Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Richard H. Thaler - 2008
Thaler, and Cass R. Sunstein: a revelatory look at how we make decisionsNew York Times bestsellerNamed a Best Book of the Year by The Economist and the Financial Times Every day we make choices—about what to buy or eat, about financial investments or our children’s health and education, even about the causes we champion or the planet itself. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. Nudge is about how we make these choices and how we can make better ones. Using dozens of eye-opening examples and drawing on decades of behavioral science research, Nobel Prize winner Richard H. Thaler and Harvard Law School professor Cass R. Sunstein show that no choice is ever presented to us in a neutral way, and that we are all susceptible to biases that can lead us to make bad decisions. But by knowing how people think, we can use sensible “choice architecture” to nudge people toward the best decisions for ourselves, our families, and our society, without restricting our freedom of choice.
The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics
Tim Harford - 2020
That’s a mistake, Tim Harford says in The Data Detective. We shouldn’t be suspicious of statistics—we need to understand what they mean and how they can improve our lives: they are, at heart, human behavior seen through the prism of numbers and are often “the only way of grasping much of what is going on around us.” If we can toss aside our fears and learn to approach them clearly—understanding how our own preconceptions lead us astray—statistics can point to ways we can live better and work smarter.As “perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world” (New Statesman), Tim Harford is an expert at taking complicated ideas and untangling them for millions of readers. In The Data Detective, he uses new research in science and psychology to set out ten strategies for using statistics to erase our biases and replace them with new ideas that use virtues like patience, curiosity, and good sense to better understand ourselves and the world. As a result, The Data Detective is a big-idea book about statistics and human behavior that is fresh, unexpected, and insightful.
Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Ernst F. Schumacher - 1973
Schumacher's riveting, richly researched statement on sustainability has become more relevant and vital with each year since its initial groundbreaking publication during the 1973 energy crisis. A landmark statement against "bigger is better" industrialism, Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful paved the way for twenty-first century books on environmentalism and economics, like Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty, Paul Hawken's Natural Capitalism, Mohammad Yunis's Banker to the Poor, and Bill McKibben's Deep Economy. This timely reissue offers a crucial message for the modern world struggling to balance economic growth with the human costs of globalization.
How to Be a Great Boss
Gino Wickman - 2016
But it doesn't have to be this way. Often, the difference between a group of indifferent employees and a fully engaged team comes down to one simple thing--a great boss.In How to Be a Great Boss, Gino Wickman and Rene' Boer present a straightforward, practical approach to help bosses at all levels of an organization get the most from their people. They share time-tested tools that have worked for more than 30,000 bosses in every industry. You can learn to be a great boss--and dramatically improve both your organization's performance and your team's excitement about their work.In this book you will discover:How to surround yourself with great peopleHow to make more effective use of your timeThe difference between leadership and management and why they're equally importantThe five leadership practices and five management practices of all great bossesHow to create accountabilityHow to develop productive, relationships with each of your peopleHow to deal with direct reports that don't meet your expectationsHow to Be a Great Boss provides practical tools that you can apply immediately with your people, allowing you to focus on improving and growing your organization and truly enjoy what you do.
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
Richard Koch - 1997
Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today's business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.
The Outward Mindset: How to Change Lives and Transform Organizations
The Arbinger Institute - 2019
This book points out the many ways, some quite subtle and deceptive, that this mindset invites tension and conflict. But incredible things happen when people switch to an outward mindset. They intuitively understand what coworkers, colleagues, family, and friends need to be successful and happy. Their organizations thrive, and astonishingly, by focusing on others they become happier and more successful themselves! This new mindset brings about deep and far-reaching changes. The Outward Mindset presents compelling true stories to illustrate the gaps that individuals and organizations typically experience between their actual inward mindsets and their needed outward mindsets. And it provides simple yet profound guidance and tools to help bridge this mindset gap. This new edition includes a new preface, updated case studies, and new material covering Arbinger's latest research on mindsets. In the long run, changing negative behavior without changing one's mindset doesn't last—the old behaviors always reassert themselves. But changing the mindset that causes the behavior changes everything.
Leading Apple with Steve Jobs: Management Lessons from a Controversial Genius
Jay Elliot - 2012
As Senior VP of Apple, Jay served as Steve's right-hand man and trouble-shooter, overseeing all corporate operations and business planning, as well as software development and HR. In "Leading Apple with Steve Jobs," Jay details how Steve managed and motivated his people--and what every manager can learn from Jobs about motivating people to do the best work of their lives.Steve Jobs used the phrase "Pirates Not the Navy" as a rallying cry--a metaphor to "Think Different." In the days of developing the Macintosh, it became a four-word mission statement. It expresses the heart of Apple and Steve. The management principles that grew out of that statement form the backbone of this book. Explains how to find talented people who will understand your objectives and be able to make a contribution to that effort Lists traits that can determine whether a person will be so committed to the vision that they will provide their own motivationExplains how to ensure that your employees hold an allegiance to the captain and to his/her shipmates, and also possess the ability to come up with original, unique ways to approach a problem, and be self-guided with a strong sense of direction"Leading Apple with Steve Jobs" will shift your thought paradigm and inspire you to assemble and lead innovative teams.
Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone
Satya Nadella - 2017
It’s about how people, organizations and societies can and must hit refresh—transform—in their persistent quest for new energy, new ideas, relevance and renewal. At the core, it’s about us humans and our unique qualities, like empathy, which will become ever more valuable in a world where the torrent of technology will disrupt like never before. As much a humanist as a technologist, Nadella defines his mission and that of the company he leads as empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life
John C. Maxwell - 2003
America's leadership expert John C. Maxwell will teach you how to be more creative and when to question popular thinking. You'll learn how to capture the big picture while focusing your thinking. You'll find out how to tap into your creative potential, develop shared ideas, and derive lessons from the past to better understand the future. With these eleven keys to more effective thinking, you'll clearly see the path to personal success.The 11 keys to successful thinking include:Big-Picture Thinking - seeing the world beyond your own needs and how that leads to great ideasFocused Thinking - removing mental clutter and distractions to realize your full potentialCreative Thinking - thinking in unique ways and making breakthroughsShared Thinking - working with others to compound resultsReflective Thinking - looking at the past to gain a better understanding of the future.
The Talent War: How Special Operations and Great Organizations Win on Talent
Mike Sarraille - 2020
It's the hidden asset that never shows up on the balance sheet, despite being the driver for a company's true value. And now, in this hypercompetitive business environment, the war for talent has never been more important, or more complex. Of eight hundred CEOs and six hundred C-suite executives polled in 2019, the overwhelming majority cited the ability to attract and retain top talent as their number one concern.For your organization to win, you need to attract and retain the best talent. But without the right strategy or mindset, you won't be able to do so--and you won't be able to compete. After all, your people, not your product or service, are your strongest competitive advantage.When it comes to winning on talent, no one does it better or more consistently than the US Special Operations community. Their success comes down to their people and a widely held foundational belief: Talent + Leadership = Victory.The Talent War explores how US Special Operations Forces assess, select, and develop their world-class talent. You'll learn how to adopt a talent mindset, the single greatest weapon you can possess in the war for talent. When your organization reflects this mindset, you will hire, train, and develop the right people, and put them in the best positions to make decisions that allow you to retake the advantage and win the war.
Conflicted: How Productive Disagreements Lead to Better Outcomes
Ian Leslie - 2021
Disagreeing productively is a hard skill for which neither evolution or society has equipped us. It’s a skill we urgently need to acquire; otherwise, our increasingly vociferous disagreements are destined to tear us apart. Productive disagreement is a way of thinking, perhaps the best one we have. It makes us smarter and more creative, and it can even bring us closer together. It’s critical to the success of any shared enterprise, from a marriage, to a business, to a democracy. Isn’t it time we gave more thought to how to do it well?In an increasingly polarized world, our only chance for coming together and moving forward is to learn from those who have mastered the art and science of disagreement. In this book, we’ll learn from experts who are highly skilled at getting the most out of highly charged encounters: interrogators, cops, divorce mediators, therapists, diplomats, psychologists. These professionals know how to get something valuable – information, insight, ideas—from the toughest, most antagonistic conversations. They are brilliant communicators: masters at shaping the conversation beneath the conversation. They know how to turn the heat of conflict into the light of creativity, connection, and insight. In this much-needed book, Ian Leslie explores what happens to us when we argue, why disagreement makes us stressed, and why we get angry. He explains why we urgently need to transform the way we think about conflict and how having better disagreements can make us more successful. By drawing together the lessons he learns from different experts, he proposes a series of clear principles that we can all use to make our most difficult dialogues more productive—and our increasingly acrimonious world a better place.
The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
Gene Kim - 2013
It's Tuesday morning and on his drive into the office, Bill gets a call from the CEO. The company's new IT initiative, code named Phoenix Project, is critical to the future of Parts Unlimited, but the project is massively over budget and very late. The CEO wants Bill to report directly to him and fix the mess in ninety days or else Bill's entire department will be outsourced. With the help of a prospective board member and his mysterious philosophy of The Three Ways, Bill starts to see that IT work has more in common with manufacturing plant work than he ever imagined. With the clock ticking, Bill must organize work flow streamline interdepartmental communications, and effectively serve the other business functions at Parts Unlimited. In a fast-paced and entertaining style, three luminaries of the DevOps movement deliver a story that anyone who works in IT will recognize. Readers will not only learn how to improve their own IT organizations, they'll never view IT the same way again.
Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
Sheryl Sandberg - 2013
The book soared to the top of bestseller lists internationally, igniting global conversations about women and ambition. Sandberg packed theatres, dominated opinion pages, appeared on every major television show and on the cover of Time magazine, and sparked ferocious debate about women and leadership. Ask most women whether they have the right to equality at work and the answer will be a resounding yes, but ask the same women whether they'd feel confident asking for a raise, a promotion, or equal pay, and some reticence creeps in. The statistics, although an improvement on previous decades, are certainly not in women's favour – of 197 heads of state, only twenty-two are women. Women hold just 20 percent of seats in parliaments globally, and in the world of big business, a meagre eighteen of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women. In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg – Facebook COO and one of Fortune magazine's Most Powerful Women in Business – draws on her own experience of working in some of the world's most successful businesses and looks at what women can do to help themselves, and make the small changes in their life that can effect change on a more universal scale.
We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be
Cornelius Minor - 2018
You want to make everything about reading or math. It's not always about that. At school, you guys do everything except listen to me. Y'all want to use your essays and vocabulary words to save my future, but none of y'all know anything about saving my now.In We Got This Cornelius Minor describes how this conversation moved him toward realizing that listening to children is one of the most powerful things a teacher can do. By listening carefully, Cornelius discovered something that kids find themselves having to communicate far too often. That my lessons were not, at all, linked to that student's reality.While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. What we hear can spark action that allows us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children. A lone teacher can't eliminate inequity, but Cornelius demonstrates that a lone teacher can confront the scholastic manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism and classism by showing:exactly how he plans and revises lessons to ensure access and equity ways to look anew at explicit and tacit rules that consistently affect groups of students unequally suggestions for leaning into classroom community when it feels like the kids are against you ideas for using universal design that make curriculum relevant and accessible advocacy strategies for making classroom and schoolwide changes that expand access to opportunity to your students We cannot guarantee outcomes, but we can guarantee access Cornelius writes. We can ensure that everyone gets a shot. In this book we get to do that. Together. Consider this book a manual for how to begin that brilliantly messy work. We got this.
The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control
Walter Mischel - 2014
What will she do? And what are the implications for her behavior later in life?The world's leading expert on self-control, Walter Mischel has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught?In The Marshmallow Test, Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life—from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement. With profound implications for the choices we make in parenting, education, public policy and self-care, The Marshmallow Test will change the way you think about who we are and what we can be.