Organizational Leadership

The Center for Talent Innovation's new study, Mission Critical: Unlocking the Value of Veterans in the Workforce, reveals how companies can ensure their veteran talent thrives in the corporate world.

Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the black box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.

That is the challenge that all leaders face. This challenge grows more intense every day. Lead with Speed is the answer. This problem of speed is often disguised by other symptoms, such as "my projects cannot make an accurate prediction of when they will be done" or the stated need of "my teams need to take more risks." The real need is not reckless risk-taking that will lead to even more problems and finishing even later. The real need is for speed.

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.

Business leaders, you hold an important position in the power structure, and you have the unique ability to reach thousands of employees and millions of consumers with your leadership. It's time for you to build a truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive work environment. This book is the comprehensive plan for leaders who are ready to get serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and creating an anti-racist company culture.

Award-winning entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow reveals the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down - and why some break through. The best teams are more than the sum of their parts, but why does collaboration so often fail to fulfill this promise? In Dream Teams, Snow takes us on an adventure through history, neuroscience, psychology, and business, exploring what separates groups that simply get by together from those that get better together.

Attention Pays spotlights on the power of attention and absolute focus. In an on-demand, 24/7 society, where distractions cost millions of people productivity, profitability, relationships, and peace, it's time to pay attention to what matters most. This book includes powerful tips and tricks to increase profitability, describes how to achieve maximum accountability and results, provides strategies to help you productively manage daily tasks, and offers guidance on improving your daily attention and focus.

Think of your to-do list at work. Chances are the most important tasks require you to work with others - and the success of those endeavors depends on the effectiveness of your collaboration. According to management expert Leigh Thompson, collaboration that is conscious, planned, and focused on generating new ideas builds excitement and produces what she calls a "creative conspiracy". Teams that conspire to organize themselves, motivate one another, and combine their talents to meet creative challenges are the hallmark of the most successful organizations.

The greatest threat we face is not robots replacing us, but our reluctance to reinvent ourselves. We live in an age of wonder: cars that drive themselves, devices that anticipate our needs, and robots capable of everything from advanced manufacturing to complex surgery. Automation, algorithms, and AI will transform every facet of daily life, but are we prepared for what that means for the future of work, leadership, and creativity?

In the wake of economic downturn, foreign competition, spiking oil prices, and even war, American business throughout this decade has been thrust into crisis. To improve their performance, corporations everywhere have adopted a wide range of tools and techniques, yet many continue to struggle. Going Lean points to a better way.

Winning Not Fighting draws on the philosophy of Wing Tsun, an ancient Chinese martial art, to offer a profound and practical guide to achieving success at work, life and business. By explaining what these teachings reveal about decision-making, professional relationships, personal targets and positivity, it challenges some of our deepest held assumptions and forces us to unlearn many ideas that inform our current ideas on professional success. Why, for example, do we refer to business through a lens of conflict?

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.

"Work-life balance" isn't making anyone happy. The pandemic helped catalyze a cultural shift of workers redefining themselves beyond what they do for a living. Now, it's time for you to rethink your role as a leader in the nexus of work and life. In Work-Life Bloom: How to Nurture a Team That Flourishes, award-winning author Dan Pontefract contends that a thriving workplace isn't about employee engagement levels, nor is it predicated on your team members bringing their "best selves" to work. Instead, it requires you to support the people you manage so they can be their best in work and life.

Based on research from over 1,200 companies, including WalMart, Google, and JPMorgan Chase, this book follows real-world cases from companies where employees evolved from silent contributors to masterminds steering corporate strategies. These cases are the vanguard of a vibrant era in which workers will be the architects of their destinies, shaping not just their own careers but the entire trajectories of their organizations.

Tom Kelley, author of The Art of Innovation and the general manager of IDEO, the world-famous design firm, illuminates the strategies IDEO used to beat the devil's advocate and drive creativity throughout the organization.

Lifelong learning has become a multibillion-dollar business, with more than 60 million adults currently engaged in webinars, webcasts, in-house training, continuing education classes, and more. But it is also an industry in flux, as newcomers topple old-guard organizations that can’t keep pace with the need for instant access to materials and flexible delivery methods, as well as demands for community and connection.

Drawing on their groundbreaking data-driven research, as well as in-depth case studies and extensive interviews with managers and employees at companies like IBM, Accenture, and eBay, the authors show what behaviors define a connector manager, and why they are able to build powerhouse teams. They also show why other types of managers fail to be equally effective, and how they can incorporate behaviors of connector managers in order to be more effective at building teams.

Kathy Caprino guides women to take the reins in their careers by identifying and overcoming the seven most damaging power gaps holding them back and accessing new levels of internal and external power to propel you forward to the success you want and deserve. The business world has been forever changed by the important progress and contributions that women have made. Yet, with only 38 percent of manager roles and 22 percent of C-suite positions being held by women, women continue to struggle to achieve the reward, respect, and authority they have earned.

Can the concept of "Spiritual Capital" actually ensure a company's success? Critics of capitalism view big businesses as insatiable masters of the universe that hold little regard for the public, and label those who create wealth as greedy, malicious, and unscrupulous. In this insightful and original book, Theodore Roosevelt Malloch answers these charges head-on with the bold idea that the creation of wealth by virtuous means is the most important thing we can do for ourselves and for others.

Traditional business structures love stability and predictability. Yet many organizations believe the two essential ingredients for long-term success are creativity and innovation. Kirsten May and Alex Varricchio, founders of the marketing agency UpHouse, call the relationship between these two opposing expectations the Proximity Paradox - the belief that those who are closest to a subject are best-qualified to innovate for it, when, in reality, intense proximity limits creativity.