Work Leadership

"Middle manager." The term evokes a bygone industrial era in which managers functioned like cogs in a vast machine and bureaucracy ruled. In recent decades, midlevel managers became a favorite target for the chopping block—underappreciated, often considered a superfluous layer of the organization. Not only does this outdated perspective need to change, the future demands it. In Power to the Middle, McKinsey thought leaders Bill Schaninger, Bryan Hancock, and Emily Field call for a profound reimagining of what middle managers can and must be able to do.

An iconic teacher. A warm friend. A generous mentor. For more than 40 years, Howard Stevenson has been a towering figure at Harvard Business School: the man who literally defined entrepreneurship and taught thousands of the world’s most successful professionals. Now - spurred by Stevenson’s heart-stopping brush with death - his student, colleague, and dear friend Eric Sinoway shares the man’s wisdom and inspiration.

Scott Adams' The Joy of Work is a manifesto for coping within the walls of your cubicle. You'll learn to look at the bright side of every work situation the Dilbert way: "I cried because I did not have an office with a door, until I met a man who had no cubicle."

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We're building more products than ever before, but most of them fail - not because we can't complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That's the promise of Running Lean.

The world's leading safety experts share practical day-to-day solutions that combine the latest tools and technologies in healthcare today with the best safety practices from high-risk yet high-reliability industries, such as aviation, nuclear power, and the United States military. Using these field-tested methods, you can develop new leadership initiatives, educate workers on the universal skills that can save lives, organize and train safety action teams, implement reliability management systems, and create long-term, transformational change.

You know you want to spot and stop manipulation from taking root in your life. You want to wrest back that feeling of control and get the sense of empowerment where no one but yourself holds the key to your destiny. In Manipulation, you will learn how to do so.

Many of the greatest accomplishments can be reached only by two people working together. Tenzing and Hillary were the first to scale Mt. Everest. Malone and Stockton were the key to each other's success on the basketball court. Eisner was never as effective at Disney without Wells.But while some partnerships reach great heights, others fall short. Why do some people click while others clash? What do great pairs have in common?

There are two kinds of managers in the world, those who have supervised non-team players and those who will. Those who have had this experience know how a non-team player can single-handedly kill a team’s productivity, focus, and morale. Most managers are woefully unprepared to work through these situations but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Creativity is the key driver of innovation, but too many teams and projects are organized in ways that stifle new ideas. It's your job as a manager to create the right conditions for creativity to thrive—and to be part of the process yourself.

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.

Work Smart Do More is the time management book for CEOs and leaders looking for proven, successful ways to increase productivity and create a winning culture.

Rookie Smarts addresses the questions every experienced professional faces: Will my knowledge and skills become obsolete and irrelevant? Will a young, inexperienced newcomer upend my company or me? How can I keep up? The answer is to stay fresh, keep learning, and know when to think like a rookie.

Projects require managers, but programs warrant maestros. Tasked with overseeing multiple project teams and thousands of activities, program managers have one of the most challenging jobs in the market. Too many overburdened managers are leaving otherwise great jobs, even the field entirely, because they haven’t equipped themselves with the right tools in hand to take on this complex but fulfilling job. How to Manage Complex Programs explains the ins and outs of program management and provides concrete and effective techniques for structuring deliverables, workflow, and staffing.

The curtain is about to rise, say Pine and Gilmore, on the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which every business is a stage, and companies must design memorable events for which they charge admission. With The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore explore how successful companies, using goods as props and services as the stage, create experiences that engage customers in an inherently personal way.

Constant complainers take up resources, time, and mental bandwidth in the workplace. When you change a culture of complainers to one of contributors, you boost morale, increase productivity, and promote effective communication. In short, you get more done with less drama. In Stop Complainers and Energy Drainers, workplace communication expert Linda Swindling shares her expertise in negotiating tough situations in the workplace. Discover how to influence others to accomplish your purpose.

There is a massive recalibration taking place around how work fits into peoples’ lives. Winning the new war for talent requires a more humane employee experience, one that meets the needs and values of a changed workforce. Get this wrong, and the future of your organization is in jeopardy. Get this right, and you create an astounding competitive advantage around hiring and retention, while reaping all the benefits and business results that dedicated employees generate.

This book provides a fly-on-the-wall perspective on what it's like to be a CMO and will help C-level executives, agency owners, marketing team members, and others who interface and collaborate with marketing departments to understand how marketing drives growth at both startup and enterprise levels, and how marketing has moved from art to science. Trends in digital marketing, analytics, and marketing automation have pushed marketing to adopt data-driven approaches that would make a CFO's head swim.

What drives us to unleash our best work? And how do we tap into that drive to get superior results with our managers, coworkers, and direct reports? As Todd Henry reveals in this illuminating book, drawing on decades of research and interviews with over 100,000 people, the answer is not one size fits all: Some people are energized by a race against the clock, while others put in extra effort only when they feel part of a team. For still others, nothing is as motivating as the possibility of public recognition.

Are you frustrated or disenchanted by the results of your Agile approach? Does Agile sound like a good idea, but you're not sure how to explain it beyond roles, practices, and meetings? Is your team going through the motions, but it's still business as usual? The missing piece is the Agile mindset - the thinking that makes Agile processes work.

We are in a period of change. We need to think and act differently. The new world of work is significantly more digitized and decentralized than before—a transformation accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis. We need to orient ourselves differently to be successful, shifting from transactional to human-centric management, mindsets, and methods to deal with the faster pace of business developments, continuing uncertainties, more complex issues, and an increase in multidimensional projects.