Finance Basics explains the fundamentals simply and quickly, introducing you to key terms and concepts such as:• How to navigate financial statements• How to weigh costs and benefits• What’s involved in budgeting and forecasting• How to gauge a company’s financial healthDon't have much time? Get up to speed fast on the most essential business skills with HBR's 20-Minute Manager series. Whether you need a crash course or a brief refresher, each book in the series is a concise, practical primer that will help you brush up on a key management topic. Advice you can quickly read and apply, for ambitious professionals and aspiring executives—from the most trusted source in business. Also available as an ebook.

    Countless business authors and analysts have assured us that great leadership demands great character. Time and again, we’ve seen that truth play out, as once-thriving organizations falter and fail under the guidance of leaders behaving badly. Why, then, do so many executives remain skeptical about the true value of leadership character? A winning strategy and a sound business model are what really matter, they argue; character is just the icing on the cake.What’s been missing from this debate is hard evidence: data that shows not only that leadership character matters for organizational success, but how it matters; and concrete evidence that it leads to better business results. Now, in this groundbreaking book, respected leadership researcher, adviser, and author Fred Kiel offers that evidence—solid data that demonstrates the connection between character, leadership excellence, and organizational results.After seven years of rigorous research based on a landmark study of more than 100 CEOs and over 8,000 of their employees’ observations, Kiel’s findings show that leaders of strong character achieved up to five times the ROA for their organizations as did leaders of weak character.Return on Character goes on to reveal:• How leadership character is formed, how it creates value, and how that value spreads throughout the organization• How low-character leaders undermine the success of even the best business plans• How leaders at any level can develop the habits of strong character and “unlearn” the habits of poor characterThe book also provides a character-building methodology—step-by-step advice and techniques for assessing your own character habits and improving your performance and that of your organization.Return on Character provides the blueprint for building your own leadership character and creating a character-driven organization that achieves superior business results.

    It’s up to you to get people to work well together and produce results.Written by team expert Mary Shapiro, the HBR Guide to Leading Teams will help you avoid the pitfalls you’ve experienced in the past by focusing on the often-neglected people side of teams. With practical exercises, guidelines for structured team conversations, and step-by-step advice, this guide will help you:• Pick the right team members• Set clear, smart goals• Foster camaraderie and cooperation• Hold people accountable• Address and correct bad behavior• Keep your team focused and motivated

    We’ve combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you transition from being an outstanding individual contributor to becoming a great manager of others. This book will inspire you to: Develop your emotional intelligence Influence your colleagues through the science of persuasion Assess your team and enhance its performance Network effectively to achieve business goals and for personal advancement Navigate relationships with employees, bosses, and peers Get support from above View the big picture in your decision making Balance your team’s work and personal life in a high-intensity workplace This collection of articles includes “Becoming the Boss,” by Linda A. Hill; “Leading the Team You Inherit,” by Michael D. Watkins; “Saving Your Rookie Managers from Themselves,” by Carol A. Walker; “Managing the High-Intensity Workplace,” by Erin Reid and Lakshmi Ramarajan; “Harnessing the Science of Persuasion,” Robert B. Cialdini; “What Makes a Leader?” by Daniel Goleman; “The Authenticity Paradox,” by Herminia Ibarra; “Managing Your Boss,” by John J. Gabarro and John P. Kotter; “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” by Herminia Ibarra and Mark Lee Hunter; “Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?” by William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass; and BONUS ARTICLE: “How Managers Become Leaders,” by Michael D. Watkins.

    One person makes a demand, the other concedes a point. In the end, you settle on a subpar solution in the middle—if you come to any agreement at all.But these discussions don’t need to be win-or-lose situations. Written by negotiation expert Jeff Weiss, the HBR Guide to Negotiating provides a disciplined approach to finding a solution that works for everyone involved. Using a seven-part framework, this book delivers tips and advice to move you from a game of concessions and compromises to one of collaboration and creativity, resulting in better outcomes and better working relationships. You’ll learn how to:• Prepare for your conversation• Understand everyone’s interests• Craft the right message• Work with multiple parties• Disarm aggressive negotiators• Choose the best solution

    In this handy guidebook, the authors contend that you manage your boss for a very good reason: to do your best on the job—and thereby benefit not only yourself but also your supervisor and your entire company. Your boss depends on you for cooperation, reliability, and honesty. And you depend on him or her for links to the rest of the organization, for setting priorities, and for obtaining critical resources. By managing your boss—clarifying your own and your supervisor's strengths, weaknesses, goals, work styles, and needs—you cultivate a relationship based on mutual respect and understanding. The result? A healthy, productive bond that enables you both to excel. Gabarro and Kotter provide valuable guidelines for building this essential relationship—including strategies for determining how your boss prefers to process information and make decisions, tips for communicating mutual expectations, and tactics for negotiating priorities. Thought provoking and practical, Managing Your Boss enables you to lay the groundwork for one of the most crucial working relationships you'll have in your career.

    Leaders who understand what's going on around them see what they need to do to achieve the results they want. Bolman and Deal's influential four-frame model of leadership and organizations--developed in their bestselling book, Reframing Organizations: Artistry Choice and Leadership--offers leaders an accessible guide for understanding four major aspects of organizational life: structure, people, politics, and culture. Tapping into the complexity enables leaders to decode the messy world in which they live, see more options, tell better stories, and find strategies that are more effective. Case examples of leaders like Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Howard Schultz at Starbucks, Tony Hsieh at Zappos, Ursula Burns at Xerox, and the late Steve Jobs at Apple provide concrete lessons that readers can put to use in their own leadership. The book's lessons include:How to use structural tools to organize teams and organizations for better results How to build motivation and morale by aligning organizations and people How to map the terrain and build a power base to navigate the political dynamics in organizations How to develop a leadership story that shapes culture, provides direction, and inspires commitment to excellence

    One of a manager's toughest--and most important--responsibilities is to evaluate an employee's performance, providing honest feedback and clarifying what they've done well and where they need to improve. In How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, Dick Grote provides a concise, hands-on guide to succeeding at every step of the performance appraisal process--no matter what performance management system your organization uses. Through step-by-step instructions, examples, do-and-don't bullet lists, sample dialogues, and suggested scripts, he shows you how to handle every appraisal activity from setting goals and defining job responsibilities to evaluating performance quality and discussing the performance evaluation face-to-face. Based on decades of experience guiding managers through their biggest challenges, Grote helps answer the questions he hears most often: -How do I set goals effectively? How many goals should someone set?-How do I evaluate a person's behaviors? Which counts more, behaviors or results? -How do I determine the right performance appraisal rating? How do I explain my rating to a skeptical employee?-How do I tell someone she's not meeting my expectations? How do I deliver bad news? Grote also explains how to tackle other thorny performance management tasks, including determining compensation and terminating poor performers. In accessible and useful language, How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals will help you handle performance appraisals confidently and successfully, no matter the size or culture of your organization. It's the one book you need to excel at this daunting yet critical task.

    In this book she shows how to build a faithful following and beat the competition clamoring for people's attention by continually delivering value - when, where, and how people want it. People want to be heard, to be involved, to be entertained, to be adventurous, to be informed.Reveals the winning strategies for using social media to achieve dramatic results Shows how to gain influence with social media that requires an unprecedented (and potentially uncomfortable) level of accessibility and ongoing affinity Filled with illustrative examples of social media successes (including Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Shaquille O'Neal, and Nike) that show how humanizing a brand through social media leads to monetization Explores how Amy Jo Martin and other successful entrepreneurs are becoming renegades by using social media to innovate their personal and professional lives The book reveals one of the basic rules of digital media success: Humans connect with humans, not logos and creative taglines.

    Where so many companies encourage a dog eat dog mentality, the Kaplan Thaler Group has succeeded through chocolate and flowers. In The Power of Nice, through their own experiences and the stories of other people and businesses, they demonstrate why, contrary to conventional wisdom, nice people finish first.Turning the well-known adage of “Nice Guys Finish Last” on its ear, The Power of Nice shows that “nice” companies have lower employee turnover, lower recruitment costs, and higher productivity. Nice people live longer, are healthier, and make more money. In today’s interconnected world, companies and people with a reputation for cooperation and fair play forge the kind of relationships that lead to bigger and better opportunities, both in business and in life. Kaplan Thaler and Koval illustrate the surprising power of nice with an array of real-life examples from the business arena as well as from their personal lives. Most important, they present a plan of action covering everything from creating a positive impression to sweetening the pot to turning enemies into allies. Filled with inspiration and suggestions on how to supercharge your career and expand your reach in the workplace, The Power of Nice will transform how you live and work.

    But many managers can't read a balance sheet, wouldn't recognize a liquidity ratio, and don't know how to calculate return on investment. Worse, they don't have any idea where the numbers come from or how reliable they really are. In Financial Intelligence, Karen Berman and Joe Knight teach the basics of finance--but with a twist. Financial reporting, they argue, is as much art as science. Because nobody can quantify everything, accountants always rely on estimates, assumptions, and judgment calls. Savvy managers need to know how those sources of possible bias can affect the financials and that sometimes the numbers can be challenged. While providing the foundation for a deep understanding of the financial side of business, the book also arms managers with practical strategies for improving their companies' performance--strategies, such as "managing the balance sheet," that are well understood by financial professionals but rarely shared with their nonfinancial colleagues. Accessible, jargon-free, and filled with entertaining stories of real companies, Financial Intelligence gives nonfinancial managers the financial knowledge and confidence for their everyday work. Karen Berman and Joe Knight are the owners of the Los Angeles-based Business Literacy Institute and have trained tens of thousands of managers at many leading organizations. Co-author John Case has written several popular books on management.

    Whether you work at a Fortune 500 company, a nonprofit, or a mom-and-pop, everybody needs to think and act like an entrepreneur. We all need to be nimble, adaptive, daring -- and maybe even a little crazy -- or risk being left behind.But how do you take smart risks without risking it all? That's Linda Rottenberg's expertise. As the cofounder and CEO of Endeavor, the world's leading organization dedicated to supporting fast-growing entrepreneurs, she's spent the last two decades helping innovators think bold and execute smart.Now Rottenberg draws on her unrivaled experience to show you the proven techniques to achieve your dreams: from overcoming fear to facing down critics, from stalking supporters to exploiting chaos. Crazy is a Compliment combines inspiring stories, original research, and practical advice to create a road map for getting started and going bigger.Rottenberg brings to life iconic entrepreneurs like Walt Disney and Estée Lauder and reveals how companies like MTV, GE, and Burberry found their best successes by breaking the corporate mold and embracing the entrepreneur mind-set. She also introduces us to some of the one thousand entrepreneurs she's advised, like Leila Velez, who started a hair-care company in her kitchen sink in Rio that now earns $80 million a year. As Linda writes:Every day I meet people with a dream. Maybe you're serving coffee and fantasizing about launching a microbrewery; maybe you've skipped college and yearn to start your own design firm; maybe you're sitting in your cubicle and brainstorming a new idea that can improve your company.You have a dream, but you don't know how to turno your dream into reality. Or you've already launched your dream but you're unsure how to take it to the next level. This book can show you the way.

    A real life case study with sample project documents and diagrams is used to more practically explain these international tools, techniques, and lean principles to a broad range of practitioners, including: - Business analysts, systems analysts, developers and project managers - Entrepreneurs, product owners and product managers - Consultants, UX designers and marketing specialists - C-suite executives, investors and managers of companies of all sizes.

    And yet the day-to-day work of product management remains largely misunderstood. In theory, product management is about building products that people love. The real-world practice of product management is often about difficult conversations, practical compromises, and hard-won incremental gains.In this book, author Matt LeMay focuses on the CORE connective skills-- communication, organization, research, execution--that can build a successful product management practice across industries, organizations, teams, andtoolsets.For current and aspiring product managers, this book explores: ? On-the-ground tactics for facilitating collaboration and communication? How to talk to users and work with executives? The importance of setting clear and actionable goals? Using roadmaps to connect and align your team? A values-first approach to implementing Agile practices? Common behavioral traps that turn good product managers bad

    This enables you to scan, absorb, and share the management insights with others. A leader's singular job is to get results. But even with all the leadership training programs and "expert" advice available, effective leadership still eludes many people and organizations. One reason, says Daniel Goleman, is that such experts offer advice based on inference, experience, and instinct, not on quantitative data. Now, drawing on research of more than 3,000 executives, Goleman explores which precise leadership behaviors yield positive results. He outlines six distinct leadership styles, each one springing from different components of emotional intelligence. Each style has a distinct effect on the working atmosphere of a company, division, or team, and, in turn, on its financial performance. The styles, by name and brief description alone, will resonate with anyone who leads, is led, or, as is the case with most of us, does both. Coercive leaders demand immediate compliance. Authoritative leaders mobilize people toward a vision. Affiliative leaders create emotional bonds and harmony. Democratic leaders build consensus through participation. Pacesetting leaders expect excellence and self-direction. And coaching leaders develop people for the future. The research indicates that leaders who get the best results don't rely on just one leadership style; they use most of the styles in any given week. Goleman details the types of business situations each style is best suitedfor, and he explains how leaders who lack one or more of these styles can expand their repertories. He maintains that with practice leaders can switch among leadership styles to produce powerful results, thus turning the art of leadership into a science.