Career Innovation

As with any large infrastructure project, the costs and risks involved in a major innovation programme are significant, and how it is led and managed will directly determine its long-term success and sustainability. The secrets of successful digital transformation are usually tightly held by the organisations that achieved them; this new title unlocks the 'how' of transformation through digital innovation.

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. Linchpins are the essential building blocks of great organizations.

The only way to secure competitive advantage is to ensure that creative thinking is driving your organization. It will enable workplace satisfaction, boost performance, and encourage new ideas throughout teams. To tackle our uncertain environment - and to win in the world of future business - we all need to get serious about creativity and the potential it can unleash. The authors of Belonging have now written A Year of Creativity, which will make creativity accessible to everyone.

When traditional approaches are inadequate or resisted, advanced leadership skills are essential. In this book, Kanter shows how people everywhere can unleash their creativity and entrepreneurial adroitness to mobilize partners across challenging cultural, social, and political situations and innovate for a brighter future.

The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-listen for those seeking to improve their organizations, with benefits such as lower turnover, more innovation, and better performance. Whether you're a startup founder or an aspiring leader, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness, humility, and the belief that learning from mistakes can make things right.

What can you learn from the world’s most successful companies? The Marvel Studios Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled a struggling comic book publisher to parlay the power of myth and storytelling to become one of history’s most successful movie studios.

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects.

In 1982, business guru Tom Peters co-authored In Search of Excellence, one of the most influential business guides of all time. More recently, through 400 seminars in 47 states and 22 countries, Peters reexamined, refined, and reinvented his views on innovation, the #1 survival strategy, he asserts, for businesses of the next millennium.

In order to be successful both today and in the future, you need to separate yourself from the competition by practicing the breakthrough principle of adaptive innovation. How? By delivering an experience that the competition either cannot or will not attempt to copy. This is literally impossible if you stick to what is already familiar to you because whatever is familiar to you and your customers is likely to be familiar to your competition. You must create a new experience that is unique to you and that fosters a powerful emotional attachment with your target customer.

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.

Based on years of solid neuroscience, quantum mechanics, complex systems theory, social science and leadership research, The New Science of Radical Innovation: The Six Competencies Leaders Need to Win in a Complex World demonstrates the ins and outs of the leadership competencies you need to jump-start and sustain radical innovation in your organization, leading to success and the results you want.

Becoming the Boss is a brisk, tech-savvy success manual filled with real-world, actionable tips from an expert. Lindsey Pollak defines what Millennial generation leadership is and draws on original research, her own experience, and interviews with young managers and entrepreneurs to share the secrets of what makes them successful leaders - and shows young professionals how to rise in their own careers.

A company's mindset - its intent to do good, avoid harmful consequences, and innovate responsibly - is not enough. That mindset must be supported by a business model, a mechanism that leaders must intentionally and proactively build along with the company from the ground up, one that incentivizes and rewards the organization for fulfilling its intentions.

Few organizations solve as many impossible problems as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and nobody knows more about leading rocket scientists to unlikely breakthroughs than Adam Steltzner. As the phase lead and development manager for EDL (entry, descent, and landing) of the Curiosity rover to Mars, Steltzner spearheaded the creation of one of engineering's wackiest kluges - the sky crane, which allowed the heaviest rover in the history of space exploration to land on Mars unscathed.

How did Ford Motors use Lean development to pull off one of the most impressive corporate turnarounds in history? Largely by avoiding the mistakes that so many companies make when in a death spiral. They looked beyond manufacturing efficiency to change the very fundamentals of how they developed vehicles. In Designing the Future, Lean product development expert James Morgan and world-renowned Lean guru Jeffrey K. Liker reveal why so many companies have achieved only moderate success with Lean in operations, with a limited impact on their overall business.

In Secrets of Silicon Valley, entrepreneur and media commentator Deborah Perry Piscione takes us inside this vibrant ecosystem where meritocracy rules the day. She explores Silicon Valley's exceptionally risk-tolerant culture, and why it thrives despite the many laws that make California one of the worst states in the union for business.

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.

Vaughn Tan opens up the black box of elite culinary R&D to provide essential insights. Drawing on years of unprecedented access to the best and most influential culinary R&D teams in the world, he reveals how they exemplify what he calls the uncertainty mindset. Such a mindset intentionally incorporates uncertainty into organization design rather than simply trying to reduce risk. It changes how organizations hire, set goals, and motivate team members and leads organizations to work in highly unconventional ways.

Globalization has created a superheated competitive business environment that demands innovation to stay ahead. But it's also created a hidden source of innovation right in your midst: the people in your organization who have deep experience in more than one culture - multiculturals. Having to integrate different cultural frameworks has enabled them to develop abilities that can contribute powerfully to building innovative organizations.

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.