Work Performance

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that once we succeed, we’ll be happy; that once we get that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But the science reveals this formula to be backward: Happiness fuels success, not the other way around.

If you listen to nothing else on performing at your highest level, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you focus on what matters, manage your energy and attention, and achieve remarkable results. This book will inspire you to improve on your weaknesses, not just your strengths; rise above the pack; take care of your physical health for sustained mental performance; understand what motivates you; use short-term goals to achieve long-term aspirations; and inspire others.

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?"

The World Health Organization estimates that American businesses lose more than $300 billion a year due to stress experienced by employees, and recent research by Harvard Medical School found that more than 95 percent of leaders felt at least somewhat burnt-out. For individuals and organizations who want to thrive in today's high-pressure, 24-7 business environment, working even longer is not the solution. To maximize your performance and well-being over the long-term, you need to work stronger.

Your business success depends on your ability to align and develop the people who work for you. High-performance teams are built intentionally by leaders who understand the three essential components of growth: alignment, development, and transition. TeamWork breaks each of these components down into actionable processes, with steps you can take immediately to start making a difference today. Learn how to create teams that work the way you want them to. Then, discover ways to scale those teams, keeping them aligned with your objectives as your business grows.

Resilience is not an innate character trait. Whether you’re in a leadership role or working as part of a team, you need to implement strategies that build and nurture resilience. You need a resilience plan. Award-winning mental health expert Marie-Hélène Pelletier draws on her clinical practice and extensive knowledge in therapeutics and business practices to explore how resilience is the best defense against burnout and how everyone can build it in themselves—not with a one-size-fits-all plan but with strategies to help you create a custom plan.

In Organize Tomorrow Today (OTT), two of the top minds in human performance come together to deliver the pathway to extreme success: Doing more is not the answer, and Selk and Bartow walk you through how to achieve more by doing less. Together, Selk and Bartow reveal the secrets of how both elite athletes and business leaders climb to the top. Selk and Bartow offer the eight fundamentals of doing what is most important. OTT will show you the performance gains that athletes, executives, and salespeople spend tens of thousands of dollars to achieve.

Modern employees are tired of command and control management. Employees are looking for personal growth, purpose, and a different lifestyle than prior generations of employees. These employees are in a market where they can have flexibility in how and where they work. They want and can demand choices in the work environment.

Being a manager is no easy task. You must set and meet team goals that match business objectives while also ensuring growth and development opportunities for your people. You have to be the voice of authority and a key decision-maker while simultaneously giving your employees autonomy and flexibility. How do you navigate these tensions?

Conducting performance reviews can be stressful. But these conversations are critical to your employees' development, allowing you to formally communicate with them about their accomplishments relative to their goals. Performance Reviews guides you through the basics.

Join a quest for the Holy Grail within each of us: the optimized brain. In Smarter Tomorrow, Ricker shares the spoils of her decade long adventure. After countless expert interviews, poring through hundreds of research studies from around the world, and testing dozens of tools on herself—including nicotine, video games, meditation, and even a little-known beverage from the Pacific islands—she explains how some experiments failed hilariously, while others transformed her cognition.

Your entire career depends on communication. When you can communicate effectively, you already have the foundation for being not just a good leader, but a great one…. A leader who inspires…. A leader who motivates…. A leader who is remembered. Whether you’re leading an entire organization, you’re an entry-level manager, or you’re considering beginning your journey into leadership, it all starts with communication.… And you’re about to uncover its secrets.

Researchers have found that the accelerated pace of modern office life is taking its toll on productivity, employee engagement, creativity and wellbeing. Faced with a relentless flood of information and distractions, our brains try to process everything at once, increasing our stress, decreasing our effectiveness and negatively impacting our performance.

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.

Pulling Together is a fantastic guide for leaders from all walks of life. In it you will learn about the 10 Rules for High Performance Teamwork. They’re simple, yet so important! It’s not only about leading a team, but also being a part of one. The 10 rules are presented in a way that every person in your organization can understand. Use this audiobook to clarify expectations and foster accountability, build more focus, unity, trust and credibility with your team, align people and systems, mobilize commitment and generate enthusiasm.

Modern work life is a maze, but you can find a shortcut through it. We are spending longer hours at work, although we desire more work-life balance. According to the World Population Review, the 10 countries with the longest workweeks averaged 42.2 hours. Given how much time you spend at work, wouldn’t it be better if you could be more efficient at your job? The Harvard Business Review says that workers spend as much as 41 percent of the average workday on tasks that don’t add value. Modern work poses its challenges.

Hay pocos libros en el mundo que todos deberíamos leer. Éste es uno de ellos. Con ejemplos prácticos y pasos concretos, nos revela un sistema que puede ayudarnos a convertirnos en personas de alto rendimiento en el trabajo, en los negocios y en el ámbito personal. El método timing funciona.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government sent thousands of Japanese American citizens to detention camps. In 1945, three Japanese-American sisters return to their farm in Stockton, California, after years in an internment camp, but the once prosperous family finds it’s not easy to pick up the pieces of their former lives. As the details of their deceased father’s final arrangements emerge, the sisters must work together to keep their dreams alive.

Much more than a knack for snappy comebacks, wit is the quick, instinctive intelligence that allows us to think, say, or do the right thing at the right time in the right place. In this whimsical book, James Geary explores every facet of wittiness, from its role in innovation to why puns are the highest form of wit. Geary reasons that wit is both visual and verbal, physical and intellectual: there’s the serendipitous wit of scientists, the crafty wit of inventors, the optical wit of artists, and the metaphysical wit of philosophers.

Even if you never intend to use steroids, you will learn about how the chemicals in our bodies act in positive or negative ways on muscle growth. If you are an experienced body builder who feels that you have reached your genetic potential and wish to exceed it, then you have likely thought about steroids. By reading this guide, you are obviously sensible and mature enough to educate yourself on how performance enhancing drugs work on the body.