Work Leadership

The Ape in the Corner Office connects with the day-to-day of the workplace because it helps explain what people are really concerned about: How come he got the wing chair with the gold trim? How can I survive as that big ape's subordinate without becoming a spineless yes-man? Why does being a lone wolf mean being a loser? And, yes, why is it that jerks seem to prosper, at least in the short run?

If you have ever been part of a great team, you will know it is exponentially better than being part of a mediocre team. Teams are at the heart of working in complex domains and are essential to the success of agile approaches yet relatively few teams achieve greatness. Agile and leadership coach Geoff Watts has pulled together his many years of experience with all sorts of teams from software to product development, from medical teams to sports teams and has identified five common characteristics of great teams:

Sexism. Self-doubt. Invisibility. When you're one of the only women in your workplace, it can be difficult to gain your footing. Organizations need to change, but in the meantime, women can find success in these settings—and even flourish in them. Thriving in a Male-Dominated Workplace provides the advice you need to ensure your professional growth in roles and industries that have traditionally been filled by and controlled by men.

Building and maintaining a successful team is no simple task. Even people who have taken their teams to the highest level in their field have difficulty recreating what accounted for their successes. Is it a strong work ethic? Is it "chemistry"? What tools can you wrap your hands around to build "or rebuild" your team?

We are living in a strange world—Salmon calls it “the New Not Normal.” The Phoenix Economy explores the ramifications of the pandemic years, many of which are surprisingly positive. In doing so, Salmon makes sense of one of the most disorienting and devastating events of our lifetimes. He examines the critical aspects of our lives that have been transformed in three parts: Time and Space, Mind and Body, and Business and Pleasure.

Governor Charlie Baker, one of the most popular governors in the United States, with a reputation for getting things done, wants to put the service back into public service. Results is the much-needed implementation guide for anyone in public service, as well as for leaders and managers in large organizations hamstrung by bureaucracy and politics. With a broad range of examples, Baker, a Republican, and Kadish, a Democrat, show how to move from identifying problems to achieving results in a way that bridges divides instead of exacerbating them.

Consider Jason your spirit guide, offering strategies for honing in on what makes you weird, recognizing when feedback is just another form of procrastination, and how to stop with social media already. There's a specific set of strategies and exercises that can help you prioritize your life over your business, by identifying your MMM (Minimum Monthly Magic) number. He also offers examples from his own life (how he got out of $124K worth of debt, escaped the pressure to have a big wedding, and has thrived on social media by primarily ignoring it).

No single factor - not sales, marketing, finance, strategy, or operations - has more influence over the ultimate success of an organization than its culture. In the game-changing first edition of Culture by Design, David Friedman cut through the fog and provided a simple, clear, and practical road map that thousands of organizations have now used to build high-performing cultures. In this new updated edition, you'll learn how to take the strategies he originally taught and adapt them to meet the unique challenges presented by today's remote work environment.

Chris Guillebeau, the best-selling author of The $100 Start Up, has created a practical, actionable guide that can help you turn your passion into paychecks - whether within a traditional company or business, or by striking out on your own.

Workers want good jobs, and many leaders want to provide them. But they don't think they can offer higher pay and more motivating work without hurting the bottom line. Most business leaders want to win with customers, but their companies are hobbled by a host of service and operational problems largely driven by high employee turnover—turnover that's partly driven by low pay. It is indeed a vicious cycle, and Zeynep Ton is here to show you the way out: why good jobs combined with strong operations lead to higher productivity and increased competitiveness for the business.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, is renowned for his work as a scientist, writer, and teacher bringing mindfulness into everyday life. He has dedicated his career to the fields of mind/body medicine, integrative medicine, and self-healing. Here, in this groundbreaking audiobook, Jon Kabat-Zinn and Daniel Goleman explore ways in which mindfulness can be applied by a variety of institutions and businesses to make better leaders and improve the quality of the workplace.

Curating your life means selecting those activities that are most important, meaningful, and joyful for you and fiercely focusing your energy on those endeavors. It also means putting a whole bunch of stuff in the back room, to be reconsidered at another time. Curating your life means sorting your activities into three categories: the things you are not going to do, at least not right now; the things you will be mediocre at; the things you will be great at. This is not simple. But the payoff is amazing. Living a well-curated life is doable.

History often appears to consist of big gestures and dramatic shifts. But for every peace treaty signed, someone set the stage and provided the pen. As social secretary to the Clintons for eight years, and more recently as chief of protocol under President Obama, Capricia Penavic Marshall has not just borne witness to history, she facilitated it. For Marshall, diplomacy runs on the invisible gesture: the micro-moves that affect the macro-shifts. Facilitation is power, and more often than not, it is the key to effective diplomacy.

Some of the world's most successful companies - Google, Disney, Starbucks - are not simply profit-driven, but purpose-driven. They identify the purpose behind why they do what they do and let their "why" drive what they do every day. Nicholas Pearce argues that we all should do the same: discover our "why" and commit to the journey of aligning our daily work with our life's work. The Purpose Path is for people in any field who long to have more than just a job or a career, but a true vocation that allows them to connect their soul with their role.

Rising Tide Car Wash in Parkland, Florida, isn’t average in any way. When Tom D’Eri and his father John bought the location in 2013, it was struggling. Now it’s one of the highest-volume washes in Florida. Its employee retention rate is five times that of its competitors. It has spun off into two additional locations that have been immediately successful, and the business is absurdly profitable.

Having difficult conversations at work is a necessary discomfort. Instead of avoiding these conversations with your boss, colleagues, or direct reports, you need a strategy that won't leave you feeling like you were being talked at or ignored. The key to solving this problem starts and ends with changing the conversation. Recognizing that it takes two people to engage in meaningful conversation, Can We Talk? outlines what each contributor needs to do to achieve the best possible result.

Leading any team involves managing people, technical oversight, and project administration, but leaders of virtual teams perform these functions from afar. Leading Virtual Teams walks you through the basics of: Connecting your people to each other—and to the team's mission, Surmounting language, distance, and technology barriers, and Identifying and using the right communication channels.

Integrating proven mindfulness practices and world-class leadership theory, The Mindful Leader is the essential guide for self-aware leadership. The book provides a practically grounded template for leaders to develop unprecedented levels of self-awareness, wellbeing, and effectiveness. Mindfulness provides practical tools for self-awareness, mental wellbeing, stress reduction, and more. When practiced through a leadership lens, it becomes much more than just another leadership guide.

As a workplace strategist and business coach, Erica Keswin has spent over 20 years working with top business leaders and executives to build successful organizations that honor relationships. Featuring case studies from top brands such as, Lyft, Starbucks, Mogul, and SoulCycle, to name a few, Bring Your Human to Work distills the key practices of the most human companies into applicable advice that any business leader can use to build a “human workplace”.

Companies spend billions of dollars annually on diversity efforts, with remarkably few results. Too often diversity efforts rest on the assumption that all that's needed is an earnest conversation about "privilege." That's not enough. To truly make progress with diversity, equity and inclusion, we must focus less on documenting the problem and more on just stopping the transmission of it.