Book picks similar to
Bigger Isn't Always Better: The New Mindset for Real Business Growth by Robert M. Tomasko
business
leadership
management
office-shelf-4
Hipster Business Models: How to make a living in the modern world
Priceonomics - 2014
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.
Unusually Excellent
John Hamm - 2011
But many times they've actually lost their grip on the very basic foundation of leadership. The business environment may change, but no management trend can displace the core laws, proven over centuries, of excellent leadership. Unusually Excellent is an essential resource for leaders that brings these fundamentals together in a new and comprehensive way. This book will help leaders at any level keep their focus on the bedrock principles that will make them extraordinary..Thoroughly practical, day-to-day primer for achieving and maintaining their highest level of leadership, for today and for a lifetime The author's Harvard Business Review articles are among the most highly read in the magazine's history Written for all leaders who need to develop and renew their leadership skills Using a sports analogy, the author breaks the work of leaders into three parts: pregame: a matter of character; game day: a matter of competence; and postgame: a matter of consequence.
Teaming to Innovate
Amy C. Edmondson - 2013
(Put another way, teaming is to innovation what assembly lines are to car production.) This book brings together key insights on teaming, as they pertain to innovation. How do you build a culture of innovation? What does that culture look like? How does it evolve and grow? How are teams most effectively created and then nurtured in this context? What is a leader's role in this culture? This little book is a roadmap for teaming to innovate. We describe five necessary steps along that road: Aim High, Team Up, Fail Well, Learn Fast, and Repeat. This path is not smooth. To illustrate each critical step, we look at real-life scenarios that show how teaming to innovate provides the spark that can fertilize creativity, clarify goals, and redefine the meaning of leadership.
Transformational Leadership
Bernard M. Bass - 1997
It is a comprehensive review of theorizing and empirical research that can serve as a reference and starting point for additional research on the theory.It can be used as a supplementary textbook in an intense course on leadership - or as a primary text in a course or seminar focusing on transformational leadership.New in the Second Edition:New, updated examples of leadership have been included to help illustrate the concepts, as well as show the broad range of transformational leadership in a variety of settings. New chapters have been added focusing specifically on the measurement of transformational leadership and transformational leadership and effectiveness. The discussion of both predicators and effects of transformational leadership is greatly expanded. Much more emphasis is given to authentic vs. inauthentic transformational leadership. Suggestions are made for guiding the future of research and applications of transformational leadership. A greatly expanded reference list is included.
Get to Aha!: Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition
Andy Cunningham - 2017
Now she reveals the winning framework she uses to transform markets and industries.Get to Aha! shows how to establish the kind of foundation world-class brands are built on. Too many business leaders fail to ask the most basic questions about their company--Who are we? And why do we matter?--before they leap right into branding. Big mistake. A company must first know itself (establish its position) before it can express its identity (execute its branding).There are three types of companies in the world, each with its own DNA: Mothers are customer-oriented, Mechanics are product-oriented, and Missionaries are concept-oriented―and it's absolutely critical for business leaders to know which type their company is to create an authentic and ultimately "sticky" position in the market. A company's DNA is the key to achieving this and with it, a competitive advantage. Why? Because if a Mechanic creates a marketing campaign based on its belief that it is a Missionary, the underlying positioning will not ring true and the company won't gain a foothold in the market. But if a company positions itself in alignment with its DNA, it will resonate authentically and establish its role and relevance even in the face of a major competitor.Get to Aha! presents a clear step-by-step framework that will help you determine your company's precise position in the marketing landscape, using Andy's DNA-based methodology. It takes you through the process of performing "genetic testing" on your company, examining the market through the six Cs of positioning, and developing your positioning statement--a rational, factual statement about your company's role and relevance. Then and only then can you create a branding and marketing strategy that will build market momentum and crush the competition.Trust Andy. Steve Jobs did.
Why Did the Policeman Cross the Road?: How to Solve Problems Before They Arise
Stevyn Colgan - 2016
He’s one of the writers of the hugely successful BBC TV series QI andThe Museum of Curiosity. But, in a previous career, he spent 30 years as a police officer in London during which he became involved in a small but potent revolution. He and some of his colleagues realised that there was a smarter way to tackle crime and public concerns that didn’t always mean clogging the judicial system with copious arrests or flooding the streets with extra cops. This new style of intelligent problem-solving policing took the cleverest ideas from academic research, military strategy, business, marketing, public health and many other areas of work, mixed them all up with a good dollop of original thinking and solved problems that had previously been labelled as unsolvable.In this remarkable book, he tells the story of his work in Scotland Yard’s innovative Problem Solving Unit and how the team tackled some of London’s most persistent problems. Along the way, you’ll find out how dog shows stopped young men killing each other, how lollipops prevented night club closures, how wheelie bins worked in cahoots with burglars, and why celebrities should be covered in chewing gum. You’ll also discover how bird tables can prevent car crashes, how fake vomit can clean up the streets, and why sitting down in Japan may just result in a sore bottom.Why did the Policeman Cross the Road? is a celebration of original thinking, peppered with fascinating research and entertaining stories in the tradition of books such as Levitt and Dubner’s Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Leonard Mlodinow’s The Drunkard’s Walk.And it’s more than possible that the book contains some little tool or technique that could help you solve some of the problems in your own life.
New Ideas from Dead CEOs: Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office
Todd G. Buchholz - 2007
Why did Ray Kroc's plan for McDonald's thrive when many burger joints failed? And how, decades later, did Krispy Kreme fail to heed Kroc's hard-won lessons? How did Walt Disney's most dismal day as a young cartoonist radically change his career? When Estée Lauder was a child in Queens, New York, the average American spent $8 a year on toiletries. Why did she spot an opportunity in selling high-priced cosmetics, and why did she pound on Saks's doors? How did Thomas Watson Jr. decide to roll the dice and put all of IBM's chips on computing, when his father thought it could be a losing idea? We learn about these CEOs' greatest challenges and failures, and how they successfully rode the waves of demographic and technological change.New Ideas from Dead CEOs not only gives us fascinating insights into these CEOs' lives, but also shows how we can apply their ideas to the present-day triumphs and struggles of Sony, Dell, Costco, Carnival Cruises, Time Warner, and numerous other companies trying to figure out how to stay on top or climb back up.The featured CEOs in this book were not candidates for sainthood. Many of them knew "god" only as a prefix to "dammit." But they were devoted to their businesses, not just to their egos and their personal bank accounts and yachts. Extraordinarily fresh and deeply thoughtful, Todd G. Buchholz's New Ideas from Dead CEOs is a truly enjoyable and fun—yet serious and realistic—look at what we still have to learn and absorb from these decomposing CEOs.
Introduction to Business [With Booklet]
Jeff Madura - 1997
This text's applied approach addresses how and why a business operates. Students can then build upon their practical skills through examples, exercises and projects to help them gain a full understanding of how and why to develop a business plan. Each text is packaged with a Business Plan Booklet and CD-ROM, which are tied to end-of-part features, allowing students hands-on practice in creating a sound business plan. Through lively examples this text emphasizes key core skill areas including, Decision-Making and Planning, Teamwork, Technology, and Communication.
Management Wisdom of Lord Krishna: A Treatise on Unified Concept of Management Performance for the Globalised World
Udai Vir Singh - 2008
Hence, modern management minds have been looking for solutions beyond the reservoir of Western management thoughts and practices. They have examined and experimented with Japanese and Chinese systems of management. Of late, their focus has shifted to Indian philosophy to find solutions to re-occurring irritants in efficient management practices. As a step in this direction, Western management executives are being encouraged to put purpose before self during retraining sessions at institutions of management learning. Through Ved Vyasa's Bhagavad Gita, they are attempting to inspire themselves with the supremacy of action, learning to enrich matter with forces of spirit, realizing that the principle of karma has invaluable merits. The present work is a systematic presentation of the vital management contents as enshrined in Bhagavad Gita, the eternal Song of Wisdom. The book is a running treatise comprising principles, precepts, and practices employed by Lord Krishna to achieve his mission incarnate objectives, examining such qualities as: the dignity of work, commitment appreciations, strategic intervention, internal conflict --- management, and the management of uncertainties --- the skills of verbal and non-verbal communication, logic, and intellect --- the humility and ethicality of approach, respect for virtue and merit, skillful ego management, and total impartiality --- using energy as a management tool, the principle of causality, and the unified concept of management performance --- and much more
Force For Change: How Leadership Differs from Management
John P. Kotter - 1990
Kotter shows with compelling evidence what leadership really means today, why it is rarely associated with larger-than-life charismatics, precisely how it is different from management, and yet why both good leadership and management are essential for business success, especially for complex organizations operating in changing environments.The critics who despair of the coming of imaginative, charismatic leaders to replace the so-called manipulative caretakers of American corporations don't tell us much about what leadership actually is, or, for that matter, what management is either. Leadership, Kotter clearly demonstrates, is for the most part not a god-like figure transforming subordinates into superhumans, but is in fact a process that creates change -- a process which often involves hundreds or even thousands of "little acts of leadership" orchestrated by people who have the profound insight to realize this. Building on his landmark study of 15 successful general managers, Kotter presents detailed accounts of how senior and middle managers in major corporations, in close concert with colleagues and subordinates, were able to create a leadership process that put into action hundreds of commonsense ideas and procedures that, in combination with competent management, produced extraordinary results. This leadership turned NCR from a loser to a big winner in automated teller machines, despite intense competition from IBM. The same process at American Express and SAS helped businesses grow dramatically despite the fact that they were "mature" and "commodity-like." Kotter also shows how leadership turned around operations at P&G and Kodak; produced huge business successes at PepsiCo, ARCO, and ConAgra; and made the impossible occasionally happen at Digital. Thousands of companies today are overmanaged and underled, John Kotter concludes, not because managers lack charisma, but because far too few executives have a clear understanding of what leadership is and what it can accomplish. Without such a vision, even the most capable people have great difficulty trying to lead effectively and to create the cultures which will help others to lead.
37 Ways to BOOST Your Coaching Practice: PLUS: the 17 Lies That Hold Coaches Back and the Truth That Sets Them Free!
Steve Chandler - 2015
Remember what coaching's really about. It's about looking for ways to touch the soul, and having someone's life change. Coaching simply can't be sold like other things are sold. And that turns out to be good news. Once you begin practicing true connection, you become successful. In 37 Ways to BOOST Your Coaching Practice, Steve Chandler shows just what steps to take - and the 17 lies to avoid - to give your prospective clients a powerful experience of the work you do. Learn to fill your practice by moving beyond coaching-as-a-concept. Creating clients happens one coaching conversation at a time, one true connection at a time.
Everything I know about LEAN I learned in first grade
Robert O. Martichenko - 2008
This book connects Lean tools to the Lean journey, shows how to identify and eliminate waste, and aids the reader in seeing Lean for what it truly is: to create a learning and problem solving culture. Written to educate the entire organization on the fundamentals of Lean thinking, this is the perfect source to engage all team members at all levels of an organization.
Emotional Intelligence 2.0 [With Access Code]
Talentsmart
Travis Bradberry and Jean Greaves unveil TalentSmart's revolutionary program to help people identify their EQ skills, build these skills into strengths, and enjoy consistent performance in the pursuit of important life objectives.The book contains proven strategies from a decade-long effort to accurately measure and increase emotional intelligence. Trusted by upper-echelon leaders inside companies worldwide, these strategies will enable you to capitalize on the skills responsible for 58% of performance in all types of jobs.
Management/Mismanagement Styles
Ichak Kalderon Adizes - 2004
The first is titled The Ideal Executive: Why You Cannot Be One and What to Do About It. The third is Leading the Leaders: How to Enrich Your Style of Management and Handle People Whose Style is Different From Yours. Each book in this series can be read independently, but all together they provide a methodology on how to lead organizations as a team.The capabilities that textbooks and trade journals demand from a leader do not and cannot exist in any single individual because the task of leading an organization is far too complicated for any one individual to perform well. These books and journals describe what a leader should be because that is what the organization needs. They ignore, however, that being human, people have strengths and weaknesses. No one is perfect. Management / Mismanagement Styles analyzes why the ideal executive or leader cannot exist and thus does not exist. Attempts to train and develop the ideal leader, by definition, cannot produce expected results.This book helps managers identify the style of real people, not imaginary templates, and provides tools to build a team of people with complementary strengths and weaknesses, based on their different management styles.This book provides a methodology to classify styles identify their strengths and weaknesses, and predict how each style will make decisions, staff, motivate, and communicate; in a word, manage.Management / Mismanagement Styles is based on Dr. Adizes 30 years of consulting experience worldwide, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies. Dr. Adizes has also used the methodology described in this book in working with prime ministers, presidents and cabinets of governments around the world. His previous books have been translated into 26 languages and are best sellers in several countries.