Organizational Management

In 2001, when Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a global community of socially and environmentally responsible partners dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty, few had heard of impact investing - Acumen’s practice of “doing well by doing good”. Nineteen years later, there’s been a seismic shift in how corporate boards and other stakeholders evaluate businesses: Impact investment is not only morally defensible, but now also economically advantageous, even necessary.

Inside Leadership in Diversity and Inclusion, you’ll discover how a team brimming with different cultural backgrounds can create better innovation and ingenuity; the largest hurdles and how to overcome them; the true meaning behind the terms “microaggressions", “unconscious bias", “privilege", and “antiracism” and how these terms apply to your business, proven techniques that you can implement to bring about major change and inclusive leadership, and much more!

Value stream mapping - an essential but underused methodology - is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than a tool to eliminate operational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow. Business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done - in any environment - and how to design improved work systems.

In this endlessly fascinating book, New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea that has profound implications: large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant. Groups are better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.

In today's increasingly diverse, global, interconnected business world, diversity and inclusion is no longer just the right thing to do, it is a core leadership competency and central to the success of business. Working effectively across differences such as gender, culture, generational, race, and sexual orientation not only leads to a more productive, innovative corporate culture, but also to a better engagement with customers and clients.

Almost 20 years ago, Clayton Christensen popularized the term disruption in his book The Innovator's Dilemma, describing it as a set of risks that established firms face. Since then, few have closely examined his account. Joshua Gans does so in this book. He looks at companies that have proven resilient and those that have fallen and explains why some companies have successfully managed disruption while others have not.

From the pioneers of the management strategy that's transforming businesses worldwide, Making Work Human shows how to implement a culture of performance and gratitude in the workplace—and seize a competitive edge, increase profitability, and drive business momentum.

With so many forces of change buffeting the business world today, a scary state of flux has replaced any sense of certainty, stability, and familiarity, delivering a wake-up call to make crucial changes happen, make them happen quickly, and make them stick. Traditional approaches to change management fall into one of two categories, but neither of these models offer a full picture to what really happens in an organization. Siobhan McHale offers a third option: organizations are complex ecosystems that require a Hive Mind or Group Intelligence (GQ) to bring about meaningful and lasting change.

This book is crucial for every manager or HR representative who shouldn’t just prepare to one day be faced with a report of a traumatic experience at work, but plan on it. This five-step method will help managers make survivors feel supported and understood. The Empathetic Workplace guides supervisors of any level through an understanding of how stories of trauma impact the brain of both the survivor and the listener, as well as the tools to handle the interaction appropriately, to help the listener, the organization, and most importantly, the survivor.

This book will inspire you to: overhaul performance management practices to jump-start motivation and engagement; use agile processes to transform how you hire, develop, and manage people; establish diversity programs that increase innovation and competitiveness as well as inclusion; use people analytics to bring unprecedented insight to hiring and talent management; prepare your company for the double waves of artificial intelligence and an older workforce; and close the gap between HR and strategy.

This book will inspire you to: better understand the path women must take to leadership; learn the root causes of the barriers that exist for women in the workplace; check your own gender biases and distinguish between confidence and competence in your colleagues; manage a more effective gender-diversity program; recognize the issues women face when speaking up about bias or harassment; and help women reenter the workforce after taking time off-and create opportunities for them to reach their ambitions.

In nearly every industry, smart machines are replacing human labor. It's not just factory jobs - automated technologies are handling people's investments, diagnosing illnesses, and analyzing written documents. If we humans are going to endure, Edward Hess and Katherine Ludwig say we're going to need a dose of humility. We need to be humble enough to let go of the idea that "smart" means knowing the most, using that information quickest, and making the fewest mistakes. Smart machines will always be better than we are at those things.

Rapid change defines the world around us, requiring a more effective type of organization. New discoveries change our understanding of how the world works, and Margaret J. Wheatley shows us how the “new science” can lead to a powerful new view of the business world. Our world has become nonlinear and filled with constant transition, and this new understanding can be applied to the way we organize work, people, and our lives. Wheatley invites us to transform our way of thinking and adapt ourselves—and our companies—to the 21st century by offering a new way of thinking.

Cynthia Shapiro is a former human resources executive who's pulling back the curtain on the way that companies really work. In Corporate Confidential, she unmasks startling truths and what you can do about them. Shapiro pulls no punches, giving listeners an inside look at a secret world of hidden agendas they would never normally see: a world of insider information and insights that can save a career.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

Working late at night, Lucas, a middle manager in a large organization, meets a custodian named Ted. The two strike up a friendship as Ted teaches Lucas three vital questions with the power to transform the disillusionment he is experiencing at work. Listeners follow Lucas as he learns how to shift from feeling like a victim to acting as a creator in his career. With the wise guidance of Ted and Kasey, a senior manager, Lucas applies the three vital questions and begins transforming his workplace relationships, with exciting results.

In this new edition of the management classic, the authors explore in-depth the core values of the culture that have made Nordstrom synonymous with legendary customer service. These essential values have enabled Nordstrom to survive and adapt to dramatic market shifts regularly since 1901, and the new edition explains how the Nordstrom approach can be emulated by any organization - in any industry - in every corner of the world.

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.

How do senior leaders, in their own words, describe the most effective leaders - the ones that get results, grow the business, enhance the culture and leave in their wake a trail of other really effective leaders? Conversely, how do senior leaders describe the kind of leader that undercuts the organization's capacity and capability to create its future? This book, based on groundbreaking research, shows how senior leaders describe and develop leadership that works, that does not, that scales, and that limits scale.

In Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, leadership coach Katie Anderson and Toyota leader Isao Yoshino bring you a remarkable book about what it means to learn, to lead, and to care. With a career that spanned nearly four decades at Toyota Motor Corporation, Isao Yoshino’s stories help us understand how Toyota intentionally developed the culture of excellence for which it is renowned today, and how one person learned to lead so that he could lead to learn.