and exercises, Happiness is an eloquent and stimulating guide to a happier life.

The art of speaking can be systematically learned, and if you have the desire, discipline, and determination - not to mention one of the world's greatest presenters as your teacher - you too can become a persuasive and powerful speaker. Tracy reveals time-tested tricks of the trade you can use to present powerfully and speak persuasively, whether in an informal meeting or in front of a large group of people.

From the bestselling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new edition of Crucial Influence (previously published as Influencer). Drawing on cases studies of remarkable leaders and the research of renowned behavioral scientists, this guide explains why people do what they do and how leaders can influence behavior to drive results. It all comes down to a powerful yet simple model—the Six Sources of Influence®.

At the heart of dealing with difficult people is handling their—and your own—emotions. How do you stay calm in a tough conversation? How do you stay unruffled in the face of passive-aggressive comments? And how do you know if you're difficult to work with? This book explains the research behind our emotional response to awful colleagues and shows how to build the empathy and resilience to make those relationships more productive.

Award-winning professor, management consultant, and virtual communications expert Andrew Brodsky is here to tell you that, yes, that meeting could have been an email. And that email? Maybe it should have been a voice note (really!). And your camera—it’s okay to turn it off; sometimes it’s even better. If you’re crushed under the weight of your inbox or exhausted from back-to-back-to-back video calls, then Ping is here to help workers at all levels and of all stripes—remote, hybrid, and in person—who use communication technologies as part of their jobs.

Whether you are in advertising, marketing, management, on sales, or just curious about how to be more influential in everyday life, Yes! shows how making small, scientifically proven changes to your approach can have a dramatic effect on your persuasive powers.