Work Leadership

In her famed TED talk, Sheryl Sandberg described how women unintentionally hold themselves back in their careers. Her talk, which has been viewed more than eleven million times, encouraged women to “sit at the table,” seek challenges, take risks, and pursue their goals with gusto.

"There is no 'i' in 'team'." "No man is an island." "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." You may roll your eyes at these age-old clichés, but you can’t afford to breeze over their point. Individual all-stars can take you only so far. Ultimately, success - whether in business, family, church, athletic teams, or any other organization - is entirely dependent on teamwork. But how does one build that team? Leadership expert and New York Times best-selling author John C. Maxwell knows that building and maintaining a successful team is no simple task.

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.

Relationships are at the heart of every positive human experience. Maxwell, a master communicator and relational expert, makes learning about relationships accessible to everyone. The most sophisticated leaders and salespeople will pick up on skills that will make them even better, and relational novices will learn skills that can transform them into relational dynamos.

Traditional management training prioritizes clarity, predictability and control. In a matrix we need to be able to balance this with the ability to tolerate ambiguity, manage uncertainty and decentralize control. Managers need an expanded toolkit to help them move from the hard to the soft, from the concrete to the ambiguous and back again depending on the situation. Making the Matrix Work helps you develop your matrix mindset and will show you how to establish and engage networks that do not depend on role, control or authority to get things done.

Corporate boards are under great pressure. Scandals and malpractice at companies like Theranos, WeWork, Uber, and Wells Fargo have raised justified questions among regulators, shareholders, and the public about the quality of corporate governance. In How Boards Work, prizewinning economist and veteran board director Dambisa Moyo offers an insider's view of corporate boards as they are buffeted by the turbulence of our times.

By the man who helped invent the red-hot management process known as "Scrum", Scrum unveils what is wrong with the way we currently do work, and how a simple set of principles, applied in exactly the right sequence, can accelerate productivity and quality as much as 1,200 percent.

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.

Building a successful career in the world of remote work, hybrid schedules, and a lack of work/life balance is not easy. In fact it’s difficult and often seems impossible. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. By confronting the lies we are told about building a career, this book will bring you one step closer to the epiphany that will change your life.

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.

The most successful leaders are storytellers. By mastering business storytelling, they achieve extraordinary business results. As a modern-day leader, you know you should develop this skill, but you don't have the time to do this in an ad-hoc way. What you need is a practical, reliable method to follow, one that will allow your business to reap the benefits of storytelling as soon as possible. In Putting Stories to Work, Shawn Callahan gives you a clear process for mastering business storytelling. He demolishes the thinking that storytelling has no place at work.

One of the biggest myths that plagues the business world today is that our ability to network depends on having the “gift-of-gab”. You don’t have to be outgoing to be successful at networking. You don’t have to become a relentless self-promoter. In fact, you don’t have to act like an extrovert at all. Matthew Pollard, an introvert himself, draws on over a decade of research and real-world examples to provide an actionable blueprint for introverted networking.

If you ever hold back from making changes or taking chances, Stop Playing Safe is for you. In this fully updated "post-pandemic" edition, Dr. Margie Warrell challenges you to "rethink risk" and back your boldest goals with braver action. Drawing on her diverse global experience working in coaching, psychology, and with trailblazing leaders such as Richard Branson and Bill Marriott, this book will empower you to master fear and "take the chance" when it matters most.

Two-thirds of executives say their organizations don't have the capabilities to support their strategy. In Strategy That Works, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi explain why. They identify conventional business practices that unintentionally create a gap between strategy and execution. And they show how some of the best companies in the world consistently leap ahead of their competitors.

You have the opportunity to lead: to show up with confidence, connected to others, and committed to a purpose in a way that inspires others to follow. Maybe it's in your workplace, or in your relationships, or simply in your own life. But great leadership - leadership that aligns teams, inspires action, and achieves results - is hard. And what makes it hard isn't theoretical, it's practical. It's not about knowing what to say or do. It's about whether you're willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing it.

The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important. There has to be a better way. And there is: the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert. It has been used in organizations around the world to close the gap between results promised and results delivered.

Your entire career depends on communication. When you can communicate effectively, you already have the foundation for being not just a good leader, but a great one…. A leader who inspires…. A leader who motivates…. A leader who is remembered. Whether you’re leading an entire organization, you’re an entry-level manager, or you’re considering beginning your journey into leadership, it all starts with communication.… And you’re about to uncover its secrets.

We stand at an inflection point where technology can be leveraged to unleash human potential, or it can pit humans against machines. Heather McGowan and Chris Shipley have dedicated the last five years to understanding how technical, business, and cultural shifts have brought us to this place in order to construct this comprehensive and approachable guide to the future of work.

Filled with practical advice and lessons, and backed by extensive research by Gentry and others, this book lays out the art, science, and practice behind learning and leading as a first time manager. Through first-hand accounts, stories, and other examples drawn from the experiences of first-time managers - including Gentry's own story of recently become a first-time manager himself - the book's practical, actionable content helps readers flip the old script, and write and live their new script.

Whether you are a new player or a seasoned veteran, Secrets to Winning at Office Politics can help you increase your personal power without compromising your integrity or taking advantage of others. This smart, practical guide shows you how to stop wasting energy on things you can't change and start taking steps to get what you want.