Systems Leadership

Most books that teach you how to build and grow a business are organized around the functional areas of business, such as people, finance, operations, and marketing. Those things are important and necessary - no question - but what is missing is an overarching methodology that systematically reels in every aspect of building and growing a successful company and creates a repeatable process to execute on the activities that will lead to big growth in your company.

Why do managers usually fail when it comes to motivating employees, in particular salespeople? What should they do instead? In answering those questions, author Mike Crandall recommends many innovative strategies inspired by the work of David Sandler, creator of the Sandler Selling System. To get the most from your organization, you need to understand why people show up for work and tie that reason to your company's mission. Crandall's book is about motivating yourself, your team, and your company at optimum levels.

In his book Driving Eureka!, best-selling business author Doug Hall presents the System Driven Innovation scientific method for enabling innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day. It’s the essential resource you need to enable yourself - and your team - to innovate, succeed, and do amazing things that matter, on a daily basis.

Are you living up to your true potential? Do you feel like you have more potential? You may be the best in your field - the best athlete, scholar, CEO, parent, mathematician, teacher, or mechanic. But that doesn't mean you can't still be better; you haven't maximized your potential. Mark Sanborn, leadership expert and international best-selling author of The Fred Factor and You Don't Need a Title to Be a Leader, invites you to get better and close the gap between how good you are and how good you can be.

Target Funding is a strategic guide to funding opportunities aimed at specific types of businesses and business owners. You'll learn about all the options available to you - including conventional, alternative, and diversity funding - and how to access them based on your needs and your demographic, industry, location, and other variables.

Love Your People centers on entrepreneurial leadership's core goal: delivering exceptional results. This groundbreaking book champions a love-based approach as a catalyst for not only enhancing workplace dynamics, but also driving superior performance.

Loaded with straightforward advice, real-world examples, and lessons learned based on Brad’s 20 years of online entrepreneurial experience, Done gives you a simple, proven approach for building and managing an amazing team of remote super stars.

Every day major headlines tell the story of a new and better American marketplace. Established corporations have begun reevaluating the quality of their products, the ethics of their supply chains, and how they can give back by donating portions of their profits to meaningful causes. Meanwhile millions of entrepreneurs who want a more responsible and compassionate marketplace have launched a new breed of socially focused business models.

Gorilla in the Cockpit offers a revolutionary way to understand megaproject failures. It opens the black box to reveal the hidden drivers of project crashes. The root causes cannot be found in traditional project management books. They are neither technical nor financial. They are human.

Experienced pastor and seminary teacher R. Robert Creech helps pastoral leaders increase their effectiveness by applying family systems theory to congregational life and ministry. Creech introduces listeners to the basic concepts of Bowen Family Systems Theory, applies family theory to the work of ministry in church settings, and connects systems thinking to the everyday aspects of congregational ministry, such as preaching, pastoral care, leadership, spiritual formation, and interpreting biblical texts. Each chapter contains discussion questions and helpful information about Bowen theory.

In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate.

What is your digital business model? While many leaders of companies recognize the threat from digital - and the potential opportunity - they lack a common language or a compelling framework to help them assess it and, more importantly, to direct them. They don't know how to think about their digital business model. In this probing and practical book, Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide much-needed tools, self-assessments, motivating examples, and key financial analyses of where the profits will likely be made.

As humans, what sets us apart is that we can achieve extraordinary goals when we focus, collaborate, and continuously check on our progress. However, even in large companies, only seven percent of the people know their company's top goals. OKRs, objectives, and key results, are what Google and many other top companies have been using deeply immersed into their culture from the very beginning.

It's a sad fact that most projects fail - as many as 70%, according to one well-known study. Those failed projects cost billions of dollars. Perhaps they’ve even cost you or your company. You’ve hired certified project managers and implemented project management techniques, and yet you still don’t have the success you need. Bare Knuckled Project Management has the answer.

Have you noticed that on some days, everything seems to go so smoothly? Those times when everybody shares the same deadline and all of a sudden everything gets done. What’s going on here? What’s different in these scenarios? At the core of each situation is a replicable occurrence, a behavior pattern, or a trend you can understand and utilize. In fact, with just a little bit of heightened awareness and increased focus on your situation, you can pinpoint these exact patterns and recreate them at will.

Described in a novel-format is an enhanced organizational governance system called Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE). The IEE system offers much flexibility, including a means for effectively managing an organization remotely. Described is how Jorge implemented IEE in his Harris Hospital, and how his golfing MBA friends applied and also benefited from the methodology in their manufacturing and transactional organizations.

This collection of essays deals with the situated management of risk in a wide variety of organizational settings. The emphasis in these contributions is upon the variety of ways in which organizational actors, in combination with a range of material technologies and artifacts, such as safety reporting systems, risk maps, and key risk indicators, accomplish and make sense of the normal work of managing risk - riskwork.

A guide to navigating the messiness of software development process change, dealing with all the legacy organizational elements, and focusing on increasing business agility.

The financial health of your organization depends on it! Bernie Haffey’s Cutting Through is a comprehensive exploration into the nuances of the key high-performance management systems that turn good companies into great ones!

Extensively revised and expanded, Future Search, the classic, definitive, best-selling book on one of the most powerful methods for changing and improving all types of organizations and communities, includes a host of new tools, and three new chapters. If you want to do strategic planning, product innovation, quality improvement, organizational restructuring, or any other major change in a participative, whole system way, this book is your guide.