Organizational Leadership

"What an asshole!" How many times have you said that about someone at work? You're not alone! In this groundbreaking book, Stanford University professor Robert I. Sutton builds on his acclaimed Harvard Business Review article to show you the best ways to deal with assholes...and why they can be so destructive to your company.

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.

We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up-to-date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Michael E. Porter to Katrina Lake and company examples from Alibaba to 3M, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

In a world of unrelenting change and unprecedented challenges, we need organizations that are resilient and daring. Unfortunately, most organizations, overburdened by bureaucracy, are sluggish and timid. In Humanocracy, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini make a passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better. Drawing on more than a decade of research and packed with practical examples, Humanocracy lays out a detailed blueprint for creating organizations that are as inspired and ingenious as the human beings inside them.

In this, his first audiobook, Tony Hsieh - the widely admired CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer -explains how he created a unique culture and commitment to service that aims to improve the lives of its employees, customers, vendors, and backers. Using anecdotes and stories from his own life experiences, and from other companies, Hsieh provides concrete ways that companies can achieve unprecedented success.

Steven Mandis charts the evolution of Goldman Sachs from an ethical standard to a legal one and uncovers the forces behind what he calls Goldman's "organizational drift". Drawing from his firsthand experience; sociological research; analysis of SEC, congressional, and other filings; and a wide array of interviews with former clients, detractors, and current and former partners, Mandis exposes the pressures that forced Goldman to slowly drift away from the very principles on which its reputation was built.

Was it a typo when the CEO mandated that the organization "institutionalize incompetents"? If not, how did the company wind up institutionalizing incompetence instead? How to Work for an Idiot is still the confessions of a recovering Idiot Boss. After decades of writing and consulting, Dr. Hoover finally realized that many of the people he kept trying to "energize" and "enlighten" were, well, idiots. More importantly, he was an idiot for thinking he could change them. This new edition is bigger and better - and filled with even more idiots - than before.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company persevere through economic challenges and continue to grow while your competitors stumble. This book will inspire you to: harness your resources to pull through a pandemic; learn the right lessons from previous recessions; minimize pain while cutting costs and managing risk; foster a healthy culture during anxious times; make smart moves to protect your own job; and seize the opportunity to innovate and reinvent your business.

Having recently stepped down as chairman and CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly shares the leadership principles illustrated by multiple vivid and concrete stories that underpinned the remarkable resurgence of Best Buy and that he believes are at the heart of business: pursue a noble purpose, put people at the center, embrace all stakeholders, and treat profit as an outcome.

Young, ambitious, and overwhelmed, Andrew O'Brien personifies a part of every leader as he wanders in search of the elusive silver bullet that will propel him to success. He happens upon an unlikely guide who distills the seemingly infinite list of leadership perils into the five temptations of a CEO. In an intense and often combative exchange, the two debate fundamental issues faced by all leaders, issues involving personal integrity and effectiveness in the ongoing struggle for success.

Starting in 1997, Bob Chapman and Barry-Wehmiller pioneered a dramatically different approach to leadership that creates off-the-charts morale, loyalty, creativity, and business performance. The company utterly rejects the idea that employees are simply functions to be moved around, "managed" with carrots and sticks, or discarded at will. Instead Barry-Wehmiller manifests the reality that every single person matters, just like in a family. That's not a cliché on a mission statement; it's the bedrock of the company's success.

In Bring Your Human to Work, Erica Keswin laid down the rules and protocols of a human workplace. Now, in Rituals Roadmap, she shows us how to further employee engagement, explaining that workplace rituals foster a sense of belonging and help workers connect with one another and their work.

In Ego vs EQ, Jen Shirkani shares strategies for using emotional intelligence (EQ) as a primary prevention tool to avoid career derailment. The executive leadership failure rate is high: two in five CEO’s fail in the first 18 months on the job and two thirds of business’ will disappear just a decade after founding. This book teaches you how to identify the most common reasons for leadership ineffectiveness, including the cascading consequences they create, and learn tools to prevent them.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

In this updated and expanded edition of her celebrated book Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, one of the world’s most influential business thinkers reveals the qualities essential to leadership in our fast-changing, post-pandemic world. Some are timeless (confidence, decisiveness), some are brand new (the ability to command Zoom), and all are game-changers.

Modern knowledge workers communicate constantly. Their days are defined by a relentless barrage of incoming messages and back-and-forth digital conversations - a state of constant, anxious chatter in which nobody can disconnect, and so nobody has the cognitive bandwidth to perform substantive work. There was a time when tools like email felt cutting edge, but a thorough review of current evidence reveals that the "hyperactive hive mind" workflow they helped create has become a productivity disaster, reducing profitability and perhaps even slowing overall economic growth.

With in-depth research, interviews, and provocative analysis, Mira Kamdar offers a penetrating view of India and its cultural and economic impact on the United States and the world. From Bollywood to the Indian diaspora to India's effect on global politics, she reports on the people, companies, and places shaping the new India. Kamdar examines the challenges India faces while celebrating India's tremendous vitality and the opportunities this Asian democracy has to shape its own and all of our destinies.

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

As a manager, it’s your role to achieve the highest possible return on the physical, emotional, and mental efforts your people put forth. It’s not just a return on investment ...it’s a return on energy. But how are you supposed to light a fire under each employee when studies find that most of them are working at only a fraction of their potential?

Organizations and employees now spend an average of $18,000 dollars per year per employee for health costs. These are direct costs, but the hidden costs of time out of the office, distraction, disengagement, and turnover far exceed them. The Healthy Workplace Nudge explains the findings of research on 100 large organizations that have tackled the problems of employee health costs and disengagement in four fresh ways and explains how to create a workplace that is good for people, releases them to what they do best and enjoy most, and produces great and profitable work.