Organizational Management

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

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.

Bypass the faulty processes and communication styles that make change impossible in so many other organizations; access these practical tools and ideas for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in your company. This book provides clear, actionable steps for you to build new values, experiences, and perspectives into your organizational culture, infusing it with the diversity, inclusion, and belonging employees need to feel accepted, be their best selves, and do their best work.

Green to Gold is an essential guide for forward-thinking business leaders who see the Green Wave coming and want to profit from it. This audio explores what every executive must know to manage the environmental challenges facing society and business. Based on the authors' years of experience and hundreds of interviews with corporate leaders around the world, Green to Gold, shows how companies generate lasting value.

In this path-breaking and genre-defying book, Parmesh Shahani - vice president at Godrej Industries Ltd - draws from his decade-long journey in the corporate world as an out and proud gay man to make a cogent case for LGBTQ inclusion and lay down a step-by-step guide to reshaping office culture in India.

Become the effective, proactive leader you aspire to be with this practical tool kit for leading people and organizations.

Value stream mapping - an essential but underused methodology - is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. Business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done - in any environment - and how to design improved work systems.

In a quick, easy listen, you can take the main principles from Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs! John Doerr spells out the recipe for efficiency in corporations by using objectives and key results. A seasoned pro, Doerr traces on his history with OKRs and uses several examples from case studies by people who have implemented his system of utilizing OKRs.

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth? Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have found and studied such companies - deliberately developmental organizations. A DDO is organized around the conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people's strongest motive, which is to grow.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

Based on 15 years of research, To Be Honest explains how four factors (Clear Identity, Accountability, Governance and Cross-Functional Relationships) affect honesty, justice, and purpose within a company. When these factors are absent or ineffective, the organizational conditions compel employees to choose dishonesty and self-interest. But when done well, the organization is 16 times more likely to have people tell the truth, behave fairly and serve a greater good.

Get more of the communication ideas you want, from the authors you trust. With insights from leading experts, this book will inspire you to: rethink how you give feedback to employees; ask questions to encourage learning and the exchange of ideas; invest in the right virtual communication tools for your team or business; establish a language strategy for your company; negotiate effectively with anyone - including liars; and present data more powerfully using visualization.

Most business leaders understand the power of a dynamic, positive culture - but almost every effort to change culture fails. Why? The approach is often all wrong. Rather than attempt to "transform" a new culture from the ground up, leaders need to instead spearhead a culture renovation. In Culture Renovation, Kevin Oakes provides tangible, tactical insights drawn from a robust data set and informed by CEOs and HR leaders at many of the world's top companies.

Beyond No: Harnessing the Power of Resistance for Organizational Growth is a thought-provoking exploration of the concept of resistance—something that is bound to arise within every organization in response to new projects, policies, or initiatives.

Every leader will agree that managing people is challenging and growing more complex. Since The Big Book of HR was first published, dramatic changes have taken place in the workplace and the workforce. This tenth anniversary edition incorporates discussions and reflections on these changes which are useful for any business owner, manager, or HR professional.

Who changed the rules of business? It's a different game now. In an increasingly globally diverse workforce, it's vitally important that leaders understand their team inside and out. This takes a new toolbox of skills for the 21st century. Today you need winning strategies to avoid the costly pitfalls of high turnover, low morale, and poor collaboration, not to mention the cost of missed deadlines and incomplete projects.

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy. Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.