Management Problem Solving

By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters. The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations - many of them his clients - avoid business disasters.

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

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.

Dan Foxx has spent more than 50,000 hours face-to-face with over 4,500 top execs from America’s finest companies, from high-flying high techs to promising start-ups. With pressure from boards of directors and investors to deliver dollars and high-ticket IPOs and with expectations from direct reports to make the savvy decisions, these CEOs bare all behind closed doors when their leadership chops are on the line.

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

The Innovative Team is an engaging business fable that reveals the impact our underlying work style preferences have on our teams and their results. The authors present a breakthrough thinking process for developing successful teams. They introduce a uniquely effective set of tools built on FourSight, a measure of problem-solving preferences field-tested by top consultants, which can help anyone from professionals to novices solve problems and achieve performance breakthroughs.

Leadership is all about others - inspiring them to believe, then enabling that belief to become reality. That's the essence of Leadership U: it starts with U but it's not about U. Those timeless words are timelier than ever today, as leaders look to accelerate through the crisis curve. As author Gary Burnison observes, "There will likely be more change in the next two years than we have seen in the last 20." Now, in Leadership U, Burnison lays out a framework - his Six Degrees of Leadership - to show leaders how to create change.

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.

Red Teaming is a revolutionary new way to make critical and contrarian thinking part of the planning process of any organization, allowing companies to stress test their strategies, flush out hidden threats and missed opportunities, and avoid being sandbagged by competitors.

Cost reduction...productivity improvement...customer retention...these are the promises of the Six Sigma quality management system. The Six Sigma Way reveals how GE, Motorola, and numerous other companies are successfully using Six Sigma to fine-tune products and processes, improve performance, and increase profits. Now you can hear the road map for implementing Six Sigma in your manufacturing or service organization.

Bina Venkataraman sees the way forward. A journalist and former adviser in the Obama White House, she helped communities and businesses prepare for climate change, and she learned firsthand why people don’t think ahead - and what can be done to change that. In The Optimist’s Telescope, she draws from stories she has reported around the world and new research in biology, psychology, and economics to explain how we can make decisions that benefit us over time.

The Financial Times Guide to Strategy is your unbeatable reference on strategy. It offers an incisive overview of both corporate level and business unit level strategy, an A to Z of the world's leading strategic thinkers, and introduces the key strategic tools and techniques you need to develop your own strategy. Based on long experience and on conversations with leading strategists around the world, Richard Koch helps you discover each critical step in creating, delivering, and understanding successful strategy.

If you read (or listen to) nothing else on inspiring and executing innovation, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you innovate effectively.

Learn how to take the bold yet intelligent risks that will help you thrive in business - and in life. How can you challenge and change yourself when you need it most? We're creatures of habit, programmed by evolution to favor the safe and familiar, especially when the stakes are high. This bias no longer serves us in a world of constant change. Through stories of trailblazers in business, health, education and activism, Jonah Sachs reveals a path to higher performance and creativity for anyone ready to step out of their comfort zone.

This elegant method prompts listeners to engage with three deceptively simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The first leads to careful observation. The second invites you to thoughtfully consider options and implications. The third ignites effective action. Together, these questions, and the tools that support them, produce a dynamic and creative dance with uncertainty.

In this revelatory book, Stephen Martin and Joseph Marks explain how in our uncertain and ambiguous world, the messenger is the message. We frequently fail to separate the idea being communicated from the person conveying it, they argue: the status or connectedness of the messenger become more important than the message itself.

Though technology has evolved at hyper-speed over the past 100 years, management styles have mostly stayed the same. The higher-ups make the decisions, and the employees grind it out, often without knowing the endgame. In 1983, Jack Stack created a new game: the great game of business. Get in the Game further explains the rules of this game: To win, you must get everyone, at all levels of the business, as informed, involved, and engaged as the owner.

Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.

Written by the former Executive Creative Director of Creations at Cirque du Soleil, this audiobook shows you how to step up your game, flex your creativity, and make big things happen. Whether you work independently or as part of a team, whether you're self-employed or part of an organization, and even if you think creativity isn't a part of the work that you do - this book gives you the perspective, courage, and kick-start you need to think differently about the things you do every day.

Turn to Decide and Conquer to access the decision framework David Siegel used when he took over as CEO of Meetup, the world’s leading platform for making connections and finding your community. Let David’s success during one of the most tumultuous times in his company’s history help guide you on your own path. Decide and Conquer helps all leaders navigate the big decisions that will impact their future and make their organizations a success. David outlines the 44 challenges leaders face when starting a new position.