You know, all those things that make life great.Most people think productivity is about finding or saving time. But it's not. It's about making our time work for us. Just imagine having free time again. It's not a pipe dream.In Free to Focus, New York Times bestselling author Michael Hyatt reveals to readers nine proven ways to win at work so they are finally free to succeed at the rest of life--their health, relationships, hobbies, and more. He helps readers redefine their goals, evaluate what's working, cut out the nonessentials, focus on the most important tasks, manage their time and energy, and build momentum for a lifetime of success.

    Within the industry, studies on game mechanics and behavioral psychology have become proliferate. However, few people understand how to merge the two fields into experience designs that reliably increases business metrics and generates a return on investment. Gamification Pioneer Yu-kai Chou takes reader on a journey to learn his twelve years of obsessive research in creating the Octalysis Framework, and how to apply the framework to create engaging and successful experiences in their product, workplace, marketing, and personal lives. Effective gamification is a combination of game design, game dynamics, behavioral economics, motivational psychology, UX/UI (User Experience and User Interface), neurobiology, technology platforms, as well as ROI-driving business implementations. This book explores the interplay between these disciplines to capture the core principles that contribute to good gamification design. The goal for this book is to become a strategy guide to help readers master the games that truly make a difference in their lives. Readers who absorb the contents of this book will have literally obtained what many companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to acquire. The ultimate aim is to enable the widespread adoption of good gamification and human-focused design in all types of industries.

    Marketers want to change their customers’ minds and leaders want to change organizations. Start-ups want to change industries and nonprofits want to change the world. But change is hard. Often, we persuade and pressure and push, but nothing moves. Could there be a better way?This book takes a different approach. Successful change agents know it’s not about pushing harder, or providing more information, it’s about being a catalyst. Catalysts remove roadblocks and reduce the barriers to change. Instead of asking, “How could I change someone’s mind?” they ask a different question: “Why haven’t they changed already? What’s stopping them?”The Catalyst identifies the key barriers to change and how to mitigate them. You’ll learn how catalysts change minds in the toughest of situations: how hostage negotiators get people to come out with their hands up and how marketers get new products to catch on, how leaders transform organizational culture and how activists ignite social movements, how substance abuse counselors get addicts to realize they have a problem, and how political canvassers change deeply rooted political beliefs.This book is designed for anyone who wants to catalyze change. It provides a powerful way of thinking and a range of techniques that can lead to extraordinary results. Whether you’re trying to change one person, transform an organization, or shift the way an entire industry does business, this book will teach you how to become a catalyst.

    But it is hard. It’s hard because it forces people and organizations to make specific choices about their future—something that doesn’t happen in most companies.Now two of today’s best-known business thinkers get to the heart of strategy—explaining what it’s for, how to think about it, why you need it, and how to get it done. And they use one of the most successful corporate turnarounds of the past century, which they achieved together, to prove their point.A.G. Lafley, former CEO of Procter & Gamble, in close partnership with strategic adviser Roger Martin, doubled P&G’s sales, quadrupled its profits, and increased its market value by more than $100 billion in just ten years. Now, drawn from their years of experience at P&G and the Rotman School of Management, where Martin is dean, this book shows how leaders in organizations of all sizes can guide everyday actions with larger strategic goals built around the clear, essential elements that determine business success—where to play and how to win.The result is a playbook for winning. Lafley and Martin have created a set of five essential strategic choices that, when addressed in an integrated way, will move you ahead of your competitors. They are:• What is our winning aspiration?• Where will we play?• How will we win?• What capabilities must we have in place to win?• What management systems are required to support our choices?The stories of how P&G repeatedly won by applying this method to iconic brands such as Olay, Bounty, Gillette, Swiffer, and Febreze clearly illustrate how deciding on a strategic approach—and then making the right choices to support it—makes the difference between just playing the game and actually winning.

     With a foreword by Larry Page, and contributions from Bono and Bill Gates. Measure What Matters is about using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), a revolutionary approach to goal-setting, to make tough choices in business. In 1999, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr invested nearly $12 million in a startup that had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. Doerr introduced the founders to OKRs and with them at the foundation of their management, the startup grew from forty employees to more than 70,000 with a market cap exceeding $600 billion. The startup was Google. Since then Doerr has introduced OKRs to more than fifty companies, helping tech giants and charities exceed all expectations. In the OKR model objectives define what we seek to achieve and key results are how those top­ priority goals will be attained. OKRs focus effort, foster coordination and enhance workplace satisfaction. They surface an organization's most important work as everyone's goals from entry-level to CEO are transparent to the entire institution. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will show you how to collect timely, relevant data to track progress - to measure what matters. It will help any organization or team aim high, move fast, and excel.

     The Workbook's easy-to-use worksheets make efficient planning simple and practical and supports your success in three ways:Reflection: Think about your approach to leadership and become more conscious about how well you engage in each of the Practices.Application Apply the Practices and commitments to all your projects.Implications Record what you've learned about yourself, your team, your organization, and your project. Develop your leadership potential with The Leadership Challenge Workbook!

    And it was an astronomer who finally explained what happened to the dinosaurs.Frans Johansson's The Medici Effect shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

    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.

    If Mandino's suggested reading structure is followed, it would take about 10 months to read the book.What you are today is not important... for in this  runaway bestseller you will learn how to change your life by applying the secrets you are about to  discover in the ancient scrolls.

    Master your soft skills and really get ahead at work!Fortune 500 coach Peggy Klaus encounters individuals every day who excel at their jobs but aren't getting where they want to go. It's rarely a shortfall in technical expertise that limits their careers, but rather a shortcoming in their social, communication, and self-management behaviors. In The Hard Truth About Soft Skills Klaus delivers practical tools and techniques for mastering soft skills across the career spectrum. She shows how to:manage your workloadhandle the criticsdevelop and promote your personal brandnavigate office politicslead the troopsand much more!Klaus reveals why soft skills are often ignored, while bringing their importance to life in her trademark style—straightforward, humorous, and motivating. Perfect for readers at all professional stages—from those who are just starting out to seasoned executives—this book is essential reading for anyone who wants to take his or her career to the next level.

    Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.Eyal provides readers with:• Practical insights to create user habits that stick.• Actionable steps for building products people love.• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.

    Yet many of us find ourselves struggling to build solid personal and professional connections or unable to handle challenges that inevitably arise when we grow closer to others. When we find ourselves in an exceptional relationship--the kind of relationship in which we feel fully understood and supported for who we are--it can seem like magic. But the truth is that the process of building and sustaining these relationships can be described, learned, and applied.David Bradford and Carole Robin taught interpersonal skills to MBA candidates for a combined seventy-five years in their legendary Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics (affectionately known to generations of students as "Touchy-Feely") and have coached and consulted hundreds of executives for decades. In Connect, they show readers how to take their relationships from shallow to exceptional by cultivating authenticity, vulnerability, and honesty, while being willing to ask for and offer help, share a commitment to growth, and deal productively with conflict.Filled with relatable scenarios and research-backed insights, Connect is an important resource for anyone hoping to improve existing relationships and build new ones at any stage of life.

    To make matters worse, Lincoln, who was elected by a minority of the popular vote, was viewed by his own advisors as nothing more than a gawky, second-rate country lawyer with no leadership experience. What Lincoln did to become our most honored and revered president is history, how he can help you to run your organization is not.Lincoln On Leadership is the first book to examine Abraham Lincoln's diverse leadership abilities and how they can be applied to today's complex world. You'll discover why you should:* Seize the initiative and never relinquish it* Wage only one war at a time* Encourage risk-taking while providing job security* Avoid issuing orders and instead - request, imply, or make suggestions* Once in a while, let things slip, unbenowst-like...and much much more.

    . . The breakthrough book that links know-how--the skills of people who know what they are doing-- with the personal and psychological traits of the successful leader. How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business--the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before. For well over four decades, Ram Charan has been learning in the most visceral way the underlying reasons why leaders succeed and fail. As one of the most influential advisers to top management teams of leading companies around the world, he has had a front-row seat to observe the cause and effect of leadership practices and behaviors. Ram Charan's insight into the real content of leadership provides you with the eight fundamental skills needed for success in the twenty-first century: - Positioning (and, when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money- Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others- Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business- Judging people by getting to the truth of a person- Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts- Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve- Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals- Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business Know-How is the missing link of leadership. By showing how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a holistic and innovative portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century.

    -- Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and author of It's Your ShipWhen I first arrived at The Walt Disney Company, I was surprised to find I had to go back to school--at Disney University! There, I learned the fundamentals of guest service that consistently gave Disney a tremendous advantage in the marketplace. Now, anyone can know these secrets of success thanks to Doug Lipp's informative book. No matter what your business, the lessons taught at DisneyUniversity will prove invaluable. -- Michael Eisner, Former CEO and Chairman, The Walt Disney CompanyWhen it comes to world-class employees, few organizations rival Disney. Famous for their friendliness, knowledge, passion, and superior customer service, Disney's employees have been fueling the iconic brand's wild success for more than 50 years.How has Disney succeeded in maintaining such a powerful workforce for so many years? Why are so many corporations and executives drawn to study how Disney continues to exemplify service and leadership standards?The Disney University, founded by Van France, trains the supporting cast that helps create the world-famous Disney Magic. Now, for the first time, the secrets of this exemplary institution are revealed. In Disney U, Doug Lipp examines how Van perpetuated Walt Disney's timeless company values and leadership lessons, creating a training and development dynasty. It contains never-before-told stories from numerous Disney legends. These pioneers share behind-the-scenes success stories of how they helped bring Walt Disney's dream to life.Disney U reveals the heart of the Disney culture and describes the company's values and operational philosophies that support the iconic brand. Doug Lipp lays out 13 timeless lessons Disney has used to drive profits and growth worldwide for more than half a century.To this day, the Disney University continues to turn out some of the most engaged, loyal, and customer-centered employees the business world has ever seen. Using the lessons outlined in Disney U will set your organization on a path of sustained success.PRAISE FOR Disney U:I highly recommend Disney U to anyone interested in building an enduring market presence and brand. -- Stephen Cannon, President and Chief Executive Officer, Mercedes-Benz USALipp's narratives reveal how Van and other Disney visionaries set the stage for a world-class organization by skillfully balancing both 'people' and 'technology.' -- Debi Aubee, Vice President of Sales, Bose CorporationEvery leader should have the equivalent of a Van France at his or her side. Thanks to Doug Lipp, we can now tap into the brilliance of a man who helped Walt createThe Happiest Place on Earth. -- David Overton, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Cheesecake FactoryHow does Disney University create such enthusiastic, loyal, and customer-centered employees, year after year? Now, for the first time, Doug Lipp takes us on a journey backstage to answer this pivotal question. -- John G. Veres III, Ph.D., Chancellor, Auburn University at MontgomeryDoug Lipp shares terrific stories about Disney that underscore the importance of creating an organizational culture with an unwavering dedication to superlativeservice and exceptional quality, both for employees and customers. He then takes it a step further by explaining how to bring these values to life for your organization. -- Christine A. Morena, Executive Vice President of Human Resources, Saks Incorporated