Business Performance

Leadership Lessons is a book about how to improve organizational performance. The essays in this book are an accumulation of various projects that I have been involved in for more than a dozen years. The term projects spans quite a range of subject matter and purposes for their existence. The reality is that the central focus of all these essays is improving the ability to understand the dynamics at play that are impacting their organizations. The purpose is to help organizations and the people within them to be able to realize their individual and collective potential.

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.

Today's leaders know that speed and agility are the keys to any company's success, and yet many are frustrated that their organizations can't move fast enough to stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow; internal resources are too limited; people are already executing beyond normal expectations. As the pace accelerates, how do you inspire people's energy and creativity? How do you collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners to keep your organization on the cutting edge?

Peak Performance Culture: The Five Metrics of Operational Excellence is a step-by-step roadmap to achieving optimal organizational development in your company or association. This practical guide helps you accurately evaluate the current state of your company and create a strategy that maximizes its future success. Author Dave Mitchell, building upon concepts introduced in his books The Power of Understanding People and The Power of Understanding, provides new applications, effective real-world tactics, powerful organizational assessment tools, and much more.

Confidence! Everyone wants it. But what do you need to achieve it? Throughout our lives, we hear the familiar expression, “You need to be more confident.” Yet, no one tells us, “Here's how you do it!” The problem remains: How do you become confident? Get Out of the Rabbit Hole answers that question and more. Dispelling the myth that people are born confident, the stories demonstrate how confidence can be developed and mastered just like any other skill.

In this timely and essential guide, McKinsey alumni Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas present a proven approach to workplace anxiety that reduces stress, boosts well-being, and overcomes blocks that get in the way of success. It begins with changing our relationship with fear and then developing strategies that improve outlook and performance, leading to greater profits, sustainable growth, and personal rewards. It’s only possible with a culture of unfear.

When your biggest superpower is also your most critical weakness, it helps to have a manual on how to control it. Entrepreneurs are creative, bold thinkers and risk-takers capable of great accomplishments. At the same time, for every success story, there is a counter story of an epic collapse caused by a lack of a moral compass, values, or proper guidance. Jeff Hays knows the highs and the lows having ridden that rollercoaster many times in his life and career and provides a much-needed user’s manual for entrepreneurs everywhere and the people in their work and personal lives.

The New York Times bestselling authors of The Carrot Principle and All In deliver a breakthrough, groundbreaking guide for building today’s most collaborative teams—so any organization can operate at peak performance.

A massive shift is taking place in the business world. In today’s average company, up to eighty percent of employees’ days are now spent working in teams. And yet the teams most people find themselves in are nowhere near as effective as they could be. They’re often divided by tensions, if not outright dissension, and dysfunctional teams drain employees’ energy, enthusiasm, and creativity. Now Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton share the proven ways managers can build cohesive, productive teams, despite the distractions and challenges every business is facing.

In The Best Team Wins, Gostick and Elton studied more than 850,000 employee engagement surveys to develop their “Five Disciplines of Team Leaders,” explaining how to recognize and motivate different generations to enhance individual engagement; ways to promote healthy discord and spark innovation; and techniques to unify customer focus and build bridges across functions, cultures, and distance. They’ve shared these disciplines with their corporate clients and have now distilled their breakthrough findings into a succinct, engaging guide for business leaders everywhere. Gostick and Elton offer practical ways to address the real challenges today’s managers are facing, such as the rise of the Millennials, the increasing speed of change, the growing number of global and virtual teams, and the friction created by working cross-functionally.

This is a must-read for anyone looking to maximize performance at work, from two of the most successful corporate consultants of their generation, whom The New York Times called “creative and refreshing.”

Next Level Sales Coaching offers insights to sales executives, customer-service managers, business owners, and other professional managers on strategies to overcome common challenges in building a "best in class" sales team. Sales performance can impact a company's revenue, profits, market share, and employee retention. The question is, how do you positively impact those goals? The answer is simple: Sales improve when your team is better trained, coached, and supported.

The number-one reason most people don't reach their biggest dreams and goals is what international business coach Howard Partridge calls F.T.I. Failure to Implement. Many times, people know what to do and how to do it; they just don't do it. This book reveals the causes of F.T.I. and offers a proven path to overcoming the tendency toward inaction.

Virtue is more than a word: it's a way for us all to live, a way to flourish as human beings. And when applied to organizational life, virtue serves to enhance engagement, strengthen relationships, and foster success in business. Picking up where the acclaimed Exception to the Rule left off, Better Humans, Better Performance connects the classical Greek virtues—Trust, Compassion, Courage, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, and Hope—with authoritative science that can help you achieve the highest performance.

In today's over-wired world, we are expected to be always on and always connected, but this approach has consequences. Workplace engagement is at an all-time low, and complaints about work-life balance are at an all-time high. In the quest to optimize while restoring balance, more people than ever before are now embracing flow. Create More Flow introduces the concept of flow, offers compelling evidence for its impact, and provides actionable strategies.

Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) is making a comeback and has made it to the top of the list of most adopted management tools among executives in leading global organizations. As we enter an unprecedented era of economic unpredictability, disruptive technologies, globalization, and fierce competition, companies are increasingly finding themselves in search of money to invest in new initiatives which have caused a resurgence in ZBB as a tool of choice among executives.

Mark Twain's lifetime spans America's era of greatest economic growth. And Twain was an active, even giddy, participant in all the great booms and busts of his time, launching himself into one harebrained get-rich-quick scheme after another. But far from striking it rich, the man who coined the term "Gilded Age" failed with comical regularity to join the ranks of plutocrats who made this period in America notorious for its wealth and excess.

From polar explorers and politicians to CEOs and sports coaches, we are fascinated with the makeup of leaders. How do they thrive under pressure and inspire others to do the same? How do they establish a culture of long-term success? Performance psychologist Tom Young has worked closely with teams and individuals at the highest level of professional sport. He has seen how leaders in these high-pressure environments communicate, how they maintain focus and respond to challenges.

The 15 Commandments are essential pillars of success that create peak performance in sales. This is a no-nonsense, 15-point strategy for growing your potential as a sales professional.

If you've ever struggled to motivate the young people in your sphere of influence, Answering Why is the game-changer you've been looking for. From the urgent skills gap crisis to the proven strategies to inspire our youngest generations, Answering Why addresses the burning questions faced by educators, employers, and parents everywhere. Author, CEO, and generational expert Mark C. Perna shares his wide experience and profound success as both a single dad and performance consultant for education and workforce development across North America.

In his work consulting to major corporations for more than 30 years, Gerald Kraines consistently hears that 60-70 percent of business organizations' potential effectiveness goes unrealized. He shares how to engage, align, and develop employees in order to leverage and encourage optimal performance and long-lasting results.

Many leaders miss out on their teams’ full potential because navigating the complex and ever-changing business landscape is more and more challenging. Traditional leadership models often fail to address the intricate interplay of organizational intentions, external factors, and internal dynamics resulting in subpar performance and disengaged teams. As a result, executives find themselves ill equipped to set their organization and leaders up for success in an increasingly complex world.

Since technology has made it easy to access, share, and distribute company data, many managers avoid live interaction, instead relying on emails, text messages, web-based seminars to manage their employees. But although technology has changed, people have not. There is still a need for effective face-to-face communication; managers need to have the ability to ask the right questions and use the answers to find solutions.