Management Problem Solving

From the best-selling authors who taught the world how to have Crucial Conversations comes the new edition of Influencer, a thought-provoking book that combines the remarkable insights of behavioral scientists and business leaders with the astonishing stories of high-powered influencers from all walks of life. You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process - including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world.

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines - called kata - that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation.

Here, drawing on revealing, honest stories from his five decades in business - the company's many successes as well as its stumbles - Koch walks the listener step by step through the five dimensions of Market-Based Management to show stockholders, entrepreneurs, leaders, students - and innovators, supervisors and employees of all kinds, in any field - how to apply the principles to generate Good Profit in their organizations, companies, and lives.

In 2015 Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC's popular podcast and radio show Note to Self, led tens of thousands of listeners through an experiment to help them unplug from their devices, get bored, jump-start their creativity, and change their lives. Bored and Brilliant builds on that experiment to show us how to rethink our gadget use to live better and smarter in this new digital ecosystem. In this fascinating new audiobook, Manoush explains the connection between boredom and original thinking.

In an increasingly polarized world, our only chance for coming together and moving forward is to learn from those who have mastered the art and science of disagreement. In this much-needed book, Ian Leslie explores what happens to us when we argue, why disagreement makes us stressed, and why we get angry. By drawing together the lessons he learns from different experts, he proposes a series of clear principles that we can all use to make our most difficult dialogues more productive—and our increasingly acrimonious world a better place.

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.

Pastor and leadership development expert Steve Cuss explains how personal anxiety and leadership frustration is the result of not being “self-aware” and provides simple tools listeners can use to do something about it. Listeners will be empowered to take back control of their lives and lead in mature and vibrant ways.

Harvard professor (and negotiation advisor to organizations around the world) Deepak Malhotra shows how to defuse even the most potentially explosive situations and to find success when things seem impossible. Malhotra illustrates key lessons using behind-the-scenes stories of fascinating real-life negotiations, including drafting the US Constitution, resolving the Cuban Missile Crisis, ending bitter disputes in the NFL and NHL, and beating the odds in complex business situations.

Even the best competitive strategies mean nothing if they can't be executed. Yet many organizations struggle when they move from defining a strategy to implementing it. Somehow, all the careful planning falls to the side, and leaders are left wondering how to pick up the pieces. The HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy is here to help. This book offers leaders and managers tips and advice for how to take even the most detailed strategy and apply it throughout their organizations.

Detonate explains how organizations built up bad habits, identifies which ones masquerade as "best practices", and suggests alternatives that can contribute to winning in the marketplace. With a focus on optimism and empowerment, it focuses on an approach and mindset which are critical to successfully compete in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty.

We spend the majority of our lives making decisions, both big and small. Yet, even though our success is largely determined by the choices that we make, very few of us are equipped with useful decision-making skills. Because of this, we often approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving them the time and thought required to put our best foot forward.

Are you a good boss - or a great one? Get more of the management ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing People (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you master the innumerable challenges of being a manager.

Rapidly grow your business while staying sane, focused, and fulfilled.

Enjoy figuring out creative solutions to real-world problems that have led to important inventions, discoveries, and innovations throughout history! The problems in this audiobook are related to erudition in fundamental areas - nature, technology, business, science, how things work, or why things are made in a certain way. But, unlike in trivia or jeopardy, you most probably do not know the answer. Instead, logic, out-of-the-box thinking, or intuition leap should be added to your knowledge to puzzle out the correct solution.

Without a strong grasp of performance metrics, a company can have no clear, quantitative indication of its performance improvement. Six Sigma Business Scorecard offers a unique approach to measuring performance. Listeners will learn how to track their improvements in operations and financials - and make critical adjustments if such improvements are not up to expectations - using Six Sigma. This much-needed second edition of Six Sigma Business Scorecard delivers an innovative Execution Map allowing you to implement, reap, and quantify the many advantages of Six Sigma.

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.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

While exposing the risks inherent in maintaining a nontransparent relationship with customers, Tactical Transparency provides a methodology that will help your organization create its unique plan to bring greater authenticity to your company and your brands. Drawn largely from interviews with leaders in companies that have achieved measurable success in this arena, authors Shel Holtz and John C. Havens provide step-by-step details on how executives and professional communicators can create a transparency strategy that will keep their organization competitive in the 21st century.

In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage.

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.