Business Organization

Most organizations realize that to succeed in today’s turbulent world, they need to perform as an integrated whole to tap into innovations and good ideas. Yet many still find it difficult to capture the collective intelligence of their employees and customers. Companies don’t know what they know—but they need to learn soon.

Too often discussions of management practice focus exclusively on managing people and organizational issues. Rarely, however, do they incorporate a discussion about technology or address all three dimensions in a balanced way. When they do, the result is game changing. In our hypercompetitive environment, those managers who are outstanding at being plugged into their people, technology, and organizational processes simultaneously excel at coming up with effective business solutions.

Thoroughly revised and updated, David Noer's classic book about downsized organizations has never been more relevant. Reports of the most recent layoffs are making the front pages of our newspapers with frightening regularity. And massive downsizing continues to reshape the face of American business. But what about those who remain behind? Healing the Wounds provides an antidote to the widespread malaise on the American business scene left in the wake of workforce reductions.

From one of the most respected names in business and leadership, a rare look at the specifics of how great leaders achieve "common purpose" and success within their organizations.

An innovative communication method for making change happen in any organization, Getting Change Right presents a new view of leadership communication that says change doesn't flow top-down, bottom-up, or sideways, but inside out. This is how change spreads through a complex system successfully - the other options are force or failure.

Scale collaboration, not process. If you're trying to use agile and lean at the program level, you've heard of several approaches, all about scaling processes. If you duplicate what one team does for several teams, you get bloat, not delivery. Instead of scaling the process, scale everyone's collaboration. With autonomy, collaboration, and exploration, teams and program level people can decide how to apply agile and lean to their work.

Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success. In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and an increased employee retention and productivity - and a better bottom line.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

Doing the right job the right way is critical to your professional success. Influence and Impact provides an easy-to-follow, common sense approach to building influence at any level of an organization. Accomplished leadership and executive coaches Bill Berman and George Bradt offer a fresh perspective on evaluating what values, strengths, and capabilities you bring to your role; how you can develop new skills to increase your influence; and determining if you are in the right place to have the greatest impact.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of 77 government organizations—ranging from small departments to entire states—Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don’t work well in the public sector.

Mastering the Cube skillfully lays out proven organization design principles. Comparing today's complex organizations to a Rubik's Cube, the authors explain how focusing improvement efforts on just one or two facets of the organization is akin to concentrating on just one side of the cube. Doing so is bound to affect - and more likely jumble - the other areas needed to generate a healthy and sustainable organization. They advocate stepping back and taking a systems-wide, comprehensive view of change and bringing all elements into alignment with strategy.

That's Not How We Do It Here! is a business parable about a clan of meerkats who live in the Kalahari. Well-organised and efficient, the colony enjoys many years of successful growth until it suddenly comes under threat from a new form of predator and is forced to rethink its organizational structure. John Kotter uses this charming parable to explore why organizations often struggle no matter their past success and why they fall.

Two distinguished scholars offer eight steps to help organizations discover and embrace an authentic higher purpose - something that will dramatically improve every aspect of any enterprise, including the bottom line. This iconoclastic audiobook will help any organization discover its authentic purpose and weave it into the fabric of everything it does, leading to unprecedented levels of personal satisfaction, service and product innovation, and economic growth.

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.

Following the enormous popularity of their bestselling The Carrot Principle, Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton return with a groundbreaking guide to building high-performance teams. The powerful research reported in The Orange Revolution reveals that the true driver of exceptional success for great companies is not a genius CEO....

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.

Far from slowing down, change and transformation in business seems to come only at a more and more furious rate. The last ten years alone have seen the introduction of groundbreaking new trends that pose new opportunities and challenges for leaders in all industries.

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.

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.