Business Problem Solving

This book adds examples from over twenty years of experience by Dr. Liker in working with companies outside of Toyota. This audiobook treats you as a student who will be actively engaged in developing lean leader skills as you read. It acts as a tutorial for beginning the journey!

On average, people leave about 20 percent of potential mutual gains untapped in any negotiation. This is akin to taking 20 percent of the value in any deal and dumping it into a garbage canister. Finding that hidden 20 percent, the “sweet spot”, is a skill that takes practice but is also one that anybody can learn. In Negotiating the Sweet Spot, Leigh Thompson offers surefire best practices and tools to use in daily negotiations and conflict situations.

In Clarity in Crisis, Marc shares how true leaders need to lead in and through times of crisis and thrive under conditions of ambiguity, rather than message their way out or duck from hard decisions.

The creative mode in your brain is like a butterfly. It's beautiful and erratic, hard to catch, and highly valued as a result. If you want to capture it, you need a net. Enter the executive mode, the task-oriented network in your brain that helps you tie your shoes, run a meeting, or pitch a client. To succeed, you need both modes to work together - your inner butterfly to be active and free, but your inner net to be ready to spring at the right time and create that "aha!" moment. But is there any way to trigger these insights, beyond dumb luck?

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

In How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm, and offers inside accounts of how they solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

How do you tell a real trend from the merely trendy? How, for example, will a technology—like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving cars, biohacking, bots, and the Internet of Things—affect us, our businesses, and workplaces? How will it eventually change the way we live, work, play, and think—and how should we prepare for it now? In The Signals Are Talking, noted futurist Amy Webb shows us how to analyze the "true signals" and land on the right side of disruption.

Do you find yourself aching to break away from the mundane routine of the status quo? Do you often come up with innovative ideas, but soon find yourself dismissing them? Doug shares with you many of the success principles and applications that he developed and tested at the unique Eureka! Ranch, extraordinary techniques that can virtually transform your business.

With Amy Herman's Fixed., we now have access to what the FBI, NATO, the State Department, Interpol, Scotland Yard, and many more organizations and their leaders have been using to solve their most intractable problems.

In the early 1980s, Harley-Davidson was on the verge of bankruptcy. In the general public's opinion, quality was substandard - of both motorcycles and riders. Harleys leaked oil and were often broken down. Riders were roughnecks, out to raise hell. The Harley-Davidson brand was tarnished. What s more, the charges were true.By the mid-1980s, Harley couldn't produce enough bikes to keep the public happy. Dealers were selling bikes off the showroom floor, struggling to assuage customers frustration.

Why do we lose money? It's easy to blame the economy or the financial markets - but the real trouble lies in the decisions we make. As a financial planner, Carl Richards grew frustrated watching people he cared about make the same mistakes over and over. They were letting emotion get in the way of smart financial decisions. He named this phenomenon - the distance between what we should do and what we actually do - "the behavior gap". He found that once people understood it, they started doing much better.

We typically work most directly with a small group of no more than 10 people, and in that team, we have a high degree of influence. Charlie Gilkey, an internationally known thought leader on productivity, planning, strategy, and leadership for creative people, explains how changing our team's habits can change our company's culture since that culture is always just an aggregation of its various teams' work habits.

Dream, Believe, Dare, Do. Though four simple words, this carefully crafted credo lies at the heart of Walt Disney's enviable empire and has led The Walt Disney Company to prosperity for decades. As foremost experts on Disney, authors Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson return with an updated and expanded third edition of The Disney Way to show how organizations can incorporate this four-pillared credo to support any business, drive any team, and guide any leader to create immeasurable success.

Ask better questions, and you will get better results. Top business coach Mark Moses has identified four critical questions every business leader should explore on their journey to business and life success.

Beyond OODA: Developing the Orientation for Deception, Conflict and Violence is Varg Freeborn's highly anticipated follow up to the extremely popular Violence of Mind. While Violence of Mind was a broad introduction to all aspects of violence preparation, Beyond OODA focuses precisely on the development of mindset, or more accurately the orientation that influences and governs our decision making, and how it is developed for both good and bad people, alike.

How can we learn to deal with uncertainty at work? The answer is to learn from the adaptive behaviors of entrepreneurs. Play, the authors show, is a crucial component of this. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and curiosity, while it also challenges established practices and orthodoxies. It facilitates change in people and organizations. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators, this audiobook explains why we should incorporate play into work, what play looks like, and how to encourage playfulness in individuals and organizations.

A paradigm-shifting manifesto for transforming our thinking from reactionary short-termism to the long-term, widening our scope beyond today, tomorrow, and to even five hundred years from now to reclaim meaning in our lives.

Numbers make or break you. Ask any bankrupt business or successful startup and they’ll both agree, numbers don’t lie. Unfortunately, most teams focus on too many numbers or the wrong numbers or maybe no numbers at all! Author Lee Benson knows numbers. He grew his business from 3 employees to 500 with 15 consecutive years of 20 percent compounded average annual growth. Friends and families asked for his secret. He told them it came down to Your Most Important Number.

The world is changing fast. Political risk - the probability that a political action could significantly impact a company's business - is affecting more businesses in more ways than ever before. A generation ago, political risk mostly involved a handful of industries dealing with governments in a few frontier markets. Today, political risk stems from a widening array of actors, including Twitter users, local officials, activists, terrorists, hackers, and more. In today's globalized world, there are no "safe" bets.

Data analytics offer an incredible opportunity to predict the future, engage with new technological advancements, and gain valuable insights about your business. But unless you're staying on top of the cutting edge of analytics, your company is wasting that potential-and your competitors will be gaining speed while you fall behind. These articles by experts and consultants will help you understand today's essential thinking about what data analytics are capable of and how to adopt their use in your organization.