Human Leadership

The workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, cofounder of ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.

Based on his work at some of the world's largest companies, including Ford, Adidas, and Chanel, Christian Madsbjerg's Sensemaking is a provocative stand against the tyranny of big data and scientism, and an urgent, overdue defense of human intelligence. Christian Madsbjerg argues that our fixation with data often masks stunning deficiencies, and the risks for humankind are enormous. Blind devotion to number crunching imperils our businesses, our educations, our governments, and our life savings.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

Negotiation is a social activity that involves disciplines like language, observation, reaction, listening, speaking, storytelling, humor, and sensing. The number one thing you bring to every negotiation is you. This book helps you understand how these various behaviors and disciplines come to play and therefore how you can become a better negotiator. The book helps you develop the mindset and tools to become a great negotiator for yourself and for others.

In this provocative yet practical book, renowned speaking coach and communication expert Nick Morgan highlights recent research that shows how humans are programmed to respond to the nonverbal cues of others--subtle gestures, sounds, and signals--that elicit emotion. He then provides a clear, useful framework of seven "power cues" that will be essential for any leader in business, the public sector, or almost any context. You'll learn crucial skills, from measuring nonverbal signs of confidence to the art and practice of gestures and vocal tones.

From making faster, better decisions to automating rote work to enabling robots to respond to emotions, AI and machine learning are already reshaping business and society. What should you and your company be doing today to ensure that you're poised for success and keeping up with your competitors in the age of AI? Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on AI and explains how to launch the right initiatives at your company to capitalize on the opportunity of the machine intelligence revolution.

Like all of us, though few so visibly, Alan Greenspan was forced by the financial crisis of 2008 to question some fundamental assumptions about risk management and economic forecasting. No one with any meaningful role in economic decision making in the world saw beforehand the storm for what it was. How had our models so utterly failed us? To answer this question, Alan Greenspan embarked on a rigorous and far-reaching multiyear examination of how Homo economicus predicts the economic future, and how it can predict it better.

Great leaders know that investing in their people boosts results and increases retention. We are mildly obsessed with relationships, organizational culture, learning and development, connection, trust, and team performance. We design and deliver interactive keynotes, team-building retreats, programs, and workshops that have real impact. 

In This is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations, award-winning author Bjarte Bogsnes describes a tested and proven way of making organizations more adaptive and human. This involves radically changing traditional management, including the budgeting process, the central nervous system of rigid and bureaucratic organizations. In this book, you’ll learn to establish a highly decentralized and dynamic management model with more adaptive and self-regulating processes, designed in line with and not against human nature.

In nearly every industry, smart machines are replacing human labor. It's not just factory jobs - automated technologies are handling people's investments, diagnosing illnesses, and analyzing written documents. If we humans are going to endure, Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig say we're going to need a dose of humility. We need to be humble enough to let go of the idea that "smart" means knowing the most, using that information quickest, and making the fewest mistakes. Smart machines will always be better than we are at those things.

We are oddly paradoxical creatures who long to be happy while creating our own suffering. We replay past anguish, anticipate future distress, and stew in self-righteous anger. In Hard to Be Human, Ted Cadsby focuses on five cognitive design flaws that foster underthinking and overreacting, and reveals powerful strategies to overcome them.

This book breaks through both the hype and the doom-and-gloom surrounding automation and the deployment of artificial intelligence-enabled—“smart”—systems at work. Management and technology experts Thomas Davenport and Steven Miller show that, contrary to widespread predictions, prescriptions, and denunciations, AI is not primarily a job destroyer. Rather, AI changes the way we work—by taking over some tasks but not entire jobs, freeing people to do other, more important and more challenging work.

As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace”. 

More than 35 years of being a police officer gave Phil Eastwood a ringside seat to one of the most entertaining shows on earth—the one with humans! Handcuffs to Handshakes is a personal story that win through the violent but fascinating streets of London in the 1980’s and into the present day on the west coast of Canada.

Robert Prechter proposes a new science called socionomics. It's the study of how humans interact and how that interaction determines the course of the economy, culture, and history.

Almost six weeks into the implementation of new strategies based on the consulting report, Bridget’s leadership team continued to hear rumblings from their direct reports. Sales continued to push back saying the way they were doing things was working fine, the company just needed to figure out how to fill their orders faster. Operations complained that they didn’t have time to implement these new procedures and keep up their current production levels. Customer service grumbled about customer complaints taking up too much of their time.

In Dr. Diane Hamilton’s provocative new book, she uncovers what could foreseeably be the next movement to enhance human performance, a critical and direct link to improving motivation and communication-based issues that challenge organizations. Drawing on decades of research and incorporating interviews from some of the top leaders of our time, Hamilton examines the factors that influence curiosity including fear, assumptions, technology, and environment (FATE). Her ground-breaking research provides an action plan to transform individuals and organizations.

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others. Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan's personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

In business, OKRs—that's short for Objectives and Key Results—are the gold standard for communicating and delivering on what you want to accomplish and how you'll get there. OKRs For Dummies provides you with step-by-step guidance for following in the footsteps of some of the world's leading organizations. Drive focus on what matters most, align and engage teams, and generally maximize the benefits OKRs have to offer, thanks to this easy-to-use guide.

Culture is complex. It has its own language and nuances that can change in an instant. To build a thriving, sustainable company, business leaders must be intentional in crafting cultures that reflect their core values- well beyond creating posters that simply profess them.