Leadership Research

With so many choices available to them today's customers are smarter and more demanding than ever before, putting repeat business at risk. In order to keep them coming back, you can't just give them good, or even great, customer service...you have to knock their socks off!

It's Monday. Time to hit the pause button on your personality and get ready for the next meeting because, for the next five days, we'll be speaking the language of business. And, from bloated jargon and monotonous memos to syrupy slogans and deadly dull presentations, the official language of business is bull. The second we get to work, we join the masses who trade the wit and warmth of their voices for a corporate stamp of approval and the comfort of conformity.

The Buyer-Centric Operating System isn't just another business book—it's a wake-up call for leaders who want to revolutionize their growth strategy by placing their buyers at the core of every decision. Forget outdated personas, funnel thinking, and superficial metrics. Andy Halko challenges traditional business frameworks, offering a radical approach to truly understanding, aligning with, and delighting your buyer. Through sharp insights, practical frameworks, and relatable experiences, this book walks you through transforming your organization into one that thrives on customer obsession.

Companies that are thriving, not just surviving, are much more than a set of ruthlessly efficient and mechanistic processes. They are a social system operated by people for people. The quality of relationships, both inside and outside the organization, is a far more important driver of sustainable success or failure than the quality of its control systems. The head is important, but it is the heart that matters most.

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.

CEO and founder of Moves the Needle and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur Brant Cooper teaches leaders how to ensure their organizations are resilient, agile, and dynamic enough to endure long-term, weathering the storms of disruption and uncertainty. One thing in...

Are Church Leaders Missing the Generational Handoff? There's Still Hope. Are we building institutions that will meaningfully serve the next generation of believers and their leaders? How does a church thrive in a culture where we have to earn credibility? How do we create a sense of belonging to...

Finally, a paradigm on leadership, transforming colleges, teaching, teams, business, sports and organizations based on research from the very best leaders and their qualities of momentum and focus as demonstrated from the research rather than whims, opinions, or influencers. Talent alone does not win championships but the research in this work shows thoughts, words, actions, habits and unified momentum does. Key leaders in the research include Jesus of Nazareth and John Wooden of UCLA.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are in the midst of a massive media revolution. For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices. The massive increase in media "noise" created by these consumers and devices creates an entirely new situation that makes conventional marketing models obsolete. And yet countless companies and marketing organizations continue to rely on traditional models, assuming that their "campaigns" will sway customers. They couldn't be more wrong.

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?

Think how commonplace it is now for people to ask Siri for the weather forecast, deploy Roomba to clean their homes, or summon Alexa to turn on the lights. The "smart home" market will reach well over $100 billion in the next five years on the promise of products that are truly integrated with our cooking, cleaning, entertainment, security, and hygiene habits. But the reality is, these first-generation "smart" products aren't very smart - yet. We're clearly seeing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of capability and how such products can enhance our lives.

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who now trains some of the world's biggest companies and consulting firms, argues that the CCO would keep a finger on the pulse of contemporary cultural trends, from sneakers to slow food to preppies, while developing a systematic understanding of the deep waves of culture in America and the world. The CCOs professionalism would allow the corporation to see coming changes, even when they only exist as the weakest of signals.

Internet Reputation Management for Businesses is a new book by Guillermo "William" Rivas, co-founder of the first company to offer reputation management to businesses. The book cuts through the clutter and hype of reputation management and helps businesses understand the keys to a successful reputation-management campaign for a healthy social media presence online. This book on Internet reputation management looks into the passion and rewards of a healthy online image.

For years, marketers have held on to unwavering beliefs that have dictated how they market to their consumers. But the hard truth is that the changes we see in marketing and business are based on one undeniable factor - the size of the generations we are selling to. As each generation ages, what they buy and how much they buy will change.