Organizational Management

Our individualistic society has created an environment of fear, division, and domination, which has crushed our ability to relate meaningfully to each other and diminished our capacity to innovate and collaborate. Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, has been on a decade-long exploration to find out how to nurture relationships with depth and purpose. Deep connections shape who we are and have a profound ripple effect on everything we do, supporting us to achieve more, withstand anything, and amplify impact.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Human beings have been organizing to accomplish work for as long as we’ve existed. So why is organizational behavior still so elusive and mysterious? In this book, one of the greatest scholars in his field reframes his career’s work around the seven forces that drive all organizations. Mintzberg identifies them as efficiency, proficiency, consolidation, collaboration, culture, division, and conflict.

As leaders, how we are is as important as what we do. This new edition of a leadership classic shows how to master the inner and outer work needed to build relationships that unleash the transformational creative potential in everyone. Top-down, one-dimensional leadership models are hopelessly outmoded in today’s rapidly changing world. And they waste the leadership ability present throughout an organization, not just at the top.

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.

Time-pressed professionals looking for practical guidance to shape their current or future safety programs should use this book. Pre-Accident Investigations: An Introduction to Organizational Safety helps to identify complex potential incidents before they take place. Based around the New View of human error, it offers established human performance theory in a highly practical context.

What if you knew the science behind the magic - a science so predictive and powerful that you could transform your organization? What if you could use cutting-edge psychology to unlock people's innate desires to innovate, experiment, and adapt? In Primed to Perform, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor show you how to do just that. The result: higher sales, more loyal customers, and more passionate employees.

Does working from home—or anywhere else but the office—make sense? In Remote, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the founders of Basecamp, bring new insight to the hotly debated argument. While providing a complete overview of remote work’s challenges, Jason and David persuasively argue that, often, the advantages of working “off-site” far outweigh the drawbacks.

Every employee at every level wants to feel seen, heard, and respected. If we don’t feel safe, we can’t be our best selves or do our most creative work. This is why leaders must ensure psychological safety for everyone in their team. Whether you’re a manager, CEO, or entrepreneur, The Psychological Safety Playbook is the guide you need to lead your team to the highest levels of performance and innovation.

This book offers a concise, accessible guide to the key concepts and applications in Otto Scharmer's classic Theory U. Scharmer argues that our capacity to pay attention coshapes the world. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of that interior condition from which our attention and actions originate. Scharmer calls this lack of awareness our blind spot. He illuminates the blind spot in leadership today and offers hands-on methods to help change makers overcome it through the process, principles, and practices of Theory U.

Citing a wealth of research data and drawing on illustrative anecdotes, The Burnout Challenge shows how organizations can change to promote sustainable productivity. Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter provide useful tools for identifying the signs of employee burnout, most often exhaustion, cynicism, and ineffectiveness. They also advise managers on assembling and interpreting worker self-evaluation surveys, which can reveal workplace problems and potential solutions. And when it comes to implementing change, Maslach and Leiter offer practical, evidence-driven guidance.

Know What You're For details an effective growth strategy for businesses and nonprofits by closing the gap between two simple questions: What do you want to be known for? What are you known for? When the two answers match, organizations gain incredible momentum by unleashing the most powerful marketing force there is: lasting word-of-mouth support.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth, tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies to global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has now codified in High Growth Handbook.

High achievers definitely approach their workday differently. This book gives access to the secrets and strategies they've found for making things work. Time Wise goes deeper and unveils some of the more counterintuitive but effective methods that boost your productivity. Some of the high achievers featured, along with their personal strategies, include Adam Alter setting systems instead of goals, Rita McGrath who consults her own personal board of directors, Jake Knapp who focuses on the one important thing of the day and Oliver Burkeman's approach to beating the to-do list.

Exploring and explaining more than 80 of the world's most important theories and big ideas about trade, commerce, and management, this audiobook offers a fascinating look at the world of business past and present. A perfect primer on the fundamental tenets of the subject, The Business Book sheds light on some of history's most important milestone developments and the key business strategies used by leading thinkers and gurus from Henry Ford to Steve Jobs.

We’ve all had those perfect moments when events that could never be predicted, let alone controlled, remarkably seem to guide us along our path. Carl Jung called this phenomena “synchronicity” - “a collaboration between persons and events that seems to enlist the cooperation of fate.” In this book, Joseph Jaworski argues that the right state of mind will make you the kind of person who can enlist the cooperation of fate and take advantage of synchronicity, creating the conditions for “predictable miracles.”

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.

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.

Leadership isn't something you're born with or gifted as a reward for an abundance of charisma; true leadership stems from core skills that can be learned. Get more of the leadership ideas you want, from the authors you trust, with HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leadership (Vol. 2). We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you maximize your own and your organization's performance.