Organizational Leadership

What really sets the best managers above the rest? It's their power to build a cadre of employees who have great inner work lives—consistently positive emotions; strong motivation; and favorable perceptions of the organization, their work, and their colleagues. The worst managers undermine inner work life, often unwittingly.

You don't have to do a dangerous job to endure a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload required frequent all-nighters, leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a 60-pound weight gain thanks to having no down time to eat properly or exercise. These individuals are not exceptions. Every industry is filled with them, and the costs, to both employees and their companies, is enormous.

Francesca Gino has been studying rebels in life and in the workplace for more than 15 years. She has discovered that rebels - those who practice "positive deviance" at work - are harder to manage, but they are good for the bottom line: their passion, drive, curiosity, and creativity raise the entire organization to a new level. And she has found that at home, rebels are more engaged partners, parents, and friends. Packed with strategies for embracing rebellion at work and in life, Rebel Talent encourages all of us to rebel against what’s comfortable, so that we can thrive.

In the rapidly changing business landscape, harnessing the power of diversity and inclusion is essential for the very viability and sustainability of every organization. Talent who feel fully welcomed, valued, respected, and heard by their colleagues and their organizations will fuel this growth. We will only succeed in this transformation if those in leadership pivot from command and control management styles to reinvent how we look at people, every organization's greatest asset.

Your organization's culture can feel like something that has a life of its own; it's long-standing, inherited, and seemingly impermeable - in fact, a strong culture is often an obstacle to doing new things or going in new directions. But leaders are the stewards of a company's culture and have the power to shape it. The best leaders know that organizational culture is a fundamental and powerful management tool that can drive positive outcomes.

According to studies, we all work for the same thing--and it's not just money. It's meaning. Through our work, we seek a sense of purpose, contribution, connection, value, and hope. Digging down to the meaning of work taps our resilience in hard times and our passion in good times. That's the simple but profound premise behind this groundbreaking book by renowned management expert Dave Ulrich and psychologist Wendy Ulrich.

Expanding on the principles, insights and wisdom that made Getting to Yes a worldwide best seller, Roger Fisher and Scott Brown offer a straightforward approach to creating relationships that can deal with difficulties as they arise. Getting Together takes you step-by-step through initiating, negotiating, and sustaining enduring relationships - in business, in government, between friends and in the family.

Resolving Conflicts at Work is a guide for preventing and resolving conflicts, miscommunications, and misunderstandings at work, including dozens of techniques for revealing how the inevitable disputes and divisions in the workplace are actually opportunities for greater creativity, productivity, enhanced morale, and personal growth. In the third edition of this text, all chapters are completely infused with additional content, updated examples, and new case studies.

This. It’s insightful, useful, funny, and incredibly easy to relate to. The audience is distanced in the intro and then pulled into the fold in a unique and engaging way. I love the “tough-love” approach; this audiobook takes a hard, honest look at what people can do to change, what best practices and methods are, and what a toxic work environment looks like. Importantly, it refuses to let the listener bypass recognizing their own flaws and weak points, but it also doesn’t make the listener feel alienated or judged for not being perfect.

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

"Your story is your life," says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories: of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving.

People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work - a colleague, subordinate, or boss. Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and - more important - the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.

In nearly every industry, smart machines are replacing human labor. It's not just factory jobs - automated technologies are handling people's investments, diagnosing illnesses, and analyzing written documents. If we humans are going to endure, Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig say we're going to need a dose of humility. We need to be humble enough to let go of the idea that "smart" means knowing the most, using that information quickest, and making the fewest mistakes. Smart machines will always be better than we are at those things.

In a world where leadership doesn't always know where we are headed, knowing how to get there can be even more challenging. In Loved Based Leadership, Dr. Maria Church builds and expands on her successful Loved Based Leadership model developed a decade ago. In this 10th Anniversary Edition, she explores the need for leadership based not on fear or intimidation, but on respect for self, respect for others, honor, and integrity

The GenAI Prompt Playbook: Strategic Leadership. AI-Powered Frameworks for Executive Decision-Making. Cut through leadership complexity with 20+ field-tested AI prompts designed for strategic executives.

Stanley Bing follows his enormously successful What Would Machiavelli Do? with another subversively humorous exploration of how work would be different - if the Buddha were your personal consultant.

Many people today are so dazzled by the long-term potential for artificial intelligence that they overlook the much clearer and more immediate potential for a new form of "collective intelligence": the intelligence of groups of people and computers working together. In Superminds, Thomas Malone explains what we need to do to take advantage of this potential. Groundbreaking and utterly fascinating, Superminds will change the way you work - both with others and with computers - for the better.

In The Employee Advantage, behavioral economist Stephan Meier explains why organizations must value their employees as much as—if not more than—their customers: those that pivot toward an employee-centric model will be more profitable, innovative, and appealing to top talent.

We all know how important our habits are for personal productivity, success and happiness. But the truth is that we rarely work alone: reaching our goals depends on how effectively we work with others, and teams have their own habits that can help - or hinder - success. Here, productivity and teamwork expert Charlie Gilkey shows how to cultivate, implement and maintain the small habits that lead to big results for any team.