A lot has been written about trust: about what it is and what it can do for people, families, companies, communities and countries. Often, good work is being sabotaged by interpersonal conflict, political infighting, paralysis, stagnation, apathy, or cynicism. Almost always, one can trace these problems to a breakdown in trust. It not only kills good work, it also inevitably creates some degree of misery, annoyance, fear, anger, frustration, resentment, and resignation. By contrast, in successful companies where people are innovative, engage in productive conflict and debate about ideas, and have fun working together, one can find strong trusting relationships. Having the trust of those you work with is too important not to be intentional about building and maintaining it. With this book, you will learn how to build and maintain strong trusting relationships with others, and repair trust when it is broken, by being intentional and consistent in your language and actions. Understanding and consistently demonstrating trustworthy language and behavior will help you earn and keep the trust of the people you work with.

    Rest assured that the book is not mere theory. Ericsson's research focuses on the real world, and he explains in detail, with examples, how all of us can apply the principles of great performance in our work or in any other part of our lives."-- Fortune Anders Ericsson has made a career studying chess champions, violin virtuosos, star athletes, and memory mavens. Peak distills three decades of myth-shattering research into a powerful learning strategy that is fundamentally different from the way people traditionally think about acquiring new abilities. Whether you want to stand out at work, improve your athletic or musical performance, or help your child achieve academic goals, Ericsson's revolutionary methods will show you how to improve at almost any skill that matters to you."The science of excellence can be divided into two eras: before Ericsson and after Ericsson. His groundbreaking work, captured in this brilliantly useful book, provides us with a blueprint for achieving the most important and life-changing work possible: to become a little bit better each day."--Dan Coyle, author of The Talent Code "Ericsson's research has revolutionized how we think about human achievement. If everyone would take the lessons of this book to heart, it could truly change the world."--Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein

    . . these are just a few of the uncomfortable topics you may have to discuss with your employees. 101 Tough Conversations to Have with Employees provides you with proven guidance and realistic sample dialogues you can use to facilitate clear, direct interactions with your people, helping to sidestep potential awkwardness and meet issues head on.This solution oriented book walks you through some of the most common—as well as the most serious—employee problems you’re ever likely to encounter. Covering everything from substandard performance reviews to personal hygiene to termination meetings, this handy guide helps you treat your people with dignity, focusing not just on what to say but also on how to say it. This helpful guide provides down to earth techniques you can use to protect yourself and your organization—and get the very best from your people.Praise for Paul Falcone’s Previous Books: 101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems: “When you feel the need to document an employee’s actions (or inactions), turn to this great tool.”— Legal Management96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire: “Takes the guesswork out of the interview process.” — Benefits and Compensation SolutionsThe Hiring and Firing Question and Answer Book: “If the art and science of hiring and firing has become a puzzle, then author Paul Falcone has the answer.” — Houston Business JournalPaul Falcone is Vice President of Employee Relations at Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles and was formerly Vice President of Human Resources at Nickelodeon. He is the author of 2600 Phrases for Effective Perform­ance Reviews, 101 Sample Write-Ups for Documenting Employee Performance Problems, 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire, and The Hiring and Firing Question and Answer Book. He lives in Valencia, California.

    These back-pocket activities are easy, quick, topic-related, and fun, and you can draw on with a minimum of preparation. The Ten-Minute Trainer features a variety of exercises, ranging from one to ten minutes in length, and provides content-specific exercises as well as activities for transitioning between topics and gauging understanding. You'll find a useful answer section that explains the brain research behind the book and a special section on learning styles that ties in with the philosophy of learn it fast and make it last.Order your copy of this effective resource today!

    That solutions-oriented individual who adds value by enhancing the executive's productivity, elevating their performance and functioning as their indispensible business partner and 'right arm.'As you read this book, you will discover the genesis of the formidable talents that are the hallmark of exeptional assistants, and understand the value they can bring to you. Throughout the book you will hear from dozens of executives and close to one hundred assistants, who gave the author a candid look into their day-to-day activities, the expectations and demands on the executive-assistant relationship, as well as their advice for how executives and assistants can work successfully and productively together. As you read about these assistants, you will begin to understand why you should not settle for anything less than a stellar assistant who knows what you need and how to give it to you, who will smooth out your life and make your workday a rewarding experience.This book provides not only the inspiration to achieve a successful business partnership, but also provides know-how and practical tools to recruit, train and work on a day-to-day basis with an exceptional assistant, showing you how to put their exemplary talents to good use. Part 1 explores the relationships between successful executives and their assistants and defines what an 'exceptional executive assistant' is. In Part 2, Jones describes the crucial characteristics that all exceptional executive assistants epitomize, and how they are critical to not only your day-to-day routine, but to your success as an executive or entrepreneur.Part 3 of this book will explore the processes, resources and skills that you will need to hire an exceptional assistant. Part 4 takes a deeper dive into the executive and assistant relationship and offers a guide to setting up a successful partnership. As with any business collaboration, it is a two-way street. In order to solidify the partnership, the executive must reciprocate. With examples throughout from successful CEOs and entrepreneurs, this book will help you create a robust, dynamic and productive partnership with your executive assistant.

    It is a comprehensive review of theorizing and empirical research that can serve as a reference and starting point for additional research on the theory.It can be used as a supplementary textbook in an intense course on leadership - or as a primary text in a course or seminar focusing on transformational leadership.New in the Second Edition:New, updated examples of leadership have been included to help illustrate the concepts, as well as show the broad range of transformational leadership in a variety of settings. New chapters have been added focusing specifically on the measurement of transformational leadership and transformational leadership and effectiveness. The discussion of both predicators and effects of transformational leadership is greatly expanded. Much more emphasis is given to authentic vs. inauthentic transformational leadership. Suggestions are made for guiding the future of research and applications of transformational leadership. A greatly expanded reference list is included.

    A generation ago, Christensen revolutionized business with his groundbreaking theory of disruptive innovation. Now, he goes further, offering powerful new insights.After years of research, Christensen has come to one critical conclusion: our long held maxim—that understanding the customer is the crux of innovation—is wrong. Customers don’t buy products or services; they "hire" them to do a job. Understanding customers does not drive innovation success, he argues. Understanding customer jobs does. The "Jobs to Be Done" approach can be seen in some of the world’s most respected companies and fast-growing startups, including Amazon, Intuit, Uber, Airbnb, and Chobani yogurt, to name just a few. But this book is not about celebrating these successes—it’s about predicting new ones.Christensen contends that by understanding what causes customers to "hire" a product or service, any business can improve its innovation track record, creating products that customers not only want to hire, but that they’ll pay premium prices to bring into their lives. Jobs theory offers new hope for growth to companies frustrated by their hit and miss efforts.This book carefully lays down Christensen’s provocative framework, providing a comprehensive explanation of the theory and why it is predictive, how to use it in the real world—and, most importantly, how not to squander the insights it provides.

    A new book that explores the science of productivity, and why, in today’s world, managing how you think—rather than what you think—can transform your life.

    Now, based on new research conducted with leaders, change makers and culture shifters, she’s showing us how to put those ideas into practice so we can step up and lead. Leadership is not about titles, status and power over people. Leaders are people who hold themselves accountable for recognising the potential in people and ideas, and developing that potential. This is a book for everyone who is ready to choose courage over comfort, make a difference and lead.When we dare to lead, we don't pretend to have the right answers; we stay curious and ask the right questions. We don't see power as finite and hoard it; we know that power becomes infinite when we share it and work to align authority and accountability. We don't avoid difficult conversations and situations; we lean into the vulnerability that’s necessary to do good work.But daring leadership in a culture that's defined by scarcity, fear and uncertainty requires building courage skills, which are uniquely human. The irony is that we're choosing not to invest in developing the hearts and minds of leaders at the same time we're scrambling to figure out what we have to offer that machines can't do better and faster. What can we do better? Empathy, connection and courage to start.Brené Brown spent the past two decades researching the emotions that give meaning to our lives. Over the past seven years, she found that leaders in organisations ranging from small entrepreneurial start-ups and family-owned businesses to non-profits, civic organisations and Fortune 50 companies, are asking the same questions:How do you cultivate braver, more daring leaders? And, how do you embed the value of courage in your culture?Dare to Lead answers these questions and gives us actionable strategies and real examples from her new research-based, courage-building programme.Brené writes, ‘One of the most important findings of my career is that courage can be taught, developed and measured. Courage is a collection of four skill sets supported by twenty-eight behaviours. All it requires is a commitment to doing bold work, having tough conversations and showing up with our whole hearts. Easy? No. Choosing courage over comfort is not easy. Worth it? Always. We want to be brave with our lives and work. It's why we're here.’

    Longer training, ever more advanced technologies—neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist. First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from disaster response to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.

    I'm going to share that mindset with you — along with hundreds of actionable techniques and proven habits — so you can shortcut those years.Introducing The Effective Engineer — the only book designed specifically for today's software engineers, based on extensive interviews with engineering leaders at top tech companies, and packed with hundreds of techniques to accelerate your career.For two years, I embarked on a quest seeking an answer to one question:How do the most effective engineers make their efforts, their teams, and their careers more successful?I interviewed and collected stories from engineering VPs, directors, managers, and other leaders at today's top software companies: established, household names like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn; rapidly growing mid-sized companies like Dropbox, Square, Box, Airbnb, and Etsy; and startups like Reddit, Stripe, Instagram, and Lyft.These leaders shared stories about the most valuable insights they've learned and the most common and costly mistakes that they've seen engineers — sometimes themselves — make.This is just a small sampling of the hard questions I posed to them:- What engineering qualities correlate with future success?- What have you done that has paid off the highest returns?- What separates the most effective engineers you've worked with from everyone else?- What's the most valuable lesson your team has learned in the past year?- What advice do you give to new engineers on your team? Everyone's story is different, but many of the lessons share common themes.You'll get to hear stories like:- How did Instagram's team of 5 engineers build and support a service that grew to over 40 million users by the time the company was acquired?- How and why did Quora deploy code to production 40 to 50 times per day?- How did the team behind Google Docs become the fastest acquisition to rewrite its software to run on Google's infrastructure?- How does Etsy use continuous experimentation to design features that are guaranteed to increase revenue at launch?- How did Facebook's small infrastructure team effectively operate thousands of database servers?- How did Dropbox go from barely hiring any new engineers to nearly tripling its team size year-over-year? What's more, I've distilled their stories into actionable habits and lessons that you can follow step-by-step to make your career and your team more successful.The skills used by effective engineers are all learnable.And I'll teach them to you. With The Effective Engineer, I'll teach you a unifying framework called leverage — the value produced per unit of time invested — that you can use to identify the activities that produce disproportionate results.Here's a sneak peek at some of the lessons you'll learn. You'll learn how to:- Prioritize the right projects and tasks to increase your impact.- Earn more leeway from your peers and managers on your projects.- Spend less time maintaining and fixing software and more time building and shipping new features.- Produce more accurate software estimates.- Validate your ideas cheaply to reduce wasted work.- Navigate organizational and people-related bottlenecks.- Find the appropriate level of code reviews, testing, abstraction, and technical debt to balance speed and quality.- Shorten your debugging workflow to increase your iteration speed.

    Yet men still predominate in the corporate world. In The Confidence Code, Claire Shipman and Katty Kay argue that the key reason is confidence.Combining cutting-edge research in genetics, gender, behavior, and cognition—with examples from their own lives and those of other successful women in politics, media, and business—Kay and Shipman go beyond admonishing women to "lean in."Instead, they offer the inspiration and practical advice women need to close the gap and achieve the careers they want and deserve.

    Covey has taught to many of the world's top executives and most influential leaders. Align your organization's resources and structures to increase long-term performance and create a high-trust culture - the ultimate competitive advantage.

    Feeling unfulfilled, burned out, or just plain unhappy with what we’re doing, we long to make that leap into the unknown. But we also hold on, white-knuckled, to the years of time and effort we’ve invested in our current profession.In this powerful book, Herminia Ibarra presents a new model for career reinvention that flies in the face of everything we’ve learned from "career experts." While common wisdom holds that we must first know what we want to do before we can act, Ibarra argues that this advice is backward. Knowing, she says, is the result of doing and experimenting. Career transition is not a straight path toward some predetermined identity, but a crooked journey along which we try on a host of "possible selves" we might become.Based on her in-depth research on professionals and managers in transition, Ibarra outlines an active process of career reinvention that leverages three ways of "working identity": experimenting with new professional activities, interacting in new networks of people, and making sense of what is happening to us in light of emerging possibilities.Through engrossing stories—from a literature professor turned stockbroker to an investment banker turned novelist—Ibarra reveals a set of guidelines that all successful reinventions share. She explores specific ways that hopeful career changers of any background can:Explore possible selvesCraft and execute "identity experiments"Create "small wins" that keep momentum goingSurvive the rocky period between career identitiesConnect with role models and mentors who can ease the transitionMake time for reflection—without missing out on windows of opportunityDecide when to abandon the old path in order to follow the newArrange new events into a coherent story of who we are becoming.A call to the dreamer in each of us, Working Identity explores the process for crafting a more fulfilling future. Where we end up may surprise us.

    Rebels have a bad reputation. We think of them as troublemakers, outcasts,contrarians: those colleagues, friends, and family members who complicate seemingly straightforward decisions, create chaos, and disagree when everyone else is in agreement. But in truth, rebels are also those among us who change the world for the better with their unconventional outlooks. Instead of clinging to what is safe and familiar, rebels defy the status quo. They are masters of innovation and reinvention, and they have a lot to teach us. Gino has spent more than a decade studying rebels at organizations around the world,from high-end boutiques in Italy's fashion capital, to the world's best restaurant, to a thriving fast-food chain, to an award-winning computer animation studio. In her work, she has identified leaders and employees who personify "rebel talent," and whose examples we can all learn to embrace. Gino argues that the future belongs to the rebel—and that there's a rebel in each of us. We live in turbulent times. In this cutthroat environment, cultivating rebel talent is what allows businesses to evolve and to prosper. And rebellion has an added benefit beyond the workplace: it leads to a more vital, engaged,and fulfilling life. Whether you want to inspire others to action, grow a business, or build more meaningful relationships, Rebel Talent will show you how to succeed—by breaking all the rules.