Organizational Management

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?

Managing a call center presents numerous challenges for leaders, including meeting stringent KPIs, maintaining employee motivation, and handling high call volumes. Achieving performance metrics such as average handle time, first call resolution, and customer satisfaction requires meticulous planning and constant monitoring. Simultaneously, leaders must keep their teams motivated in a high-pressure environment, often characterized by repetitive tasks and demanding customers.

Every organization from any sector can benefit from becoming trauma-informed. Trauma-informed workplaces understand and recognize the presence of trauma, acknowledge the role trauma can play in a person’s life, and promote work environments that support the individual and collective well-being of all staff and clients. They create a sense of belonging, connection, and safety through their attitudes, policies, and practices. As a result of these practices, organizations that are trauma-informed are more resilient and better equipped to achieve their missions.

In the modern workplace, employees collaborate. Managers are expected to be effective team leaders and employees are expected to be valued teammates. But many teams struggle. Being part of a struggling team can be unpleasant, but it can also hurt your career and waste company resources.

This new edition of this best-selling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

Who changed the rules of business? It's a different game now. In an increasingly globally diverse workforce, it's vitally important that leaders understand their team inside and out. This takes a new toolbox of skills for the 21st century. Today you need winning strategies to avoid the costly pitfalls of high turnover, low morale, and poor collaboration, not to mention the cost of missed deadlines and incomplete projects.

Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes offers an eye-opening account of how corporate managers think the world works, and how big organizations shape moral consciousness. Based on extensive interviews with managers at every level of two industrial firms and of a large public relations agency, IMoral Mazes takes the reader inside the intricate world of the corporation.

In this audiobook, leading consultants Dick and Emily Axelrod share a way to meet that enables you to get work done right there in the meeting, an approach they’ve spent 30 years field testing. Using the same work-design principles that transformed the mind-numbing assembly line into the dynamic factory floor and make video games so engaging, they offer a flexible, repeatable process that has already been used to run thousands of productive meetings in all kinds of organizations.

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

Are you feeling less engaged, less committed and more skeptical at work? Do you find yourself isolated? Or are you caught in the middle of co-workers’ interpersonal conflicts? If so, you may be experiencing the confidence-busting, commitment-breaking, energy-draining patterns consistent with broken trust. We’ve all been there, but few of us know how to rebuild that trust. Dennis and Michelle Reina have spent their careers researching and measuring workplace trust.

Business Ethics for Better Behavior concisely answers the three most pressing ethical questions business professionals face: What makes business practices right or wrong? Why do normal, decent businesspeople of good will sometimes do the wrong thing? And how can we use the answer to these questions to get ourselves, our coworkers, our bosses, and our employees to behave better?

Bestselling author Peter Block is a true visionary: author of the classic Flawless Consulting, his work is about empowerment, stewardship, chosen accountability, and reconciliation of community. In The Empowered Manager, he returns his eye toward management to renew our efforts to create a shift in the traditional hierarchy. Twenty years after the original book, Block talks of why it is so difficult to both open the door to empowerment and more importantly, have people walk through it.

In The Elephant and the Mouse, diversity and inclusion expert Laura Liswood delivers a thought-provoking and insightful new business guide that explores workplace diversity and offers new ideas for gaining the real benefits from your diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. In this book, you'll explore the powerful case for diversity, equity, and inclusion and the often-overlooked risks posed by a homogeneous workforce. You will learn the hard truths about why many DE&I efforts fail, millions of dollars are wasted, and why organizations confuse efforts with outcomes.

Organizations are facing an engagement crisis. Not surprisingly, these stakeholders have developed deflector shields to protect themselves. Only a privileged few organizations are allowed to penetrate the shield, and even less will meaningfully engage. To penetrate the shield, and engage the audience, organizations need an edge. Gamification has emerged as a way to gain that edge and organizations are beginning to see it as a key tool in their digital engagement strategy.

In A Leader's Guide to Cybersecurity, Thomas Parenty and Jack Domet, who've spent over three decades in the field, present a timely, clear-eyed, and actionable framework that will empower senior executives and board members to become stewards of their companies' cybersecurity activities. Filled with tools, best practices, and strategies, A Leader's Guide to Cybersecurity will help boards navigate this seemingly daunting but extremely necessary transition.

Being empathetic at work means seeing the situation from another’s perspective, and using that vantage point to shape your leadership style, workplace culture, and branding strategy. Pairing her knowledge as a branding expert with proven research and fascinating stories from executives, change makers, and community leaders, Maria Ross reveals exactly how empathy makes brands and organizations stronger and more successful.

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.

Positive organizational psychology, with its focus on the identification and development of strengths, is a natural ally to executive development and leadership coaching. However, this approach is only just beginning to come to the attention of organizations and consequently, the research base for strength-based coaching is in its early stages of development. Strength-Based Leadership Coaching in Organizations reviews strength-based approaches to positive leadership development and evaluates the evidence for their effectiveness, critically assesses their apparent distinctiveness and more.

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.