Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose


Tony Hsieh - 2010
    You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.

The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business


Michael Hyatt - 2020
    If you don't know where you're going, how on earth will you get there? But how do you craft that vision? How do you get others on board? And how do you put that vision into practice at every level of your organization?In The Vision Driven Leader, New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt offers six tools for crafting an irresistible vision for your business, rallying your team around the vision, and distilling it into actionable plans that drive results. Based on Michael's 40 years of experience as an entrepreneur and executive, backed by insights from organizational science and psychology, and illustrated by case studies and stories from multiple industries, The Vision Driven Leader takes you step-by-step from why to what and then how. Your business will never be the same.

The First-Time Manager


Loren B. Belker - 1978
    In addition, the completely updated fifth edition shows you how to build trust and confidence, be an active listener, manage a diverse group of individuals, conduct performance appraisals, and address many other challenges that come with the manager's job.Written in an inviting and accessible style, this classic skill-building book is an essential tool for becoming an effective, confident new manager."

Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement


Buster Benson - 2019
    Conflict, or the fear of it, can be devastating. And the process of minimizing, deflecting, or avoiding difficult people can leave you brimming with repressed emotions.But as this powerful book argues, conflict doesn't have to be unpleasant. In fact, properly channeled, conflict can be the most powerful tool we have at our disposal for deepening relationships, solving problems, and coming up with new ideas.As the mastermind behind some of the highest-performing teams at Amazon, Twitter, and Slack, Buster Benson spent decades facilitating hard conversations in stressful environments. He found that even smart, eloquent people struggled to stay calm and keep their heads clear when differences of opinion arose. So he set out to find a better way to argue, staging a succession of experiments and informal debates, and studying the participants closely. He took note of the scripts people defaulted to and the chain reactions they caused. Slowly, patterns began to emerge.Buster's findings shattered his assumptions about what makes some arguments productive and others not, and dramatically improved his relationships at work, with his wife, and with strangers online. In this book, Buster reveals the psychological underpinnings of awkward, unproductive conflict, and the critical habits anyone can learn to avoid it. Armed with a deeper understanding of how arguments work and why, you'll be able to:* Remain confident when you're put on the spot* Diffuse tense moments with a few strategic questions* Facilitate creative solutions even when your team has radically different perspectives* Get through to the most stubborn people by understanding their motivationsFreed of your fear of disagreement, you'll find yourself eager to engage with intimidating people and uncomfortable ideas. You'll end up having fewer repetitive, predictable fights, not because you're avoiding or squashing them, but because you're finally able to identify your biases, listen with an open mind, and communicate well. As your confidence grows, you'll shake off lingering memories of interactions that made you feel tongue-tied or incapable, knowing that it's in your power to steer the conversation wherever you want it.

I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships


Michael S. Sorensen - 2017
     Whether you’re looking to improve your relationship with your spouse, navigate difficult conversations at work, or connect on a deeper level with friends and family, this book delivers simple, practical, proven techniques for improving any relationship in your life. Mastery of this simple skill will enable you to: • Calm (and sometimes even eliminate) the concerns, fears, and uncertainties of others • Increase feelings of love, respect, and appreciation in your romantic relationships • Quickly resolve, or even prevent, arguments • Help others become open to your point of view • Give advice and feedback that sticks • Provide support and encouragement to others, even when you don’t know how to “fix” the problem • And much more In short: this skill is powerful. Give the principles and practices in this book a chance and you’ll be amazed at the difference they can make.

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life


Susan David - 2016
      The path to fulfillment, whether at work or at home, is almost never a straight line. Ask anyone who has achieved their biggest goals or who thrives in their relationships, and you’ll hear stories of many unexpected detours along the way. What separates those who rise to these challenges and those who get derailed? The answer is agility—emotional agility.Emotional agility is a four-step approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. In her more than twenty years of research, Susan David has found that no matter how intelligent, resilient, or creative people are, when they ignore how situations or interactions make them feel, they miss opportunities to gain insight, getting hooked by thoughts, emotions, and habits that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Emotionally agile people experience the same stresses and setbacks as anyone else, but they know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small changes that lead to a life of growth.Drawing on her extensive professional research, her international consulting work, and her own experiences growing up in Apartheid-era South Africa and losing her father at a young age, David shows how anyone can become more emotionally agile and thrive in an uncertain world. Written with authority, wit, and empathy, Emotional Agility will help you live your most successful life, whoever you are and whatever you face. Take the FREE Emotional Agility Insights Quiz here: https://bitly.com/ea-quiz

The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd


Allan Dib - 2016
    Traditionally, creating a marketing plan has been a difficult and time-consuming process, which is why it often doesn't get done. In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It's literally a single page, divided up into nine squares. With it you'll be able to map out your own sophisticated marketing plan and go from zero to marketing hero. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced entrepreneur, The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the easiest and fastest way to create a marketing plan that will propel your business growth. In this groundbreaking new book you'll discover: • How to get new customers, clients, or patients and how make more profit from existing ones. • Why “big business” style marketing could kill your business and strategies that actually work for small and medium-sized businesses. • How to close sales without being pushy, needy, or obnoxious while turning the tables and having prospects begging you to take their money. • A simple step-by-step process for creating your own personalized marketing plan that is literally one page. Simply follow along and fill in each of the nine squares that make up your own 1-Page Marketing Plan. • How to annihilate competitors and make yourself the only logical choice. • How to get amazing results on a small budget using the secrets of direct response marketing. • How to charge high prices for your products and services and have customers actually thank you for it.

Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go: Career Conversations Employees Want


Beverly Kaye - 2012
    Nevertheless, it’s frequently back-burnered. When asked why, managers say the number one reason is that they just don’t have time—for the meetings, the forms, the administrative hoops.But there’s a better way. And it’s surprisingly simple: frequent short conversations with employees about their career goals and options integrated seamlessly into the normal course of business. Beverly Kaye, coauthor of the bestselling Love ’Em or Lose ’Em, and Julie Winkle Giulioni identify three broad types of conversations that will increase employees’ awareness of their strengths, weaknesses, and interests; point out where their organization and their industry are headed; and help them pull all of that together to design their own up-to-the-minute, personalized career plans.Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go is filled with practical tips, guidelines, and templates, as well as nearly a hundred suggested conversation questions.

That's What She Said: What Men Need to Know (and Women Need to Tell Them) about Working Together


Joanne Lipman - 2018
    They discuss these issues amongst themselves all the time.  What they don’t do is talk to men about it. It’s time to end that disconnect. More people in leadership roles are genuinely trying to transform the way we work together, because there's abundant evidence that companies with more women in senior leadership perform better by virtually every measure. Yet despite good intentions, men often lack the tools they need, leading to fumbles, missteps, frustration and misunderstanding that continue to inflict real and lasting damage on women's careers.That's What She Said solves for that dilemma.  Filled with illuminating anecdotes, data from the most recent studies, and stories from Joanne Lipman’s own journey to the top of a male-dominated industry, it shows how we can win by reaching across the gender divide. What can the Enron scandal teach us about the way men and women communicate professionally? How does brain chemistry help explain men’s fear of women’s emotions at work? Why did Kimberly Clark have an all-male team of executives in charge of their Kotex tampon line? What can we learn from Iceland’s campaign to “feminize” an entire nation? That’s What She Said shows why empowering women as true equals is an essential goal for women and men—and offers a roadmap for getting there. That’s What She Said solves for:·         The respect gap·         Unconscious bias·         Interruptions·         The pay and promotion gap·         Being heard·         The motherhood penalty·         “Bropropriation” and “mansplaining”·         And more….

A Second Chance: For You, For Me, And For The Rest Of Us


Catherine Hoke - 2018
    It heals families, strengthens communities, creates jobs, and incubates small businesses. But mostly, Defy helps us find our humanity, regardless of whether we've been to prison or not.This is the book that everyone is talking about, and for good reason. You might have heard Cat talking with Tim Ferriss on his podcast, or read about her work on Seth Godin's blog."This is the bravest book I've read in years." -Bill Hybels, Willow CreekBy sharing her personal story of a second chance, and then introducing us to the people she serves, Cat takes us on a life-changing journey. She helps us understand the methods that are used by the Defy team and how they persevere in the face of daunting odds. A Second Chance is a book about the change that Defy creates, yes, but also about changing your own life."This inspiring book shows how it's possible for people who have been cast aside in society to turn their lives around and start giving back to that society." -Adam Grant, bestselling authorA Second Chance is about one woman's vision and her relentless effort to make it real--but it's also about building a community that makes a difference. Defy is based on a unique inside/outside partnership. It only works because of the generous work of everyone in Defy's volunteer community, and this book teaches us what it means to lead from within."I've never seen anything like Defy, and I've been in corrections for 31 years." -Warden Ducart, Pelican Bay State Prison "If you care about our society, you have to read this book." -Joe Moglia, Chairman, TD Ameritrade

Who Stole My Cheese?!!


Ilene Hochberg - 2002
    A hilarious parody of the classic bestseller Who Moved My Cheese, Who Stole My Cheese?!! offers a little lift in an otherwise challenging situation. Inside is an insipid tale that reveals profound truths about greed. It's a cloying yet inspiring story of four small characters -- two rats and two "loyal employees" -- who are trapped in a "maze" and looking for their share of the "cheese" to sustain them and bring them happiness.

Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work


Marilee G. Adams - 2009
    Virtually everything we think and do is generated by questions. Questions push us into new territories. The future begins with our thinking, represented by the questions we ask ourselves."Change Your Questions, Change Your Life" shows readers how to consistently choose the questions that can lead them to success, both personally and professionally. This technique, called "QuestionsThinking," stimulates innovation, accelerate productivity, and create more rewarding relationships."Change Your Questions, Change Your Life" is a personal growth fable that tells how a seasoned executive, Ben Knight, uses QuestionThinking to move into a higher leadership role and how the same methods of change help him and his wife, Grace, enrich their marriage.

Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation


Daniel J. Siegel - 2009
    Mindsight allows you to make positive changes in your brain-and in your life.- Is there a memory that torments you, or an irrational fear you can' t shake?- Do you sometimes become unreasonably angry or upset and find it hard to calm down?- Do you ever wonder why you can't stop behaving the way you do, no matter how hard you try?- Are you and your child (or parent, partner, or boss) locked in a seemingly inevitable pattern of conflict?What if you could escape traps like these and live a fuller, richer, happier life? This isn't mere speculation but the result of twenty-five years of careful hands-on clinical work by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. A Harvard-trained physician, Dr. Siegel is one of the revolutionary global innovators in the integration of brain science into the practice of psychotherapy. Using case histories from his practice, he shows how, by following the proper steps, nearly everyone can learn how to focus their attention on the internal world of the mind in a way that will literally change the wiring and architecture of their brain.Through his synthesis of a broad range of scientific research with applications to everyday life, Dr. Siegel has developed novel approaches that have helped hundreds of patients heal themselves from painful events in the past and liberate themselves from obstacles blocking their happiness in the present. And now he has written the first book that will help all of us understand the potential we have to create our own lives. Showing us mindsight in action, Dr. Siegel describes- a sixteen-year-old boy with bipolar disorder who uses meditation and other techniques instead of drugs to calm the emotional storms that made him suicidal- a woman paralyzed by anxiety, who uses mindsight to discover, in an unconscious memory of a childhood accident, the source of her dread- a physician-the author himself-who pays attention to his intuition, which he experiences as a "vague, uneasy feeling in my belly, a gnawing restlessness in my heart and my gut," and tracks down a patient who could have gone deaf because of an inaccurately written prescription for an ear infection- a twelve-year-old girl with OCD who learns a meditation that is "like watching myself from outside myself" and, using a form of internal dialogue, is able to stop the compulsive behaviors that have been tormenting herThese and many other extraordinary stories illustrate how mindsight can help us master our emotions, heal our relationships, and reach our fullest potential.A book as inspiring as it is informative, as practical as it is profound, Mindsight offers exciting new proof that we aren't hardwired to behave in certain ways, but instead have the ability to harness the power of our minds to resculpt the neural pathways of our brains in ways that will be life-transforming.

Leading the Unleadable: How to Manage Mavericks, Cynics, Divas, and Other Difficult People


Alan Willett - 2016
    Difficult people are the worst part of a manager's job. Whether it comes from direct reports or people above, outbursts, irrational demands, griping, and other disruptions need to be dealt with--and it's your responsibility to do it. Leading the Unleadable turns this dreaded chore into a straight forward process that gently, yet effectively, improves behaviors. Written by an insider in the tech industry, where personality issues routinely wreck projects, the book reveals a core truth: most people actually want to contribute results, not cause headaches. Once you realize the potential for change, the book's simple steps, examples, and scripts explain how to right even the most hopeless situations. You'll learn how to: - Master the necessary mindset - Explain the problem calmly in a short feedback session - Get a commitment to change, and follow up - Coach others to replicate the process - Develop the situational awareness required to spot trouble even earlier in the future Every manager has "problem people." What sets great managers apart is how they turn them into productive team players. Prepare to transform the troublesome into the tremendous.

How to Argue and Win Every Time: At Home, At Work, In Court, Everywhere, Every Day


Gerry Spence - 1995
    So you want to know how to compose the winning arguent? How to prepare it? Deliver it? Spense believes that argument begins with the person, and that to argue successfully one must accomplish more than mere teechnique. He maintains that success in arguments, as in life, is a derivative of personal growth, of discoverring who we are, and embracing the uniqueness that is individual to each of us. The Laws of Arguing According to Gerry Spence1. Everyone is capable of making the winning aargument.2. Winning is getting what we want, which also means helping "others" get what they want.3. Learn that words are a weapon, and can be used hostilely in combat.4. Know that there is always a "biological advantage" of delivering the TRUTH.5. Assault is not argument.6. Use fear as an ally in pubic speaking or in argument. Learn to convert its energy.7. Let emotions show and don't discourage passion.8. Don't be blinded by brilliance.9. Learn to speak with the body. The body sometimes speaks more powerfully than words. 10 Know that the enemy is not the person with whom we are engaged in a failing argument, but the vision within ourselves