Reach back into your childhood and recapture the leadership principles you learned from your favorite toys.What can LEGOS teach you about building your business through connection? How can Slinky Dog demonstrate the value of patience when you're growing your organization? What has every little boy learned from his Little Green Army Men that he can use in business strategy? Whether you are an executive, a manager, or a parent, in Toy Box Leadership you will find the toy box a great place for lessons to successfully influence and lead others.

    This book helps supervisors and managers effectively communicate appreciation and encouragement to their employees, resulting in higher levels of job satisfaction, healthier relationships between managers and employees, and decreased cases of burnout. Ideal for both the profit and non-profit sectors, the principles presented in this book have a proven history of success in businesses, schools, medical offices, churches, and industry. Each book contains an access code for the reader to take a comprehensive online MBA Inventory (Motivating By Appreciation) - a $20 value.The inventory is designed to provide a clearer picture of an individual's primary language of appreciation and motivation as experienced in a work-related setting. It identifies individuals' preference in the languages of appreciation. Understanding an individual's primary and secondary languages of appreciation can assist managers and supervisors in communicating effectively to their team members.

    With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work.Meng’s job is to teach Google’s best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond; now, readers everywhere can get insider access to one of the most sought after classes in the country, a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.With forewords by Daniel Goleman, author of the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned mindfulness expert and author of Coming To Our Senses, Meng’s Search Inside Yourself is an invaluable guide to achieving your own best potential.

    Ask for a pay rise? Pushy.Take credit for an idea? Arrogant.Admit a mistake? Weak.Successfully juggle work and family? Unpromotable.In How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men's Feelings, Sarah Cooper, author of the bestselling 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, illustrates how women can achieve their dreams, succeed in their careers and become leaders, without harming the fragile male ego.This wickedly funny tongue-in-cheek guide includes chapters on ‘How to Ace Your Job Interview Without Over-acing It’, ‘9 Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women’, and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure: Do You Want to Be Likeable or Successful?’. It even includes several pages to doodle on while men finish explaining things.When all else fails, there is a set of cut-outable moustaches inside to allow women to seem more man-like, which will probably lead to a quick promotion!PRAISE FOR 100 TRICKS TO APPEAR SMART IN MEETINGS:'A lot of fun and absolutely on the money' Daily Telegraph, Book of the Year'Even though it's mostly a comedy book, I can't help but think how legitmately useful I would have found this in my early twenties' The Pool'Sarah Cooper is uncannily spot on when describing the seemingly innocent behaviours of people attempting to impress others' Christine Tsai, Founding Partner, 500 STARTUPS

    A manager spots consumer-spending patterns no one else sees and defines new market categories your enterprise can serve. A strategist anticipates global changes and correctly interprets their business implications. Companies' competitiveness, even survival, increasingly hinge on such "clever people." But the truth is, clever people are as fiercely independent as they are clever-they don't want to be led. So how do you corral these players in your organization and inspire them to achieve their highest potential? In Clever, Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones offer potent insights drawn from their extensive research. The authors explain how to: • Identify your clever people and their motivations • Shelter your "clevers" from political distractions that can inhibit their productivity • Help clevers generate even more value by creating clever teams • Manage the unique tensions that can arise when clevers work together Leading clever people can be enormously challenging, yet doing so effectively is the key to your organization's sustained success. Lively and engaging, this book provides the ideas, practices, and examples you need to create an environment where your most brilliant people can flourish.

    Career paths look nothing like they did in the days before phones got smart. We work more hours at more jobs for more years than ever before. So it's vital that we know how to find work that allows us to remain true to who we are in the deepest sense, work that connects us to something larger than ourselves in short, our calling. We all have one, and bestselling authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro can help you uncover yours. Through a unique Calling Card exercise that features a guided exploration of fifty-two natural preferences (such as Advancing Ideas, Doing the Numbers, Building Relationships, and Performing Events), Leider and Shapiro give us a new way to uncover our gifts, passions, and values and find work that expresses them. Along the way, they mix in dozens of inspiring true stories about people who have found, or are in the process of finding, their own callings. Uncovering your calling enables you to experience fulfillment in all aspects and phases of your life. And here's the even better news: you'll never have to work again. When you choose to do what you are called to do, you're always doing what you want to do. Work Reimagined offers an enlightening, effective, and entertaining approach to discovering what you were born to do, no matter your age or stage of life."

    Blending theory with practice, this book provides applied advice.

    There are no magic formulas, shortcuts, or secret sauce. The 7-rules, or 3 steps, or 12 laws that promise to change your life - they won’t help, unless you do the work. You will learn from many, yet the most important steps, you need to take on your own. Over the course of your adult life it is always you, who has the most power. You will not always be in control and nobody is. But you can choose to maximize your effect on this planet, on your loved ones and on your personal fulfillment by building an Excellence Habit. The Excellence Habit also examines the distinction between success and excellence. Success is achieving high goals. Excellence is doing the right thing, even when not driving towards any goal. It is a small mindset shift, which will produce big results. Excellence can and will lead to success. Success, on the other hand, can be the biggest enemy of excellence. More often than not success is measured in social influence, recognition and wealth. For those practicing it faithfully - excellence is its own biggest reward.

    But a few years ago, he realized that while some of the habits he outlined in What Got You Here apply to both men and women, women face specific, and different, challenges as they seek to advance in their careers.So he partnered with his longtime colleague, women’s leadership expert Sally Helgesen, to create this invaluable handbook for women trying to take the next step in their careers. They realized that for women in particular, the very skills and habits that made them successful early in their careers could actually be holding them back as they advance to the next stage of their working lives. Women in particular struggle with habits like:1. Reluctance to Claim Your Achievements2. Expecting Others to Spontaneously Notice and Reward Your Hard Work3. Overvaluing Expertise4. Building Rather than Leveraging Relationships5. Failing to Enlist Allies from Day One6. Putting Your Job Before Your Career7. The Disease to Please8. The Perfection Trap9. Minimizing10. Too Much11. Ruminating12. Letting Your Radar Distract YouLike the original What Got You Here, this new book will help women identify specific behaviors that keep them from realizing their full potential, no matter what stage they are in their career. It will also help them identify why what worked for them in the past will not necessarily get them where they want to go in the future–and how to finally shed those behaviors so they can advance to the next level, whatever that may be.

    Tragically, these teams often devolve into wheel-spinning, contentious assemblies that get nothing done.  Or members may disengage from a team if they find its work frustrating, trivial, or a waste of their time.  Even teams with a spirit of camaraderie may take actions that are flat-out wrong. But there is also good news. This book draws on recent research findings as well as Harvard Professor Richard Hackman’s own experience as an intelligence community researcher and advisor to show how leaders can create an environment where teamwork flourishes.  Hackman identifies six enabling conditions – such as establishing clear norms of conduct and providing well-timed team coaching – that increase the likelihood that teams will be effective in any setting or type of organization.. Although written explicitly for intelligence, defense, crisis management, and law enforcement professionals it will also be valuable for improving team success in all kinds of leadership, management, service, and production teams in business, government, and nonprofit enterprises.

    Not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. You're well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware--our own brains? Learning new skills and new technology is critical to your career, and it's all in your head. In this book by Andy Hunt, you'll learn how our brains are wired, and how to take advantage of your brain's architecture. You'll learn new tricks and tips to learn more, faster, and retain more of what you learn. You need a pragmatic approach to thinking and learning. You need to Refactor Your Wetware. Programmers have to learn constantly; not just the stereotypical new technologies, but also the problem domain of the application, the whims of the user community, the quirks of your teammates, the shifting sands of the industry, and the evolving characteristics of the project itself as it is built. We'll journey together through bits of cognitive and neuroscience, learning and behavioral theory. You'll see some surprising aspects of how our brains work, and how you can take advantage of the system to improve your own learning and thinking skills.In this book you'll learn how to:Use the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to become more expertLeverage the architecture of the brain to strengthen different thinking modesAvoid common "known bugs" in your mindLearn more deliberately and more effectivelyManage knowledge more efficientlyPrinted in full color.

    Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

    Drawing on her years of experience as a relationship coach and a teamwork consultant to Fortune 500 companies, Susan Campbell shows readers how to drastically improve the quality of their everyday interations by relying on a simple, straight-forward approach to communication and letting go of their need to control the outcome. Practical techniques for dropping one's defenses are offered, as well as a fresh new perspective on using intimate relationships as a form of spiritual practice. Other useful tools include seven statements designed to bring the reader's awareness into the present moment, as well as handy communication-enhancing phrases and Campbell's insights on the most commonly encountered problems.

    With a vivid, humorous, and too familiar scenario they show a manager loaded down by all the monkeys that have jumped from their rightful owners onto his back. Then step by step they show how managers can free themselves from doing everyone else's job and ensure that every problem is handled by the proper staff person. By using Oncken's Four Rules of Monkey Management managers will learn to become effective supervisors of time, energy, and talent -- especially their own.If you have ever wondered why you are in the office on the weekends and your staff is on the golf course, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey is for you. It's priceless!

    Beyond their bestselling books, you know them from commentary and features in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, Wired, New York, and more. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are filled with demands to read their reporting (such as "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," "Creativity Crisis," and "Losing Is Good for You"). In Top Dog, Bronson and Merryman again use their astonishing blend of science and storytelling to reveal what's truly in the heart of a champion. The joy of victory and the character-building agony of defeat. Testosterone and the neuroscience of mistakes. Why rivals motivate. How home field advantage gets you a raise. What teamwork really requires. It's baseball, the SAT, sales contests, and Linux. How before da Vinci and FedEx were innovators, first, they were great competitors. Olympians carry Top Dog in their gym bags. It's in briefcases of Wall Street traders and Madison Avenue madmen. Risk takers from Silicon Valley to Vegas race to implement its ideas, as educators debate it in halls of academia. Now see for yourself what this game-changing talk is all about.