Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences


Nancy Duarte - 2010
    So why then do so many audiences leave feeling like they've wasted their time? All too often, presentations don't resonate with the audience and move them to transformative action.Just as the author's first book helped presenters become visual communicators, Resonate helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action. The author's approach is simple: building a presentation today is a bit like writing a documentary. Using this approach, you'll convey your content with passion, persuasion, and impact.Author has a proven track record, including having created the slides in Al Gore's Oscar-winning An Inconvenient TruthFocuses on content development methodologies that are not only fundamental but will move people to action Upends the usual paradigm by making the audience the hero and the presenter the mentor Shows how to use story techniques of conflict and resolution Presentations don't have to be boring ordeals. You can make them fun, exciting, and full of meaning. Leave your audiences energized and ready to take action with Resonate.

How to Improve Your Leadership and Management Skills - Effective Strategies for Business Managers


Meir Liraz - 2013
    It points out that you must be a leader that people follow, keep informed, make timely decisions and take effective action. In effect you must control the activities of your organization rather than being controlled by them. Here's what’s in the book: * How to lead and manage people; powerful tips and strategies to motivate and inspire your people to bring out the best in them. Be the boss people want to give 200 percent for. * How to Make a Good First Impression * How to Motivate Your Employees in the Workplace * How to Manage Change Effectively * How to Deal With Difficult Employees * Effective Business Negotiation Techniques * How To Set and Achieve Goals * Effective Delegating Strategies * How To Ensure the Profitability of Your Business * How to Create a Business Environment that Supports Growth * All these and much much more. My name is Meir Liraz and I'm the author of this book. According to Dun & Bradstreet, 90% of all business failures analyzed can be traced to poor management. This is backed up by my own experience. In my 31 years as a business coach and consultant to managers, I've seen practically dozens of managers fail and lose their job -- not because they weren't talented or smart enough -- but because they were trying to re-invent the wheel rather than rely on proven, tested methods that work. And that is where this book can help, it will teach you how to avoid the common traps and mistakes and do everything right the first time. Table of Contents 1. How to Lead and Manage People 2. How to Make a Good First Impression 3. How to Motivate Employees in the Workplace 4. How to Manage Change Effectively 5. How to Deal With Difficult Employees 6. Effective Business Negotiation Techniques 7. How To Set and Achieve Goals 8. Effective Delegating Strategies 9. How To Ensure the Profitability of Your Business 10. How to Create a Business Environment that Supports Growth Tags: leadership development, student leadership challenge, business leadership, leadership development program, leadership dynamics, management skills and application, developing management skills.

Tribal Leadership: Leveraging Natural Groups to Build a Thriving Organization


Dave Logan - 2008
    I learned about myself and learned lessons I will carry with me and reflect on for the rest of my life.”—John W. Fanning, Founding Chairman and CEO napster Inc.“An unusually nuanced view of high-performance cultures.” —Inc.Within each corporation are anywhere from a few to hundreds of separate tribes. In Tribal Leadership, Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright demonstrate how these tribes develop—and show you how to assess them and lead them to maximize productivity and growth. A business management book like no other, Tribal Leadership is an essential tool to help managers and business leaders take better control of their organizations by utilizing the unique characteristics of the tribes that exist within.

Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters


Ryan Singer - 2019
    "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."

Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works


Ash Maurya - 2012
    We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

The HR Answer Book: An Indispensable Guide for Managers and Human Resources Professionals


Shawn Smith - 2004
    Accessible and concise, this on-the-job companion offers expert guidance on all types of ""people"" issues, enabling managers and human resources professionals to:* Save time, money, and trouble* Increase employee productivity, satisfaction, and retention* Attract and hire the best candidates while avoiding the inferior ones** Handle tough issues like sexual harassment, Internet and e-mail usage, performance problems, and more -- fairly, sensitively, and legally.The HR Answer Book is an easy-to-use problem solver that can be read cover-to-cover or as a quick reference in specific situations. An appendix of tools, templates, and lists of additional resources completes this excellent and valuable guide."

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything


Kerry Patterson - 2007
    You'll be taught each and every step of the influence process-including robust strategies for making change inevitable in your personal life, your business, and your world. You'll learn how to:- Identify a handful of high-leverage behaviors that lead to rapid and profound change.- Apply strategies for changing both thoughts and actions.- Marshall six sources of influence to make change inevitable.Influencer takes you on a fascinating journey from San Francisco to Thailand where you'll see how seemingly “insignificant” people are making incredibly significant improvements in solving problems others would think impossible. You'll learn how savvy folks make change not only achievable and sustainable, but inevitable. You'll discover why some managers have increased productivity repeatedly and significantly-while others have failed miserably.

The Ten Faces of Innovation: IDEO's Strategies for Defeating the Devil's Advocate and Driving Creativity Throughout Your Organization


Tom Kelley - 2005
     The role of the devil's advocate is nearly universal in business today. It allows individuals to step outside themselves and raise questions and concerns that effectively kill new projects and ideas, while claiming no personal responsibility. Nothing is more potent in stifling innovation. Drawing on nearly 20 years of experience managing IDEO, Kelley identifies ten roles people can play in an organization to foster innovation and new ideas while offering an effective counter to naysayers. Among these approaches are the Anthropologist—the person who goes into the field to see how customers use and respond to products, to come up with new innovations; the Cross-pollinator who mixes and matches ideas, people, and technology to create new ideas that can drive growth; and the Hurdler, who instantly looks for ways to overcome the limits and challenges to any situation. Filled with engaging stories of how companies like Kraft, Procter and Gamble, Cargill and Samsung have incorporated IDEO's thinking to transform the customer experience, THE TEN FACES OF INNOVATION is an extraordinary guide to nurturing and sustaining a culture of continuous innovation and renewal.

The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization


Peter M. Senge - 1990
    As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire. The updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will:• Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them• Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity• Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets• Teach you to see the forest and the trees• End the struggle between work and personal time

One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value


Marc Effron - 2010
    You also know what it takes to build that talent—and you spend significant financial and human resources to make it happen. Yet somehow, your company’s beautifully designed and well-benchmarked processes don’t translate into the bottom-line talent depth you need. Why?Talent management experts Marc Effron and Miriam Ort argue that companies unwittingly add layers of complexity to their talent building models—without evaluating whether those components add any value to the overall process. Consequently, simple processes like setting employee performance goals become multi-page, headache-inducing time-wasters that turn managers off to the whole process and fail to improve results.In this revolutionary book, Effron and Ort introduce One Page Talent Management (OPTM): a powerfully simple approach that significantly accelerates a company’s ability to develop better leaders faster. The authors outline a straightforward, easy-to-use process for designing results-oriented OPTM processes: base every process on proven scientific research; eliminate complexity by including only those components that add real value to the process; and build transparency and accountability into every practice.Based on extensive research and the authors’ hands-on corporate and consulting experience with companies including Avon Products, Bank of America, and Philips, One Page Talent Management shows how to:• Quickly identify high potential talent without complex assessments• Increase the number of “ready now” successors for key roles• Generate 360 feedback that accelerates change in the most critical behaviors• Significantly reduce the time required for managers to implement talent processes• Enforce accountability for growing talent through corporate culture, compensation, etc.A radical new approach to growing talent, One Page Talent Management trades complexity and bureaucracy for simplicity and a relentless focus on adding value to create the high-quality talent you need—right now.

Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders


Jurgen Appelo - 2010
    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.

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great


Esther Derby - 2006
    The tools and recipes in this book will help you uncover and solve hidden (and not-so-hidden) problems with your technology, your methodology, and those difficult "people" issues on your team.Project retrospectives help teams examine what went right and what went wrong on a project. But traditionally, retrospectives (also known as "post-mortems") are only helpful at the end of the project--too late to help. You need agile retrospectives that are iterative and incremental. You need to accurately find and fix problems to help the team today.Now, Derby and Larsen show you the tools, tricks, and tips you need to fix the problems you face on a software development project on an on-going basis. You'll see how to architect retrospectives in general, how to design them specifically for your team and organization, how to run them effectively, how to make the needed changes, and how to scale these techniques up. You'll learn how to deal with problems, and implement solutions effectively throughout the project--not just at the end.With regular tune-ups, your team will hum like a precise, world-class orchestra.ContentsForwardPrefaceIntroduction1. Helping your team inspect and adapt2. A retrospective custom-fit for your team3. Leading retrospectives4. Activities to set the stage5. Activities to gather data6. Activities to gather insights7. Activities to decide what to do8. Activities to close the retrospective9. Releases and project retrospectives10. Make it soA1. Facilitation suppliesA2. Debriefing activitiesA3. Activities quick reference matrixA4. Resources for learning facilitation skillsA5. Bibliography

No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results


Cy Wakeman - 2017
    Those beliefs have inspired expensive attempts to shield employees from change, involve them in high-level decision-making, and keep them happy with endless “satisfaction surveys” and workplace perks. But what these engagement programs actually do, Cy Wakeman says, is inflate expectations and sow unhappiness, leaving employees unprepared to adapt to even minor changes necessary to the organization’s survival. Rather than driving performance and creating efficiencies, these programs fuel entitlement and drama, costing millions in time and profit.It is high time to reinvent leadership thinking. Stop worrying about your employees’ happiness, and start worrying about their accountability. Cy Wakeman teaches you how to hire “emotionally inexpensive” people, solicit only the opinions you need, and promote self-awareness in your whole team. No Ego disposes with unproven HR maxims, and instead offers a complete plan to turn your office from a den of discontent to a happy, productive place.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't


James C. Collins - 2001
    The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.The ChallengeBuilt to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The StudyFor years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?The StandardsUsing tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The ComparisonsThe research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? The FindingsThe findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life)


Cathie Black - 2007
    She was a pioneer in advertising sales at a time when women didn’t sell; served as president and publisher of the fledgling USA Today; and, in her current position as the president of Hearst Magazines, persuaded Oprah to launch a magazine. In 2006 she was named one of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” for the seventh consecutive year. Now, in the exuberant, down-to-earth voice that is her trademark, Cathie explains how she achieved “the 360° life”—a blend of professional accomplishment and personal contentment—and how any woman can seize opportunity in the workplace.No matter where you are in your career, Basic Black offers invaluable lessons that will help you land the job, promotion, or project you’re vying for. At the core of the book are Cathie’s candid, personal stories. She walks us through her decision to risk dropping a huge ad agency that handled the USA Today campaign in favor of a small boutique agency run by a wild man. (It was a smash.) She admits that her sometimes brusque style once led to a mutiny of staffers at Ms. (She learned to be more flexible in her managerial style.) She offers a clear-eyed look at what happened during the twenty-eight months between the launch and the close of the much-buzzed-about Talk magazine. And throughout, she offers fascinating glimpses of media and business personalities, such as Rupert Murdoch, Tina Brown, Frank Bennack, Vic Ganzi, former CosmoGirl! editor Atoosa Rubenstein, Bonnie Fuller, and the legendarily difficult Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today.Above all, Basic Black is motivating. It provides a close-up look at the keen judgment, perseverance, and optimism that have propelled Cathie Black to the top of her game, along with the kind of straight-up practical advice you get in a one-on-one session with a career coach. You’ll find out how to handle job interviews, which rules to break, and why you should make your life a grudge-free zone. Equally important, you’ll be inspired to pursue your passions and achieve your very best.