Leadership Problems

Good problem-solving skills are not something you're born with.... They’re something you can master. If your struggle is not coming up with solutions, but coming up with the best solution, look no further.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a third way that is neither sustaining nor disruptive.

“Coaches rely far too much on asking open-ended questions,” says Marcia Reynolds. But questions only seek answers — inquiry provides insight. When, instead of just questions, clients hear their thoughts, opinions, and beliefs spoken by someone else, it prompts them to critically consider how their thinking affects their goals. Reynolds cites the latest brain science to show why reflective inquiry works and provides techniques, tips, and structures for creating breakthrough conversations.

The strength of any organization is determined by the quality of its managers. Want to be invaluable to your company? Just boost your management skills. When you discover what the most successful managers know, you'll unlock the secrets to turning even ordinary employees into extraordinary performers. Filled with proven techniques, this guide tells you how to bring out the best in your people - and hit new heights in your own career.

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.

Volume 2 of The Great Mental Models series provides a collection of over twenty important concepts from physics, chemistry, and biology in a clear and accessible style. Not only will you better understand the hidden forces that influence the world around you, you’ll also learn how those forces can work to your advantage.

A practical four-step methodology for any leader or manager facing a tough choice, and for creating integrative solutions to big, complex, and pressing problems. Stimulating and practical, Creating Great Choices blends storytelling, theory, and hands-on advice to help any leader or manager facing a tough choice.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman is one of the tech world's most accomplished executives in enterprise growth, having led Snowflake to the largest software IPO ever after leading Data Domain and ServiceNow to exponential growth and the public market before that. In Amp It Up, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.

The Great Game of Business started a business revolution by introducing the world to open-book management, a new way of running a business that created unprecedented profit and employee engagement. The revised and updated edition of The Great Game of Business lays out an entirely different way of running a company.

A successful Wall Street trader turned Cambridge neuroscientist reveals the biology of boom and bust and how risk taking transforms our body chemistry, driving us to extremes of euphoria and risky behavior or stress and depression. The laws of financial boom and bust, it turns out, have more than a little to do with male hormones. In a series of groundbreaking experiments, Dr. John Coates identified a feedback loop between testosterone and success that dramatically lowers the fear of risk.

Business and organizational leaders spend well over half of their professional time engaged in this process. It is the way they do deals, lead employees, and manage relationships. Most leaders learn to negotiate on the job through a long process of trial and error. In today’s competitive marketplace, there is no time for experimentation, nor room to make mistakes. The good news is by mastering negotiation, the next level of success is actually closer than it appears. The actionable advice and practical guidance offered in this book give a roadmap for every type of negotiation.

Best-selling author and scholar Michael Roberto presents a thorough investigation of organizational obstacles to creative thought. Highly relevant to the growth crises many enterprises face in today's economic landscape, this book examines how to break barriers to spark creativity and foster new ideas.

In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively listenable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.

"What an asshole!" How many times have you said that about someone at work? You're not alone! In this groundbreaking book, Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton builds on his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article to show you the best ways to deal with assholes...and why they can be so destructive to your company.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

In The Partnership Charter, psychologist and business mediation expert David Gage offers a comprehensive guide to the art of establishing and maintaining a business partnership. The centerpiece of his approach is the Partnership Charter, a document that clearly outlines the goals, expectations, responsibilities, and relationships of the principals. The charter identifies potential sources of conflict and how they will be resolved, while addressing such sensitive issues as personal styles, values, money, and power.

Managing the Unexpected, third edition, is a thoroughly revised text that offers an updated look at the groundbreaking ideas explored in the first and second editions. Revised to reflect events emblematic of the unique challenges that organizations have faced in recent years, including bank failures, intelligence failures, quality failures, and other organizational misfortunes, often sparked by organizational actions, this critical book focuses on why some organizations are better able to sustain high performance in the face of unanticipated change.

What’s the most pressure you’ve ever been under? How did you react? What helped? What didn’t? Over the past five years, Dane Jensen has asked these questions of thousands of high performers - from Olympic gold medalists to Navy SEALs, politicians, executives, and busy parents. What has emerged from these conversations is that while everyone’s experiences under pressure are unique, pressure follows patterns and develops in predictable ways. If we can recognize the patterns, we can improve our ability to sidestep the biological traps that can sabotage us....

The training to become a fighter pilot is among the most competitive and difficult in the world with less than one-in-a-thousand succeeding. Pushing a cutting-edge jet to its limits at over 1,000 mph means that every split-second decision can have catastrophic consequences. This extreme environment has forged a group of warriors who for the last 50 years have been considered at the apex of decision-making theory and practice. In The Art of Clear Thinking Hasard Lee distills what he’s learned during his career flying some of the Air Force’s most advanced aircraft.

Lawyers. Accountants. Software Engineers. That what Mom and Dad encouraged us to become. They were wrong. Gone is the age of "left-brain" dominance. The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers - creative and emphatic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.