Workplace Leadership

Most business leaders understand the power of a dynamic, positive culture - but almost every effort to change culture fails. Why? The approach is often all wrong. Rather than attempt to "transform" a new culture from the ground up, leaders need to instead spearhead a culture renovation. In Culture Renovation, Kevin Oakes provides tangible, tactical insights drawn from a robust data set and informed by CEOs and HR leaders at many of the world's top companies.

Throughout her career in the super-competitive, male-dominated media industry, Gail Evans, one of the country's most powerful executives, has met innumerable women who tell her that they feel lost in the workplace, almost as if they were playing a game without knowing the directions. In this book, she reveals the secrets to the playbook of success and teaches women at all levels of the organization - from assistant to vice president - how to play the game of business to their advantage.

Sun Tzu's Art of War for Women helps women find the peaceful path to success through strategies made famous in the ancient Chinese text, The Art of War. Female wisdom, or common sense, is about avoiding needless confrontation, conserving energy for the things that matter, and seeking an outcome in which everyone wins. And for women, as for Sun Tzu, success doesn't come simply from knowing what to do, but from knowing who you are.

For business leaders and public figures in any arena, The Speed of Trust offers an unprecedented and eminently practical look at exactly how trust functions in our every transaction and relationship - from the most personal to the broadest, most indirect interaction - and how to establish trust immediately so that you and your organization can forego the time - killing, bureaucratic check - and - balance processes so often deployed in lieu of actual trust.

Today's ways of working are not working - even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload, Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. "Flexible" work policies and corporate lip service about "work-life balance" don't come close to fixing the problem.

Listen to this book at your own risk. It contains ideas that may lead to a profound self-awakening. An introspective journey for those in the trenches of today's modern organizations, Deep Change is a survival manual for finding our own internal leadership power. By helping us learn new ways of thinking and behaving, it shows how we can transform ourselves from victims to powerful agents of change. And for anyone who yearns to be an internally driven leader, to motivate the people around them, and return to a satisfying work life, Deep Change holds the key.

The Employee Experience helps organizations attract and retain top talent, and reveals the secrets for building a deeply engaged workforce. With insights into the dynamics of trust and mutual expectations, this book proves that before you can deliver a transcendent customer experience (CX), you must first build a superlative employee experience (EX). It's not about perks. It's not about creating a worker's utopia, and it doesn't mean that work must be easy; employees are responsible for managing expectations and meeting the organization's requirements

Organizations today face a crisis. The crisis is of long standing and its signs are widespread. Most proposals for improving management address one element of the crisis at the expense of the others. The principles described by award-winning author Stephen Denning simultaneously inspire high productivity, continuous innovation, deep job satisfaction and client delight. Denning puts forward a fundamentally different approach to management, with seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: Passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom.

Backed by an extensive research project that looked at over 150 studies and articles, featured extensive interviews with over 150 executives, and analyzed over 250 global organizations, this book clearly breaks down the three environments that make up every single employee experience at every organization around the world and how to design for them. These are the cultural, technological, and physical environments. The Employee Experience Advantage guides listeners on a journey of creating a place where people actually want to show up to work.

We've all had experiences with two dramatically different types of leaders. The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the people around them and always need to be the smartest people in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them.

More people need to step up. When we take responsibility for making change wherever we can, not only does it make our companies, communities, and the world better, but we are happier and more successful and have more fulfilling relationships. But all too often, we stop ourselves before we start. The problems seem too daunting, it’s another department’s responsibility, other people are the issue and we can’t change them, and so on. And so nothing ever changes.

People Strategy: How to Invest in People and Make Culture Your Competitive Advantage provides listeners with a powerful framework in which to develop high-performing teams, increase employee motivation, and use data to build an inviting and effective company culture. Author Jack Altman, cofounder and CEO of Lattice, an award-winning HR and performance management platform, shows you how to: establish the values that will form the bedrock of your organization; develop feedback processes that help employees feel heard, supported, and equipped to succeed; and more.

This new edition of this best-selling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites.

With Give and Take, Adam Grant not only introduced a landmark new paradigm for success but also established himself as one of his generation’s most compelling and provocative thought leaders. In Originals he again addresses the challenge of improving the world, but now from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?

Digital technologies are disrupting organizations of every size and shape, leaving managers scrambling to find a technology fix that will help their organizations compete. This book offers managers and business leaders a guide for surviving digital disruptions - but it is not a book about technology. It is about the organizational changes required to harness the power of technology. The authors argue that digital disruption is primarily about people and that effective digital transformation involves changes to organizational dynamics and how work gets done.

The most effective leaders know how to connect with people. It's not about power or popularity, but about making the people around you feel heard, comfortable, and understood. While it may seem like some folks are born with a commanding presence that draws people in, the fact is anyone can learn to communicate in ways that consistently build powerful connections. Bestselling author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell offers advice for effective communication to those who continually run into obstacles when it comes to personal success.

Brought to life through real-world examples and backed by rigorous data, The Athena Doctrine shows how feminine traits are ascending - and bringing success to people and organizations around the world. By nurturing, listening, collaborating and sharing, women and men are solving problems, finding profits, and redefining success in every realm.

The benefits of the levity effect are not conjecture but are built on extensive research and case studies from some of the world's most successful organizations. New York Times best-selling authors Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher provide powerful examples from Boeing, Nike, KPMG, Yamaha, Enterprise, Zappos, and dozens of others, showing how lightening up can drive real business results.

When it comes to running a business, the most important decisions a leader makes are not about products or locations - they're about people. For the past 33 years, Dee Ann Turner has been recruiting, training, and retaining some of the best employees in the restaurant business. Now she's ready to share her secrets on how to build, sustain, and grow an organizational culture that attracts world-class talent and consistently delights customers, no matter what your industry.