Workplace Management

We've all been taught that we must suppress or avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to a loss in productivity, diminished creativity, and crushing job dissatisfaction. Research shows 85 percent of us avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, and many of us who are employed are actively looking for a different job. What's going on?

In addition to his work as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, and consultant, for the last 16 years August Turak worked alongside the Trappist monks of Mepkin Abbey, watching firsthand as they undertook new enterprises and sustained an incredibly successful business practice. Service and selflessness are at the heart of this 1,500-year-old monastic tradition’s remarkable business success, an ancient though immensely relevant economic model that preserves what is positive and productive about capitalism while transcending its ethical limitations and internal contradictions.

Throughout the history of business, employees had to adapt to managers and managers had to adapt to organizations. In the future, this is reversed with managers and organizations adapting to employees. This means that in order to succeed and thrive, organizations must rethink and challenge everything they know about work. The demographics of employees are changing and so are employee expectations, values, attitudes, and styles of working.

Good works are no longer optional. For many businesses, success comes in unexpected ways. Toms grew into a $600-million company by giving away 35 million pair of shoes. Patagonia's profits have climbed year after year even as it funnels heavy investments into sustainability. And it's not just millennials rewarding companies with causes. In every age group, people commit to brands that show good citizenship.

Change is the new norm in society, and it's having a devastating impact on organizations. The proof? Insecure, demoralized employees and the lowest levels ever of employee engagement. In Conscious Culture, Joanna Barclay shares 30 years of business transformation experience. Leaders learn how to awaken the life force energy within values, ethics, and leadership that ignites performance and employee engagement. With the ABCs of culture change, she provides a blueprint for leaders to consciously create a high-performing, values-driven organization.

Running with Purpose is a highly engaging listen with insights, inspirational stories, and tangible takeaways for current and aspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, Berkshire Hathaway enthusiasts, and especially the 150+ million runners worldwide and those in the broader running community who continually invest in themselves and put positive energy into the world.

In The Courage Playbook: Five Steps to Overcome Your Fears and Become Your Best Self, Gus Lee, bestselling author and leadership expert, delivers an astonishing reveal that with moral courage, we can overcome our fears. This is a practical guide to gaining your courage to live rightly, treat others without bias, and lead inspirationally.

In the past, business leadership was strictly an autocratic proposition. But times have changed, and companies are just discovering they must change with them. In Chase Greatness: Enlightened Leadership for the Next Generation of Disruption, CEO Rajeev Kapur reveals how most business leadership is out of step with evolving times and values—which has negatively impacted both the effectiveness of our workforces as well as the bottom line.

The digital age will raise the question of how we humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviorally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Professor Ed Hess believes that requires us to become hyper-learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change.

The Gen Z Effect provides a mind-bending view of why we will need to embrace Gen Z as the last, best hope for taking on the world's biggest challenges and opportunities, and how you can prepare yourself and your business for the greatest era of disruption, prosperity, and progress the world has ever experienced.

We made some incorrect assumptions about work, and those assumptions are killing us. We allowed a narrative that is solely about earnings to replace what we know to be true about human motivation. Human beings are hardwired to seek purpose, but according to data, most people don't feel a sense of purpose in their work. Work has become a grind, an endless series of tasks that lack meaning.

Through her global consulting projects, keynote speeches, and work with thousands of leaders, Karen has seen first-hand how a pervasive lack of clarity strangles business performance and erodes employee engagement. Ambiguity is the corporate default state, a condition so prevalent that “tolerance for ambiguity” has become a clichéd job requirement. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Visionary Leadership in a Turbulent World: Thriving in the New VUCA Context is the thoughtful analysis of nine expert authors from around the globe who put VUCA under the microscope and take the listener on a journey that looks at VUCA from a number of different leadership perspectives. Through their research and writing these nine authors seek to provide sense-making and insights that are combined with practical tips and frameworks to help leadership embrace this new VUCA context and learn how to thrive within it.

Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems - everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive.

Organization: Contemporary Principles and Practice addresses organizational issues in terms of how managers experience them and how MBA students can most effectively learn about them. John Child draws attention to the exciting possibilities currently arising in organizations as the conditions for their survival change. His analysis covers new internal organizational forms, various kinds of network organization, and the evolution of organization to meet new demands.

Nearly a quarter century ago Carter Cast seemed to have it all together: he had a first-class education, an all-American athletic career, and was a very bright and energetic rising star on the fast track at a Fortune 100 company, PepsiCo. But blissfully unaware of how negative perceptions were shaped, he was stunned when called into his boss's office, and told he was "unpromotable" because he was "obstinate", "resistant", and "insubordinate".

Joey Havens breaks through the limiting barriers of common culture theory and shows, with great transparency, the real human emotions that elevate a culture to one that is genuine, enduring, and magnetic. Joey shares insights, failures, low points, lessons learned, and growth from his experience of helping lead the successful transformation of HORNE LLP’s good culture to a magnetic, people-first culture based on the Christian principles of caring and service.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

Most leaders know that a winning, engaged culture is the key to attracting top talent - and customers. Yet, it remains elusive how exactly to create this ideal workplace - one where everyone from the front lines to the board room knows the company’s values and feels comfortable and empowered to act on them. Based on Ann Rhoades’ years of experience with JetBlue, Southwest, and other companies known for their trailblazing corporate cultures, Built on Values reveals exactly how leaders can create winning environments that allow their employees and their companies to thrive.

Staying healthy at work has never been more top-of-mind than it is today. But staying healthy isn’t the same as staying well. Staying well at work isn’t just about the germs and toxins that impact how we feel physically or even make us sick; it’s also about the many aspects of the environment that affect our stress levels, mood, focus, and productivity. Whether you work in a traditional office or a corner of your bedroom, healthy workplaces need not be a luxury. Well at Work reveals how to design these spaces for wellbeing across the seven domains of integrative health.