Featuring the contributions of leading executives, human resources practitioners, and consultants, this book presents a comprehensive approach to talent management.

    Feedback, compensation, coaching, promotion, and legal documentation are all covered, as well as a variety of new alternatives that produce better results for both managers and employees.

     The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

    Project Management For Dummies, Second Edition introduces you to the principles of successful project management and shows you how to motivate any team to gain maximum productivity. You'll find out how to:Define your project and what you intend to accomplish Identify project stakeholders and their expectations Develop a project plan Establish project schedules and timetables Determine which skill sets and resources the project requires Choose team members and define their roles Launch you project and track its progress Encourage peak performance Conclude your project successfully Complete with helpful tips on delegating, shortening schedules, and optimizing your own performance Project Management for Dummies, help you get your project, and your career, off the ground in no time.

    Ten times. You can't afford not to hire them. But if you haven't been reading Joel Spolsky's books or blog, you probably don't know how to find them and make them want to work for you.In this brief book, Joel reveals all his secrets--from his years at Microsoft, and as the co-founder of Fog Creek Software--for recruiting the best developers in the world.If you've ever wondered what you should be looking for in a resume, if you've ever struggled to decide whether to hire someone at the end of an interview, or if you're wondering why you can't find great programmers, stop everything and read this book.

    They would do exactly what we asked them to do, exactly when we asked them to do it – except, of course, for the fantastic ideas they would cook up on their own…Back to reality. Your employees are, like you and me, flawed and hopeful human beings whose success is at least partly dependent on your skill as a manager, human beings who will thrive with skillful and consistent attention and wither without it.” In business today we’re told that management development is a thing of the past. Staying limber, preparing to change hats at a moment’s notice, and keeping your finger on the pulse of the “new” – that’s what we’re told is critical. At this moment when companies and managers aren’t focusing on the long haul, Erika Andersen says just the opposite. If you want to compete with the market leaders, grow your business, and succeed in your field, you need support: an all-star staff that epitomizes your company’s mission and has the skills to implement it. How do you achieve this? Grow great employees. For twenty-five years Erika Andersen has been helping some of the best-managed companies in the world develop their employees. In Growing Great Employees you’ll learn how they stay ahead of the competition by investing in their people. You’ll discover that: • Listening is your most powerful asset. Use it to motivate and build commitment. • Everything you know about interviewing is wrong. Find out how to discover what you really need in a potential employee and how to find it. • Successful companies hire for keeps. Get people feeling like part of the team from day one. • Great leaders surround themselves with the best. Recognize who has potential and develop them into tomorrow’s leaders. Whether you’re a manager or a senior executive, Growing Great Employees is your guide to creating a dynamic workplace where the efforts you make with your employees today will blossom into success for years to come.

    Providing strategies and solutions for the managers of today, this book offers answers for improving employee commitment and profitability by strategically acknowledging employee effort. How is it done? The deceptively simply answer: with carrots.

    Yet, today’s young people have much more to offer. If half of the hipster stereotype is a consumer who tries to show off how cool he is based on his tastes, the other half of the stereotype is ‘The Maker’ -- the person out hawking homemade cheese, knitting sweaters for your beard, or repurposing steel-framed bicycles. The hipster business model is distinctive: Make a product you love so much that you’ll make it yourself. See if anyone wants it. Try again. When they want to build apparel companies, they teach themselves how to sew. When they dream of producing toys, they learn how to use 3D printing software. When they don’t know investors who will back their restaurant concepts, they open food trucks. All the while, they are guided by books, instructional videos, and intuition; only later do they move production to real factories, or hire lawyers. They frequent public parks to see if anyone will buy their custom, typewritten stories. They use crowdfunding websites to raise money from customers before their products even exist. They post their ideas to massive web forums to gauge interest, or set up online shops the second they have a product to sell. In their world, sales come first, not last. While each entrepreneur featured in this book embarked on his or her own unique quest, their stories share a common thread: like true hipsters, they were not afraid to try new things.

    The secret for creating magic in our careers, our organizations, and our lives is simple: outstanding leadership--the kind that inspires employees, delights customers, and achieves extraordinary business results. No one knows more about this kind of leadership than Lee Cockerell, the man who ran Walt Disney World(R) Resort operations for over a decade. And in Creating Magic, he shares the leadership principles that not only guided his own journey from a poor farm boy in Oklahoma to the head of operations for a multibillion dollar enterprise, but that also soon came to form the cultural bedrock of the world's number one vacation destination. But as Lee demonstrates, great leadership isn't about mastering impossibly complex management theories. We can all become outstanding leaders by following the ten practical, common sense strategies outlined in this remarkable book. As straightforward as they are profound, these leadership lessons include: Everyone is important.Make your people your brand. Burn the free fuel: appreciation, recognition, and encouragement. Give people a purpose, not just a job. Combining surprising business wisdom with insightful and entertaining stories from Lee's four decades on the front lines of some of the world's best-run companies, Creating Magic shows all of us - from small business owners to managers at every level - how to become better leaders by infusing quality, character, courage, enthusiasm, and integrity into our workplace and into our lives.

    Communication is also emphasized, with a focus on how to document and communicate project developments, both within and outside of the team. In-depth coverage of planning, scheduling and cost management is also provided. The authors' goal is to provide many cases that are fun and elicit interesting debates, and this edition includes new end-of-chapter cases. In addition, all new up-to-date Real World Project Management vignettes are included at the beginning and within each chapter, giving you a taste of how project management is practically applied in the workplace. Key points of each chapter are highlighted in Critical Success Factor boxes, providing an overview of the main ideas covered within the chapter. End-of-chapter materials contain questions and Internet exercises that allow you to apply the concepts covered in the chapter. Sprinkled throughout each chapter are boxed questions designed to test your comprehension of key concepts. A trial version of Microsoft Office Project 2007 is included for student use on class projects.

    These are intelligent, well-meaning answers but they are also completely wrong. More valuable than money, human resources, and intellectual property, Passion Capital is what separates leaders from followers, and innovators from imitators. It is the foundation upon which all other forms of capital are built. Passion is an emotion, but Passion Capital is tangible. It is the energy, intensity, and sustainability leaders use to build lasting value and competitive advantage. Organizations that possess Passion Capital – Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Four Seasons Hotels, the Montreal Canadiens, among others – lead their sectors, while those that rely on established forms of capital may get stuck in neutral and fail to achieve their full potential.Passion Capital presents seven principles for growing and investing in this new asset class and includes over fifty insightful stories drawn from business, not-for-profit, the arts sector, and politics.  In this groundbreaking book, veteran business leader Paul Alofs ushers in a whole new way of thinking about the very definition of success and reveals how to acquire the world’s most valuable asset and apply it to your career, company, or cause.

    Strategy deployment, called hoshin kanri by Toyota, has proven to be the most effective process for meeting this ongoing challenge. In his new book Getting the Right Things Done, author and LEI faculty member Pascal Dennis outlines the nuts and bolts of strategy deployment, answering two tough questions that ultimately can make or break a company's lean transformation: * What kind of planning system is required to inspire meaningful company-wide continuous improvement? * How might we change existing mental models that do not support a culture of continuous improvement? Getting the Right Things Done demonstrates how strategy deployment can help leaders harness the full power of Lean. Organization leaders at all levels and the management teams who are responsible for strategy deployment will find this book especially insightful. It tells the story of a fictional (yet very real) midsized company, Atlas Industries that needs to dramatically improve to compete with emerging rivals and meet new customer demands. Getting the Right Things Done chronicles the journey of the company and its President/COO, an experienced lean leader who was hired five years ago to steer Atlas in the right direction. While Atlas had already applied some basic lean principles, it had not really connected the people and business processes so that the company could dramatically improve. Atlas' challenge: "Something was missing: a way of focusing and aligning the efforts of good people, and a delivery system, something that would direct the tools to the right places." Enter strategy deployment. The book is designed to provide readers with a framework for understanding the key components of strategy deployment: agreeing on the company's "True North," working within the PDCA cycle, getting conse

    Covey presents a personal hands-on companion to the landmark The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , which has become a touchstone for individuals, families, and businesses around the world. The overwhelming success of Stephen R. Covey's principle-centered philosophy is a testament to the millions who have benefited from his lessons, and now, with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Personal Workbook , they can further explore and understand this tried-and-true approach. With the same clarity and assurance Covey's fans have come to appreciate, this individualized workbook teaches readers to fully internalize the 7 Habits through private and thought-provoking exercises, whether they are already familiar with the principles or not.

    In so many workplaces, people feel they’re playing a high-stakes game of “blame or be blamed,” which can be disastrous for the individuals who get caught up in it and can sink teams and afflict whole companies. Dattner presents compelling evidence that whether we fall into the trap of playing the blame game or learn to avoid the pitfalls is a major determinant of how successful we will be. The problem is that so many workplaces foster a blaming culture. Maybe you have a constantly blaming boss, or a colleague who is always taking credit for others’ work. All too often, individuals are scapegoated, teams fall apart, projects get derailed, and people become disengaged because fear and resentment have taken root. And what’s worse, the more emotionally charged a workplace is—maybe our jobs are threatened or we’re facing a particularly difficult challenge—the more emphatically people play the game, just when trust and collaboration are most needed. What can we do? We can learn to understand the hidden dynamics of human psychology that lead to this bad behavior so that we can inoculate ourselves against it and defuse the tensions in our own workplace.In lively prose that is as engaging as it is illuminating, Dattner tells a host of true stories of those he has worked with—from the woman who was so scapegoated by her colleagues that she decided to quit, to the clueless boss who was too quick to blame his staff. He shares a wealth of insight from the study of human evolution and psychology to reveal the underlying reasons why people are so prone to blaming and credit-grabbing; it’s not only human nature, it’s found throughout the animal kingdom. Even bats do it. He shows how our family experiences, gender, and culture also all shape the way we cope with credit and blame issues, and introduces eleven personality types that are especially prone to causing difficulties and illustrates how we can best cope with them. He also profiles how a number of outstanding leaders, from General Dwight Eisenhower and President Harry Truman to highly respected business figures such as former Intel CEO Andy Grove and Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, employed the power of taking blame and sharing credit to achieve great success.The only winning move in the blame game, Dattner shows, is not to play, and the insights and practical suggestions in this book will help readers, at any level of any organization and at any stage of their careers, learn to manage the crucial psychology of credit and blame for themselves and others.

    Dread no longer: Read This Before Our Next Meeting not only explains what’s wrong with “the meeting,” and meeting culture, but suggests how to make meetings more effective, efficient, and worthy of attending. It assesses when it’s necessary to skip the meeting and get right to work. Al Pittampalli shares examples of transforming workplaces by revamping the purpose of the meeting and a company's meeting culture. This book belongs on the shelf of any employee, employer and company looking to revolutionize what it means to do "work" all day and how to do it. Simply put: Stop wasting time. Read This Before Our Next Meeting is the call to action you (or your boss) needs to create the company that does the meaningful work it was created to do.