Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives


Nicholas A. Christakis - 2008
    Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her. A happy neighbor has more impact on your happiness than a happy spouse. These startling revelations of how much we truly influence one another are revealed in the studies of Dr. Christakis and Fowler, which have repeatedly made front-page news nationwide. In Connected, the authors explain why emotions are contagious, how health behaviors spread, why the rich get richer, even how we find and choose our partners. Intriguing and entertaining, Connected overturns the notion of the individual and provides a revolutionary paradigm-that social networks influence our ideas, emotions, health, relationships, behavior, politics, and much more. It will change the way we think about every aspect of our lives.

The Effective Manager


Mark Horstman - 2016
    Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today. First, you'll identify what "effective management" actually looks like: can you get the job done at a high level? Do you attract and retain top talent without burning them out? Then you'll dig into the four critical behaviors that make a manager great, and learn how to adjust your own behavior to be the leader your team needs. You'll learn the four major tools that should be a part of every manager's repertoire, how to use them, and even how to introduce them to the team in a productive, non-disruptive way.Most management books are written for CEOs and geared toward improving corporate management, but this book is expressly aimed at managers of any level--with a behavioral framework designed to be tailored to your team's specific needs.Understand your team's strengths, weaknesses, and goals in a meaningful way Stop limiting feedback to when something goes wrong Motivate your people to continuous improvement Spread the work around and let people stretch their skills Effective managers are good at the job and "good at people." The key is combining those skills to foster your team's development, get better and better results, and maintain a culture of positive productivity. The Effective Manager shows you how to turn good into great with clear, actionable, expert guidance.

Principles of Product Management: How to Land a PM Job and Launch Your Product Career


Peter Yang - 2019
    The book has three parts: Principles: Part one covers the leadership principles that PMs use to lead their team to overcome adversity. When your product fails to gain traction, when your team falls apart, or when your manager gives you tough feedback—these are all opportunities to learn principles that will help you succeed. Product development: Part two covers how PMs at Facebook, Amazon, and other top companies build products. We'll walk through the end-to-end product development process— from understanding the customer problem to identifying the right product to build to executing with your team to bring the product to market. Getting the job: Part three covers how you can land a PM job and reach the interview stage at the right company. We'll prep you for the three most common types of PM interviews— product sense, execution, and behavioral—with detailed frameworks and examples for each. Hear directly from product leaders at Airbnb, Amazon, Google, and more on: How to overcome challenging situations from a VP of Product at Amazon. How to build a great product roadmap from product leaders at LinkedIn and Airbnb. How Google, Airbnb, and other top companies evaluate PM candidates from leaders at those companies. How PMs can grow their career from a Director at Instagram and Twitter. Table of Contents1. PrinciplesTake OwnershipPrioritize and ExecuteStart with WhyFind the TruthBe Radically TransparentBe Honest with Yourself2. Product DevelopmentProduct Development LoopUnderstanding the Customer ProblemSelecting a Goal MetricMission, Vision, and StrategyBuilding a Product RoadmapDefining Product RequirementsGreat Project ManagementEffective CommunicationMaking Good Decisions3. Getting the JobPreparing for the TransitionMaking the TransitionFinding the Right CompanyAcing your PM InterviewsProduct Sense InterviewExecution InterviewBehavioral InterviewYour First 30 Days4. Product Leader Interviews

No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention


Reed Hastings - 2020
    It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrel-evant. At Netflix, you don't try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don't need approval, and the company pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world.Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings's own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.

The New One Minute Manager


Kenneth H. Blanchard - 2015
    While the principles it lays out are timeless, our world has changed drastically since the book’s publication. The exponential rise of technology, global flattening of markets, instant communication, and pressures on corporate workforces to do more with less—including resources, funding, and staff—have all revolutionized the world in which we live and work.Now, Ken Blanchard and Spencer Johnson have written The New One Minute Manager to introduce the book’s powerful, important lessons to a new generation. In their concise, easy-to-read story, they teach readers three very practical secrets about leading others—and explain why these techniques continue to work so well.As compelling today as the original was thirty years ago, this classic parable of a young man looking for an effective manager is more relevant and useful than ever.

QBQ! The Question Behind the Question: Practicing Personal Accountability in Work and in Life


John G. Miller - 2004
    No organization—or individual—can successfully compete in the marketplace, achieve goals and objectives, provide outstanding service, engage in exceptional teamwork, or develop people without personal accountability.   John G. Miller believes that the troubles that plague organizations cannot be solved by pointing fingers and blaming others. Rather, the real solutions are found when each of us recognizes the power of personal accountability. In QBQ! The Question Behind the Question®, Miller explains how negative, ill-focused questions like “Why do we have to go through all this change?” and “Who dropped the ball?” represent a lack of personal accountability. Conversely, when we ask better questions—QBQs—such as “What can I do to contribute?” or “How can I help solve the problem?” our lives and our organizations are transformed.THE QBQ! PROMISEThis remarkable and timely book provides a practical method for putting personal accountability into daily actions, with astonishing results: problems are solved, internal barriers come down, service improves, teams thrive, and people adapt to change more quickly. QBQ! is an invaluable resource for anyone seeking to learn, grow, and change. Using this tool, each of us can add tremendous worth to our organizations and to our lives by eliminating blame, victim-thinking, and procrastination.                                                                                                 QBQ! was written more than a decade ago and has helped countless readers practice personal accountability at work and at home. This version features a new foreword, revisions and new material throughout, and a section of  FAQs that the author has received over the years.

Caught Between the Dog and the Fireplug, or How to Survive Public Service


Kenneth H. Ashworth - 2001
    The book is written as a series of lively, entertaining letters of advice from a sympathetic uncle to a niece or nephew embarking on a government career. The book will interest students and teachers of public administration, public affairs, policy development, leadership, or higher education administration. Ashworth's advice will also appeal to anyone who has ever been caught in a tight spot will working in government service.

Playing Big: Find Your Voice, Your Mission, Your Message


Tara Mohr - 2014
    Mohr’s work helping women play bigger has earned acclaim from the likes of Maria Shriver and Jillian Michaels, and has been featured on the Today show, CNN, and a host of other media outlets.   Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In gave many women new awareness about what kinds of changes they need to make to become more successful; yet most women need help implementing them. In the tradition of Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, Playing Big provides real, practical tools to help women quiet self-doubt, identify their callings, “unhook” from praise and criticism, unlearn counterproductive good girl habits, and begin taking bold action.   While not all women aspire to end up in the corner office, every woman aspires to something. Playing Big fills a major gap among women’s career books; it isn’t just for corporate women. The book offers tools to help every woman play bigger—whether she’s an executive, community volunteer, artist, or stay-at-home mom.   Thousands of women across the country have been transformed by Mohr’s program, and now this book makes the ideas and practices available to everyone who is ready to play big.

Cultures Built to Last: Systemic PLCs at Work


Richard DuFour - 2013
    You'll move beyond isolated pockets of excellence while allowing every person in your school system-from teachers and administrators to students-the opportunity to be an instrument of lasting cultural change.

Overcoming the Achievement Gap Trap: Liberating Mindsets to Effective Change


Anthony Muhammad - 2015
    Investigate previous and current policies designed to help close the achievement gap. Examine predominant mindsets that contradict school missions to promote equal academic opportunities, and consider the psychological impact this has on students. Explore strategies for adopting a new mindset that frees educators and students from negative academic performance expectations.

Co-Active Coaching: Changing Business, Transforming Lives


Laura Whitworth - 1998
    Published in more than ten languages now, this book has been used as the definitive resource in dozens of corporate, professional development and university-based coaching programs as well as by thousands of individuals looking to elevate their communication, relationship and coaching skills. This fully revised third edition of Co-Active Coaching has been updated to reflect the expanded vision of the newly updated Co-Active Model and coaching course curriculum at The Coaches Training Institute, the training organization founded and run by the authors for 20 years. The third edition emphasizes evoking transformational change in the client and extends the use of the Co-Active Model into leadership management and its effectiveness throughout organizations. This edition also contains an on-line Coach's Toolkit (replacing the CD of the second edition), several new coaching demonstrations and more than 35 updated exercises, questionnaires, checklists and reproducible forms.

Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values


Fred Kofman - 2005
    Without it, we forget what's important to us and lose sight of the steps we might take to reach those goals. Conscious business, explains Fred Kofman, means shining this awareness on every area of your work: in recognizing the needs of others and expressing your own; in seeing the hidden emotional obstacles that may be holding your team back; in making good decisions under pressure; and even in delving into such spiritual questions as "Who am I?" and "What is my real purpose here?" In Conscious Business, this visionary teacher and consultant to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and other leading companies presents the complete training manual in the breakthrough techniques he has shared with over 20,000 executives on four continents.

Community: The Structure of Belonging


Peter Block - 2008
    The various sectors of our communities--businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government--do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work towards it together. We know what healthy communities look like--there are many success stories out there, and they've been described in detail. What Block provides in this inspiring new book is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what each of us can do to make that happen.

Be a People Person


John C. Maxwell - 1989
    Being a leader means working with people, and that's not always easy! Interpersonal relationships can make or break a leader-whether in the office, the church, or elsewhere.

City of Victory: The Rise and Fall of Vijayanagara


Ratnakar Sadasyula - 2016
    Over the next 3 centuries, it would grow to become one of the mightiest empires in the world, the Vijayanagara Empire. An empire dazzling in it's achievements, in it's riches, in it's arts. From it's founding, to it's fall after the Battle of Tallikota to the heights it achieved under Sri Krishna Deva Raya, City of Victory aims to recreate the splendor and glory of one of the most magnificent empires ev