Business Organization

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.

What does it mean in practice to be a values-based leader? When faced with real situations, how can you be your best self and create best teams - while also being a best partner with customers and vendors, a best investment for your stakeholders, and a best citizen making a difference in the world? It's a tall order, but these are the expectations for world-class organizations today.

Drawing on military leadership knowledge and personal experience, 5 to 50 to 500 introduces The Business Navigation Framework™, designed to create the conditions for organizational scalability. To be scalable, organizations need to navigate toward an end state using an intent based decision-making and action-enabling framework. Scalability is not about resources, it's about an adaptability mindset. Organizations are complex organic living systems that can adapt and grow. Developing and sustaining adaptive capacity in organizations is the main job of a leader preparing to scale. 

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.

The Product Mindset approaches product development from a bold, new direction, based on a shared internal outlook that drives focus, speed, experimentation, and innovation from a wide variety of stakeholders. David DeWolf and Jessica Hall provide you with all the tools you’ll need to revitalize your company’s methodologies, reframe its culture, and help your company thrive in the digital marketplace.

This book defines not-for-profit organizations and how to set up and structure them for success.

We are living in an epidemic of disengagement and despair that calls us to action. Awakening Compassion at Work answers the call, showing us new ways to enliven the humanity of work and in so doing address the suffering of the world and create an innovative, optimistic, and engaged workforce.

The formula for lean success! Toyota veterans reveal how to build continuous improvement into your company's DNA.

Award-winning organizational advisor Anese Cavanaugh reveals the secrets of IEP - Intentional Energetic Presence - for transforming your workplace and your life. The key to any company's success lies in its culture. This game-changing guide shows you how to shape and revitalize this culture - by setting the tone, engaging the team, and creating a dynamic working environment that encourages growth, productivity, and innovation.

In The Digital Helix, authors Michael Gale and Chris Aarons explain the specifics of digitally transforming your organization - from the role of the digital-explorer leader in using information to empower the organization to move better and faster to shifts in sales, marketing, communications and leadership, product development, and service and support. The Digital Helix is a practical guide to bringing all the key functions together and includes guidance on developing a digital culture from the ground up.

Flat Army arms you with powerful tools for overcoming resistance to change and creating a culture of collaboration, engagement, and employee empowerment. Your people are your most valuable asset, and if you want them to excel (and your profits to soar), you'll need to abandon your traditional command-and-control management style and adopt a collaborative, open leadership approach - one that engages and empowers your people. While this isn't a particularly new idea, many leaders, while they may pay lip service to it, don't really understand what it means.

For ages, global corporations have been lecturing small organizations and not-for-profits on how to get things done. As it turns out, it should have been the other way around. In this groundbreaking audiobook, award-winning researcher Paulo Savaget shows how the most valuable lessons about problem-solving can be learned from the scrappiest groups. Savaget draws most of his examples from small organizations dedicated to social action that have made an art form out of subverting the status quo and have proved themselves adept at achieving massive wins with minimal resources.

The spiritual successor to KPIs (key performance indicators), OKRs, or objectives and key results, are rapidly gaining popularity and helping some of the world's most successful businesses solve their strategic execution problems. However, some companies struggle with their implementation, finding that using OKRs as top-down directives changes little. In OKRs for All, Objectives and Key Results (OKR) expert Vetri Vellore delivers an impactful and actionable guide on how to use OKRs for more than a quarterly, executive-level review tool.

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,

The leader's guide to building a service powerhouse using the approach that made Mayo Clinic the number one health-care system in America.

In a tight market, your most powerful growth engine - and your best protection from competitive inroads - is this: Put everything you can into cultivating true customer loyalty. Loyal customers are less sensitive to price competition, more forgiving of small glitches, and, ultimately, become "walking billboards" who will happily promote your brand.

In Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit, insiders Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon reveal the secrets of providing online and offline customer service so superior it nearly guarantees loyalty.

Business leaders are continually told they need to embrace digital disruption wholeheartedly to thrive in the 21st century. Legacy companies, we hear, are all doomed to fail unless they double down on the latest digital innovations, and disruptors are ordained to take over the world. Digital innovation is the answer to everything. False! Nothing in life or business is ever that simple.

Many companies make disruption their goal. They believe that if they develop the right innovation, they will disrupt their markets forever and drive the kind of growth worthy of a magazine cover story. But as best-selling author Charlene Li explains, that’s not how disruption works. Disruption doesn’t create growth; instead, growth creates disruption.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Once upon a time, a clan of meerkats lived in the Kalahari, a region in Southern Africa. After years of steady growth, a drought has sharply reduced the clan's resources, and deadly vulture attacks have increased. As things keep getting worse, the harmony of the clan is shattered. The executive team quarrels about possible solutions, and suggestions from frontline workers face a soul-crushing response: "That's not how we do it here!"