Workplace Leadership

Filled with practical advice and lessons, and backed by extensive research by Gentry and others, this book lays out the art, science, and practice behind learning and leading as a first time manager. Through first-hand accounts, stories, and other examples drawn from the experiences of first-time managers - including Gentry's own story of recently become a first-time manager himself - the book's practical, actionable content helps readers flip the old script, and write and live their new script.

When it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams, Patty McCord says most companies have it all wrong. McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

Leadership can be learned: New evidence from neuroscience clearly points to ways that leaders can significantly improve how they engage with and motivate others. This book provides leaders and managers with an accessible guide to practical, effective actions, based on neuroscience.

Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to listeners everywhere. As the corporate lifecycle touches virtually every aspect of business, this book is for anyone with skin in the corporate finance game—from managers to investors, from novices to seasoned pros. Aswath Damodaran’s The Corporate Life Cycle is the definitive guide to understanding businesses growth, behavior, and value.

In 2001, when Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a global community of socially and environmentally responsible partners dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty, few had heard of impact investing - Acumen’s practice of “doing well by doing good”. Nineteen years later, there’s been a seismic shift in how corporate boards and other stakeholders evaluate businesses: Impact investment is not only morally defensible, but now also economically advantageous, even necessary.

Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don't we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don't realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn't just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion best practices, showing how leaders and organizations can meaningfully promote inclusion.

In his trademark storybook style that has won tens of millions of fans, Dr. Spencer Johnson once again uses a simple tale to reveal profound truths that can allow you to have less stress and enjoy more success and fulfillment. In Who Moved My Cheese?, two mouse-sized characters named Hem and Haw were faced with unexpected change when the Cheese they loved suddenly disappeared. Haw learned how to deal with that change by setting off in search of New Cheese. But Hem remained stuck where he was.

Young, ambitious, and overwhelmed, Andrew O'Brien personifies a part of every leader as he wanders in search of the elusive silver bullet that will propel him to success. He happens upon an unlikely guide who distills the seemingly infinite list of leadership perils into the five temptations of a CEO. In an intense and often combative exchange, the two debate fundamental issues faced by all leaders, issues involving personal integrity and effectiveness in the ongoing struggle for success.

In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey show how our individual beliefs - along with the collective mindsets in our organizations - combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.

In this updated and expanded edition of her celebrated book Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, one of the world’s most influential business thinkers reveals the qualities essential to leadership in our fast-changing, post-pandemic world. Some are timeless (confidence, decisiveness), some are brand new (the ability to command Zoom), and all are game-changers.

The secret for creating magic in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership, the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World Resort operations for over a decade.

What’s the secret to business growth and innovation and a purpose-driven career in a world that is becoming vastly more complicated by the day? According to Marc Benioff, the answer is embracing a culture in which your values permeate everything you do. In Trailblazer, Benioff gives listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most admired companies. He reveals how Salesforce’s core values - trust, customer success, innovation, and equality - and commitment to giving back have become the company’s greatest competitive advantage.

In Learning to Lead, Leading to Learn, leadership coach Katie Anderson and Toyota leader Isao Yoshino bring you a remarkable book about what it means to learn, to lead, and to care. With a career that spanned nearly four decades at Toyota Motor Corporation, Isao Yoshino’s stories help us understand how Toyota intentionally developed the culture of excellence for which it is renowned today, and how one person learned to lead so that he could lead to learn.

Jonathan Smart, business agility practitioner, thought leader, and coach, reveals the patterns and antipatterns that will help organizations from every industry deliver better value sooner, safer, and happier through high levels of engagement, inclusion, and empowerment. Through his decades of experience in the technology world, Smart provides business leaders with a blueprint for creating a world-class organization of the future.

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.

The success of Starbucks is one of the most remarkable business stories in decades. Since 1987, the coffee merchant has grown from a single retail store on Seattle's waterfront to a company with more than 1,000 stores nationwide and a new one opening somewhere every business day. According to Fortune magazine, Starbucks "has changed everything...from our tastes to our language to the face of Main Street."

Continuous improvement, understanding complex systems, and promoting innovation are all part of the landscape of learning challenges today's companies face. Amy Edmondson shows that organizations thrive, or fail to thrive, based on how well the small groups within those organizations work. In most organizations, the work that produces value for customers is carried out by teams, and increasingly, by flexible team-like entities.

Our individualistic society has created an environment of fear, division, and domination, which has crushed our ability to relate meaningfully to each other and diminished our capacity to innovate and collaborate. Jean Oelwang, president and founding CEO of Virgin Unite, has been on a decade-long exploration to find out how to nurture relationships with depth and purpose. Deep connections shape who we are and have a profound ripple effect on everything we do, supporting us to achieve more, withstand anything, and amplify impact.

Linda Kohanov, author of the bestselling The Tao of Equus, pioneered a deep understanding of "the way of the horse," including the extraordinary nonverbal communication of skilled riders and the collaborative power of "herding cultures" through the centuries. She has adapted this profound, time-tested approach to modern life and the organizations in which top-down management hierarchies have become obsolete.