Workplace Leadership

Do you wish you could more fully engage your employees? Or reduce turnover by 25% or more? Do you need to quickly align staff around the organization's long-term strategy? Or achieve double-digit growth? Then this groundbreaking audiobook is for you.

From Workplace to Playspace is about visionary, courageous, innovative, and persistent organizations that challenge long-held preconceptions about the incompatibility of workplace and playspace. Each day organizations across industries and with wide-ranging missions are discovering that playspace is the space they can and must create every day at work if they are to think creatively, question old assumptions, respond effectively to the unexpected, and engage all to work at the top of their talent.

In The Culture Solution, business consultant and The New York Times best-selling author of The Dream Manager and Off Balance presents the six enduring principles of a dynamic culture, designed in a way that is both intensely practical and inspiring. If you want to grow your business; attract, grow, and retain top talent; learn the key to hiring in the 21st century; teach every person in your organization that they have a role to play in making the culture better today than it was yesterday, this book is for you and every person on your team.

In Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura, CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a design firm that finds creative solutions for iconic brands and institutions such as GE, Nike, Citibank, Nikon, and Warby Parker and also West Point and the White House, offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work as well as the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value).

The myth of innovation is that brilliant ideas leap fully formed from the minds of geniuses. The reality is that most innovations come from a process of rigorous examination through which great ideas are identified and developed before being realized as new offerings and capabilities. This is not a book by designers for designers; this is a book for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization's products or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

We send our kids to school and obsess about their test scores, their behavior and theirability to fit in. We post a help wanted ad and look for experience, famous colleges and a history of avoiding failure. We invest in companies based on how they did last quarter, not on what they’re going to do tomorrow. So why are we surprised when it all falls apart? Our economy is not static, but we act as if it is. Your position in the world is defined by what you instigate, how you provoke, and what you learn from the events you cause. In a worldfilled with change, that’s what matters - your ability to create and learn from change.

When is the last time you visibly and boldly challenged the status quo? It might be a tough question to answer. Uncertainty about what’s on the other side of the familiar and comfortable stops many of us from taking action. And yet, we continue to stay stuck, unaware of our roadblocks, and without a meaningful way forward. What can be done? We must intentionally “invite change”.

Flat, Fluid, and Fast delivers the tactics and strategies you need to create a disruption-proof company during the talent mobility revolution. It walks you through the entire process, providing expert advice on new ways to draw top talent to your company, implement new training programs, create employee mobility plans, design innovative career paths for staff, leverage contractors and other contingent workers, and operate an adaptable organization for long-term success.

The Hope-Driven Leader is not about feel-good theory or dry data. It's an action guide informed by the thousands of people Gill has coached in both the corporate and entrepreneurial worlds around the globe. Whether you are a rising star or a seasoned leader in your own business, a corporation, or your community, The Hope-Driven Leader offers you a roadmap for instilling positive beliefs and behaviors into the core of your being and the culture of your workplace. Let the journey begin!

Using real-life practical experiences, serial entrepreneur and thought leader Faisal Hoque teams up with journalist Drake Baer to provide a personal and professional playbook that is part philosophy, part business, and part history. Everything Connects offers the wisdom of 2,500-year-old Eastern philosophies and the interconnected insights of Leonardo da Vinci. Couple that with Fortune 100 corporate cross pollination for creativity and startup thinking for how to adapt with ease, and you'll quickly discover that everything connects.

A high-performing company culture can translate into happy employees, a productive and engaging work environment, and fluid communications. To help you define and create a culture that works in today's competitive world, Entrepreneur's community of small-business owners and entrepreneurs share their battle-tested strategies, hard-won advice, and secrets behind what works and what doesn't.

An unstoppable business revolution is under way - and it is Agile. Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything...all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.

You're in a matrix, whether you realize it or not. The test: Do you have multiple bosses? Do you depend on a variety of resources throughout the organization to get your tasks done, and do these resources report into other people or teams? If you answered ''yes'' to either, you're in a matrix role. Matrix roles are everywhere. The field customer contact person who writes contracts, negotiates delivery and troubleshoots product issues is in a matrix role.

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

Only 10% to 25% of organizations get it right when it comes to achieving the expected results from their strategic planning. This means 75% to 90% of them are leaving results on the table and wasting their time on things that don't matter. Almost a decade ago, a major steel manufacturer approached Sean Ryan and his team to help them think through how to better convert strategy to results. This was the catalyst for the seven gears that translate strategy to results found in Strategy-Execution-Results (SXR).

The Trustworthy Leader reveals the benefits organizations enjoy when trustworthy behavior is practiced consistently by their leaders. Drawing from examples from the best companies to work for, Lyman, cofounder of Great Place to Work Institute, explains that being trustworthy means that leaders' behaviors are rooted in their commitment to the value of trust and not simply in an imitation of the practices of others.

Existing narratives about how we should organize are built upon, and reinforce, a concept of "good management" derived from what is assumed to be a fundamental need to increase efficiency. But this assumption is based on a presentist, monocultural, and generally limited view of management's past. A New History of Management disputes these foundations. By reassessing conventional perspectives on past management theories and providing a new critical outline of present-day management, it highlights alternative conceptions of "good management".

Imagine a company where everyone loves to work, where employees feel not just "satisfied" but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired.

Employers look for two things when hiring or promoting people: knowledge and skill. They rarely, if ever, consider character. Yet character is the key to extraordinary business success. The Good Ones presents 10 crucial qualities of high-character employees, qualities that enhance employee satisfaction, client relationships, and the bottom line. You'll hear stories from managers and employees across the US and beyond who reveal how honesty, courage, loyalty, and patience have helped their organizations maintain an edge over the competition.

The Compass and the Nail presents an unconventional perspective of how particular organizations create rabid fan bases, in turn making them more successful and more profitable. Written by Patagonia's former lead strategist for consumer marketing, and advisor to such iconic brands as Seventh Generation and Burton Snowboards, Craig Wilson outlines game-changing insights for providers of any product or service who desire fiercely loyal behavior.