Management Problem Solving

Scott knows firsthand what it’s like to go from out-of-touch boss to team-growing leader. In Management Mess to Leadership Success, you’ll find 30 leadership challenges, honed by FranklinCovey through years of research, instructional programs, and executive consultancy, and illustrated with real-life experiences shared by someone who’s lived these challenges.

Value stream mapping - an essential but underused methodology - is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. Business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done - in any environment - and how to design improved work systems.

Despite all the effort through the years to understand what it takes to be an effective leader, the challenges of leadership remain enormously difficult and elusive. Drawing on the distilled wisdom, stories and lessons from hundreds of chief executives to show how every aspiring leader can master these challenges and lead like a CEO, The CEO Test is the authoritative, no-nonsense insider's guide to navigating leadership's toughest challenges, brought to you by authors uniquely qualified to tell the stories.

This is clearly abook every manager should listen to. One of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job - most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original book into a lean, action-oriented shortened version. The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra.

Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success - whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over 300 leaders from around the world.

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.

Data analytics offer an incredible opportunity to predict the future, engage with new technological advancements, and gain valuable insights about your business. But unless you're staying on top of the cutting edge of analytics, your company is wasting that potential-and your competitors will be gaining speed while you fall behind. These articles by experts and consultants will help you understand today's essential thinking about what data analytics are capable of and how to adopt their use in your organization.

With the countless distractions that come from every corner of a modern life, it's amazing that we're ever able to accomplish anything. The Power of Less demonstrates how to streamline your life by identifying the essential and eliminating the unnecessary - freeing you from everyday clutter and allowing you to focus on accomplishing the goals that can change your life for the better

Decisions equal success - nothing happens until one is made. Businesses make millions of decisions every day. But once in a great while a leader makes a truly game-changing decision that shifts not only the strategy of a single company but how everyone does business. These big decisions are counterintuitive - they go against the conventional wisdom. In hindsight, taking a different direction may seem easy, but these bet-the-company moves involve drama, doubt, and high tension.

The biggest threat facing modern business is the sheer complexity of an uncertain future. That, and the fact that everyone is busy. Too busy for progress. Workplace cultures have become cursed with efficiency. And so when it comes to developing strategy, we default to our defaults. We favor quick fixes, easy templates, and familiar approaches, developing 'robust plans' that do little to mitigate strategic risk or generate new value. The result? The future comes, and businesses die.

Navy Ace pilot and TOPGUN instructor Bill Driscoll demonstrates how his own life-or-death aerial dogfights - and the preparation for them - can help guide high-risk corporate decisions. Interviews with over 200 senior executives and 26 Ace pilots, as well as strategies from Driscoll's own highly successful second career in commercial real estate, reinforce the consistent patterns underlying exceptional performance under pressure.

Are you a Simplifier or a Multiplier? Every great entrepreneur is primarily one or the other, and identifying which you are adds deeper insight and meaning to the way you instinctively create value. Once you know who you are, you can find the perfect collaborator: your opposite. Simplier-Multiplier collaborations lead to unprecedented breakthroughs and results, and give you the freedom to focus exclusively on what you do best.

In Clarity in Crisis, Marc shares how true leaders need to lead in and through times of crisis and thrive under conditions of ambiguity, rather than message their way out or duck from hard decisions.

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.

Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior.

The pressure to generate big ideas can feel overwhelming. We know that bold innovations are critical in these disruptive and competitive times, but when it comes to breakthrough thinking, we often freeze up. Instead of shooting for a $10-billion payday or a Nobel Prize, the most prolific innovators focus on Big Little Breakthroughs - small creative acts that unlock massive rewards over time. By cultivating daily micro-innovations, individuals and organizations are better equipped to tackle tough challenges and seize transformational opportunities.

How do some startups go from zero to billions in mere months? How did Alexander the Great, YouTube tycoon Michelle Phan, and Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon climb to the top in less time than it takes most of us to get a promotion? What do high-growth businesses, world-class heart surgeons, and underdog marketers do in common to beat the norm? One way or another, they do it like computer hackers. They employ what psychologists call "lateral thinking: rethinking convention and breaking "rules" that aren't rules.

The ability to make sound and timely decisions is the mark of a good leader. But when leaders with otherwise strong track records suddenly begin making poor decisions - as seen in the recent corporate scandals that rocked the business world - the impact can be widespread. In The Stress Effect, leadership expert Henry L. Thompson argues that stress is often the real culprit behind this leadership failure.

Generating and executing great ideas is the key to staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. It seems so basic. Why is it so hard to actually get right? According to innovation expert Phil McKinney, the real problem is that we're teaching people to ask the wrong questions about their businesses - or none at all. There has to be a better way. In Beyond the Obvious, McKinney will help you use his proven FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution) Method to dig deeper and get back to asking the right questions - the ones all companies must ask to survive.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.