Career Skills

Average schools don't inspire greatness - and greatness is what our world needs if we are going to produce world-changing learners. In Culturize, author and education leader Jimmy Casas shares insights into what it takes to cultivate a community of learners who embody the innately human traits our world desperately needs, such as kindness, honesty, and compassion. His stories reveal how these "soft skills" can be honed while meeting and exceeding academic standards of 21st-century learning.

More than a decade ago, The Gallup Organization combed through its database of more than one million employee and manager interviews to identify the elements most important in sustaining workplace excellence. These elements were revealed in the 1999 best-seller First, Break All the Rules. 12: The Elements of Great Managing is that management classic's long-awaited sequel.

Disregard the myth of the lone professional “superman” and the rest of our culture’s go-it alone mentality. The real path to success in your work and in your life is through creating an inner circle of “lifeline relationships”–deep, close relationships with a few key trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support every one of us needs to reach our full potential.

Soft skills are the personal qualities that make you a great communicator, problem solver, and leader on the job—and in your personal life. Soft Skills For Dummies helps you hone in on the traits you already have—or fine tune the ones that may need some extra attention—to market yourself as a workplace leader who's in touch with what today's employers are looking for: people who can lead and inspire through interpersonal communication, cultural awareness, time management, teamwork, critical thinking, and problem solving.

Dodging issues, appeasing difficult people, and mishandling tough encounters all carry a high price for managers and companies - in the form of damaged relationships, ruined careers, and intensified problems. In Failure to Communicate, Holly Weeks shows how to master the combat mentality, emotional maelstrom, and confusion that poison difficult conversations.

I studied over 200 of the best TED talks. I broke each TED talk down in terms of structure, message, and delivery. Here's what I discovered: After studying over 200 TED talks, the one commonality among all the great TED talks is that they contain stories. Discover the 23 storytelling secrets of the best TED talks! In this short, but powerful, guide you're going to learn how to use stories to make your presentations engaging and entertaining.

The Art of Influence will make you think twice about everything you've ever learned about influence. As Chris Widener's inspiring story reveals, it's not something you "do" to other people but rather something that starts with how you shape and transform your own life.

Toastmaster's Secret is a complete guide to get the maximum leverage out of the Competent Communicator program. Based on experience of a committed toastmaster who has taken effort to create speeches as suggested by the manual, this step-by-step guide shows you how to craft speeches. It has explanation on selection of topics, delivery preparation, and much more.

Today everyone - whether they know it or not - is in the emotional transportation business. More and more, success is won by creating compelling stories that have the power to move partners, shareholders, customers, and employees to action. Simply put, if you can’t tell it, you can’t sell it. And this book tells you how to do both. Peter Guber, whose executive and entrepreneurial accomplishments have made him a success in multiple industries, has long relied on purposeful story telling to motivate, win over, shape, engage, and sell.

The most effective communicators in the world all structure their messages the same way, by designing for simplicity. But the problem is, simple is hard work. Our brains are programmed to complicate. Our world incentivizes more, more, more. It takes deliberate, intentional effort to communicate in a way that seems effortless. In Simply Put, award-winning marketing entrepreneur Ben Guttmann unveils a five-part framework that allows anybody to communicate with clarity. With this book, you'll be able to design messages that are beneficial, focused, salient, empathetic, and minimal—and that work.

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.

Do you want to overcome stress? Do you want to learn to assert yourself? Do you want to be understood? Do you want to understand other people? These are just some of the concerns that developing your emotional intelligence will address. Having a high intelligence quotient may not be enough to achieve success. Psychologists say that emotional intelligence affects performance. It has a huge impact on your professional success.

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.

You never dreamed being the boss would be so hard. You're caught in a web of conflicting expectations from your subordinates, from those above you, and from your peers and customers. You're not alone. As Harvard Business School's Linda Hill and manager and executive Kent Lineback reveal in Being the Boss, becoming an effective manager is a painful, difficult journey. It requires trial and error, endless effort, and slowly acquired personal insight. Many managers never complete the journey and instead just learn how to get by. At worst, they become terrible bosses.

In this modern classic, Annette Simmons reminds us that the oldest tool of influence is also the most powerful. Fully revised and updated to account for new technology and social media, along with two new chapters on the role of stories in the development of civilization and how to adjust your story to your specific goal, Simmons showcases over 100 examples of effective storytelling drawn from the front lines of business and government, as well as myths, fables, and parables from around the world.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the 10 most important ones to help you speak confidently in front of a group and connect with audiences of any size. This book will inspire you to: feel more confident when it's your turn to present; understand how to persuade, motivate, and change minds; frame your message so people really listen; gain your audience's trust by being more authentic; use visuals and data more effectively; learn to be more charismatic; and infuse your day-to-day communication with storytelling.

In the midst of a world filled with disagreements and disputes, the art of effective argumentation stands as a beacon of clarity. Doug Madden, in How to Argue Like a Lawyer, transforms the courtroom strategies used by seasoned attorneys into everyday tools for clear communication, productive disagreements, and mutual understanding.

Whether you are forced to negotiate a high-pressure business deal or confront an angry family member, within the chapters of this book you will learn how to manage your emotions and quickly process information during stressful situations. You will learn how to effectively read your counterparts and how to decipher their words and body language. This book will properly prepare you for conflict and how to effectively use these skills in multiple real-world situations.

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.

The ability to think clearly and critically is a lifelong benefit that you can apply in any situation that calls for reflection, analysis, and planning. Being able to think systematically and solve problems is also a great career asset. Critical Thinking Skills for Dummies helps you hone your thinking abilities and become a better communicator. You'll find hands-on, active instruction and exercises that you can put to work today as you navigate social media and news websites, chat with AI, fact-check your own and others' views, and more. Become a thinking machine, with this Dummies guide.