The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise


Eric Ries - 2017
     In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups - building minimal viable products ("MVPs"), extensive customer-focused testing based on a build, measure, learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to a whole new group of organizations: iconic multinationals like GE and Toyota, Silicon Valley tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a new management system that leads to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential roadmap for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.

The 12 Week Year


Brian P. Moran - 2009
    Instead, The 12 Week Year avoids the pitfalls and low productivity of annualized thinking. This book redefines your "year" to be 12 weeks long. In 12 weeks, there just isn't enough time to get complacent, and urgency increases and intensifies. The 12 Week Year creates focus and clarity on what matters most and a sense of urgency to do it now. In the end more of the important stuff gets done and the impact on results is profound.Explains how to leverage the power of a 12-week year to drive improved results in any area of your lifeOffers a how-to book for both individuals and organizations seeking to improve their execution effectivenessAuthors are leading experts on execution and implementation Turn your organization's idea of a year on its head, and speed your journey to success.©2013 Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life


Francesca Gino - 2018
    Rebels have a bad reputation. We think of them as troublemakers, outcasts,contrarians: those colleagues, friends, and family members who complicate seemingly straightforward decisions, create chaos, and disagree when everyone else is in agreement. But in truth, rebels are also those among us who change the world for the better with their unconventional outlooks. Instead of clinging to what is safe and familiar, rebels defy the status quo. They are masters of innovation and reinvention, and they have a lot to teach us. Gino has spent more than a decade studying rebels at organizations around the world,from high-end boutiques in Italy's fashion capital, to the world's best restaurant, to a thriving fast-food chain, to an award-winning computer animation studio. In her work, she has identified leaders and employees who personify "rebel talent," and whose examples we can all learn to embrace. Gino argues that the future belongs to the rebel—and that there's a rebel in each of us. We live in turbulent times. In this cutthroat environment, cultivating rebel talent is what allows businesses to evolve and to prosper. And rebellion has an added benefit beyond the workplace: it leads to a more vital, engaged,and fulfilling life. Whether you want to inspire others to action, grow a business, or build more meaningful relationships, Rebel Talent will show you how to succeed—by breaking all the rules.

Launching a Leadership Revolution: Mastering the Five Levels of Influence


Chris Brady - 2005
    Leadership skills are vital in corporate settings, small businesses, church or community organizations, and even within the home. Chris Brady and Orrin Woodward have recognized this need and have jointly created an in-depth, step-by-step guide for developing leadership skills.Utilizing an abundance of historical examples, the authors have developed a unique 5-step plan that charts a course for creating and maintaining strong leadership in any organization. The plan guides the reader through the "Five Levels of Influence": - Learning: a leader must be able to learn from anyone- Performing: perservere through failure to find success- Leading: extend your ability by expanding your team- Developing Leaders: learn to trust your people - Develop Leaders who Develop Leaders: create a legacyThis book is full of prescriptive advice, quotes and anecdotes that illustrate their principles.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works


A.G. Lafley - 2013
    But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies.Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win.The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are:• What is our winning aspiration?• Where will we play?• How will we win?• What capabilities must we have in place to win?• What management systems are required to support our choices?The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.

One Question: Answers from America's Leading Voices for Every Stage of Life


Ken Coleman - 2013
    Great questions are often the keys that unlock possibilities for human advancement. That truth has been proven again and again throughout human history, as great interviewers from Bob Costas to Barbara Walters have captivated audiences and ignited imaginations. In a world where the messages of public figures and politicians are carefully crafted by publicists and media consultants, we often receive only partial pictures and manipulated facts. The right questions uncover truths we might not otherwise know. They pull back the curtain on the wizard and give us a more accurate view of reality. —Excerpt from the IntroductionIf you could sit down with the people you most admire and ask just one question, what would you ask? One Question invites you to peer over the shoulder of a master interviewer with access to today’s best and brightest as he delivers carefully crafted questions and collects answers guaranteed to surprise, challenge, and inspire. • What is Coach Tony Dungy’s advice for achieving success while maintaining integrity? • What advice does Malcolm Gladwell give parents about instilling a work ethic in our children? • How does President Jimmy Carter suggest we continue forward and reinvent ourselves in new seasons? • What does Robin McGraw have to say to women about reaching their full potential both inside and outside their homes?

The Energy Bus: 10 Rules to Fuel Your Life, Work, and Team with Positive Energy


Jon Gordon - 2007
    Jon infuses this engaging story with keen insights as he provides a powerful roadmap to overcome adversity and bring out the best in yourself and your team. When you get on The Energy Bus you'll enjoy the ride of your life!

The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators


Jeffrey H. Dyer - 2011
    This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company’s stock price—an innovation premium—which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization’s people, processes, and guiding philosophies.Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s DNA is an essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

Creative People Must Be Stopped: 6 Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying)


David A. Owens - 2011
    It shows that the antidote to this self-defeating behavior is to identify which of the six major types of constraints are hindering innovation: individual, group, organizational, industry-wide, societal, or technological. Once innovators and other leaders understand exactly which constraints are working against them and how to overcome them, they can create conditions that foster innovation instead of stopping it in its tracks.The author's model of constraints on innovation integrates insights from the vast literature on innovation with his own observations of hundreds of organizations. The book is filled with assessments, tools, and real-world examples.The author's research has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on Fox News and on NPR's MarketplaceIncludes illustrative examples from leading organizations Offers a practical guide for bringing new ideas to fruition even within a previously rigid organizational culture This book gives people in organizations the conceptual framework and practical information they need to innovate successfully.

Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility


Patty McCord - 2018
    McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR―annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs―often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

Encore: Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life


Marc Freedman - 2007
    Encore describes the competing visions for work that are already lining up to capture the hearts and minds, and the time, of waves of baby boomers who are not content, or affluent enough, to spend their next twenty or thirty years on the golf course. Baby boomers are searching for a calling in the second half of life; they are moving beyond midlife yet refusing to phase out or fade away. If the old dream of the Golden Years was the Freedom from Work, the dream of this new wave is the Freedom to Work--in new ways, on new terms, to new ends. As their numbers begin to swell, these individuals hold the potential not only to transform work in America, but to create a society that balances the joys and responsibilities of contribution across the generations--in other words, one that works better for everyone.

Right Away and All At Once


Greg Brenneman - 2016
    The techniques that will grow your business will also help you achieve a rich, purposeful, and integrated life. In Right Away and All At Once, Brenneman takes what he’s learned from turning around or tuning up many businesses?including Continental Airlines and Burger King?and distills it into a simple, clear, 5-step roadmap that anyone can follow. His 5 steps teach you how to prepare a succinct Go Forward plan, build a fortress balance sheet, grow your sales and profits, choose all-star servant leaders, and empower your team. For more than thirty years, Brenneman has seen these steps foster dramatic results in a variety of business environments. But ten years ago he realized that he could apply these same business principles to improve his life and build a lasting moral legacy. He found he could make better decisions by carefully taking the most important facets of his life?faith, family, friendship, fitness, and finance?into consideration. Brenneman’s inspiring examples, from both his business and life, demonstrate the astounding effects these 5 steps can have when you apply them right away and all at once.

The Effective Executive


Peter Drucker - 2018
    Usually this involves doing what other people have overlooked, as well as avoiding what is unproductive.He identifies five talents as essential to effectiveness, and these can be learned; in fact, they must be learned just as scales must be mastered by every piano student regardless of his natural gifts. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that convert these into results. One of the talents is the management of time. Another is choosing what to contribute to the particular organization. A third is knowing where and how to apply your strength to best effect. Fourth is setting up the right priorities. And all of them must be knitted together by effective decision-making. How these can be developed forms the main body of the book. The author ranges widely through the annals of business and government to demonstrate the distinctive skill of the executive. He turns familiar experience upside down to see it in new perspective. The book is full of surprises, with its fresh insights into old and seemingly trite situations.

Selling with Noble Purpose


Lisa Earle McLeod - 2012
    Using hard data and compelling field stories, "Selling with Purpose" explains why salespeople who understand earnestly how they make a difference to customers outperform their more quota-driven counterparts. This book shows executives, managers, and aspiring sales leaders how to find your NSP and create a sales force of True Believers who drive revenue and do work that makes them proud.Explains why sales organizations with a clearly stated Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) dramatically outperform sales organizations driven by numbers aloneDetails how to find your NSP using a simple three-part formulaShares how to use NSP to make your salespeople more assertive, focused, and profitableIn an era where most organizations believe that money is the only way to motivate salespeople, "Selling With Purpose" offers a sustainable and exciting alternative.

One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value


Marc Effron - 2010
    You also know what it takes to build that talent—and you spend significant financial and human resources to make it happen. Yet somehow, your company’s beautifully designed and well-benchmarked processes don’t translate into the bottom-line talent depth you need. Why?Talent management experts Marc Effron and Miriam Ort argue that companies unwittingly add layers of complexity to their talent building models—without evaluating whether those components add any value to the overall process. Consequently, simple processes like setting employee performance goals become multi-page, headache-inducing time-wasters that turn managers off to the whole process and fail to improve results.In this revolutionary book, Effron and Ort introduce One Page Talent Management (OPTM): a powerfully simple approach that significantly accelerates a company’s ability to develop better leaders faster. The authors outline a straightforward, easy-to-use process for designing results-oriented OPTM processes: base every process on proven scientific research; eliminate complexity by including only those components that add real value to the process; and build transparency and accountability into every practice.Based on extensive research and the authors’ hands-on corporate and consulting experience with companies including Avon Products, Bank of America, and Philips, One Page Talent Management shows how to:• Quickly identify high potential talent without complex assessments• Increase the number of “ready now” successors for key roles• Generate 360 feedback that accelerates change in the most critical behaviors• Significantly reduce the time required for managers to implement talent processes• Enforce accountability for growing talent through corporate culture, compensation, etc.A radical new approach to growing talent, One Page Talent Management trades complexity and bureaucracy for simplicity and a relentless focus on adding value to create the high-quality talent you need—right now.