Behavior Business

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe - and shoot down those we don't.

Physicist and entrepreneur Safi Bahcall reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Drawing on the science of phase transitions, Bahcall reveals why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing wild new ideas to rigidly rejecting them.

Author Matt LeMay explains agile in clear, jargon-free terms and provides concrete and actionable steps to help any team put its values and principles into practice. Examples from a wide variety of organizations, including small nonprofits and global financial enterprises, bring to life the on-the-ground realities of agile across industries and functions.

Exploring and explaining more than 80 of the world's most important theories and big ideas about trade, commerce, and management, this audiobook offers a fascinating look at the world of business past and present. A perfect primer on the fundamental tenets of the subject, The Business Book sheds light on some of history's most important milestone developments and the key business strategies used by leading thinkers and gurus from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs.

Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel - a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources - produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada, and the UK?

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.

Existing narratives about how we should organize are built upon, and reinforce, a concept of "good management" derived from what is assumed to be a fundamental need to increase efficiency. But this assumption is based on a presentist, monocultural, and generally limited view of management's past. A New History of Management disputes these foundations. By reassessing conventional perspectives on past management theories and providing a new critical outline of present-day management, it highlights alternative conceptions of "good management".

In this completely updated new edition, the best-selling author of 101 Great Answers to the Toughest Interview Questions and 101 Smart Questions to Ask on Your Interview takes you step by step through the hiring process. Whether you're replacing an employee who's leaving or creating a new position in your organization, Ron Fry shows you how to write a concise and accurate job description, identify key competencies, and how to translate them into a realistic set of search criteria.

Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance is based on a deceptively simple philosophy: set a direction, try to stay on track, and make adjustments when necessary. Easy to do? Hardly - especially when the typical workday is time-crunched, stressful, and deadline-driven. Drawing on research done at the Wharton School of Business, the authors reveal how to deliver results under these tough conditions.

There is an invisible army of people deep inside the world’s biggest and best-known companies, pushing for safer and more responsible practices. They are trying to prevent the next Rana Plaza factory collapse, the next Deepwater Horizon explosion, the next Foxconn labor abuses. Obviously, they don’t always succeed. Christine Bader was one of those people. Using her story as its skeleton, Bader weaves in the stories of other “Corporate Idealists” working inside some of the world's biggest and best-known companies.

The Art of Opportunity offers a path toward new growth, providing the perspective and methods you need to make innovation happen. Written by a team of experts with both academic and industry experience - and a client roster composed of some of the world's leading companies - this book provides you with the necessary tools to help you capture growth instead of chasing it.

With the toughest economic downturn in recent history, the issue of accountability has taken center stage. However accountability is often confused with punishment, fault, blame, and guilt. In this book, the author argues that the only true accountability is "personal accountability" and the only way to achieve it is to take responsibility for the outcomes of your choices, behaviors, and actions.

An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks listeners through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must listen for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manager looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.

In Bring Your Human to Work, Erica Keswin laid down the rules and protocols of a human workplace. Now, in Rituals Roadmap, she shows us how to further employee engagement, explaining that workplace rituals foster a sense of belonging and help workers connect with one another and their work.

Today, when companies and customers are faced with an infinite number of messages, the word “relevance” has taken on a new meaning and dimension. We know that relevance matters, but what does that mean exactly? Andy Coville guides leaders and executives toward the realization that if they can focus on a single, guiding principle—a magnetic one—that permeates their brand or company, customers will not only engage but change thinking and behavior in turn.

Humans have kept honey bees in hives for millennia, yet only in recent decades have biologists begun to investigate how these industrious insects live in the wild. The Lives of Bees is Thomas Seeley’s captivating story of what scientists are learning about the behavior, social life, and survival strategies of honey bees living outside the beekeeper’s hive - and how wild honey bees may hold the key to reversing the alarming die-off of the planet’s managed honey bee populations.

Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary - and frequently contrarian - principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business.

The United States has always proved an inviting home for boosters, sharp dealers, and outright swindlers. Worship of entrepreneurial freedom has complicated the task of distinguishing aggressive salesmanship from unacceptable deceit, especially on the frontiers of innovation. At the same time, competitive pressures have often nudged respectable firms to embrace deception. As a result, fraud has been a key feature of American business since its beginnings.

It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.