Business Performance

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?"

The Leadership Contract provides the manual that leaders around the world need. With only seven percent of employees feeling confident in senior leadership, the problem is evident: disappointing, and often disgraceful leaders. Employees deserve better than that; organizations need better than that - and this book provides a robust framework for stepping up and making the decision to lead. If you're not exceptional, step up or step aside - this book helps you toughen up and put your commitment to great leadership in writing for yourself as much as everyone else.

We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. Managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will show you how.

The successful CEO of the internationally renowned Peak Potentials - who has trained thousands of people to find new jobs, careers, and directions - reads his practical and inspirational guide for reinventing yourself whether you are out of work or want to change your professional trajectory.

Legendary magician Penn Jillette was approaching his 60th birthday. Topping 330 pounds and saddled with a systolic blood pressure reading over 200, he knew he was at a dangerous crossroads: If he wanted to see his small children grow up, he needed to change. And then came Crazy Ray. A former NASA scientist and an unconventional, passionate innovator, Ray Cronise saved Jillette's life with his wild "potato diet". Outspoken, frank, and bitingly clever, Presto is an incisive, rollicking listen.

In The Scrum Fieldbook, he draws on his firm’s extensive experience in the field to take leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and new opportunities organizations face in an Agile transformation. He shows how the Scrum framework can be successfully applied to any project in any industry, from automobile manufacturers in the US and Europe to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from fighter plane builders in Sweden to US Navy Special Forces teams.

People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work - a colleague, subordinate, or boss. Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and - more important - the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.

The essential complement to the pathbreaking Competitive Strategy, Michael E. Porter's Competitive Advantage explores the underpinnings of competitive advantage in the individual firm. Competitive Advantage introduces a whole new way of understanding what a firm does. Porter's groundbreaking concept of the value chain disaggregates a company into activities, or the discrete functions or processes that represent the elemental building blocks of competitive advantage.

Gapology is the term Mark Thienes and Brian Brockhoff coined to describe what winning leaders do to identify and close performance gaps in their teams. Gapology is their process. For more than a decade, they analyzed the results, leadership behaviors and tactics of winning leaders as compared to those of leaders who were not winning. They wanted to understand how winning leaders win and if winning could be replicated. They were deeply curious about whether winning can be taught to those not winning or if winning leaders are simply born with the skills to win.

During his 20 years as a Navy officer and SEAL, Rich Diviney was intimately involved in a specialized SEAL selection process, which whittled a group of hundreds of extraordinary candidates down to a handful of the most elite performers. Diviney was often surprised by which candidates washed out and which succeeded. Some could have all the right skills and still fail, while others he might have initially dismissed would prove to be top performers.

Learn the key solutions to solve the 10 proven, repeatable, and beatable challenges that every business encounters. Whether you are a startup, restructuring, or escalating to a higher level, you can grow your business, improve performance, and improve efficiency starting right now with the help of The Profit Pattern. This is an insider's look at the strategies behind authority business coach and serial entrepreneur John Mautner's formula. The Profit Pattern will help you protect, restore, and grow your business, just as Mautner has personally done to help thousands.

To succeed in a fast-changing world, individuals and companies know they must create a culture of growth, where experimentation and feedback are encouraged, and learning is integrated into the everyday. Yet we often get stuck in a well-worn pattern of habits that don’t move us forward. Why? Because many of us get trapped in the Performance Paradox: the counterintuitive phenomenon that if we focus only on performing, our performance suffers. How can we give ourselves the space to experiment and grow while also delivering high-level results?

Great companies, large and small, rise or fall because of their talent: The more high performers on your team, the more successful your organization will be. Of course, that’s easier said than done. Research shows that only about 25% of all new hires turn out to be high performers. But companies that have used Brad Smart’s Topgrading system over the past two decades have boosted their hiring success rates dramatically - sometimes even to 90%.

Modern employees are tired of command and control management. Employees are looking for personal growth, purpose, and a different lifestyle than prior generations of employees. These employees are in a market where they can have flexibility in how and where they work. They want and can demand choices in the work environment.

Streamline KPIs to craft a simpler, more effective system of performance measurement.

Your business success depends on your ability to align and develop the people who work for you. High-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand the three essential components of growth: alignment, development, and transition. TeamWork breaks each of these components down into actionable processes, with steps you can take immediately to start making a difference today. Learn how to create teams that work the way you want them to. Then, discover ways to scale those teams, keeping them aligned with your objectives as your business grows.

The new female manager’s encyclopedia - how to lead like a pro and spin teamwork into value, even with little experience! If you’ve been newly appointed to a managerial position with a few years of experience under your belt…you may struggle to get used to your peers calling you “boss”. However, it would help if you weren’t afraid to embrace leadership roles - you earned every right to excel, and your boss must have noticed something exceptional in you, so don’t downplay yourself.

The World Health Organization estimates that American businesses lose more than $300 billion a year due to stress experienced by employees, and recent research by Harvard Medical School found that more than 95 percent of leaders felt at least somewhat burnt-out. For individuals and organizations who want to thrive in today's high-pressure, 24-7 business environment, working even longer is not the solution. To maximize your performance and well-being over the long-term, you need to work stronger.

With Results, Not Reports, Peter Follows, CEO of Carpedia International, provides business leaders with a framework for lasting improvements in performance and profitability. Carpedia has a remarkable success rate in large-scale improvement programs, helping clients achieve their improvement goals over 90 percent of the time. In this book, Peter explains how to achieve sustainable improvement through the dynamic management of process, performance, and people, emphasizing that all three components have an interdependent relationship and that the key is to address them concurrently.

"Your story is your life," says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories: of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving.