Career Organization

Why do some businesses “fail to scale”? Smooth Scaling offers a clear diagnosis, along with twenty practical Rituals to boost your organization’s performance and achieve frictionless growth. Where other books on scaling focus on strategy, fundraising, or product-market fit, Smooth Scaling addresses the most pervasive and least-understood fail point that threatens to kneecap even the best-laid scaling plan: organizational friction.

Corporate culture is ground zero for your organization. If left to chance, corporate culture will fall to the lowest common denominator or the loudest voice, resulting in inconsistency at best and volatility at worst. Scaling your company means scaling your culture first. You need a clear playbook with actionable steps to foster alignment and a results-driven team of passionate stakeholders. In Scaling Culture, Ron Lovett provides you with the key components you need to create a successful organization that lasts.

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.

DEI is an eight-billion-dollar industry that is not yet accessing its full potential through real solutions and results. However, through a powerful formula of policies and practices that motivate employees to be more socially and self-aware, The Inclusive Organization is a revolutionary yet practical resource for individuals at any stage of their career. Jenkins discusses human behavior, workplace psychology, and shares her DEI-tested framework for success.

With increased demand for hybrid and fully remote work styles, most firms understand that some form of distance work is here to stay—and have put some remote protocols in place. But many companies either see the shift to remote work as a threat to their culture and management style, or they just don’t know how to make the transition. It’s time to take advantage of the many opportunities remote work presents. This book will tell you how.

If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.

When you feel that pull to be part of social change, where do you start? How can you ensure that your good intentions create a positive impact? How do you focus your scattered efforts? And how do you sustain yourself throughout? Impact brings you the answers. Drawing on their network and experience as founders of She's the First, Christen Brandt and Tammy Tibbetts show you how to create your own impact strategy, one that fits into your life and allows you to match what you have with what the world needs.

An ordinary leader is someone who leads a small organization or team that is doing great things. They manage the majority of the world's workforce, but they don't lead large corporations or big government agencies. Ordinary leaders are rarely written about in books or quoted in magazines. They are, however, important. Maybe not globally, but in their own realm of influence, their leadership makes a difference.

What is your organization's glass ceiling? Wondering why your organization isn't reaching its potential? You're not alone. Many leaders sense something is amiss but struggle to identify the missing link. In Build Smart, organizational leadership expert Simon A. Taylor tackles this challenge head-on.

The Professional Agile Leader is a realistic, practical guide written by experienced agile leaders who share their collective experiences in helping agile leaders to grow responsive and adaptive teams. They structure powerful lessons around a case study based on decades of experience helping agile leaders achieve and sustain agile transformation. Best of all, they never settle for high-level hand-waving—they show you how it’s really done.

The Remedy is a compelling a business fable that shows how Lean quality improvement business practices - traditionally associated with manufacturing - can dramatically improve the service areas of your business - including design, engineering, sales, marketing and all processes in between. Written by Pascal Dennis, a leading Lean consultant, the story follows Tom Pappas and Rachel Armstrong, senior leaders at a desperate automotive company as they try to implement a Lean management system across an entire platform, the Chloe, a breakthrough "green" car.

Few leaders will admit it, but again and again the growth of their organizations outruns their skills. If you're one of those leaders, you know the result: as the job grows bigger than you are, you get disoriented by a world of unfamiliar challenges. You then hit a wall of ineffectiveness, a stall point. Why won't doubling down on the managerial and technical building blocks that have worked before help you out of a stall? Because you invariably neglect the new political, personal, strategic, and interpersonal skills needed to manage yourself and others.

With its gripping narrative and relatable takeaways, The Grit Factor is both inspiring and pragmatic, a book that will energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere - whether male or female.

After two decades in the trenches of helping companies design and build better, more efficient operations, Karen Martin has pinpointed why performance improvement programs usually fail: Chaos, the sneaky but powerful force that frustrates customers, keeps business leaders awake at night, and saps company morale. In The Outstanding Organization, Karen offers a toolbox for combating chaos by creating the organizational conditions that will allow your improvement efforts to return greater gains.

Kotter and co-author Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

Two distinguished scholars offer eight steps to help organizations discover and embrace an authentic higher purpose - something that will dramatically improve every aspect of any enterprise, including the bottom line. This iconoclastic audiobook will help any organization discover its authentic purpose and weave it into the fabric of everything it does, leading to unprecedented levels of personal satisfaction, service and product innovation, and economic growth.

Document your leadership vision, then transform your organization into it...and leave the legacy of an organization that performs brilliantly now and long after you've moved on.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, can recognize a pattern from any set of data it is given, which is what makes it such an extraordinarily powerful tool. But because not all patterns are authentic or reliable, AI’s pattern-finding superpower can lead to spurious patterns. Hence the conundrum at the heart of AI: its greatest strength can also be its greatest weakness. Targeting the businessperson who needs to know how to use AI profitably and responsibly, Caleb Briggs and Rex Briggs offer a foundational understanding of AI that is easy to grasp yet thorough enough to be used effectively.

Whether people want more government or less, everyone wants an efficient government. Traditional thinking is that this requires a government to be run more like a business. But a government is not a business, and this approach merely replaces old problems with new ones. In their six-year, five-country study of 77 government organizations—ranging from small departments to entire states—Alan Robinson and Dean Schroeder found that the predominant private-sector approaches to improvement don’t work well in the public sector.

An accessible guide showing all people how to create and sustain diversity and inclusivity in the workplace - no matter your identity, industry, or level of experience.