Organizational Leadership

In this insider’s look into the world’s biggest tech company, former CEO and SVP of Google share how they helped engineer a new strategy and philosophy to help them thrive—a perfect book for seasoned business employees and the tech curious.

Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don't we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don't realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn't just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion best practices, showing how leaders and organizations can meaningfully promote inclusion.

The traditional hierarchical organization is dead, but what replaces it? Numerous new models - the agile organization, the networked organization, and holacracy, to name a few - have emerged, but leaders need to know what really works. How do you build an organization that is responsive to fast-changing markets? What kind of organization delivers both speed and scale, and how do you lead it? Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich provide leaders with a much-needed blueprint for reinventing the organization.

In Come Up for Air, you’ll discover the CPR® Business Efficiency Framework, a proven system for leaders, managers, and teams to maximize their performance and reduce overwhelm by using the right tools in the right way, at the right time. The end result? More output, less stress, happier employees, and the potential to gain an extra full day per week in productivity to use however you’d like.

Fast-paced and down-to-earth, Delivering Happiness shows how a different kind of corporate culture is a powerful model for achieving success, and concentrating on the happiness of those around you can dramatically increase your own.

1:1s are arguably one of the most critical meeting types for the success of team members, managers, coaches, teams, and organizations. The best managers recognize that 1:1s are not an add-on to their role as a manager. Conducting 1:1s successfully are foundational to being a manager. At the same time, these meetings are the core of a direct report's experience and development at work, including how well they engage and attach to their role, perceive the effectiveness of their manager, and envision their future at the organization.

Sun Tzu's Art of War for Women helps women find the peaceful path to success through strategies made famous in the ancient Chinese text, The Art of War. Female wisdom, or common sense, is about avoiding needless confrontation, conserving energy for the things that matter, and seeking an outcome in which everyone wins. And for women, as for Sun Tzu, success doesn't come simply from knowing what to do, but from knowing who you are.

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.

Resilient leaders rise: Empower yourself and your team to conquer every challenge. Have you ever experienced a moment when the pace of the world seemed to surpass your ability to keep up? As a leader, the demands of navigating through challenging times can feel utterly overwhelming. The business landscape is evolving at an unprecedented rate, presenting new challenges and uncertainties every day.

Many of Philip K. Dick’s books and short stories seem like hallucinations, leading us to distant future scenarios or into surreal parallel worlds. On a second look, we discover that these social and technical developments are emerging, if they do not already exist. Dick’s philosophy is in harmony with W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Both ideas jointly together show important ways to prevent a dystopia and to use the new technologies to humanize the corporate world, including a focus on ethics, compliance, and sustainability.

Rapid change defines the world around us, requiring a more effective type of organization. New discoveries change our understanding of how the world works, and Margaret J. Wheatley shows us how the “new science” can lead to a powerful new view of the business world. Our world has become nonlinear and filled with constant transition, and this new understanding can be applied to the way we organize work, people, and our lives. Wheatley invites us to transform our way of thinking and adapt ourselves—and our companies—to the 21st century by offering a new way of thinking.

"What an asshole!" How many times have you said that about someone at work? You're not alone! In this groundbreaking book, Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton builds on his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article to show you the best ways to deal with assholes...and why they can be so destructive to your company.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

You don’t need all the answers to lead well. True leadership is about showing up with purpose, supporting your team, and leading by example. In Leadership Uncomplicated, Bryan Banta cuts through the noise to offer a clear, real-world guide to leading others—at work, on the field, or in your community.

Almost one in four American working adults has a job that pays less than a living wage. Conventional wisdom says that’s how the world has to work. Bad jobs with low wages, minimal benefits, little training, and chaotic schedules are the only way companies can keep costs down and prices low. If companies were to offer better jobs, customers would have to pay more or companies would have to make less. But in The Good Jobs Strategy, Zeynep Ton, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, makes the compelling case that even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind - with bad jobs - is a choice, not a necessity.

The world’s best teams don’t win because of leadership alone. They win because of teamship. Yet when it comes to success, it is leaders who are lauded; too little attention is given to the transformation of the team itself. We’ve all but ignored how to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in teams, Keith Ferrazzi argues. Upgrading teams is one of the least curated and under-leveraged opportunities for success. It is time to focus on teamship.

Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth, tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies to global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has now codified in High Growth Handbook.

Jeremy Utley and Perry Klebahn of Stanford’s renowned Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka the “d.school”) offer a proven strategy for coming up with great ideas by yourself or with your team, and quickly determining which are worthy. Drawing upon their combined decades of experience leading Stanford’s premier Launchpad accelerator and advising some of the world’s most innovative organizations, like Microsoft, Michelin, Keller Williams Realty, and Hyatt, they’ll teach you how to:

The Song of Significance is a rousing contemplation on work: why it is the way it is, why it’s gotten so bad, what all of us–especially leaders–can do to make it better.