Performance Management Leadership

Battered by waves of downsizing since the 1980s, talented men and women no longer seek job security from one company. This is the true hallmark of the new economy—not fleeting dot-coms and IPOs, but a fast-moving, free-agent workforce with the flexibility to jolt productivity. Managers, meanwhile, must grab hold of this shifting group of talent and squeeze more work out of them than ever before, particularly in a tight economy. The trouble is, their traditional source of power over employees—the corporate ladder—is dead and gone.

Now, from the AGI-Goldratt Institute and Jeff Cox, the same creative writer who co-authored The Goal, comes Velocity the book that reveals how to achieve outstanding bottom-line results by integrating the world's three most powerful continuous improvement disciplines: Lean, Six Sigma, and Goldratt's Theory of Constraints.

Being a great leader - one who drives massive passion, commitment and engagement - is within your reach. Follow the step-by-step plan in Employee Engagement 2.0 and prepare to be a great place to work.

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.

"Your story is your life," says Loehr. As human beings, we continually tell ourselves stories: of success or failure; of power or victimhood; stories that endure for an hour, or a day, or an entire lifetime. We have stories about our work, our families and relationships, our health; about what we want and what we're capable of achieving.

From polar explorers and politicians to CEOs and sports coaches, we are fascinated with the makeup of leaders. How do they thrive under pressure and inspire others to do the same? How do they establish a culture of long-term success? Performance psychologist Tom Young has worked closely with teams and individuals at the highest level of professional sport. He has seen how leaders in these high-pressure environments communicate, how they maintain focus and respond to challenges.

In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed business consultant and international speaker Greg Bustin shares his interviews with leaders of the most admired companies in the world, and CEOs of mid-size companies who outperform their competition on a consistent basis.

Teams Unleashed provides a map and compass for engaged, sustainable, and improved team performance. This practical approach uses the everyday language of teams to highlight what's working, and uncover what's not, and gives teams the tools to incorporate new practices that build team effectiveness. This is an approach proven in the real world of teams since 2005 and used by thousands of teams worldwide.

Joe Ferreira specializes in spectacular turnarounds. However, none of Joe’s hard-won personal or professional successes prepared him for becoming the CEO of an organization the same week it was threatened with imminent dissolution by the United States government. Faced with a toxic legacy culture and the worst performance metrics in his industry, Joe drew upon his most momentous personal and professional life experiences. A management memoir, the story of Uncomfortable Inclusion will intrigue, infuriate, and inspire leaders who are eager to turn their organizations into world leaders.

Better executive health drives business performance and a stronger society. For the experienced manager as well as manager in training, business school professor, and executive coach; Steven P. MacGregor helps you leverage this truth in your life and your business. MacGregor shares breakthrough insights and techniques he's honed through seven years of pioneering the world-renowned Sustaining Executive Performance (SEP) program and working with thousands of top executives worldwide.

Leadership is the most overanalyzed, thoroughly dissected, and utterly confused topic in business. In Leaders Open Doors, author Bill Treasurer helps lighten the leadership load by distilling that leaders are simply creators of opportunity for others. Using personal stories and anecdotes, Treasurer presents the idea of open-door leadership - that is, the responsibility that leaders have for noticing, identifying, and creating opportunities for the benefit of people, organizations, and society.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

You don't have to do a dangerous job to endure a health-destroying, possibly life-threatening workplace. Just ask the manager in a senior finance role whose immense workload required frequent all-nighters, leading to alcohol and drug addiction. Or the dedicated news media producer whose commitment to getting the story resulted in a 60-pound weight gain thanks to having no down time to eat properly or exercise. These individuals are not exceptions. Every industry is filled with them, and the costs, to both employees and their companies, is enormous.

Finally, a paradigm on leadership, transforming colleges, teaching, teams, business, sports and organizations based on research from the very best leaders and their qualities of momentum and focus as demonstrated from the research rather than whims, opinions, or influencers. Talent alone does not win championships but the research in this work shows thoughts, words, actions, habits and unified momentum does. Key leaders in the research include Jesus of Nazareth and John Wooden of UCLA.

No one is immune to these rocky economic times. Innovative businesspeople all over the country are adapting their organizational structures to survive, profit, and compete in today's unreliable market. The practical and relevant advice in Transformational Leadership: A Blueprint for Real Organizational Change by Randy Dobbs can be applied to major corporations and small businesses alike, as well as to nonprofits, universities, hospitals, and other institutions.

With Results, Not Reports, Peter Follows, CEO of Carpedia International, provides business leaders with a framework for lasting improvements in performance and profitability. Carpedia has a remarkable success rate in large-scale improvement programs, helping clients achieve their improvement goals over 90 percent of the time. In this book, Peter explains how to achieve sustainable improvement through the dynamic management of process, performance, and people, emphasizing that all three components have an interdependent relationship and that the key is to address them concurrently.

There's a revolution taking place that most businesses are still unaware of. The understanding of how our brains work has radically shifted, exploding long-held myths about our everyday cognitive performance and fundamentally changing the way we engage and succeed in the workplace. Combining their expertise in both neuropsychology and management consulting, neuropsychologist Friederike Fabritius and leadership expert Dr. Hans W. Hagemann present simple yet powerful strategies.

Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life’s toughest challenges into manageable facets that listeners can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and best-selling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it’s an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley’s hands.

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?