Organizational Culture

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

Driven to Delight offers an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at CEO Steve Cannon and his leadership team's ambitious, multi-pronged strategy to elevate the company's customer experience to best-in-class across all brands and industries.

Joey Havens breaks through the limiting barriers of common culture theory and shows, with great transparency, the real human emotions that elevate a culture to one that is genuine, enduring, and magnetic. Joey shares insights, failures, low points, lessons learned, and growth from his experience of helping lead the successful transformation of HORNE LLP’s good culture to a magnetic, people-first culture based on the Christian principles of caring and service.

The scenario is all too familiar: a qualified, motivated professional woman does everything she can think of to secure a coveted promotion. After years of investing her time and energy in the company, she is ready to advance. Later, she is shocked and dismayed to find that not only was she passed over, but the successful candidate had fewer qualifications and little to no familiarity with the practical side of the business. What happened?

¿Puede una persona normal volverse psicópata? ¿Por qué no es fácil reconocer a un psicópata integrado en el trabajo? ¿Qué es lo que convierte a algunos jefes y directivos en depredadores de sus equipos? Camuflados bajo un aspecto encantador y un halo de falsa eficiencia, una nueva raza de psicópatas integrados está alcanzando el poder en las organizaciones.

For thousands of years, the Chinese believed that they had created a perfect social system based on Confucian values and tempered by the Mandate of Heaven. Dynasties came and went, but the essence of being Chinese remained essentially unchanged until the 20th century. Since then, change has taken place in Chinese society at an unprecedented speed: the country experienced the turmoil of civil war and revolution and then emerged on to the world stage as a global superpower.

In A Good Time to Be a Girl, Helena Morrissey sets out how we might achieve the next big breakthrough towards a truly inclusive modern society. Drawing on her experience as a City CEO, mother of nine, and founder of the influential 30% Club, which campaigns for gender-balanced UK company boards, her manifesto for new ways of working, living, loving and raising families is for everyone, not just women.

Serving on a board is like having a second full-time job. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you address classic challenges such as increasing diversity, ensuring a culture that reflects company values, and providing strategic oversight while also addressing emerging issues such as shareholder activism, cybersecurity, and ever-shifting regulations.

Most of us are terrified of conflict, says Arnold Mindell, PhD, author of 15 books and internationally recognized for his innovative synthesis of Jungian therapy, dreams, and bodywork. But we needn't be. His burning passion is to create groups and organizations, where everyone looks forward to group processes instead of fearing them. He calls this the deep democracy of open forums, where all voices, thoughts, and feelings are aired freely, especially the ones nobody wants to hear.

“Everyone wants everyone else to change.” That is the fundamental reason why most organizational transformations fail. Leaders want their people to exhibit behaviors that they don’t exhibit themselves. Team members feel powerless to make significant change just because of where they are situated on the organization chart. Improvement Starts with I provides you with a framework to change this through a simple plan that, when followed, will deliver outstanding engagement, improvement, and results, helping you avoid the potholes into which countless companies have fallen.

Catherine had just celebrated her forty-third birthday on May 20th. Her dream of owning and running a thriving company was coming true. Essentially Proximal's essential oil line was becoming a major success. As a female business owner, she was doing her best to promote positive culture at work and retain talent. Her goal was to build a diverse high-performing and inclusive leadership team, but her leadership team was struggling to put people first and live the mission and values of the company. She had to make some serious changes to ensure the future success of the company.

Sephora is a playground for women, chock full of lipstick, eyeshadows, foundations, blushes, and so much more, just waiting to be experienced. It’s where teens learn to apply foundation and adults learn how to create the perfect smoky eye. It’s the cosmetic birthplace for the iconic Kardashian contour. And it’s a dominant brand, taking home a large portion of the $48.3 billion-dollar makeup industry. This book will teach entrepreneurs, innovators, marketers, and executives everything they need to know about creating an iconic experience for their customers.

When Christine Armstrong became a mother, it never occurred to her that she would want to stop work or even work part-time. But the truth is, combining work and small kids is hard. From the broken breast pumps on business trips, to hiding chicken pox from the nursery, to the heartbreak when you come home and realise your baby smells of the childminder. When Christine Armstrong tried it, she found herself desolate with misery. Determined to make it work, she looked for answers by interviewing other working mums and found that she wasn't alone.

In her refreshing and forthright voice, Anne-Marie Slaughter returns with her vision for what true equality between men and women really means and how we can get there. She uncovers the missing piece of the puzzle, presenting a new focus that can reunite the women's movement and provide a common banner under which both men and women can advance and thrive.

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).

Great business leaders understand that acceptance of greater personal accountability and responsibility leads individuals, teams, and organizations back on the path to success. But with the evolving nature of 21st century business, the practical steps that go into creating a high performance culture of accountability have become more muddled than ever.

Why were the American POWs imprisoned at the Hanoi Hilton so resilient in captivity and so successful in their subsequent careers? This book presents six principles practiced within the POW organizational culture that can be used to develop high-performance teams everywhere. The authors offer examples from both the POWs’ time in captivity and their later professional lives that identify, in real-life situations, the characteristics necessary for sustainable, high-performance teamwork.

From the best-selling author of The Little Book of Stress Relief comes the definitive guide to treating - and eliminating - excessive stress in the workplace. Dr. David Posen, a popular speaker and a leading expert on stress mastery, identifies the three biggest problems that contribute to burnout and low productivity: Volume, Velocity, and Abuse. He shares revealing anecdotes and offers clear descriptions of the biology of stress to illustrate how downsizing, economic uncertainty, and technology have made the workplace more toxic than ever.

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 his new audiobook, The Heart-Led Leader, Spaulding turns his focus to ourselves - to who we are. Authentic leaders, Spaulding says, live and lead from the heart. The values and principles that guide our lives and shape our ability to lead others is far more important than our titles or our ability to crunch numbers or the impressive degrees we display on our walls. To effect true transformational change, heart-led leaders draw on the qualities of humility, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, and love.