Career Skills

Professionals and entrepreneurs do a great job of keeping up appearances. But if they're honest with themselves, they're short on living the life they really want. Train Your Brain for Success provides the perspective to analyze how you got where you are and, more importantly, learn the skills to get where you truly desire to be. Train Your Brain for Success explains specific ways of thinking and acting that will get anyone where they want to go, fast.

In the bestselling book, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen, the authors wrote: "We receive a deluge of feedback—from bosses, colleagues, friends, family—yet it rarely improves performance. The problem is that we've focused all of our attention and training on the feedback giver. Instead, it is the feedback receiver who decides whether to make use of the feedback and improve."

A best seller since 1990 and fully updated in 2010, Professional Writing Skills: A Write It Well Guide provides a step-by-step process for planning business letters, memos, e-mail, and other business documents. Learn how to position your message from the reader's point of view, write persuasively, include the right information, and organize the information logically. Expanded sections on language, punctuation, and grammar offer busy professionals the tools they need to get their message across clearly, concisely, and professionally.

Maximize your chances to get promoted to the executive level. Filled with stories of managers who successfully climbed up the executive ladder - and some who struggled - The Unwritten Rules is an invaluable resource for aspiring executives.

What hidden skill links successful people in all walks of life? What helps them make smart decisions? The answer is surprisingly simple: They know how to ask the right questions at the right time. Questions help us break down barriers, discover secrets, solve puzzles, and imagine new ways of doing things. But few of us know how to question in a methodical way. Emmy-award-winning journalist and media expert Frank Sesno aims to change that with Ask More.

Whether you’re new to freelance life, thinking of taking the leap, or more experienced, the messiness and challenges of self-employment can trip you up if you’re not prepared. Survival Skills for Freelancers is your secret weapon to help you do what you love and love what you do.

There has never been a better time to build an audience around your idea or product. But with so many people and companies clamoring for attention, it's also more challenging than ever to do work that deeply resonates with the marketplace and creates true and lasting impact.

The secret to giving better feedback isn't what we say - it's what others hear. Too often, people hear about a past they can't control, not a future they can. That changes with "feedforward" - a radical approach to sharing feedback that unleashes the performance and potential of everyone around us.

Accelerate your career by acquiring the twelve key skills successful leaders have mastered. Clearly structured, evidence-based, and packed with self-assessment tools and proven techniques, this book is the definitive guide to understanding and developing the fundamentals that enable you to stand out and move up.

In I Wanted Fries with That, Amy Fish encourages listeners to stand up for themselves by complaining effectively. In her career as a university ombudsman, Fish has dealt with thousands of complaints - some trivial, some serious - and gained actionable insights about what works and what doesn't. Her suggestions will appeal to anyone who wants to speak up and isn't sure where to start, including managers navigating workplace disputes, couples who argue about the same things over and over, and even someone with a friend with bad breath.

In this book, you will be learning how to communicate effectively in English in a professional context. You will be expanding your English vocabulary, improve your ability to write and speak in both social and professional interactions, and learn terminology and skills that you can apply to business negotiations, telephone conversations, written reports, emails, and presentations. This book is written to bridge the gap between the general English and the specialized business English that you need for career advancement.

Your workday is filled with them - people who frustrate, impede, maneuver, undermine, plot, connive, and whine. This indispensable guide details specific techniques for handling all of them, with easy-to-follow scenarios for every situation. Updated and revised to reflect modern issues including technology, generation gaps, and language barriers, this guide describes 10 kinds of culprits and offers helpful strategies and phrases for diffusing workplace tensions and effectively resolving conflicts.

Would you rather get a root canal than face a group of strangers? Does the phrase “working a room” make you want to retreat to yours? Devora Zack, an avowed introvert and successful consultant who gives presentations to thousands of people at dozens of events annually, feels your pain. She found that other networking books assume that to succeed, you have to act like an extrovert. Not at all. There is another way.

Whether on the job or at home, we've all yearned for a way to simplify our lives and become more organized. In A Simpler Way, authors Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers use the latest scientific research to develop new structures to help us become more cooperative, creative, and free. By simplifying our individual worlds, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers explain that we will inevitably increase our self-assurance, resulting in a continuous cycle of creativity, accomplishment, and learning.

Forget everything you've been taught about selling: forget the hard sell, forget negotiation strategies, forget those closing techniques. In The Inner Game of Selling, Ron Willingham debunks the familiar myths about "sales skills", showing that those tired methods are too shallow and manipulative to do anything but alienate potential customers and drain you of energy and dignity.

TED talks are popular for several reasons: they captivate, inspire, and take listeners on emotional journeys. Even if you're not preparing to give an actual TED talk, you can use the same principals to wow your audience and give the talk of your life. In this audiobook, you'll learn exactly what piques and keeps your audience's interest by modeling your delivery on the best presentations in the world!

Welcome to what may be the most important module in this course. I'll be talking about problem-solving and a way of visually representing problem-solving. You may have heard this referred to as "A3 reporting" or "A3 storytelling". I will be referring to it as "A3 thinking"; that is, it's a way of thinking rather than documenting problem-solving on a piece of paper.

This is the most important module because in the Toyota Way, problem-solving drives continuous improvement and showing respect for people. Problem-solving is the core skill of a lean leader and it is the skill most leaders lack.

Think of your most valuable skill, the thing you can reliably do under pressure to deliver results. How did you learn it? Whatever your job–plumber, attorney, teacher, surgeon–decades of research show that you achieved mastery by working with someone who knew more than you did. Formal learning—school and books—gave you conceptual knowledge, but you developed your skill by working with an expert.

Are you an enterprise sales leader who wants to move up the leader board and become a Top Seller? Do you want to learn proven sales tactics from one of the elite sellers and performance coaches today? Do you want to discover how you can stay at the forefront of our rapidly evolving modern economy and adapt your sales techniques to the digital age?

In Words Like Loaded Pistols, Sam Leith traces the art of argument from ancient Greece down to its many modern mutations. He introduces verbal villains from Hitler to Richard Nixon—and the three musketeers: ethos, pathos and logos. He explains how rhetoric works in speeches from Cicero to Obama, and pays tribute to the rhetorical brilliance of AC/DC's "Back In Black". Before you know it, you'll be confident in chiasmus and proud of your panegyrics—because rhetoric is useful, relevant, and absolutely nothing to be afraid of.