Career Innovation

In the wake of economic downturn, foreign competition, spiking oil prices, and even war, American business throughout this decade has been thrust into crisis. To improve their performance, corporations everywhere have adopted a wide range of tools and techniques, yet many continue to struggle. Going Lean points to a better way.

You are not alone. Finally, here is a book that gets to the heart of what professional women really want. You have had enough of 60-hour workweeks, the day care dash, and the vacations that never get taken. You want to work, but on your own terms. Women have power. In Womenomics, journalists Shipman and Kay deal in facts. Companies with more women managers are more profitable and report higher levels of employee satisfaction.

In Driving Innovation from Within, strategist and advisor Kaihan Krippendorff disproves one of today's biggest business myths to highlight lessons for innovators and leaders. He reveals how many of the modern world's most impactful creations were invented by passionate employee innovators. Distilling more than 150 interviews with internal innovators and leading experts along with insights from the latest research and today's most successful companies Krippendorff lays out a step-by-step playbook to unlock innovation from the inside. He maps the barriers that frustrate efforts to disrupt from within and provides tools to remove them.

In the world of work, the single greatest asset of successful individuals, teams, and organizations is their mindset - what happens in between their ears. It's not the corporate strategy, the sales compensation plan, or the market segments they're pursuing. It is what each leader, team member, and employee chooses to focus on, to believe, and to create for themselves and others.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

We all know a visionary leader when we see one. They're bold and prophetic and at the same time pragmatic. They don't just promote change - they drive it, while inspiring and mobilizing others to do the same. Visionaries like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos possess a host of innate qualities that make them extraordinary, but what truly sets them apart is their ability to turn vision into action. Here, Innosight's Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz introduce a new way of thinking and managing, called "future-back", that enables any manager to become a practical visionary.

Most of us assume our success relies on a network of friends and close contacts. But innovative thinking requires a steady stream of fresh ideas and new possibilities, which strangers are more likely to introduce. Our survival instincts naturally cause us to look upon strangers with suspicion and distrust, but in The Necessity of Strangers, Alan Gregerman offers the provocative idea that engaging with strangers is an opportunity, not a threat, and that engaging with the right strangers is essential to unlocking our real potential.

In Fostering Innovation: How to Build an Amazing IT Team, accomplished technology strategist, executive, and leader Andrew Laudato delivers an eye-opening exploration of how to design, build, staff, and run a high-performing IT department. The book is filled with universally applicable strategies and techniques that can transform any IT team into an all-star cast perfectly aligned with your organization's objectives.

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain: Enhance Your Leadership, Build Stronger Teams, Make Better Decisions, and Inspire Greater Innovation with Neuroscience, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative Director Michael Platt explains how.

The Art of Making Sh!t Up combines the lessons learned from a personal journey with the teachings derived from years of honing valuable skills through performing and presenting to thousands of people to demonstrate how working together has helped others found and grow several multimillion-dollar companies. By focusing on topics that serve as pain points and detailing the tools and techniques of improv, this audiobook helps people and organizations utilize new skill sets to be more productive, more accepting, and more "all in" to create a stronger teammate and team.

Who’s going to write the next chapter in the saga of American business? Who’s going to chronicle the best way to compete, the new way to win? That’s the mission of Mavericks at Work, a book that profiles a network of rebels who are creating a new business model that makes use of fresh principles and captures what it means to be a state-of-the-art organization. Including such pioneering companies as ING Direct, Southwest Airlines, Pixar, HBO, Anthropologie, Craigslist, Netflix, and Commerce Bank, this book is nothing short of a lively new intellectual agenda for business.

Drawing on considerable original research and case studies from Wang’s acclaimed firm, Constellation Research, this groundbreaking guide reveals which kinds of companies will thrive and which will get crushed by the powerful forces now at work. Ultimately, you will understand how the business world is changing in the face of extreme competition and, most importantly, you will learn how to adapt now to stay relevant and in demand.

Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and, most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design explains the rise of "Open Engineering", a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. It explains how to establish open flows of information inside and outside an organization.

Innovating Innovation! answers the trillion-dollar question, “What can large companies do to innovate as easily as their disruptive startup competitors?” Corporate executives will learn how they can catch up and unlock the same quick-to-market innovations startups use to rapidly disrupt whole industries.

Mapping Innovation is a refreshing alternative in the crowded business innovation space. Engaging and informative without sacrificing substance and expertise, this groundbreaking guide provides thorough background on some of the greatest innovations of the past century. It details the processes that advanced them from inception to world-changing products - and shows you how to replicate their success.

The 10 Elements of Successful Change Leadership, a captivating and empowering guide that will equip you with the tools, strategies, and mindsets needed to conquer the ever-changing business landscape. Dr. Christopher Meade serves as your expert navigator, unveiling the 10 Elements of Successful Change Leadership that will propel your organization to new heights.

In his book Driving Eureka!, best-selling business author Doug Hall presents the System Driven Innovation scientific method for enabling innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day. It’s the essential resource you need to enable yourself - and your team - to innovate, succeed, and do amazing things that matter, on a daily basis.

Paul Falcone, author of 101 Sample Write Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems and renowned HR and leadership expert, breaks down the best practices for progressive employee discipline and structured terminations into easy-to-understand steps that will help you avoid common legal and ethical pitfalls.

Drawing on the knowledge and experience of working with hundreds the world's top social change leaders in all fields, Beverly Schwartz presents a model for change based on five proven principles that any individual leader or organization can apply to bring about deep, lasting, and systematic change. Rippling shows how to activate the type of change that is needed to address the critical challenges that threaten to destroy the foundations of our society and planet in these increasingly turbulent times.

Leveraging more than two decades of experience organizing innovation tournaments in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, from Buenos Aires to Kuwait City, Shanghai to Moscow, and with many Fortune 500 companies, two renowned researchers, entrepreneurs, and the foremost experts on innovation tournaments offer a template that you can use to generate winning ideas that will drive great outcomes―whatever your challenges, whatever your business.