Business Psychology Success

In The Tools, Barry Michels and Phil Stutz revolutionized the world of personal growth and self-actualization by offering doable, dynamic actions that transformed challenges into opportunities for change. Now, in Coming Alive, they provide four vital tools for tapping into the Life Force that resides within each of us - a wellspring of positive energy that is the source of creativity, renewal, confidence, and engagement.

There are moments when we achieve peak performance: An athlete plays a perfect game; a business has a quarter with once-in-a-lifetime profits. But these moments are often elusive, and for every amazing day, we may have a hundred ordinary and even unsatisfying days. Fulfillment doesn’t come from isolated peak experiences, but rather from many consistent good days. So how do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance? In Optimal, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss reveal how emotional intelligence can help us have a great day, any day.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.

The New York Times best-selling Freakonomics changed the way we see the world, exposing the hidden side of just about everything. Then came SuperFreakonomics, a documentary film, an award-winning podcast, and more. Now, with Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner have written their most revolutionary book yet. With their trademark blend of captivating storytelling and unconventional analysis, they take us inside their thought process and teach us all to think a bit more productively, more creatively, more rationally.

There used to be two teams in every workplace: management and labor. Now there’s a third team, the linchpins. These people invent, lead (regardless of title), connect others, make things happen, and create order out of chaos. They figure out what to do when there’s no rule book. They delight and challenge their customers and peers. They love their work, pour their best selves into it, and turn each day into a kind of art.

In Your Brain at Work, Dr. David Rock goes inside Emily and Paul's brains to see how they function as each attempts to sort, prioritize, organize, and act on the vast quantities of information they receive in one typical day. Dr. Rock is an expert on how the brain functions in a work setting. By analyzing what is going on in their heads, he offers solutions Emily and Paul (and all of us) can use to survive and thrive in today's hyperbusy work environment - and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

Regardless of what you want to accomplish, from growing your business, creating a great company culture, championing a social cause, or affecting your habits, you can’t do it alone. The people around you define your success (whatever that means for you) and they have the potential to change the course of your life.

What is genius? The word evokes iconic figures like Einstein, Beethoven, Picasso, and Steve Jobs, whose cultural contributions have irreversibly shaped society. Yet Beethoven could not multiply. Picasso couldn’t pass a fourth grade math test. And Jobs left high school with a 2.65 GPA. The Hidden Habits of Genius explores the meaning of this contested term, and the unexpected motivations of those we have dubbed "genius" throughout history, from Charles Darwin and Marie Curie to Leonardo Da Vinci and Andy Warhol to Toni Morrison and Elon Musk.

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.

You were born influential. But then you were taught to suppress that power, to follow the rules, to wait your turn, to not make waves. Award-winning Yale professor Zoe Chance will show you how to rediscover the superpower that brings great ideas to life. Influence doesn’t work the way you think because you don’t think the way you think. Move past common misconceptions—such as the idea that asking for more will make people dislike you—and understand why your go-to negotiation strategies are probably making you less influential.

Are you above average? Is your child an A student? Is your employee an introvert or an extrovert? Every day we are measured against the yardstick of averages, judged according to how close we come to it or how far we deviate from it. The assumption that metrics comparing us to an average—like GPAs, personality test results, and performance review ratings—reveal something meaningful about our potential is so ingrained in our consciousness that we don't even question it. That assumption, says Harvard's Todd Rose, is spectacularly—and scientifically—wrong.

How can you come up with great ideas by yourself, or in the context of your team, and quickly determine which are worthy of investment? The simple metric of ideaflow determines success like no other. Ideaflow is a mindset, a way of approaching all your business problems, that multiplies your efforts and unleashes your full potential. Nurture ideaflow and watch your results transform.

New York Times best-selling author Dan Heath examines how to prevent problems before they happen, drawing on insights from his innovative behavior research, as well as hundreds of new interviews with unconventional problem solvers. Most of us spend our days handling a deluge of pressing issues. We’re so accustomed to managing emergencies as they strike that we often don’t stop to think about how we could prevent crises before they happen. Why stop at treating the symptoms when you could develop a cure?

It’s easy to be positive when everything is coming up roses. But what happens when life goes sideways? Many of us lapse into a self-defeating negative spiral that makes it hard to accomplish anything. Getting to Neutral is a step-by-step guide that shows listeners how to use mental conditioning coach Trevor Moawad’s innovative motivational system to defeat negativity and thrive.

A pioneer in the field of social engineering and a master hacker, Christopher Hadnagy specializes in understanding how malicious attackers exploit principles of human communication to access information and resources through manipulation and deceit. Now, he shows you how to use social engineering as a force for good - to help you regain your confidence and control. Hacking Humans provides tools that will help you establish rapport with strangers, use body language and verbal cues to your advantage, steer conversations and influence other’s decisions, and more.

We pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings”. We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: We don’t subtract. Leidy Klotz’s pioneering research shows why.

For many of us, listening is simply something we do on autopilot. We hear just enough of what others say to get our work done, maintain friendships, and be polite with our neighbors. But we miss crucial opportunities to go deeper - to give and receive honest feedback, to make connections that will endure for the long haul, and to discover who people truly are at their core. Fortunately, listening can be improved - and Ximena Vengoechea can show you how.

Lawyers. Accountants. Software Engineers. That what Mom and Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of "left-brain" dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.

In Happy Derren Brown explores changing concepts of happiness - from the surprisingly modern wisdom of the Stoics and Epicureans in classical times right up until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. He shows how many of self-help’s suggested routes to happiness and success – such as positive thinking, self-belief and setting goals – can be disastrous to follow and, indeed, actually cause anxiety. Happy aims to reclaim happiness and to enable us to appreciate the good things in life, in all their transient glory.

The Magical Approach teaches us how to live our lives spontaneously, creatively, and according to our own natural rhythms. It helps us to discover and tune into our natural, instinctive behavior. By applying the principles in this book, listeners will learn to trust their impulses and discover the highest expression of their creativity.