Design Leadership

Design to Engage is a “how-to” book that will help you become an effective designer and facilitator of learning events. Practical, accessible, and jam-packed with tools to support facilitators to create impactful learning experiences, Design to Engage is a revelation and an inspiration.

This book guides listeners through best practices around planning, designing, building, and implementing a design system, with insights and first-hand experiences from lead designers at Shopify, Google, Apple, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

IDEO, the widely admired, award-winning design and development firm that brought the world the Apple mouse, Polaroid's I-Zone instant camera, the Palm V, and hundreds of other cutting-edge products and services, reveals its secrets for fostering a culture and process of continuous innovation.

Moments of Impact is an audiobook on a mission: to eradicate time-sucking, energy-depleting workshops and meetings. In our fast-changing world, organizations have important challenges and opportunities to address - and no time to waste. Moments of Impact delivers the single most useful resource for managers and leaders who need better strategic conversation - now - to shape the future of their organizations.

Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.

How often do you walk away from a conversation feeling really heard? That it moved the people in it forward in some important way? You’re not alone. In his practice as a designer, Fred Dust began to approach conversations differently. After years of trying to broker communication between colleagues and clients, he came to believe there had to a way to design the art of conversation itself with intention and purpose, but still artful and playful.

Do you hope to be coached or be a great coach? Or wish that your organization could execute its coaching mandate? Mark Colgate's 8 Moments of Power is the missing piece for those hoping to orchestrate a coaching change. In this engaging book, Colgate takes us on a journey with humorous stories, case studies, and pragmatic frameworks, while examining how organizations can create a coaching system that designs for, and delivers, continuous feedback that simultaneously increases employee and customer engagement.

This book employs scientific evidence to examine why humans tend to make poor investment choices. Most investors continue to see their investment results harmed by the book’s two main themes: fear and greed. Fear and greed are human emotions that are as old as history, even prehistory. The bible also cites fear, greed, envy, and desire as destructive influences, so this has been going on for a long time.

In Design Any Disaster, certified emergency manager and master business continuity practitioner Patrick Hardy reveals the secrets of disaster preparedness that helped him build the largest and most successful small business and family disaster planning company in the world. He explains why: You should never, ever "remain calm" during a disaster, 99% of all disaster plans are a complete waste of time, and fancy disaster equipment and supplies actually leave you less prepared.

It's no secret that culture is the key to attracting and engaging top talent and seizing the competitive edge. But the vast majority of culture efforts fail as quickly as they started. Why? Because leaders are missing the big picture. They're creating and communicating values but failing to ensure the values are tied to the purpose and the strategy of the company while also being integrated into processes, operations, and behaviors.

This book is a practical guide that explores how startup entrepreneurs and business leaders, who hold no design degrees, can integrate service design into their development cycles to create sustainable, desirable, and profitable new services.

Real critique has become a lost skill among collaborative teams today. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, rather than be used to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of "feedback". In this practical guide, authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry teach you techniques, tools, and a framework for helping members of your design team give and receive critique.

How many of us have been told after we graduated that what you studied in books is one thing, and how it works in reality is something different! This audiobook is a complete guide that takes you through all phases of a project.

RAISE Your Value is the ultimate guide to elevating Architecture and Engineering firms out of the trap of commoditization. Learn how to Uncover Hidden Value, Design a Winning Advantage, and Charge More. As your firm pursues business, your staff must navigate difficult conversations around fees and pricing every day. Pressures from existing and potential new clients to lower fees often force your team to give away profits and avoid asking for change orders to get the work and “be competitive.”

In a series of fascinating tales, Gene Kohn explains how he helped build one of the most successful architecture firms in the world, offering inspiring lessons on business leadership and design innovation that can be applied to many fields.

Forthright and engaging, Kohn examines both award-winning achievements and missteps in his 50-year career in architecture. In the process, he shows how his firm, KPF, has helped change the buildings and cities where we live, work, learn, and play.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

Learn competitive business strategy from the best. According to strategic planning expert Dr. Chuck Bamford, business strategy is a mixture of instinct and instruction. You already have the instinct - let Bamford provide the instruction you need to hone your business and leadership traits, and lead your organization into a bright future. Bamford’s work stands out from other business leadership audiobooks by providing in-depth processes in a practical format that allows the listener to use the material immediately.

Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple's singular approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience. Learn how design can create a competitive advantage by delivering beauty, ingenuity, and charisma. Get guidance on how to nurture taste, talent, and a design culture at every level of your organization.

In the course of my more than 15 years of experience as an attorney, I’ve worked on billions of dollars’ worth of public construction projects, and I’ve seen them succeed and fail. The general lack of prior experience that many public officials have, when properly acknowledged, can be a great asset, rather than a significant detriment. How is that so? When you come into a project without the burden of prior assumptions based on previous project experience, you can reenvision what a successful project should be, and what your goals should be.

Despite how much is written about strategy, and money spent on it, reports of chronic failures persist. Two causes dominate. Strategy is still not fully defined, and strategy practice is still largely based on a planned view of the world. Change and innovation, however, are not wholly planned but emerge from the myriad interactions of the players involved—some by design, many not. This science of complex adaptive systems must be the bedrock on which strategy is built.