Organizational Management

Institutions remain essential to human flourishing. They are the means by which communities thrive, individual vocations are fulfilled, and society is changed for the good. As a result, we all need to learn how to work effectively within institutions. That is just what Gordon Smith provides. He unpacks the core of institutional intelligence - the wisdom of working effectively within an organization. At the same time, he explains how team leaders, directors, executives, board members, key stakeholders, and employees can avoid what is often their greatest source of stress on the job,

Catherine had just celebrated her forty-third birthday on May 20th. Her dream of owning and running a thriving company was coming true. Essentially Proximal's essential oil line was becoming a major success. As a female business owner, she was doing her best to promote positive culture at work and retain talent. Her goal was to build a diverse high-performing and inclusive leadership team, but her leadership team was struggling to put people first and live the mission and values of the company. She had to make some serious changes to ensure the future success of the company.

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

In Begin With WE, leadership expert Kyle McDowell examines the root causes of dysfunction in business, highlighting the plague of a “me-oriented” paradigm, and provides the remedy with his framework, The 10 WEs. These guiding principles are the cornerstone of Kyle’s leadership philosophy and establish the foundation required for a Culture of Excellence. Kyle’s inside-out approach cultivates courageous “WE-oriented” leaders who recognize the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions - but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done.

With a spectacular array of true stories and case studies of the hidden benefits of mess, A Perfect Mess overturns the accepted wisdom that tight schedules, organization, neatness, and consistency are the keys to success.

Reframing Organizations provides time-tested guidance for more effective organizational leadership. Rooted in decades of social science research across multiple disciplines, Bolman and Deal's four-frame model has continued to evolve since its conception over 25 years ago; this new sixth edition has been updated to include coverage of cross-sector collaboration, generational differences, virtual environments, globalization, sustainability, and communication across cultures.

The digital age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become hyper-learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change.

The only thing you can rely on in today’s workplace is uncertainty. Between mergers and acquisitions, layoffs and team shuffles, pandemics and recessions, only the nimble survive. Change on the Run is your secret weapon to navigating it all. Change on the Run provides a laser-focused guide to navigating your way through disruption, without any time-consuming fluff or theory. Change-management expert Phil Buckley gives you 44 tried-and-true survival strategies for responding to transitions and disruptions as quickly as possible.

Based on five years of proprietary research, How Remarkable Women Lead speaks to you as no other book has, with its hopeful outlook and unique ideas about success. It's the new "right stuff" of leadership, raising provocative issues such as whether feminine leadership traits (for women and men) are better suited for our fast-changing, hyper-competitive, and increasingly complex world. In this book, McKinsey & Company consultants Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston establish the links between joy, happiness, and distinctive performance with the groundbreaking model of Centered Leadership.

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

For decades Tom Peters has been preaching the gospel of putting people first, and in today's rapidly changing business environment, this message is more important than ever. With his unparalleled expertise and inimitable charisma, Peters provides a roadmap for you and your organization to thrive amidst the tech tsunami, and he has a lot of fun doing it. The Excellence Dividend is an important new book from one of today’s greatest business thinkers.

In this fascinating examination of our widespread obsession with winning, Cath Bishop draws on her personal experience of high-performance environments to trace the idea of winning through history, language and thought to explore how it has come to be a defining concept in fields from sport to business, from politics to education. Faced with the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century, Cath offers a new, broader approach - the long win.

For Jim McCann, the founder and CEO of the world’s leading florist, 1-800-Flowers.com, being open and ready to speak to a variety of audiences is his most powerful leadership tool. In Talk Is (Not!) Cheap, McCann illustrates how the art of conversation leadership - the process he developed to engage others and create forward momentum in the workplace - can be used to inspire, innovate, and win. Using a blend of how-to and insightful personal stories, this audiobook argues that the gift of gab may just be the most critical (and undervalued) skill set in today’s workplace.

Is it possible to create a positive workforce in negative times? Yes, it is, says speaker, strategist and consultant Liz Jazwiec, RN. But first, you have to get real about how tough a job in healthcare really is and also about the negative things you and your staff members do to make it even tougher. In her audiobook, Liz gets real about all that and more. In her darkly humorous, ever-so-slightly sarcastic style - after all she was an ER nurse - she builds a case for the powerful benefits of a positive workplace.

The workplace is going through a large-scale transition with digitization, automation, and acceleration. Critical skills and expertise are imperative for companies and their employees to succeed in the future, and the most forward-thinking companies are being proactive in adapting to the shift in the workforce. Kelly Palmer, Silicon Valley thought leader from LinkedIn, Degreed, and Yahoo, and David Blake, cofounder of ed-tech pioneer Degreed, share their experiences and describe how some of the smartest companies in the world are making learning and expertise a major competitive advantage.

"What does a workplace utopia look like to you?" This is the question Dr. Ella F. Washington asks company leaders, and often she hears about an ideal vision of an organization that values diversity and inclusion and wants employees to bring their whole selves to work. But how can you get there? Organizations have largely missed the mark when it comes to creating environments where all employees thrive in an equal and equitable way, because they treat diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a program that gets done rather than the necessary and difficult journey it is.

The "Step Up, Step Back" approach suggests leaders need to step up and do more than they typically do in the early stages of the change - in specific ways and at specific times; and then step back and do less than they typically do in the later stages of the change - again, in specific ways, at specific times. The result is not only change that sticks, but empowered, motivated managers who can get on with delivering change, without needing ongoing input or cover from leaders.

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.