Leadership Research

Series editor Andrew Leckey and guest editor Marshall Loeb have scoured the print media and have consulted with editors of major business and general-interest publications and with the deans of several schools of journalism in order to find the 30 best business stories from the past 12 months. Among the articles selected: Ken Auletta on Herb Allen's CEO retreat, from The New Yorker; Diane Brady on Martha Stewart, from Business Week; and Steve Silberman on creating a borderless global cyber-marketplace, from Wired.

Do you want to know exactly how to get the upper hand in conversations, debates, and negotiations? Do you desire the ability to persuade individuals as well as audiences? Persuasion often gets a bad rap; naysayers call it manipulative. However, persuasion is all around us. You are affected by it every day. Simple choices like the colors of a company logo influence the way you think. You may already practice persuasion without even realizing it.

Book coach Cathy Fyock doesn’t tell you how to create a Blog2Book - she shows you! If you’ve been writing weekly blog posts for a year, you likely have enough content for your own book. In this easy format, Cathy provides you a framework along with tips and tools to create your own book quickly!

Disruption - the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts - drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware. Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs.

Coal, iron ore, and oil were the key productive assets that fueled the Industrial Revolution. Today data is the vital raw material of the information economy. The explosive abundance of this digital asset, more than doubling every two years, is creating a new world of opportunity and challenge. Data-ism is about this next phase, in which vast, Internet-scale data sets are used for discovery and prediction in virtually every field. It is a journey across this emerging world with people, illuminating narrative examples, and insights.

The extraordinary breakthrough management program - heralded by GE, Motorola, and AlliedSignal - that is sweeping corporate America with its unprecedented ability to achieve superior financial results. Six Sigma is the most powerful breakthrough management tool ever devised, promising increased market share, cost reductions, and dramatic improvements in bottom-line profitability for companies of any size. The darling of Wall Street, it has become the mantra of Fortune 500 boardrooms around the world because it works.

In Demand, Adrian Slywotzky provides a radically new way to think about demand, with a big idea and a host of practical applications - not just for people in business but also for social activists, government leaders, non-profit managers, and other would-be innovators. To succeed in their various missions, all these groups need to master such ground-breaking concepts as the hassle map (and the secrets of fixing it); the curse of the incomplete product (and how to avoid it); why “very good” does not equal “magnetic”....

An organization's future success depends on their decision makers' ability to anticipate changes and disruptions in the marketplace. This book provides the information you need to anticipate the future, understand tomorrow's market dynamics, and make the necessary decisions to meet the future on your terms. Small Data, Big Disruptions lets you exploit the period between the moment you could know about emerging disruptions and the moment most everybody will know about it. It's the difference between being ahead of the curve and struggling to catch up.

With the explosion of social media, the competition for attention - and customers - is more intense than ever before. Standing out is not only more challenging than ever, it now has less of an impact on sustained growth. To be a lasting company, leader, or brand on a positive trajectory today, one must become iconic. Award-winning author and speaker Scott McKain examines what an iconic organization or leader is and helps you attain and retain that rare status. If your company has slipped in its standing, McKain teaches you how you can regain your position.

The Review Cycle is a disruptive new consumer behavior model developed by social innovator, Matt R. Vance. This four-phase model illustrates the cyclical consumer decision-making process, informed by online reviews. Such decisions include everything from what we buy and where we eat to what doctor we use and where we apply for jobs.

Von den einen geliebt, von den anderen gehasst - doch wie schafft man es, so erfolgreich wie Amazon zu sein? Kindle, Prime, Alexa - Amazon hat die Wirtschaftswelt wie kein zweites Unternehmen verändert. Wie ist es dem Netzgiganten gelungen, sich derart auf die Bedürfnisse seiner Kunden einzustellen, um alle anderen Konkurrenten zu überholen? Welche wesentlichen Bausteine der Unternehmenskultur führten zu diesem Erfolg, und was sind die 14 Leadership-Prinzipien von Amazon?

People don't always communicate well. It's a fact of life. But you don't have to be a helpless witness or participant in a conversation that steadily unravels into misunderstandings, confusion, and even hostility. You can take charge - and you can make a difference! Breakthrough Communication provides easy-to-implement strategies for virtually any business situation, whether it's one-on-one or within a group.

YouthNation is an indispensable brand road map to the youth-driven economy. Exploring the idea that youth is no longer an age - it's a commodity that's available to everyone - this book shows what it takes to stay connected, agile, authentic, and relevant in today's marketplace. Listeners will learn the ins and outs of the new consumer and the tools, methods, and techniques that ensure brand survival in the age of perpetual youth.

Good works are no longer optional. For many businesses, success comes in unexpected ways. Toms grew into a $600-million company by giving away 35 million pair of shoes. Patagonia's profits have climbed year after year even as it funnels heavy investments into sustainability. And it's not just millennials rewarding companies with causes. In every age group, people commit to brands that show good citizenship.

From bargains in the Big Apple to the bustling bazaars of Istanbul, from in-store to interactive and online to mobile, neuromarketing pioneer Dr. David Lewis goes behind the scenes of the "persuasion industry" to reveal the powerful tools, techniques, technologies, and psychologies seeking to stimulate us all to buy more - often without us consciously realizing it.

Demographics not only define who we are, where we live, and how our numbers change. For those who can read beyond the raw figures, they open up hidden business opportunities that lie ahead. What will happen when retiring Boomers free up jobs? How will Generation Y alter supermarkets? Which states will have the most dynamic workforces? Will American manufacturing rebound as Asia's population declines? Upside puts this powerful yet little-understood science to work finding answers.

You negotiate every day in everything you do: vacation time, work duties, even child care. Yet you probably have never had a course in how to negotiate effectively. Often, we are afraid of negotiating because we think it will strain or kill relationships. But negotiation doesn’t have to be a win-loss game. You can strike a deal good for everyone. The skill lies in negotiating in a way that relationships can be built, developed and maintained. This is the first book ever written on how to combine negotiation with psychology to get the outcome you want.

For many companies, large and small, customer data is a noisy mess. There are problems across the ecosystem from partners to page views and from KPIs to campaign tracking. But the biggest problem is not the technical data silos but the human ones. In The Age of Customer Equity, marketing expert with a passion for analytics Allison Hartsoe helps you cut through the noise and gives you the tools you need to humanize your customer data to connect to the right customers at the right time.

Business leaders are in charge. They are in charge of people, of budgets, of production lines. Most leaders also believe that they are in charge of their greatest resource - their own brain. But how true is that? The more we understand about how the brain works, the clearer it becomes that our brain often kicks in before we do.

In this hysterical, astute book, HR industry expert Jim Dunn explores how humor can improve our professional environments and personal development by exploring questions like: How is humor a superpower for fostering collaborative environments? Are funny employees more effective? How can laughter turn crisis into connection and opportunity? How can instituting a culture of levity shape team dynamics and improve job satisfaction?