Book picks similar to
The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry (Thin Book Series) by Sue Annis Hammond
business
coaching
non-fiction
leadership
It's the Manager: Gallup finds the quality of managers and team leaders is the single biggest factor in your organization's long-term success.
Jim Clifton - 2019
Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Gallup research reveals: It’s your managers.While the world’s workplace has been going through extraordinary historical change, the practice of management has been stuck in time for more than 30 years. The new workforce -- especially younger generations -- wants their work to have deep mission and purpose, and they don’t want old-style command-and-control bosses. They want coaches who inspire them, communicate with them frequently and develop their strengths. Who is the most important person in your organization to lead your teams through these changes? Decades of global Gallup research reveal: It’s your managers. They are the ones who make or break your organization’s success. When you have great managers who can maximize the potential of every team member, you will see organic revenue and profit growth, and you will give every one of your employees what they most want today: a great job and a great life. This is the future of work.
It’s the Manager
includes exclusive content from Gallup Access -- Gallup’s new workplace platform, chock full of additional content, tools and solutions for business. Your book comes with a code for the CliftonStrengths assessment, which reveals your top five strengths.
How to Be a Positive Leader: Small Actions, Big Impact
Jane E. Dutton - 2014
It offers a potent assembly of ideas about how small actions leaders take can make a difference in changing the trajectory of individuals and organizations, moving them more rapidly and effectively toward being their best. The book is built on a foundation of cutting-edge research and transformational insights from the field of positive organizational scholarship.How to Be a Positive Leader captures and clusters these transformational insights into four leadership action domains—tapping into the good, unlocking valuable resources, fostering positive relationships, and facilitating generative change—that encompass the full range of leadership abilities, from negotiating to inspiring to leading the ethics charge. Above all, each domain focuses on human relationships as the basis of any effective leadership. Proof that positive models of leading are the most productive means to lasting change, this book will give every leader the courage to make a positive difference in the workday.
Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing
Po Bronson - 2013
Beyond their bestselling books, you know them from commentary and features in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, Wired, New York, and more. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are filled with demands to read their reporting (such as "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," "Creativity Crisis," and "Losing Is Good for You"). In Top Dog, Bronson and Merryman again use their astonishing blend of science and storytelling to reveal what's truly in the heart of a champion. The joy of victory and the character-building agony of defeat. Testosterone and the neuroscience of mistakes. Why rivals motivate. How home field advantage gets you a raise. What teamwork really requires. It's baseball, the SAT, sales contests, and Linux. How before da Vinci and FedEx were innovators, first, they were great competitors. Olympians carry Top Dog in their gym bags. It's in briefcases of Wall Street traders and Madison Avenue madmen. Risk takers from Silicon Valley to Vegas race to implement its ideas, as educators debate it in halls of academia. Now see for yourself what this game-changing talk is all about.
Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
Peter C. Brown - 2014
Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier. Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. Drawing on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines, the authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners.Memory plays a central role in our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never before encountered and drawing inferences from facts already known. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads both to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.Many common study habits and practice routines turn out to be counterproductive. Underlining and highlighting, rereading, cramming, and single-minded repetition of new skills create the illusion of mastery, but gains fade quickly. More complex and durable learning come from self-testing, introducing certain difficulties in practice, waiting to re-study new material until a little forgetting has set in, and interleaving the practice of one skill or topic with another. Speaking most urgently to students, teachers, trainers, and athletes, Make It Stick will appeal to all those interested in the challenge of lifelong learning and self-improvement.
HBR'S 10 Must Reads: The Essentials
Harvard Business School Press - 2010
Yet certain challenges never go away. That's what makes this book "must read." These are the 10 seminal articles by management's most influential experts, on topics of perennial concern to ambitious managers and leaders hungry for inspiration--and ready to run with big ideas to accelerate their own and their companies' success.If you read nothing else - full stop - read:Michael Porter on creating competitive advantage and distinguishing your company from rivalsJohn Kotter on leading change through eight critical stagesDaniel Goleman on using emotional intelligence to maximize performancePeter Drucker on managing your career by evaluating your own strengths and weaknessesClay Christensen on orchestrating innovation within established organizationsTom Davenport on using analytics to determine how to keep your customers loyalRobert Kaplan and David Norton on measuring your company's strategy with the Balanced ScorecardRosabeth Moss Kanter on avoiding common mistakes when pushing innovation forwardTed Levitt on understanding who your customers are and what they really wantC. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel on identifying the unique, integrated systems that support your strategy
Managing Your Boss
John J. Gabarro - 2008
In this handy guidebook, the authors contend that you manage your boss for a very good reason: to do your best on the job—and thereby benefit not only yourself but also your supervisor and your entire company. Your boss depends on you for cooperation, reliability, and honesty. And you depend on him or her for links to the rest of the organization, for setting priorities, and for obtaining critical resources. By managing your boss—clarifying your own and your supervisor's strengths, weaknesses, goals, work styles, and needs—you cultivate a relationship based on mutual respect and understanding. The result? A healthy, productive bond that enables you both to excel. Gabarro and Kotter provide valuable guidelines for building this essential relationship—including strategies for determining how your boss prefers to process information and make decisions, tips for communicating mutual expectations, and tactics for negotiating priorities. Thought provoking and practical, Managing Your Boss enables you to lay the groundwork for one of the most crucial working relationships you'll have in your career.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
Charles Duhigg - 2012
Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.They succeeded by transforming habits.In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't
Robert I. Sutton - 2007
Sutton addressed a taboo topic that affects every workplace: employees who are insensitive to their colleagues, corporate bullies, bosses who just don't get it, the kind of people who make you exclaim in exasperation, "What an asshole!"Now, in a definitive book that addresses this growing problem, Sutton shows you how you can work with unsavory people without becoming one of them yourself.
What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers
Richard Nelson Bolles - 1970
A favourite of job hunters and career changers for more than three decades, it continues to be a mainstay on best-seller lists, from Amazon.com to BusinessWeek to the New York Times, where it has spent five and a half years.
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
Jake Knapp - 2018
Why? In a world where information refreshes endlessly and the workday feels like a race to react to other people's priorities faster, frazzled and distracted has become our default position. But what if the exhaustion of constant busyness wasn't mandatory? What if you could step off the hamster wheel and start taking control of your time and attention? That's what this book is about. As creators of Google Ventures' renowned "design sprint," Jake and John have helped hundreds of teams solve important problems by changing how they work. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, focus, and time. Now they've packaged the most effective tactics into a four-step daily framework that anyone can use to systematically design their days. Make Time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Instead, it offers a customizable menu of bite-size tips and strategies that can be tailored to individual habits and lifestyles. Make Time isn't about productivity, or checking off more to-dos. Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day..., Make Time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter.
The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play
Neil A. Fiore - 1988
Dr. Fiore’s techniques will help any busy person start tasks sooner and accomplish them more quickly, without the anxiety brought on by the negative habits of procrastination and perfectionism.
No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work
Liz Fosslien - 2019
We're expected to be authentic but not too authentic. Professional but not stiff. Friendly but not an oversharer.As organizational consultants and regular people, we know what it's like to experience uncomfortable emotions at work - everything from mild jealousy and insecurity to panic and rage. Ignoring or suppressing what you feel hurts your health and productivity but so does letting your emotions run wild.In this book we'll help you figure out which emotions to toss, which to keep to yourself, and which to express in order to be both happier and more effective. We'll share the latest research and helpful tips, and reveal the surprising reason why you'll actually be more healthier and focused if you're less passionate about your job.Drawing on what we've learned from behavioural economics, psychology and our own experiences at countless organizations, we'll show you how to bring your best self (and your whole self) to work every day.
The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want
Sonja Lyubomirsky - 2007
Research psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky's pioneering concept of the 40% solution shows you how Drawing on her own groundbreaking research with thousands of men and women, research psychologist and University of California professor of psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky has pioneered a detailed yet easy-to-follow plan to increase happiness in our day-to-day lives-in the short term and over the long term. The How of Happiness is a different kind of happiness book, one that offers a comprehensive guide to understanding what happiness is, and isn't, and what can be done to bring us all closer to the happy life we envision for ourselves. Using more than a dozen uniquely formulated happiness-increasing strategies, The How of Happiness offers a new and potentially life- changing way to understand our innate potential for joy and happiness as well as our ability to sustain it in our lives. Beginning with a short diagnostic quiz that helps readers to first quantify and then to understand what she describes as their "happiness set point," Lyubomirsky reveals that this set point determines just 50 percent of happiness while a mere 10 percent can be attributed to differences in life circumstances or situations. This leaves a startling, and startlingly underdeveloped, 40 percent of our capacity for happiness within our power to change. Lyubomirsky's "happiness strategies" introduce readers to the concept of intentional activities, mindful actions that they can use to achieve a happier life. These include exercises in practicing optimism when imagining the future, instruction in how best to savor life's pleasures in the here and now, and a thoroughgoing explanation of the importance of staying active to being happy. Helping readers find the right fit between the goals they set and the activities she suggests, Lyubomirsky also helps readers understand the many obstacles to happiness as well as how to harness individual strengths to overcome them. Always emphasizing how much of our happiness is within our control, Lyubomirsky addresses the "scientific how" of her happiness research, demystifying the many myths that unnecessarily complicate its pursuit. Unlike those of many self-help books, all her recommendations are supported by scientific research. The How of Happiness is both a powerful contribution to the field of positive psychology and a gift to all those who have questioned their own well- being and sought to take their happiness into their own hands.
Six Thinking Hats
Edward de Bono - 1981
Meetings are a crucial part of all our lives, but too often they go nowhere and waste valuable time. In Six Thinking Hats, Edward de Bono shows how meetings can be transformed to produce quick, decisive results every time. The Six Hats method is a devastatingly simple technique based on the brain's different modes of thinking. The intelligence, experience and information of everyone is harnessed to reach the right conclusions quickly. These principles fundamentally change the way you work and interact. They have been adopted by businesses and governments around the world to end conflict and confusion in favour of harmony and productivity. 'An inspiring man with brilliant ideas. De Bono never ceases to amaze with his clarity of thought' Richard Branson.Edward de Bono invented the concept of lateral thinking. A world-renowned writer and philosopher, he is the leading authority in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill. Dr de Bono has written more than 60 books, in 40 languages, with people now teaching his methods worldwide. He has chaired a special summit of Nobel Prize laureates, and been hailed as one of the 250 people who have contributed most to mankind
Brag!: The Art of Tooting Your Own Horn without Blowing It
Peggy Klaus - 2003
The renowned communication expert's subtle but effective plan for selling your best asset - yourself - without turning off those you're trying to impress.