Workplace Organization

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

Institutions remain essential to human flourishing. They are the means by which communities thrive, individual vocations are fulfilled, and society is changed for the good. As a result, we all need to learn how to work effectively within institutions. That is just what Gordon Smith provides. He unpacks the core of institutional intelligence - the wisdom of working effectively within an organization. At the same time, he explains how team leaders, directors, executives, board members, key stakeholders, and employees can avoid what is often their greatest source of stress on the job,

It's time to get intentional about your organizational culture, to shape it yourself and make it strong. This book shows you how, with a proven framework and deeply practical advice for doing the work. By combining design-thinking principles with inclusive-leadership best practices, Culture Design teaches you how to shape a culture that is resilient, inclusive, powerful, and effective.

Bringing together fifty years of research into behavior change, The Science of Change explores Intentional Change Theory (ICT) and highlights how the model can be used to understand and support lasting change. In this book, Richard E. Boyatzis presents a unifying theory for lasting change with an examination of each phase and principle in this multi-level, fractal theory and provides examples of sustained, desired change at the individual, dyadic, team, organization, community, and country levels.

Meet The Elephant Hunter and get swept up in a ride-along adventure on organizational safari, hunting, tagging, and tracking a wide variety of elephants in the room. Slog through the organizational waste these creatures excrete and experience how the Elephant Hunters Paraphernalia offers the tools and techniques to free the elephants in the room and liberate their Handlers and Colluders in the room.

Why do some businesses “fail to scale”? Smooth Scaling offers a clear diagnosis, along with twenty practical Rituals to boost your organization’s performance and achieve frictionless growth. Where other books on scaling focus on strategy, fundraising, or product-market fit, Smooth Scaling addresses the most pervasive and least-understood fail point that threatens to kneecap even the best-laid scaling plan: organizational friction.

How to articulate and assess what success looks like. The Social Profit Handbook offers those who lead, govern, and support mission-driven organizations and businesses new ways to assess their impact in order to improve future work rather than merely judge past performance. Drawing upon decades of leadership in schools and the foundation and nonprofit worlds, author David Grant offers strategies that help organizations take assessment back into their own hands, and improve their work as a result.

A deployed nuclear submarine operates alone - hundreds of miles from any support and hundreds of feet below the surface. An emotionless and indifferent enemy constantly surrounds the crew. Thousands of pounds of sea pressure sit right over their heads, waiting to crush them like a tin can and send them to the bottom of the ocean. Even the most junior sailor’s mistake can result in loss of the submarine and everyone on it.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

Beholden to accepted assumptions about people and organizations, too many enterprises waste human potential. Robert Quinn shows how to defy convention and create organizations where people feel fully engaged and continually rewarded, where - both individually and collectively - they flourish and exceed expectations.

Do you wonder why your organization struggles with morale? Perhaps it's time to dive into the dark arts of destructive leadership! In this unapologetically satirical audiobook, leadership expert John T. Gordon humorously uncovers the toxic practices that can turn a thriving workplace into a nightmare. With tongue-in-cheek "how-to" guides and cringe-worthy scenarios, this audiobook explores leadership missteps that squash motivation, halt innovation, and send talent running.

Technology thought leader and organizational architect Matt K. Parker breaks down the counterintuitive principles and practices that radically collaborative organizations thrive on. By combining the latest insights from organizational science, sociology, and psychology, he illuminates four imperatives that all radically collaborative organizations must embrace in order to succeed: team autonomy, managerial devolution, deficiency gratification, and candid vulnerability.

With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess, A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success.

Whether it shows up as stress, top-down leadership styles, drama, or uncertainty, fear kills good decision-making, dampens morale, lowers employee engagement, and hurts bottom-line growth. The good news is that there's an antidote: Freedom at Work. In this groundbreaking book, Traci Fenton brings together decades of original research, based on her team's work with hundreds of top companies around the world, such as The WD-40 Company, Mindvalley, DaVita, Menlo Innovations, Zappos, HCL Technologies, and more, revealing the proven pathway to leadership success.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Trust is essential to all relationships, but knowing how to build and maintain it remains elusive. Drawing from three decades of research and consulting, trust experts Dennis and Michelle Reina provide a comprehensive roadmap for creating lasting trust in any relationship.

Dynamic capability management provides the road map for proactive disruption. It helps modern businesses deal with volatility, rapid growth, and new skills in a much smarter manner. This groundbreaking book explains why dynamic capability management is the way to go for the future-ready organization. It demonstrates how traditional management practices are evolving to meet the needs of a blended workforce. It shatters conventional organizational structures, provides a robust new talent framework, and presents a practical blueprint to make any business truly future-ready.

Organization: Contemporary Principles and Practice addresses organizational issues in terms of how managers experience them and how MBA students can most effectively learn about them. John Child draws attention to the exciting possibilities currently arising in organizations as the conditions for their survival change. His analysis covers new internal organizational forms, various kinds of network organization, and the evolution of organization to meet new demands.

For many years, there has been quite a bit of talk about employee engagement as a means to lift corporate profits and reduce absenteeism and turnover. However, this talk has not produced better companies. Additionally, with profit as the primary goal of organizations, most employees view any benign treatment they receive as a secondary convenience that will dissipate once corporate fortunes decline. This book turns that equation around by examining the practices of 21 companies that put the interests and needs of employees first.

Every team has a manager.... But not every team is lucky enough to have a true leader. Get ready to break the mold! Did you know that 82 percent of employees would consider quitting their job because of a bad boss? And it isn’t just that you don’t want to be a bad boss…. You don’t want to be a boss at all – you want to be a leader.