Workplace Behavior

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.

Consciousness is the main source of organizational greatness. "Conscious business", explains Fred Kofman, means finding your essential values through your work. A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

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.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Early in the 21st century, a quiet revolution occurred. For the first time, the major developed economies began to invest more in intangible assets, like design, branding, R&D, or software, than in tangible assets, like machinery, buildings, and computers. For all sorts of businesses, from tech firms and pharma companies to coffee shops and gyms, the ability to deploy assets that one can neither see nor touch is increasingly the main source of long-term success.

Have you ever wondered what it would take to be a better leader, or achieve your wildest dreams, or make a bigger difference in the world? The answer lies in the choices you make: about everything from how you spend your time to the way you view the world. Smart Leadership is the latest essential business title from internationally best-selling author of Win the Heart and Chess Not Checkers, Mark Miller. In this book, he shares the four research-based "smart choices" the best leaders make to scale their influence and results.

Change within organizations is disruptive, making people feel less in control of their work and lives. With every passing day, organizational change becomes more complex. It’s no surprise that efforts for change encounter resistance. Jan Kaderly knows that managing change is managing resistance. In Change Killers, Kaderly takes you on a deep exploration of resistance. Dive into decades of research on the very human reasons why we resist change and discover how you can manage resistance while building the support needed to evolve and grow.

Based on an extensive global research program conducted in nineteen countries around the world surveying over forty-eight thousand people, The Archetype Effect delivers a new framework to understand and cater to worker motivators across roles, industries, and organizations. This book shows how workers can be classified into six major archetypes based on their motivations, and describes how recent disruptions, such as gig work, remote work and AI-assisted automation, are impacting worker motivators overall.

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.

In the modern workplace, conflict has become a dirty word. After all, conflict is antithetical to teamwork, employee engagement, and a positive company culture. Or is it? The truth is that our teams and organizations require conflict to get things done. But we avoid conflict and build up conflict debt by deferring and dodging the difficult decisions. Our organizations are paying the price - becoming less productive, less innovative, and less competitive.

This book is designed to help you rise to the challenge and become the game changer your organization needs. Candid insights from dozens of coaches, managers, CEOs, journalists, entrepreneurs, and other elite performers reveal the qualities that make some people stand out, and the underlying theme is mindset. While talent is a great head start, it is merely potential. Undeveloped and erratically-wielded talent holds little value for an organization.

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

As leaders, how we are is as important as what we do. This new edition of a leadership classic shows how to master the inner and outer work needed to build relationships that unleash the transformational creative potential in everyone. Top-down, one-dimensional leadership models are hopelessly outmoded in today’s rapidly changing world. And they waste the leadership ability present throughout an organization, not just at the top.

Are you feeling less engaged, less committed and more skeptical at work? Do you find yourself isolated? Or are you caught in the middle of co-workers’ interpersonal conflicts? If so, you may be experiencing the confidence-busting, commitment-breaking, energy-draining patterns consistent with broken trust. We’ve all been there, but few of us know how to rebuild that trust. Dennis and Michelle Reina have spent their careers researching and measuring workplace trust.

I know my own mind. I am able to assess others in a fair and accurate way. These self-perceptions are challenged by leading psychologists Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony G. Greenwald as they explore the hidden biases we all carry from a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. Blindspot is the authors’ metaphor for the portion of the mind that houses hidden biases.

What will your 100-year life look like? Does the thought of working for 60 or 70 years fill you with dread? Or can you see the potential for a more stimulating future as a result of having so much extra time? Many of us have been raised on the traditional notion of a three-stage approach to our working lives: education, followed by work and then retirement. But this well-established pathway is already beginning to collapse.

How would you like to be calmer, less distracted, more productive, and more content at your job? You might think it would take more hours in the day, a better boss, more support, less interference, a shorter commute - and the list goes on. Most of the things we think would help are either not in our control or simply not realistic. But there is one thing we can do to achieve the qualities we seek, and it can be done invisibly and often: meditation.

With insights from leading experts including John Kotter and Indra Nooyi, this book will inspire you to: lead through the eight critical stages of change; create and instill a sense of urgency; transform your company's culture; get reorgs right; reshape your organization for climate sustainability; remodel the chief learning officer position to lead change; scale agile practices throughout your organization; and lead change when business is good - but also when times are tough.

The HBR Guide to Collaborative Teams provides practical tips and advice to help you collaborate more effectively. Whether you're leading your own direct reports or building a talented group from disparate parts of your organization, you'll discover how to align others' goals and skills so you can solve problems as a team and deliver great results.

Everyone has secrets, and everyone is living a double life to some degree. The world is held up by lies; if everyone's secrets were to all be revealed tomorrow morning, civilization might collapse. To ascend the social hierarchies and achieve great power, you need to optimize and strategize rather than slogging and "working hard" every day of your life. This is counterproductive since it does not guarantee any beneficial results in the end. Nobody can succeed by following rules in the first place.