Business Problem Solving

For over 20 years, a select group of Yale undergraduates has been admitted into the year-long "Grand Strategy" seminar team-taught by John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy. Its purpose: to provide a grounding in strategic decision-making in the face of crisis to prepare future American leaders for important work. Now, John Lewis Gaddis has transposed the experience of that course into a wonderfully succinct, lucid and inspirational book, a view from the commanding heights of statesmanship across the landscape of world history from the ancient Greeks to Lincoln, and beyond.

Klein proposes a naturalistic approach to decision making, which views people as gaining experience that enables them to use a combination of intuition and analysis to make decisions. To illustrate this approach, Klein tells stories of people - from pilots to chess masters - acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions.

>. Orange Beach, Alabama is a simple town filled with simple people. But like all humans on the planet, the good folks of Orange Beach have their share of problems - marriages teetering on the brink of divorce, young adults giving up on life, business people on the verge of bankruptcy, as well as the many other obstacles that life seems to dish out to the masses. Fortunately, when things look the darkest - a mysterious man named Jones has a miraculous way of showing up.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

Since 1946, Henry Hazlitt's best-selling Economics in One Lesson has popularized the belief that economics can be boiled down to one simple lesson: market prices represent the true cost of everything. But one-lesson economics tells only half the story. It can explain why markets often work so well, but it can't explain why they often fail so badly - or what we should do when they stumble. In Economics in Two Lessons, John Quiggin teaches both lessons, offering a masterful introduction to the key ideas behind the successes - and failures - of free markets.

In The Serendipity Mindset, Christian Busch explains that serendipity isn't about luck in the sense of simple randomness. It's about seeing links that others don't, combining these observations in unexpected and strategic ways, and learning how to detect the moments when apparently random or unconnected ideas merge to form new opportunities. Busch explores serendipity from a rational and scientific perspective and argues that there are identifiable approaches we can use to foster the conditions to let serendipity grow.

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details 10 real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations.

From Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First, Clockwork, and The Pumpkin Plan, comes the ultimate diagnostic tool for every entrepreneur.... The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is that they don't know what their biggest problem is. If you find yourself trapped between stagnating sales, staff turnover, and unhappy customers, what do you fix first? Every issue seems urgent—but there's no way to address all of them at once. The result? A business that continues to go in endless circles putting out urgent fires and prioritizing the wrong things.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value – creativity, responsiveness, resilience – are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.

Performing Under Pressure tackles the greatest obstacle to personal success, whether in a sales presentation, at home, on the golf course, interviewing for a job, or performing onstage at Carnegie Hall. Despite sports mythology, no one rises to the occasion under pressure and does better than they do in practice. The reality is pressure makes us do worse and sometimes leads us to fail utterly. But there are things we can do to diminish its effects on our performance.

Les meilleurs conseils en matière de négociation, applicables à tous les domaines de nos vies quotidiennes, de la part de Laurent Combalbert et Marwan Mery, deux négociateurs reconnus internationalement.

In this irreverent and illuminating audiobook, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, chance, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious causes, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

After two decades as a behavior analyst in the FBI, Robin Dreeke knows a thing or two about sizing people up. He's navigated complex situations that range from handling Russian spies to navigating the internal politics at the Bureau. Through that experience, he was forced to develop a knack for reading people - their intentions, their capabilities, their desires and their fears. In Sizing People Up, Dreeke shares his simple, six-step system that helps you predict anyone's future behavior based on their words, goals, patterns of action, and the situation at hand.

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.

Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve and profitable. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level. By challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries, anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity.

Crucial Conversations exploded onto the scene 10 years ago and revolutionized the way people communicate when stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong. Since then, millions of people have learned how to hold effective crucial conversations and have dramatically improved their lives and careers thanks to the methods outlined in this book. Now, the authors have revised their best-selling classic to provide even more ways to help you take the lead in any tough conversation.

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job.

Disruption for disruption's sake isn't a smart strategy when you're seeking ways to accelerate your career and become truly indispensable. In The Bold Ones, you'll discover it's more about being bold than disruptive: being simultaneously confident enough to challenge industries, yet practical enough to recreate them. In this playbook from internationally celebrated disruption strategist Shawn Kanungo, you'll learn where to start, what to do, and how to break through with your ideas.

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

Create the Future is an exciting guidebook for disruptive thinking, innovation, and change, paired with The Innovation Handbook, an updated version of the award-winning book, Exploiting Chaos. The bestseller is loaded with the same tactics, tools, and frameworks that Gutsche's team uses to accelerate 700 of the world's most powerful brands, billionaires, CEOs, and NASA.