Great Business

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

Over the past three decades, Professor Larry Smith has become something of a “career whisperer” for his students at the University of Waterloo. His stunning TEDx talk on finding your calling has been viewed by more than six million people and counting. This book captures the best of his advice in a one-stop roadmap for your future. Showcasing his particular mix of tough love and bracing clarity, Smith itemizes all the excuses and worries that are holding you back—and deconstructs them brilliantly.

Change-Friendly Leadership: How to Transform Good Intentions into Great Performance is a simple affirmation that successful organizational change involves - requires, in fact - the active, willful participation of the people affected by the change. In the change approach prescribed here, the friendly factor is not just a play on words; it is the very foundation for effectively engaging people's heads, hearts, and hopes.

By using strategies and technologies as the flywheel to orchestrate systems of listening, understanding, and predicting, as well as taking action and learning from those interactions at scale, businesses can easily put the customer and employee first, not only meet the ever-changing customer and employee expectations, but also leapfrog their competition. They predict empathy is the next frontier in technology. This book is aimed at sparking an industry-wide conversation about how exponential technologies like AI and cloud can enable a more empathetic world.

In The Crash of Flight 3804, Investigative Journalist Charlotte Dennett digs into her father’s counterintelligence work, which pitted him against America’s wartime allies - the British, the French, and the Russians - in a covert battle for geopolitical and economic influence in the Middle East. Through vivid storytelling, extensive research, and deep analysis of region-defining maps, she reveals how feverish competition among intelligence networks, military, and Big Oil interests have fueled indiscriminate attacks and targeted killings that continue to this day.

This is an audio summary of Good to Great, a book that examines how good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies can achieve enduring greatness.

Why are some people and teams more motivated, more innovative, and more successful than others? Why do some teams of talented and seemingly compatible people fail short against lesser teams with less suitable members? Why do some leaders cast bold inspiring visions that fail to materialize, while other, seemingly inconsequential leaders rally their teams to victory? More often than not, it's actually quite simple: They picked a fight.

What makes a coach great? How do great coaches turn a collection of individuals into a coherent “us”? Seth Davis, one of the keenest minds in sports journalism, has been thinking about that question for 25 years. It’s one of the things that drove him to write the definitive biography of college basketball’s greatest coach, John Wooden, Wooden: A Coach’s Life. But John Wooden coached a long time ago. The world has changed, and coaching has, too, tremendously.

Great sexual confidence is one of your most powerful assets. Having it will make you feel secure, strong - and sexy. In this audiobook, by Debs de Vries, one of the U.K's top self-confidence teachers, you'll learn to express your needs and desires in ways that respect and protect you - and others. Debs will show you how to learn the vital skills of thoughtful inquiry so you avoid 'crash and burn' relationships - and you'll also get the low-down on how to nurture yourself to enjoy your unique sensuality.

Take a new approach to success! Let words of wisdom from billionaires, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople motivate you and help you on your own path to success. In this witty collection of business know-how, you will find quotations grouped into categories that reflect the full scope of business success, from "Pit Bull Management" to "Slaying Life's Goliaths". Great Quotes for Great Businesses will give listeners the extra spark of courage and inspiration they need to reach their goals!

Wisdom is a much-needed quality these days. We have selected for you 100 of the wisest sayings ever pronounced. They are taken from various cultural backgrounds to demonstrate that wisdom transcends frontiers. Let yourself be led with them into a journey around the world, across cultures and continents: you will find here deep quotes from the Talmud, efficient ones from Ancient Greek masters like Plato or Sophocles, poetic wise sayings by Indian sages, and numerous examples of Persian and Ancient Chinese Wisdom.

In this audiobook leading entrepreneur Judy Piatkus helps you focus on what you need to do in order to grow and develop your business into a great company. Her advice and guidance is based on her experience of building a world-class brand and growing her company through three global recessions.

How can you guarantee that your company delivers great service, has a great culture, and still manages to stay profitable? You need to follow certain “Unbreakable Rules” for success. Best-selling business author and coach Karl W. Palachuk draws on more than thirty years of owning and running service-based businesses to present the rules his companies live by. These rules will help you align your personal and professional goals while creating “standard operating procedures” to automate successful habits.

Great teams are built and maintained with great intention, though they can make it look deceptively easy. Too many teams engage in dysfunctional behaviors or fall into territorialism, apathy, and unproductive relationships. The result? An overwhelmed, unengaged, and stressed-out workforce that settles for average or poor performance.

Do you always get the assignments you want? Do you know how to ask for help without sounding dumb? How to answer a question you don’t know the answer to? All the while sounding smart, capable, and competent? If the answer is no, you’re not alone. Jodi Glickman founded the communication consulting firm Great on the Job to help rising stars of the business world with the same issues. Now, for the first time, the training program that Jodi uses with her top-tier clients is available in book form. Great on the Job teaches people how to talk to one another at work, every day, in every situation....

Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event.

For 20 years, Great Place to Work has published its gold-standard list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, which appears first in Fortune magazine. But its latest research shows that what was good enough to be a “great” workplace 10 or 20 years ago is not good enough now. Even at the best workplaces, leaders can - and must - do better. The vital differentiator for companies now is their people - all their people.

Dogs thrive when they can make sense of the rules and the relationships around them. Likewise, technology is an amazing companion when you give it a role to play, but it will drive you crazy and make a mess if you think it's in charge. You own technology—not the other way around. And only the technologies that are useful to you should be a part of your life. Adopt the eight ownership mindsets in this book to ensure a positive relationship with both dogs and technology.

An Insider's Perspective on the Chief of Staff explores every aspect of the Chief of Staff role in a straightforward and engaging way. Author Emily Sander provides one-of-a-kind insights, combining her own experience as a Chief of Staff with perspectives gained from colleagues and her coaching clients. Sander offers her unique perspective on how the role fits into the organizational big picture, with real-life examples to drive home her points.

As nations careen from one crisis to the next, there is a growing cry for fresh leadership. Those in charge have relatedly fallen short, and trust in institutions have plummeted. So, what does great leadership look like? And how are great leaders made? David Gergen, a leader in the public arena for more than half a century, draws from his experiences as a White House adviser to four presidents, his decades as a trusted voice on national issues, and years of teaching and mentoring young people to offer a stirring playbook for the next generation of change-makers.