Management Problem Solving

Customers can be a mystery. Despite the availability of more data than ever before, everyone, from the CEO to salespeople in the field, struggles to understand who their customers really are, what they want, why they lose them, and how to regain them. To crack the case, start thinking like a market detective. David Scott Duncan shows how in his entertaining story of Tazza, a fictional chain of cafes with declining sales and leaders urgently seeking to understand why.

Sightline spells out the why and the how of collaborative strategy building. It pragmatically explains how to establish a clear destination with your team, while staying flexible about the routes you take to get there. With an emphasis on community building organizations, it’s a go-to resource for leaders craving clarity and conviction when responsiveness and adaptability are also required.

Not all heroes wear capes. You might not think of yourself as a hero, but every time you create value for others, you're benefiting people and making life easier or better for them in some way. The question is, "Who do you want to be a hero to?" By identifying the key audience you want to create value for, you focus yourself on the most crucial people in your life, helping them to grow their capabilities - and growing your own as well.

Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead, and Andrew Campbell show how the usually beneficial processes of the human mind can become traps when we face big decisions. The authors show how the shortcuts our brains have learned to take over millennia of evolution can derail our decision making. Think Again offers a powerful model for making better decisions, describing the key red flags to watch for and detailing the decision-making safeguards we need.

On average, people leave about 20 percent of potential mutual gains untapped in any negotiation. This is akin to taking 20 percent of the value in any deal and dumping it into a garbage canister. Finding that hidden 20 percent, the “sweet spot”, is a skill that takes practice but is also one that anybody can learn. In Negotiating the Sweet Spot, Leigh Thompson offers surefire best practices and tools to use in daily negotiations and conflict situations.

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.

Plenty of books dwell on the faults in our decision-making or offer advice on how to make better choices. The Elements of Choice goes one step further and explains how we can design better end-to-end decision-making processes. Going well beyond the familiar concepts of nudges and defaults, Eric J. Johnson offers a comprehensive, systematic guide to creating effective choice architectures, the environments in which decisions are made.

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

In Friend and Foe, researchers Galinsky and Schweitzer explain why this debate misses the mark. Rather than being hardwired to compete or cooperate, humans have evolved to do both. It is only by learning how to strike the right balance between these two forces that we can improve our long-term relationships and get more of what we want.

With Amy Herman's Fixed., we now have access to what the FBI, NATO, the State Department, Interpol, Scotland Yard, and many more organizations and their leaders have been using to solve their most intractable problems.

We struggle to manage complexity every day. We follow intricate diets to lose weight, juggle multiple remotes to operate our home entertainment systems, face proliferating data at the office, and hack through thickets of regulation at tax time. But complexity isn't destiny. Sull and Eisenhardt argue there's a better way: by developing a few simple yet effective rules, you can tackle even the most complex problems.

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.

Today, we’ll tackle several skills and abilities you should master before you start or run a business. These are: Communication tools and skills that are typically used in the workplace. Too many problems exist in businesses because of miscommunication, delays, and faulty reasoning. Presentation skills. These will come in handy when selling, getting partners, negotiating, or marketing a product or service. We will go over some tips that can boost your presentation skills.

ABC Hurricane Shutters, a Florida-based company, was on the verge of Chapter 11 bankruptcy, having recorded losses in each of the preceding three years. In From Red to Black: A Business Turnaround, Robert S. Curry shares his thought process, action steps, and profit improvement recommendations throughout his turnaround engagement at the shutter company. After Bob’s first meeting with the owner, he developed a detailed plan for recovery and was engaged the next day. Within four months, the company had made a complete turnaround with nearly every “must-do” completed.

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.

In QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, John G. Miller revealed how personal accountability helps to create opportunity, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals by eliminating blame, complaining, and procrastination. The result? Stronger organizations, more dynamic teams, and healthier relationships. Now Miller takes listeners to the next level to show how they can use the power of the QBQ! and personal accountability every day. When a light switch is flipped the flow of energy that is released reaches the lightbulb in an instant, bringing it to life.

Jobs to Be Done gives you a clear-cut framework for thinking about your business, outlines a road map for discovering new markets, new products, and new services, and helps you generate creative opportunities to innovate your way to success.

For creators, getting that promotion to management is exciting but can also be scary. The skills that made them so successful may not translate to the skill required to be a great manager, and this gets even more complicated when managing other creatives who often don’t thrive under traditional management procedures. Creative Directions is a management masterclass in which you attend lectures and seminars as you learn from some of the best in the business.

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.

Data. It's the benchmark that informs corporate projections, decision-making, and analysis. But, why do many organizations that see themselves as data-driven fail to thrive? In Leading with AI and Analytics, two renowned experts from the Kellogg School of Management show business leaders how to transform their organization to become evidence-driven, which leads to real, measurable changes that can help propel their companies to the top of their industries.