Leadership Problems

Winning with Data explores the cultural changes big data brings to business, and shows you how to adapt your organization to leverage data to maximum effect. Authors Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien draw on extensive background in big data, business intelligence, and business strategy to provide a blueprint for companies looking to move head-on into the data wave. Instrumentation is discussed in detail, but the core of the change is in the culture.

Tackle your thorniest problems using the wise fool's savvy strategies! The wise fool is the archetypal contrarian known for his creativity, irreverence, and humor. He looks at life in unorthodox ways and pushes back against the status quo. Throughout history, powerful decision-makers (Egyptian pharaohs, Chinese emperors, Persian sultans, and European kings) consulted wise fools to question the assumptions that kept them mired in stale and obsolete solutions.

The availability of big data, low-cost commodity hardware, and new information management and analytics software has produced a unique moment in the history of business. The convergence of these trends means that we have the capabilities required to analyze astonishing data sets quickly and cost-effectively for the first time in history. These capabilities are neither theoretical nor trivial. They represent a genuine leap forward and a clear opportunity to realize enormous gains in terms of efficiency, productivity, revenue and profitability.

In You're the Leader. Now What?, Dr. Richard Winters, a Mayo Clinic emergency physician, executive coach, and director of leadership development for the Mayo Clinic Care Network, uses proven frameworks, practical tactics, and real-life experience to help you become a more effective leader as you face your thorniest organizational challenges.

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details 10 real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations.

The HBR Guide to Collaborative Teams provides practical tips and advice to help you collaborate more effectively. Whether you're leading your own direct reports or building a talented group from disparate parts of your organization, you'll discover how to align others' goals and skills so you can solve problems as a team and deliver great results.

Agility isn't a formula, a framework, nor a set of roles and rituals to follow. It's a timeless way of being that matures with practice and skill. Becoming agile involves knowing the difference between being quick or hurrying, moving with ease or difficulty, being in or out of balance, graceful or awkward, adaptable or rigid, resourceful or resentful. With Joy of Agility, Joshua Kerievsky, CEO of Industrial Logic, one of the oldest and most-respected agile consultancies in the world, shows you how to harness agility in work and life to solve problems and succeed sooner.

Installing agile tools and practices won’t be enough to respond to rapid market change unless you lay the groundwork with six key enabling factors, identified by the United Kingdom’s leading agile consulting firm, Agile Centre. From years of experience certifying people in agile leadership, product ownership, and scrum mastery, Karim Harbott has created a model that will help your organization achieve all six factors required for success. This audiobook will help leaders get realistic about the scope of the changes needed in their organization and show them how to get started.

In this practical guide, business coach Stacy Tuschl shares a personalized, step-by-step plan for rescuing your business - and your sanity. She talks directly to you and other female entrepreneurs who are lost in the responsibilities of running a business while maintaining a full life.

How to Be Strategic is your accessible but comprehensive guide to strategic thinking in any situation. Fred Pelard distils 20 years' experience training executives at all levels from leading companies around the world into a range of smartly illustrated, workable methodologies that will enable you to understand each approach and find your own path to the right solution every time.

As the chief economist at Spotify, Will Page has had the best seat in the house for witnessing - and harnessing - the power of disruptive change. Music has often been the canary in the coal mine for major technological and societal shifts, and if there’s one thing Page learned from the digital revolution, it’s that businesses must be ready to pivot. Drawing practical lessons from a variety of fresh case studies covering Radiohead, Starbucks, and even Groucho Marx, Page examines the eight principles that disruption has thrown into sharp relief as keys to survival in any sector.

Imagine you’ve just come back to work after a two-week vacation during which you actually relaxed, without calling in or checking e-mail. You discover that there are no pressing issues and that, on the contrary, your team scored a big new customer and fixed a nagging problem during your absence. No red flags or fires to put out. Sadly, for most leaders this scenario is only a dream. They constantly check on what’s happen­ing because they expect the worst (and usually get it).

Working with difficult people can reduce your morale, threaten your productivity, deplete your energy, and waste your time. But you don't have to be helpless in the face of other people's craziness! Knowing how to handle coworkers' disruptive behavior is one of the most important career skills you can have, allowing you to become a more valuable employee and a more self-reliant person.

In The Leader's Checklist, 10th Anniversary Edition: 16 Mission-Critical Principles, world-renowned leadership expert and Wharton professor Michael Useem shows you how to lead through any challenge.

Stuck No More: Practical Self-Coaching for Everyday Problems is a powerful self-coaching guide to help you take control of your life and create the success you desire. Written by two experienced executive coaches, this book provides inspiring tools with a very practical application to help you identify and address 80 percent of the issues and challenges that hold you back.

For many organizations, the word strategy conjures up endless ideas, concepts, and tools - while the intent is correct, the awful reality is most companies do not have a simple, common definition of strategy or a simple approach to make the big decisions. Too many PowerPoints, not enough one pagers that can be put into practice. The lack of a common approach to strategy frustrates executives, creates conflict where there is none, fast-tracks dubious alternatives, lengthens decision-making, and hampers the quality of the decisions that finally emerge.

As the former chief scientist of Express Scripts, a Fortune 25 health-care company dedicated to making the use of prescription medications safer and more affordable, Bob Nease is an expert on applying behavioral sciences to health care. Now, he applies his knowledge to the wider world, providing important practical solutions marketers, human resources professionals, teachers, and even parents can use to improve the behavior of others around them and get the positive results they want.

In this revolutionary guide, Stanford University professor and international best-selling author of inGenius adapts her popular course material to teach everyone how to make imaginative ideas into realities.

Torture in Abu Ghraib prison. Corporate fraud. Falsified records at Veterans Administration hospitals. Teachers pressured to feed test answers to students. These scandals could have been prevented if, early on, people had said no to their higher-ups. In this timely new book, Ira Chaleff goes deeply into when and how to disobey inappropriate orders, reduce unacceptable risk, and find better ways to achieve legitimate goals.The inspiration for the book and its title came from a concept used in guide-dog training.