Organizational Leadership

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

What really drives workplace equity and inclusion - beyond strategies and systems? The truth is, all historically excluded persons who have broken through to greater levels of professional belonging and achievement have succeeded not by policy and systems change alone, but because of leaders who chose to remove barriers, open doors, and guide them toward their goals. The bottom line? Someone made a way for them. Using case studies, data, and candid storytelling, Tara Jaye Frank outlines how leaders with power and position can clear the path to workplace equity.

Heather E. McGowan and Chris Shipley deliver a guidebook for leaders navigating the uncertainty of a post pandemic world in this sequel to The Adaptation Advantage. Leaders today must acknowledge and respond to the fundamental shifts that lay the foundation for effective leadership: From managing people to enabling success, from viewing peers as competitors to seeing them as collaborators, from applying extrinsic pressure on workers to unlocking intrinsic motivation, and from driving productivity with unquestioned authority to inspiring value creation by leading with empathy.

When you care enough to champion others, the workplace becomes happily infectious and the organization benefits in more ways than one.

Imagine walking up to a stranger on the subway and asking them for their seat. What about asking a random person on the street if you could borrow their phone? If the idea makes you squeamish, you're not alone - social psychologists have found that doing these very things makes most of us almost unbearably uncomfortable. But here's the funny thing: even though we hate to ask for help, most people are wired to be helpful. And that's a good thing, because every day in the modern, uber-collaborative workplace, we all need to know when and how to call in the cavalry.

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are combined, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life. Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan Raymond takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need.

The hardest part of a manager’s job isn’t staying organized, meeting deliverable dates, or staying on budget. It’s dealing with people who are too comfortable doing things the way they’ve always been done and too afraid to do things differently. Treasurer, a courage-building pioneer, proposes a bold antidote: courage. With more courage, workers gain the confidence to take on harder projects, embrace company changes with more enthusiasm, and extend themselves in ways that will benefit their careers and their company.

At the highest level of any pursuit, the difference between the two top performers in a contest is always mental. One holds it together - while the other falls apart. The same is true in business. Whether you are confronting a crisis, making a pitch, negotiating a deal, or facing a deadline, your mindset can give you the edge. When the Pressure's On brings peak performance principles to the boardroom, revealing five core mental skills that enable professionals to excel while under duress.

Veteran DEI leader Mita Mallick debunks thirteen myths that hold us back from transforming our workplaces. She delivers powerful storytelling combined with practical and hands-on ways for us to be more inclusive leaders. She teaches us that when we show up as more inclusive leaders, we have the power to change our organizations, ultimately creating a ripple effect across our ecosystem.

An essential resource for current CEOs, leaders, and future leaders who realize a new cultural order is transforming what effective leadership is about, The Culturepreneur will help you and your organization reach new levels of performance - driving human, organizational, societal, and economic successes that exceed even your own expectations.

Traditional business structures love stability and predictability. Yet many organizations believe the two essential ingredients for long-term success are creativity and innovation. Kirsten May and Alex Varricchio, founders of the marketing agency UpHouse, call the relationship between these two opposing expectations the Proximity Paradox - the belief that those who are closest to a subject are best-qualified to innovate for it, when, in reality, intense proximity limits creativity.

Backed by an extensive research project that looked at over 150 studies and articles, featured extensive interviews with over 150 executives, and analyzed over 250 global organizations, this book clearly breaks down the three environments that make up every single employee experience at every organization around the world and how to design for them. These are the cultural, technological, and physical environments. The Employee Experience Advantage guides listeners on a journey of creating a place where people actually want to show up to work.

Stop chasing hot trends and start driving real growth. It's Not Rocket Science blasts through the trends and false promises permeating the business world to help you and your company get back to basics and get things done. Why doggedly pursue the "next big thing" when the most effective drivers of growth are right under your nose? This audiobook asserts that you've already heard, been taught, and know well the key fundamentals that spell business success.

Paris, 1927, a day in July. A destitute young American named Rafaela Fano gets into the car of a dazzling stranger, the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka. Struggling to halt a downward slide toward prostitution, Rafaela agrees to model for the artist. The relationship between the artist and her muse lasted less than a year, yet in 1980, just before Tamara died, she was working on a copy of Beautiful Rafaela. Author Ellis Avery imagines their affair from Rafaela’s point of view, and the final day of Tamara’s life from the painter’s point of view.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.

Managers will learn how and why to stop bullying; prepare executives to lead the campaign and to resist undermining efforts of subordinates; and create a new, positive role for human resources. Outlining the required steps, The Bullying-Free Workplace includes information on how to create a preventive policy that brings consequences, like never before, when violated.

The Loudest Duck is a book for managers and executives faced with the productivity and leadership challenges of a heterogeneous, multicultural workplace. It's a book for anyone working his or her way up the ladder in this new corporate world order. It's a book for anyone who belongs to a non-dominant group, be it women, people of color, short people, or employees who don't play golf but whose bosses do.

In existence for decades, ERGs originated out of affirmative action policies and have evolved into powerful sources of employee activity and engagement. Organizations can leverage ERGs to support business goals, but ERGs can also play a critical role in creating a more inclusive work environment for marginalized individuals.

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.

Remote working is on the rise. Whether or not we are remote workers, it is likely we are all part of a global workforce. We need to learn to interact remotely, because we are all remote from someone in some way. Rather than simply simulating the way we'd usually work together via digital means, we have to learn new communication skills and adopt a different mindset in order to work remotely effectively, efficiently, and, most importantly, healthily. We'll start by getting you set up with the right equipment and habits. Then, we'll learn the mindset of treating everyone as remote.