Performance Culture

In Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means - or doesn’t - to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected president of the United States purely on showmanship.

In this timely and essential guide, McKinsey alumni Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas present a proven approach to workplace anxiety that reduces stress, boosts well-being, and overcomes blocks that get in the way of success. It begins with changing our relationship with fear and then developing strategies that improve outlook and performance, leading to greater profits, sustainable growth, and personal rewards. It’s only possible with a culture of unfear.

They're Your Rules, Break Them! offers 50 innovative ways of looking at your business as a long-term, dynamic, progressive entity. Here you will find 50 ways to ditch the atrophying forces and create an exponentially achieving, high-performance culture in your organization. Disruption is everywhere. Rather than suffering its blows, what if you could institutionalize it into your business? What if, rather than being rigid and rule-bound, you could make your business "ever changing" within?

Virtue is more than a word: it's a way for us all to live, a way to flourish as human beings. And when applied to organizational life, virtue serves to enhance engagement, strengthen relationships, and foster success in business. Picking up where the acclaimed Exception to the Rule left off, Better Humans, Better Performance connects the classical Greek virtues—Trust, Compassion, Courage, Justice, Temperance, Wisdom, and Hope—with authoritative science that can help you achieve the highest performance.

Culture guru and best-selling author, Chris McGoff, allows you to journey along with Carolyn, a composite character based on real-life people, to learn and see how it’s up to everyone to work through the struggles and find a way to redefine company culture and achieve peak performance. By the end of Carolyn’s story, you will be equipped to break down that default culture and build a culture of peak performance.

For too long, humans have been following others based largely on that person's sense of physical strength, appearance, and dominance. It's a model that dates back to the Neanderthals and which, incredibly, we continue to apply—consciously or not. The Power of Evolved Leadership establishes a new standard for leadership. It shifts you away from a leadership profile of power, command, and control to move your toward the nuance of motivation, inspiration, and, most critically, the shedding of "ego."

Armstrong on Reinventing Performance Management presents a holistic approach to performance management, drawing on Michael Armstrong's vast research and experience. Most organizations have performance management processes in one form or another, but these are often based on formal annual reviews, forced rankings and directly linked to pay decisions. These traditional approaches are often at the expense of ongoing, continuous feedback and focus on looking back at what has or has not been achieved rather than looking forward.

In the fourth book in Miller’s High Performance series, CEO Blake Brown sets out to discover how to create the kind of workplace where everyone feels excited to come to work, passionate about what he or she brings to the company, and energized at the end of the day. It’s a journey that takes him literally all over the world - from Italy to Greece to Green Bay and more. What he discovers from the pages of history is as relevant as the evening news.

Perfunctory efforts to show investment in a business relationship don't cut it anymore. Business professionals working across national and cultural boundaries need to form authentic relationships that drive rapport, camaraderie, and optimal team performance—and Forging Bonds in a Global Workforce provides the most thorough and practical approach to date on this issue. Renowned academics in the field of intercultural relationship-building Andy Molinsky and Melissa Hahn deliver an easy-to-understand approach to help you supercharge your global relationship-building skills.

An essential resource for current CEOs, leaders, and future leaders who realize a new cultural order is transforming what effective leadership is about, The Culturepreneur will help you and your organization reach new levels of performance - driving human, organizational, societal, and economic successes that exceed even your own expectations.

In his work consulting to major corporations for more than 30 years, Gerald Kraines consistently hears that 60-70 percent of business organizations' potential effectiveness goes unrealized. He shares how to engage, align, and develop employees in order to leverage and encourage optimal performance and long-lasting results.

Emotion, more than anything else, spells the difference between stellar and mediocre team performance. Fear, anger, frustration, and other negative feelings, can en danger a group's dynamic. But positive emotions have the power to transform it into a high-performance engine, where everyone operates at their peak. Their minds sharpen. They find creative solutions. They get great results.

This book is about one of the most important factors that leads to spectacular performance in organizations. Kim Cameron, a true pioneer in the study of positive leadership, offers validated scientific evidence that all individuals are inherently attracted to and flourish in the presence of positive energy.

In today’s work environment, the lines between our professional and personal lives are blurred more than ever before. Whatever is happening to us outside of our workplace - whether stressful, painful, or joyful - follows us into work as well. We may think we have to keep these realities under wraps and act as if we “have it all together”. But as Mike Robbins explains, we can work better, lead better, and be more engaged and fulfilled if - instead of trying to hide who we are- we show up fully and authentically.

Today's leaders know that speed and agility are the keys to any company's success, and yet many are frustrated that their organizations can't move fast enough to stay competitive. The typical chain of command is too slow; internal resources are too limited; people are already executing beyond normal expectations. As the pace accelerates, how do you inspire people's energy and creativity? How do you collaborate with customers, vendors, and partners to keep your organization on the cutting edge?

The creators of the popular website Black Nerd Problems bring their witty and unflinching insight to this engaging collection of pop culture essays - on everything from Mario Kart to issues of representation - that “will fill you with joy and give you hope for the future of geek culture” (Ernest Cline, number one New York Times best-selling author).

Leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to overcome the great disconnect between employers and employees by inviting individuals to become part of something bigger than themselves—to belong. Belonging Rules gives leaders the tools, knowledge, and confidence to harness belonging to address the workplace’s most critical challenges.

Committed Teams: Three Steps to Inspiring Passion and Performance is based on a deceptively simple philosophy: set a direction, try to stay on track, and make adjustments when necessary. Easy to do? Hardly - especially when the typical workday is time-crunched, stressful, and deadline-driven. Drawing on research done at the Wharton School of Business, the authors reveal how to deliver results under these tough conditions.

Thousands of books have been written about leadership and workplace culture, but many rely too much on abstract philosophy and head-scratching jargon. In Jumpstart Your Workplace Culture, Eric Stone breaks through the noise to give listeners a practical road map for fostering a culture that yields results year in and year out. Influenced by his quarter-century of experience with one of America's most beloved brands, the book is loaded with interviews from senior corporate executives as well as real-life examples and anecdotes.

Most companies strive to attract talented people, retain them for years, watch them engage in their work and have them consistently perform at a high level. In order to achieve this, they spend significant time, money and resources providing their team with “learning and development” opportunities. Unfortunately, these initiatives rarely produce an ROI because they are not customized and personalized for each employee.