Career Social

Every day there are moments when you must persuade, inform, and motivate others effectively. Each of those moments requires you, in some way, to play a role, to heighten the impact of your words, and to manage your emotions and nerves. Every interaction is a performance, whether you're speaking up in a meeting, pitching a client, or walking into a job interview.

In a tech-dominated world, the most needed degrees are the most surprising: the liberal arts. Did you take the right classes in college? Will your major help you get the right job offers? For more than a decade, the national spotlight has focused on science and engineering as the only reliable choice for finding a successful postgrad career. Quietly, though, a different path to success has been taking shape. In You Can Do Anything, George Anders explains the remarkable power of a liberal arts education.

Through his vaunted philanthropy, Bill Gates transformed himself from a tech villain into one of the most admired people on the planet. Even as divorce proceedings and allegations of misconduct have recently tarnished his public image, the beneficence of the Gates Foundation, celebrated for spending billions to save lives around the globe, is taken as a given. But as Tim Schwab shows in this fearless investigation, Gates is still exactly who he was at Microsoft: a bully and monopolist.

In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you'll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. What do you want to learn?

Taking a brass tacks approach to communication, How to Have Confidence and Power in Dealing with People explains how to interact with others as they really are, not as you would like them to be. The goal is to get what you want from them successfully - be it cooperation, goodwill, love or security.

In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: It would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic one billion dollars when Instagram had only 13 employees.

Why are certain people so incredibly great at what they do? Most of us think we know the answer - but we’re almost always wrong. That’s important, because if we’re wrong on this crucial question, then we have zero chance of getting significantly better at anything we care about. Happily, the real source of great performance is no longer a mystery. Bringing together extensive scientific research, best-selling author Geoff Colvin shows where we go wrong and what actually makes world-class performers so remarkable.

You face tough communication challenges every day at work, both in person and online - a toxic boss, backstabbing coworkers, office politics, and much more. Here are immediate, effective, eye-opening actions you can take to resolve those infuriating problems. You will find stories and examples drawn from corporate communications consultant Leil Lowndes’s more than 20 years of training business professionals, from entry-level new hires to CEOs.

This series is a thank-you to emergency workers! Each title will look into an emergency worker job, the training it takes, and what a day in the life looks like.

We all say things we shouldn't. What is important is how we deal with the gaffe. If a slip-of-the-tongue at a family gathering, office meeting, or social setting causes you to inadvertently embarrass or offend someone, the strategy presented here, will help you to smooth things over as quickly as possible. But what about when you really mess up?

Etiquette, Sara Jane says, is the glue that holds society together. Humans are social creatures, after all—we need connection to survive. But with global cultures in flux and the post-pandemic digital age, shadow epidemics of anxiety and loneliness are on the rise. Plus, the old rules of “decorum” don’t match the times. Amidst all this withdrawal and change, social growth can feel out of reach. How do we leave the comfort of our homes, step away from our screens, and interact face to face?

How do leaders become clearer as complexity increases? We live in a world where decisions require judgment, getting people on board, drawing on local knowledge, ingenuity, and commitment. As leaders, how do you get beneath surface-level change to tackle complex challenges with depth and clarity?

Nuance is the answer. Michael Fullan returns with an eminently digestible, compelling and practical guide on the three habits of nuance: joint determination, adaptability, and culture-based accountability.

New York Times bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk shares hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition. A mash-up of the best elements of "Crush It!" and "The Thank You Economy" with a fresh spin, "Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook" is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really works. When managers and marketers outline their social media strategies, they plan for the "right hook"—their next sale or campaign that's going to knock out the competition.

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job.

In this new book, Frederick Chavalit Tsao and Chris Laszlo argue that current approaches to leadership fail to produce positive outcomes for either businesses or the communities they serve. Employee disengagement and customer fickleness remain high, resulting in a lack of creativity and collaboration at all levels of entrepreneurial activity. Investor demand for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) continues to be poorly integrated into profit strategies.

In The Storyteller's Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don't, keynote speaker, best-selling author, and communication expert Carmine Gallo reveals the keys to telling powerful stories that inspire, motivate, educate, build brands, launch movements, and change lives.

Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up or that housing prices never fall. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that.

Henry Kissinger analyses the lives of six extraordinary leaders—Konrad Adenauer, Charles de Gaulle, Richard Nixon, Anwar Sadat, Lee Kuan Yew, and Margaret Thatcher—through the distinctive strategies of statecraft that he believes they embodied. To each of these studies, Kissinger brings historical perception, public experience and, because he knew each of the subjects and participated in many of the events he describes, personal knowledge.

An informative and entertaining account of how actions send signals that shape behaviors and how to design better incentives for better results in our life, our work, and our world.

In Volume 3, Dr. Peck explores the largely unknown world of possession and exorcism. He also describes the unique relationship between group evil and individual evil, demonstrating how one person can affect or be affected by the actions and attitudes of a group. Drawing on his experiences as a psychiatrist and his observations of vivid incidents of evil in today's society. Dr. Peck takes us further into the dark side of the human psyche.