Dealing with Difficult Teachers


Todd Whitaker - 1999
    .This book provides tips and strategies to help school leaders improve, neutralize, or eliminate resistant and negative teachers. 1999.

Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and Superior Results


Mike Rother - 2009
    Womack, Chairman and Founder, Lean Enterprise Institute. This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain of Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines--called kata--that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation. The book also reaches beyond Toyota to explain issues of human behavior in organizations and provide specific answers to questions such as: How can we make improvement and adaptation part of everyday work throughout the organization? How can we develop and utilize the capability of everyone in the organization to repeatedly work toward and achieve new levels of performance? How can we give an organization the power to handle dynamic, unpredictable situations and keep satisfying customers? Mike Rother explains how to improve our prevailing management approach through the use of two kata: Improvement Kata--a repeating routine of establishing challenging target conditions, working step-by-step through obstacles, and always learning from the problems we encounter; and Coaching Kata: a pattern of teaching the improvement kata to employees at every level to ensure it motivates their ways of thinking and acting. With clear detail, an abundance of practical examples, and a cohesive explanation from start to finish, Toyota Kata gives executives and managers at any level actionable routines of thought and behavior that produce superior results and sustained competitive advantage.

Be Amazing or Go Home: Seven Customer Service Habits That Create Confidence with Everyone


Shep Hyken - 2017
    In fact, amazement is a habit that anyone can master--and Shep Hyken knows the tricks to making it your own.In Be Amazing or Go Home, Shep shares the secrets behind making his motto "Always Be Amazing!" an everyday lifestyle and shows how you too can become exceptional in business and in life. Drawing on the routines of incredible people, Shep demonstrates simple practices that can elevate your game, including: Showing up ready to amazing Being proactive Craving feedback Taking responsibility Embracing authenticity Focusing on excellence Turning misery into magic Once you master these habits, you'll be able to create trust, build stronger relationships, make sales, advance your career, and more. Now is the time to step out of the ordinary and step into amazing.

Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future


Leonard A. Schlesinger - 2012
    But in today’s environment, where change is the only constant, it’s a question everyone must answer. This is true whether you are an innovator or an entrepreneur, a manager or a newly minted graduate.The first step, say the authors of this book, is this: “Just start.” In other words, take action now and learn as you go.Written by a trio of seasoned business leaders, Just Start combines fascinating research with proven practices to deliver a reliable method for helping you advance toward your goals—despite the uncertainty that is all too common today. Babson College President Leonard Schlesinger, organizational learning expert Charles Kiefer, and veteran journalist Paul B. Brown share their own deep and varied experiences and draw from a source where striving amid constant uncertainty actually works: the world of serial entrepreneurship. In this world, people don’t just think differently—they act differently, as well.Using this novel approach, Just Start will help you:• Determine the best strategy and tactics when the future is uncertain• Minimize financial risk in every decision you make• Attract like-minded people to what you want to do (and learn why this is important)• Understand why “Act. Learn. Build (so you can) Act again” is the best course of action when facing the unknownSo throw out your forecasting tools and shrug off that nagging frustration that comes with constant uncertainty. Just Start distills for you the very essence of what makes people successful in today’s volatile environment. This book is your guide to achieving your goals—whether your project is professional or personal, or somewhere in between.

Learning Targets: Helping Students Aim for Understanding in Today's Lesson


Connie M. Moss - 2012
    Moss and Susan M. Brookhart contend that improving student learning and achievement happens in the immediacy of an individual lesson--what they call today's lesson--or it doesn't happen at all.The key to making today's lesson meaningful? Learning targets. Written from students' point of view, a learning target describes a lesson-sized chunk of information and skills that students will come to know deeply. Each lesson's learning target connects to the next lesson's target, enabling students to master a coherent series of challenges that ultimately lead to important curricular standards.Drawing from the authors' extensive research and professional learning partnerships with classrooms, schools, and school districts, this practical book- Situates learning targets in a theory of action that students, teachers, principals, and central-office administrators can use to unify their efforts to raise student achievement and create a culture of evidence-based, results-oriented practice. - Provides strategies for designing learning targets that promote higher-order thinking and foster student goal setting, self-assessment, and self-regulation. - Explains how to design a strong performance of understanding, an activity that produces evidence of students' progress toward the learning target. - Shows how to use learning targets to guide summative assessment and grading. Learning Targets also includes reproducible planning forms, a classroom walk-through guide, a lesson-planning process guide, and guides to teacher and student self-assessment.What students are actually doing during today's lesson is both the source of and the yardstick for school improvement efforts. By applying the insights in this book to your own work, you can improve your teaching expertise and dramatically empower all students as stakeholders in their own learning.

Resolving Conflicts at Work: Ten Strategies for Everyone on the Job


Kenneth Cloke - 2011
    In the third edition of this text, all chapters are completely infused with additional content, updated examples, and new case studies. Like its predecessors, it identifies core strategies for preventing and resolving both intermittent and chronic conflicts in the workplace. In addition, the bookIncludes a new foreword by Warren Bennis, which represents his most recent thinking about judgment calls and candid communications in the workplace Presents new chapters on leadership and transformational conflict coaching, and organizational systems design This definitive and comprehensive work provides a handy guide for managers, employees, union representatives, human resource experts, and consultants seeking to maintain stable and productive workplaces.

Speak with Impact: How to Command the Room and Influence Others


Allison Shapira - 2018
    Find your powerful voice, and step into leadership. Speak with impact. Every day, you have an opportunity to use your voice to have a positive impact -- at work or in your community. You can inspire and persuade your audience -- or you can distract and put them to sleep.Presentation styles where leaders are nervous, ramble, and robotic can ruin a talk on even the most critical topics. As your performances become weak, your career prosects start to dim. To get ahead and make an impact, you need to deliver well-crafted messages with confidence and authenticity. You must?sound?as capable as you are.Public speaking is a skill, not a talent. With the right guidance, anyone can be a powerful speaker. Written by former opera singer turned CEO and TEDx speaker Allison Shapira, Speak with Impact unravels the mysteries of commanding attention in any setting, professional or personal.Whether it's speaking up at a meeting, presenting to clients, or talking to large groups, this book's easy-to-use frameworks, examples and exercises will help you:Engage your audience through storytelling and humorUse breathing techniques to overcome stage frightStrengthen and project your voice by banishing filler words/uptalkUse effective body language and build your executive presenceCompose a clear message and deliver confident, authentic presentationsLearn to conquer fear, capture attention, motivate action, and take charge of your career with?Speak with Impact.

The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done


Stephen Denning - 2018
    Companies that embrace Agile Management learn to connect everyone and everything . . . all the time. They can deliver instant, intimate, frictionless value on a large scale.Agile began emerging many decades ago, but truly took off in the software development industry. Sparking dramatic improvements in quality, innovation, and speed-to-market, the Agile movement is now spreading quickly throughout all kinds of companies. It enables a team, a unit, or an enterprise to nimbly adapt and upgrade products and services to meet rapidly changing technology and customer needs. And the process is applicable anywhere — companies don’t need to be born Agile, like Spotify. Even centuries-old Barclays is making the transition and reaping rewards.Filled with examples from every sector, The Age of Agile helps readers:Master the three laws of Agile Management (team, customer, network) ● Embrace the new mindset ● Overcome constraints ● Employ meaningful metrics ● Make the entire organization Agile ● And moreWith this breakthrough approach, even global giants can learn to act entrepreneurially. Their future depends on it.

The 24-Carrot Manager


Adrian Gostick - 2002
    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.

The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions


Mary Poppendieck - 2013
    Through cutting-edge research and case studies from leading organizations, including Spotify, Ericsson, Intuit, GE Healthcare, Pixar, CareerBuilder, and Intel, you'll discover proven patterns for developing that mindset. You'll see how to cultivate product teams that act like successful startups, create the kind of efficiency that attracts customers, and leverage the talents of bright, creative people. The Poppendiecks weave lean principles throughout this book, just as those principles must be woven throughout the fabric of your truly lean organization. Learn How To Start with an inspiring purpose, and overcome the curse of short-term thinking Energize teams by providing well-framed challenges, larger purposes, and a direct line of sight between their work and the achievement of those purposes Delight customers by gaining unprecedented insight into their real needs, and building products and services that fully anticipate those needs Achieve authentic, sustainable efficiency without layoffs, rock-bottom cost focus, or totalitarian work systems Develop breakthrough innovations by moving beyond predictability to experimentation, beyond globalization to decentralization, beyond productivity to impact Lean approaches to software development have moved from novelty to widespread use, in large part due to the principles taught by Mary and Tom Poppendieck in their pioneering books. Now, in The Lean Mindset, the Poppendiecks take the next step, looking at a company where multidiscipline teams are expected to ask the right questions, solve the right problems, and deliver solutions that customers love.

Assertive Discipline: Positive Behavior Management for Today's Classroom


Lee Canter - 2001
    A special emphasis on the needs of new and struggling teachers includes practical actions for earning student respect and teaching them behavior management skills. The author also introduces a real-time coaching model and explains how to establish a schoolwide Assertive Discipline(r) program.

The ShipIt Journal Five Pack


Seth Godin - 2010
    A five-pack of the 32 page ShipIt Journal, a workbook designed for groups of people (or individuals) who want to do work that matters.Share them with your team, fill them out together, surface the issues and then ship.

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience


Jeff Gothelf - 2012
    In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.Inspired by Lean and Agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of the product team, and gather feedback early and often. You’ll learn how to drive the design in short, iterative cycles to assess what works best for the business and the user. Lean UX shows you how to make this change—for the better.Frame a vision of the problem you’re solving and focus your team on the right outcomesBring the designers’ toolkit to the rest of your product teamShare your insights with your team much earlier in the processCreate Minimum Viable Products to determine which ideas are validIncorporate the voice of the customer throughout the project cycleMake your team more productive: combine Lean UX with Agile’s Scrum frameworkUnderstand the organizational shifts necessary to integrate Lean UXLean UX received the 2013 Jolt Award from Dr. Dobb's Journal as the best book of the year. The publication's panel of judges chose five notable books, published during a 12-month period ending June 30, that every serious programmer should read.

Rethink Communication: A Playbook to Clarify and Communicate Everything in Your Church


Phil Bowdle - 2019
    The church is facing a message delivery problem.The old communication playbook no longer works. What worked before isn’t working anymore. It’s time to rethink communication and leverage the greatest opportunities we’ve ever had to communicate in the church. In Rethink Communication, Phil Bowdle walks through the new reality for what attendance, engagement, and attention look like for the church. Then he offers a practical communication playbook you can use to communicate anything in your church—and actually connect. These practical tips and proven strategies will work regardless of size, staff, or budget.Communication has been overlooked for far too long in the church. It’s time for that to change. It’s time to rethink communication for the church.

Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery


Garr Reynolds - 2007
    Presentation Zen challenges the conventional wisdom of making "slide presentations" in today’s world and encourages you to think differently and more creatively about the preparation, design, and delivery of your presentations. Garr shares lessons and perspectives that draw upon practical advice from the fields of communication and business. Combining solid principles of design with the tenets of Zen simplicity, this book will help you along the path to simpler, more effective presentations.--back cover