Workplace Leadership

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."

Once, the job of leaders was to identify problems and fix them, while leaving nonproblems alone. Today, the notion that the new way is always better than the old way—and that if you aren’t disrupting everything, you are losing—has come to constitute a new orthodoxy of business thinking. Whether it’s a merger or re-org or a new office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon, unleashing a torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease.

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.

Working late at night, Lucas, a middle manager in a large organization, meets a custodian named Ted. The two strike up a friendship as Ted teaches Lucas three vital questions with the power to transform the disillusionment he is experiencing at work. Listeners follow Lucas as he learns how to shift from feeling like a victim to acting as a creator in his career. With the wise guidance of Ted and Kasey, a senior manager, Lucas applies the three vital questions and begins transforming his workplace relationships, with exciting results.

Every organization from any sector can benefit from becoming trauma-informed. Trauma-informed workplaces understand and recognize the presence of trauma, acknowledge the role trauma can play in a person’s life, and promote work environments that support the individual and collective well-being of all staff and clients. They create a sense of belonging, connection, and safety through their attitudes, policies, and practices. As a result of these practices, organizations that are trauma-informed are more resilient and better equipped to achieve their missions.

Paul Falcone, author of 101 Sample Write Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems and renowned HR and leadership expert, breaks down the best practices for progressive employee discipline and structured terminations into easy-to-understand steps that will help you avoid common legal and ethical pitfalls.

Many corporations have slick, flashy mission statements that ultimately do little to motivate employees and less to impress customers, investors, and partners. But there is a way to share your excitement for the future of your company in a clear, compelling, and powerful way, and entrepreneur and business growth expert Cameron Herold can show you how.

In Ruthless Consistency, Michael Canic identifies the three surprising reasons most strategic change initiatives fail: Leaders unwittingly send mixed messages that demotivate their people and undermine those initiatives; leaders focus on what they do instead of what their people experience; and leaders are not as committed as they think they are or need to be. The book then introduces an intuitive yet comprehensive model for success.

Dream, Believe, Dare, Do. Though four simple words, this carefully crafted credo lies at the heart of Walt Disney's enviable empire and has led The Walt Disney Company to prosperity for decades. As foremost experts on Disney, authors Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson return with an updated and expanded third edition of The Disney Way to show how organizations can incorporate this four-pillared credo to support any business, drive any team, and guide any leader to create immeasurable success.

New edition, expanded and updated. With the release of Theory U almost 10 years ago, Otto Scharmer set in motion a revolution in thought. Scharmer explained that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate.

Through this essential and easy-to-digest reference book, international leadership expert John C. Maxwell gives you the bottom line on mentoring—what it is, why you should do it, and how you can do it most effectively....

How can you come up with great ideas by yourself, or in the context of your team, and quickly determine which are worthy of investment? The simple metric of ideaflow determines success like no other. Ideaflow is a mindset, a way of approaching all your business problems, that multiplies your efforts and unleashes your full potential. Nurture ideaflow and watch your results transform.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

Every year, millions of top performers are promoted to management-level jobs - only to discover that the tactics that got them promoted are not the tactics that will make them effective in their new role. In Welcome to Management, Ryan Hawk provides practical, actionable advice and tools designed to ensure that transition is a successful one.

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.

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.

It's difficult to ask anybody "how are you?" without hearing the word "busy" somewhere in their response. We feel overwhelmed by busyness because of the demands on our time: our inboxes and our to-do lists are bulging, a huge amount of people expect things from us and our organisations are trying to do more with fewer people. But it doesn't have to be that way. In reality, busyness isn't essential. Yes, there is a lot to do, but believing you're always busy because you have so much to do is both false and unhelpful.

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.

There is a large body of shared knowledge between the study of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management but despite the crossover, they are often treated as very distinct disciplines. Written by a team of experts across both fields, Organizational Behaviour bridges the gap between OB and HRM, with an emphasis on inter-cultural and cross-cultural perspectives of organizational development, talent management, and leadership

Two-time New York Times best-selling authors Roger Connors and Tom Smith show how leaders can achieve record-breaking results by quickly and effectively shaping their organizational culture to capitalize on their greatest asset - their people. Change the Culture, Change the Game joins their classic book The Oz Principle and their recent best seller How Did That Happen? to complete the most comprehensive series ever written on workplace accountability.