Organizational Behavior Leadership

With the toughest economic downturn in recent history, the issue of accountability has taken center stage. However accountability is often confused with punishment, fault, blame, and guilt. In this book, the author argues that the only true accountability is "personal accountability" and the only way to achieve it is to take responsibility for the outcomes of your choices, behaviors, and actions.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

Berkshire Hathaway, the $300+ billion conglomerate that Warren Buffett built, is among the world's largest and most famous corporations. Yet for all its power and celebrity, few people understand Berkshire, and many assume it cannot survive without Buffett. This book challenges that assumption. In a comprehensive portrait of the corporate culture that unites Berkshire's subsidiaries, Lawrence Cunningham unearths the traits that assure the conglomerate's perpetual prosperity.

This transformative new era requires a radically different approach to leadership. The tactics put in place to reduce risk, drive success, and make us feel safe in the past are now the very things creating vulnerability today. In Leadering, Nancy Giordano provides clarity and urgency around what 21st century stewardship demands as exponential technologies and changing societal expectations converge to shape a better next. This audiobook challenges us to shift our outdated thinking and adopt the mindset we need to build the future we all want.

Can you be in HR for more than 30 years and still be geeked out about it? The answer is yes, you can! HR leader and popular Everyday People blogger Steve Browne takes a fresh look at HR through an engaging assortment of real-life examples, insights, and epiphanies and encourages practitioners to drop the preconceptions of what HR should be and instead look to what HR could be. Listen to this book to rekindle your passion for a field that is vibrant and vital and touch the lives of everyone you encounter with HR on Purpose!

Your brand’s story can’t be concocted by a marketing team or agency, bubbling into some witches’ brew. It must be uncovered by revealing your brand’s most inspiring aspects. The simple truth: if you build on a foundation of authenticity, you can find the people that think like you, value what you value, and are ready to join in the celebration of your story. In Everyone is an Influencer, Kelly Keenan, founder of Brand Story Experts, unlocks the code to recognizing and utilizing true Influencers to soar your organization to new heights.

Kip Tindell, the founder and CEO of The Container Store, reveals the seven secrets to keeping both customers and employees happy and all fully engaged. In Uncontainable, Tindell reveals his approach for building a business where everyone associated with it thrives through embodying the tenets of conscious capitalism. Tindell's seven foundation principles are the road map that drives everyone at The Container Store to achieve the goals of the company.

From award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett comes a brilliant examination of how our tendency to create functional departments - silos - hinders our work and how some people and organizations can break those silos down to unleash innovation.

The principles in this book can be applied to leadership at any level, providing listeners with the tools they need to shift awareness, enhance communication, build trust, eliminate fear and self-doubt, and minimize unnecessary workplace drama. Embracing any one of the seven practices alone can be life-changing. When used together, they support a path of well-being, productivity, and positive influence.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

Beyond Leaning In is a different kind of business book - based on research, but told as a novel and designed to spark discussion among friends, family, classmates, and co-workers across genders and generations. Through the perspective of female and male characters across generations, listeners gain new insights about why gender gaps are so hard to close despite our best intentions. We are inspired to think differently about what both individuals and organizations must do to ensure all employees thrive.

Listen to this book at your own risk. It contains ideas that may lead to a profound self-awakening. An introspective journey for those in the trenches of today's modern organizations, Deep Change is a survival manual for finding our own internal leadership power. By helping us learn new ways of thinking and behaving, it shows how we can transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change. And for anyone who yearns to be an internally driven leader, to motivate the people around them, and return to a satisfying work life, Deep Change holds the key.

According to conventional morality, either a business manager maximizes profits and necessarily compromises on ethics, or necessarily sacrifices profits in order to be moral. Woiceshyn explains why this is a false dichotomy and offers rational egoism as an alternative moral code to business people who want to maximize profits ethically. Through logical argument and various examples, this audiobook shows how to apply principles such as rationality, productiveness, honesty, justice, and pride for long-term self-interest.

Black Faces in High Places is the essential guide for Black professionals who are moving up through their organizations or industries but need a roadmap for how to get to the top and stay there. Based on the authors' considerable experiences in business, in the public eye, and as a minority, the book shows how African-American professionals can (and must) think and act both entrepreneurially and "intrapreneurially".

In the past, business leadership was strictly an autocratic proposition. But times have changed, and companies are just discovering they must change with them. In Chase Greatness: Enlightened Leadership for the Next Generation of Disruption, CEO Rajeev Kapur reveals how most business leadership is out of step with evolving times and values—which has negatively impacted both the effectiveness of our workforces as well as the bottom line.

Leaders today must navigate their teams and organizations through unprecedented levels of uncertainty. It feels like every year there is some-game changing technology or catastrophe that gives rise to a “new normal” and sends businesses scrambling for how to rethink themselves to operate under these new conditions. K. Scott Griffith, a former airline pilot, socio-technical physicist, and author of the first independently audited high reliability and just culture model, offers practical and proven methods to build processes that will withstand the winds of uncertainty while driving success.

When is the last time you visibly and boldly challenged the status quo? It might be a tough question to answer. Uncertainty about what’s on the other side of the familiar and comfortable stops many of us from taking action. And yet, we continue to stay stuck, unaware of our roadblocks, and without a meaningful way forward. What can be done? We must intentionally “invite change”.

Kindness isn’t merely about getting along with people and being nice. It’s a game changer in business, the door opener to opportunity, and the key to authenticity and confidence. It’s a superpower that can be honed through an intentional lifestyle of kindness and is especially important in these divisive times.

The workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, cofounder of ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.

The digital age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become hyper-learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change.