Workplace Leadership

Decades of research demonstrates that we often have an over-inflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe. Perfectly Confident is the first book to bring together the best psychological and economic studies to explain exactly what confidence is, when it can be helpful, and when it can be destructive in our lives.

"Empowerment" can be a mind-numbing topic, but in The 3 Keys to Empowerment, Ken Blanchard and his coauthors use concrete examples, a Q&A format, case histories, and entertaining comments to keep the discussion lively. The authors show that empowerment is not about giving people power, it's about releasing the power they already have.

For decades there have been two iconic Japanese auto companies. One has been endlessly studied and written about. The other has been generally underappreciated and misunderstood. Until now. Since its birth as a motorcycle company in 1949, Honda has steadily grown into the world’s fifth largest automaker and top engine manufacturer, as well as one of the most beloved, most profitable, and most consistently innovative multinational corporations.

The digital age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become hyper-learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change.

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.

Nolan Bushnell founded the groundbreaking gaming company Atari, the restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese's, and two dozen other companies. He also launched Steve Jobs' career, along with those of many other brilliant creatives over the course of his five decades in business. In his eagerly awaited first book, Bushnell explains how to find, hire, and nurture the people who could turn your company into the next Atari or the next Apple.

For decades, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have championed simplicity as a competitive advantage and a consumer right. Consulting with businesses and organizations around the world to streamline products, services, processes and communications, they have achieved dramatic results.

Too often, team dysfunction leads to abysmal productivity and zero innovation for your organization, as well as misery and wasted time for you. Most team members sit and wait, feeling trapped in a team that just isn't working. You First: Inspire Your Team to Grow Up, Get Along, and Get Stuff Done presents a radical new idea: You can change your team. Author Liane Davey shows how you, from any seat at the table, even without support from your colleagues or your team leader, can transform even a toxic team.

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

Culture has become the hottest word in today's organizational lexicon. From boardrooms to locker rooms, everyone's talking about the critical link between culture and extraordinary team performance. Yet, as clear as that link may be, understanding what culture is, and what to do about it, has always been so murky. Until now. In this game-changing audiobook, David Friedman cuts through the fog and provides a simple, clear, and practical roadmap for building a high-performing culture - in any organization.

In today's workplace, too many marginalized groups are underrepresented. And yet, workplaces often struggle to find enough employees to sustain their growing needs, putting massive pressure on HR hiring teams to fill the demand. Organizational psychologist Gil Winch argues that addressing our own biases and building organizations where everyone feels a profound sense of belonging is not only great for a company's bottom line, it's also good for employees, communities, and society as a whole. Winning with Underdogs is the highly practical step-by-step guide you need.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

We live in a world of vast collaborative potential. Yet all too often, powerful boundaries create barriers that can splinter groups. And this can lead to uninspiring results. To transform borders into frontiers in today's global, multistakeholder organizations, you need Boundary Spanning Leadership. Powered by a decade of global research and practice by the top-ranked Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), this book takes you from rural towns in the US to Hong Kong's skyline, showing you how to build bridges across boundaries.

In Why Smart Executives Fail, Sydney Finkelstein uncovers - with startling clarity and unassailable documentation - the causes regularly responsible for major business breakdowns. Why Smart Executives Fail relates the stories of great business disasters and demonstrates that there are specific, identifiable ways in which many businesses regularly make themselves vulnerable to failure.

We all know that IQ, education, knowledge, and technical skills are essential for professionals, but they alone are insufficient for effective leadership. Who you are as a person - your personality and character - drives leadership performance and determines who thrives and who fails. In Personality at Work, psychologist Ron Warren lays out the key personality traits that drive high performance - and the common traits that derail it.

Imagine walking up to a stranger on the subway and asking them for their seat. What about asking a random person on the street if you could borrow their phone? If the idea makes you squeamish, you're not alone - social psychologists have found that doing these very things makes most of us almost unbearably uncomfortable. But here's the funny thing: even though we hate to ask for help, most people are wired to be helpful. And that's a good thing, because every day in the modern, uber-collaborative workplace, we all need to know when and how to call in the cavalry.

In the new edition of this fascinating book, a book that has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, Slashdot.org, Lifehacker.com and in the New York Times, best-selling author Scott Berkun pulls the best lessons from the history of innovation, including the recent software and web age, to reveal powerful and surprising truths about how ideas become successful innovations - truths people can easily apply to the challenges of today.

Cynthia Shapiro is a former human resources executive who's pulling back the curtain on the way that companies really work. In Corporate Confidential, she unmasks startling truths and what you can do about them. Shapiro pulls no punches, giving listeners an inside look at a secret world of hidden agendas they would never normally see: a world of insider information and insights that can save a career.

This new edition of this best-selling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites.

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are combined, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life. Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan Raymond takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need.