Extreme market volatility, pandemics, industry change, supply-chain disruption. The list of potential threats and strategic challenges seems to be growing exponentially. At the same time, the laborious processes used by many firms to develop a workable strategy often feel overly bureaucratic and behind the curve. There is no question that strategic decision-making has become more challenging and complex. In fact, many companies seem to have given up on strategy altogether. In Better, Simpler Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee provides executives with a simple tool to cut through technological complexity and market uncertainties. The Value Stick, based on proven economic mechanics, is an extraordinarily powerful tool that helps executives decide where to focus their attention and how to deepen their firm's competitive advantage. How does the Value Stick work? It provides a way of measuring two fundamental forces that lead to value creation and capture-the customer's willingness to pay and the employee's willingness to sell their services to the firm. For example, increasing product quality increases a customer's willingness to pay. And firms can redesign work processes or conditions or integrate other benefits (besides income) to lower employees' willingness to sell their services to firms and still retain them. With many examples across industries (based on Harvard Business School case studies), Oberholzer-Gee shows these value dynamics in action and explains how looking at and adjusting these measures using one tool, the Value Stick, enables firms to gauge and improve their strategies and operations. Based on the author's successful strategy course, Better, Simpler Strategy will become every business strategist's must-have guide for making better strategic decisions and gaining competitive advantage"--

    "The Powell Principles " outlines the decision-making habits, success strategies, and leadership philosophies of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and provides fascinating examples of how Powell has used them to overcome numerous obstacles in his climb to the top. Filled with insights that are refreshingly honest, this concise, powerful book reveals how you can dramatically improve your leadership skills and achieve unmatched levels of professional success, while inspiring others to extraordinary performance.

    Most leaders need reminding everyday that with their privileges comes responsibility and obligation. If any young man or woman seeking to become a leader and not a manager only reads one book on leadership, let it be this one!

    Providing strategies and solutions for the managers of today, this book offers answers for improving employee commitment and profitability by strategically acknowledging employee effort. How is it done? The deceptively simply answer: with carrots.

     Share before you’re ready. Get more agreements. Have difficult conversations. These are a few of the practical but profound ideas Lessonly CEO Max Yoder shares in Do Better Work. No matter your rank or role, if you want to see more understanding, accountability, and progress on your team, these stories and examples are for you. Praise for Do Better Work: “Devastatingly effective, and a must-read for business leaders with a soul. Do Better Work is the modern manual for how to align company success and personal growth.” Jay Baer, New York Times bestselling author of Youtility and co-author of Talk Triggers “The best books pop lightbulbs over our heads that feel so obvious we wonder why we didn't realize them all along. This book does that. An essential read for any 21st-century leader." Coco Brown, CEO and founder of The Athena Alliance “Our world needs a style of leadership that puts people at the center, and I can think of no better guide than the lessons contained in this book.” Scott Dorsey, former CEO of ExactTarget/Salesforce Marketing Cloud “Practical advice with a soul and a deep understanding of how humans connect and work together.” Nataly Kogan, founder of Happier @ Work and author of Happier Now

    "Social Media Explained" explores the fundamental strategies and answers the biggest questions every business professional needs to answer before diving into a social media initiative! The is the must-have guide for understanding the sociological and psychological drivers that make social media marketing work.

    Today's professionals feel rushed, overwhelmed, and perennially behind. So we keep our heads down, focused on the next thing, and the next, without a moment to breathe.How can we break out of this endless cycle and create the kind of interesting, meaningful lives we all seek?Just as CEOs who optimize for quarterly profits often fail to make the strategic investments necessary for long-term growth, the same is true in our own personal and professional lives. We need to reorient ourselves to see the big picture so we can tap into the power of small changes that, made today, will have an enormous and disproportionate impact on our future success. We need to start playing The Long Game.As top business thinker and Duke University professor Dorie Clark explains, we all know intellectually that lasting success takes persistence and effort. And yet so much of the relentless pressure in our culture pushes us toward doing what's easy, what's guaranteed, or what looks glamorous in the moment. In The Long Game, she argues for a different path. It's about doing small things over time to achieve our goals—and being willing to keep at them, even when they seem pointless, boring, or hard.In The Long Game, Clark shares unique principles and frameworks you can apply to your specific situation, as well as vivid stories from her own career and other professionals' experiences. Everyone is allotted the same twenty-four hours—but with the right strategies, you can leverage those hours in more efficient and powerful ways than you ever imagined. It's never an overnight process, but the long-term payoff is immense: to finally break out of the frenetic day-to-day routine and transform your life and your career.

    The only classroom-based integrated study system for professional certification gives you complete coverage of all objectives for the PMP exam, hundreds of practice exam questions, and hands-on exercises. The CD-ROM features full practice exam software with interactive tutorials and lab simulations, plus an adaptive test engine.

    Written by two leading OKRs consultants and researchers, this book provides a one-stop resource for organizations looking to quantify qualitative goals and ensure each team focuses their efforts to make measureable progress on their most important goals. You'll learn how OKRs came to be and how leading companies use them every day to help teams and employees stretch their thinking about what's possible, build their goal-setting muscles and achieve results that reflect their full potential. From the basic framework to a detailed dissection of best practices, this informative guide walks you through real-world implementations to help you get the most out of OKRs.OKRs help employees work together, focus effort, and drive the organization forward. Key results are used to define what it means to achieve broad, qualitative goals, and imperatives like 'do it better' are transformed into clear, measureable markers. From the framework's inception in the 1980s to its popularity in today's hyper-competitive environment, OKRs make work more engaging and feature frequent feedback cycles that enable workers to see the progress they make at work each and every day. This book shows you everything you need to know to implement OKRs effectively. Understand the basics of OKRs and their day-to-day use Learn how to gain the executive support critical to a successful implementation Maintain an effective program with key assessment tips Tailor the OKRs framework to your organization's needs"OKRs Step-by-Step" is your key resource for designing, planning, implementing, and maintaining your OKRs program for sustainable company-wide success.

    Marshaling evidence from two decades of field research, scholars and consultants Monica Worline and Jane Dutton show that alleviating such suffering confers measurable competitive advantages in areas like innovation, collaboration, service quality, and talent attraction and retention. They outline four steps for meeting suffering with compassion and show how to build a capacity for compassion into the structures and practices of an organization--because ultimately, as they write, "Compassion is an irreplaceable dimension of excellence for any organization that wants to make the most of its human capabilities."

    It’s helpful for learning Agile and Scrum, and also for a basic preparation for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master level 1). It can also act as a simple reference for Scrum practitioners.

    This new edition of a perennial bestseller boasts new and exciting tips, tricks, and methods that strike a perfect balance between current technology and common sense solutions for getting things done. Exploring the many ways technology has changed since the previous edition, this new edition has been updated to reflect the latest and greatest in technological and personal productivity.The new "hacks" run the gamut of working with the latest Windows and Mac operating systems for both Windows and Apple, getting more done with smartphones and their operating systems, and dealing with the evolution of the web. Even the most tried-and-true hacks have been updated to reflect the contemporary tech world and the tools it provides us.Technology is supposed to make our lives easier by helping us work more efficiently. Lifehacker: The Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, and Better, Third Edition is your guide to making that happen!

    While the primary audience for this work is the individual preparing to sit for the Six Sigma Black Belt certification examination, a secondary audience for the handbook is the quality and Six Sigma professional who would like a relevant Six Sigma reference book. With this audience in mind, the authors have greatly expanded the appendices section to include: * The 2001 Body of Knowledge, so that readers can compare changes and perhaps offer recommendations to future bodies of knowledge * Statistical tables completely redeveloped using a combination of Microsoft Excel and Minitab 15 * A table for control constants expanded to now include virtually all control constants * Tables for both cumulative and non-cumulative forms of the most useful distributions, including binomial, Poisson, and normal * Additional alpha values in tables * An expanded glossary, with more terms relating to lean * A second glossary of the most common Japanese terms used by quality and Six Sigma professionals

    But we rarely stop to think about how much impact they have on our well-being and our ability to thrive. This book shows how Appreciative Inquiry (AI) - one of the most widely used new approaches for fostering positive change for individuals, groups, organizations, and communities - can help everyone communicate better and flourish in all areas of their lives. Stavros and Torres spell out 2 practices and 5 principles to create great conversations. Each chapter is built around real-life stories of people using AI practices and principles to transform their conversations and their organizations.

    From leaders of countries to leaders of companies to people just starting out in their career, Becker and Wortmann teach techniques that start with the essential wisdom of Aristotle and include the best practices in today's global organizations.The book includes interviews with leaders who reveal the inside story of the communication secrets at:The White House Doris Kearns Goodwin, presidential historian and Pulitzer Prize winning authorGoogle Laszlo Bock, Vice President, People OperationsEMI Publishing Big Jon Platt, PresidentIBM Jeanatte Horan, Vice President of Enterprise Business TransformationHarvard Business School Tony Mayo, Director of the Leadership InitiativeThe New York Giants Peter John-Baptiste, Director of Public RelationsMastering Communication at Work provides clear, actionable advice you can put to use right away and simple drills to practice during your next meeting, one-on-one conversation--or even sitting at your desk.Use Mastering Communication at Work as your coach and you'll see immediate results in yourself, your people, and your organization.