Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how--by saying less and asking more--you can develop coaching methods that produce great results. – Get straight to the point in any conversation with The Kickstart Question – Stay on track during any interaction with The Awe Question – Save hours of time for yourself with The Lazy Question – and hours of time for others with The Strategic Question – Get to the heart of any interpersonal or external challenge with The Focus Question – and The Foundation Question – Ensure others find your coaching as beneficial as you do with The Learning Question A fresh innovative take on the traditional how-to manual, the book combines insider information with research based in neuroscience and behavioural economics, together with interactive training tools to turn practical advice into practiced habits. Witty and conversational, The Coaching Habit takes your work--and your workplace--from good to great. "Coaching is an art and it's far easier said than done. It takes courage to ask a question rather than offer up advice, provide and answer, or unleash a solution. giving another person the opportunity to find their own way, make their own mistakes, and create their own wisdom is both brave and vulnerable. In this practical and inspiring book, Michael shares seven transformative questions that can make a difference in how we lead and support. And he guides us through the tricky part - how to take this new information and turn it into habits and a daily practice. --Brené Brown, author of Rising Strong and Daring Greatly

    Desire and motivation aren't enough: even when it's literally a matter of life or death, the ability to change remains maddeningly elusive.Given that the status quo is so potent, how can we change ourselves and our organizations?In Immunity to Change, authors Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey show how our individual beliefs--along with the collective mind-sets in our organizations--combine to create a natural but powerful immunity to change. By revealing how this mechanism holds us back, Kegan and Lahey give us the keys to unlock our potential and finally move forward. And by pinpointing and uprooting our own immunities to change, we can bring our organizations forward with us.This persuasive and practical book, filled with hands-on diagnostics and compelling case studies, delivers the tools you need to overcome the forces of inertia and transform your life and your work.

    The book emphasizes that we all contain the ingredients for leadership, though some elements are better developed than others. "Anyone can improve as a leader simply by building the strength of our weakest elements, " author Gerald M. Weinberg writes. "Mr. Universe doesn't have more muscles than I do, just better developed ones."On one level, the book is an extremely down-to-earth, how-to guide. On a second, it is a set of parables, full of analogies that stick in the mind -- the art of management taught through stories about pinball, tinkertoys, and electric blankets. On yet another level, this is a book about the philosophy and psychology of managing technical projects. On every level, the author brings these entertaining and enlightening elements together to teach you the essentials of leadership.You'll learn how to-- master your fear of becoming a leader-- be creative in solving problems-- motivate people while maintaining quality-- gain organizational power-- plan personal change.-- Whether you manage people, are managed by people, or just want to change the way you interact with others, this book is about success. How to plan it, how to make it happen -- Becoming a Technical Leader shows you how to do it!

    Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance.Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts.For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive:Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.Don't move on to your next project without consulting and using this readable, practical handbook. Each member of your team will be better prepared for the next deadline.

    Kanban leverages visual management techniques to involve stakeholders and to facilitate understanding of how the work works. Through limiting the amount of work in process, and by focusing on finishing that work as soon as possible, kanban helps you to adjust demand to capacity, to reduce lead times and to create a driver for continuous improvement.Kanban in Action is a down-to-earth, no-frills, get-to-know-the-ropes introduction to kanban. It's based on the real-world experience and observations from two kanban coaches who have introduced this process to dozens of teams. In this book, you'll discover basic but powerful techniques on how to visualize and track work, how to construct a kanban board, how to visualize queues and bottlenecks, and much much more. You'll learn the principles of why kanban works as well as nitty-gritty details like how to use different color stickies to help you organize and track your work items.

    Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.Eyal provides readers with:• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.• Actionable steps for building products people love.• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

    How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?   Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor. The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo.

    However well intentioned they may be, leaders who deceive themselves always end up undermining their own performance.This straightforward book explains how leaders can discover their own self-deceptions and learn how to escape destructive patterns. The authors demonstrate that breaking out of these patterns leads to improved teamwork, commitment, trust, communication, motivation, and leadership.

    As an agile coach, I've found the combination of straightforward advice and colorful anecdotes to be invaluable in guiding and focusing interactions with my teams. Jean's wealth of experience is conveyed in a carefully struck balance of reference guides and prose, facilitating just-in-time learning in the agile spirit. All in all, a superb resource for building stronger teams that's fit for agile veterans and neophytes alike." --Arlen Bankston, Lean Agile Practice Manager, CC Pace "If Agile is the new 'what, ' then surely Collaboration is the new 'how.' There are many things I really like about Jean's new book. Right at the top of the list is that I don't have to make lists of ideas for collaboration and facilitation anymore. Jean has it all. Not only does she have those great ideas for meetings, retrospectives, and team decision-making that I need to remember, but the startling new and thought-provoking ideas are there too. And the stories, the stories, the stories! The best way to transfer wisdom. Thanks, Jean!" --Linda Rising, Independent Consultant The Hands-On Guide to Effective Collaboration in Agile Projects To succeed, an agile project demands outstanding collaboration among all its stakeholders. But great collaboration doesn't happen by itself; it must be carefully planned and facilitated throughout the entire project lifecycle. Collaboration Explained is the first book to bring together proven, start-to-finish techniques for ensuring effective collaboration in any agile software project. Since the early days of the agile movement, Jean Tabaka has been studying and promoting collaboration in agile environments. Drawing on her unsurpassed experience, she offers clear guidelines and easy-to-use collaboration templates for every significant project event: from iteration and release planning, through project chartering, all the way through post-project retrospectives. Tabaka's hands-on techniques are applicable to every leading agile methodology, from Extreme Programming and Scrum to Crystal Clear. Above all, they are practical: grounded in a powerful understanding of the technical, business, and human challenges you face as a project manager or development team member. - Build collaborative software development cultures, leaders, and teams - Prepare yourself to collaborate--and prepare your team - Define clear roles for each participant in promoting collaboration - Set your collaborative agenda - Master tools for organizing collaboration more efficiently - Run effective collaborative meetings--including brainstorming sessions - Promote better small-group and pair-programming collaboration - Get better information, and use it to make better decisions - Use non-abusive conflict to drive positive outcomes - Collaborate to estimate projects and schedules more accurately - Strengthen collaboration across distributed, virtual teams - Extend collaboration from individual projects to the entire development organization

    That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.

    Cracking the PM Interview is a comprehensive book about landing a product management role in a startup or bigger tech company. Learn how the ambiguously-named "PM" (product manager / program manager) role varies across companies, what experience you need, how to make your existing experience translate, what a great PM resume and cover letter look like, and finally, how to master the interview: estimation questions, behavioral questions, case questions, product questions, technical questions, and the super important "pitch."

    Unfortunately, reliable guidance on Agile management has been scarce indeed. Now, leading Agile manager Jurgen Appelo fills that gap, introducing a realistic approach to leading, managing, and growing your Agile team or organization. Writing for current managers and developers moving into management, Appelo shares insights that are grounded in modern complex systems theory, reflecting the intense complexity of modern software development. Appelo's Management 3.0 model recognizes that today's organizations are living, networked systems; and that management is primarily about people and relationships. Management 3.0 doesn't offer mere checklists or prescriptions to follow slavishly; rather, it deepens your understanding of how organizations and Agile teams work and gives you tools to solve your own problems. Drawing on his extensive experience as an Agile manager, the author identifies the most important practices of Agile management and helps you improve each of them. Coverage includes - Getting beyond "Management 1.0" control and "Management 2.0" fads - Understanding how complexity affects your organization - Keeping your people active, creative, innovative, and motivated - Giving teams the care and authority they need to grow on their own - Defining boundaries so teams can succeed in alignment with business goals - Sowing the seeds for a culture of software craftsmanship - Crafting an organizational network that promotes success - Implementing continuous improvement that actually works Thoroughly pragmatic-and never trendy-Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0 helps you bring greater agility to any software organization, team, or project.

    "This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, you’re probably here because of some common challenges that all software companies have to face."

    But being a great ScrumMaster, one who truly embodies the principles of servant-leadership and helps move a team to the high performance levels possible with Scrum, is much harder and much more elusive. In his over ten years of coaching numerous Scrum teams, the highly-respected and experienced Scrum coach Geoff Watts has identified patterns that separate a good ScrumMaster from a great one. In this book, he not only illustrates these patterns through stories of his own experiences and those of the many Scrum teams he has encountered but offers practical guidance for you on your own path to greatness.In this book you will learn:The skills and characteristics of great ScrumMastersHow to generate, maintain and increase engagement from the teamHow to increase the effectiveness of the Scrum meetings, such as retrospectives and daily scrums.How to foster a more creative and collaborative teamHow to increase the performance of the teamHow to know when you are a successful ScrumMaster\Scrum Mastery is for practicing ScrumMasters who want to develop themselves into a great servant-leader capable of taking their teams beyond simple process compliance.Comments on the bookMike Cohn, in his foreword for the book, said:"Most books rehash well-trod territory and I don’t finish them any wiser. I am positive I will be referring back to this book for many years" Roman Pichler, author of Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products That Customers Love said:"I am thoroughly impressed with how comprehensive and well-written the book is. It will be indispensable for many people"Jean Tabaka, Agile Fellow, Rally Software:"Geoff brings us a personal and inspired peak into what truly moves us from good to great: great in how we serve; great in how we lead; great in how we create mastery in our teams and organizations; and, great in how we recognize the impediments to our own growth to greatness. Scrum mastery is a skill that can be honed and Geoff gives us rich tools to sharpen our craft."

     They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.