In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company - the Exponential Organization - that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology.

    Leading Teams is not about subscribing to a specific formula or leadership style, says Hackman. Rather, it is about applying a concise set of guiding principles to each unique group situation—and doing so in the leader's own idiosyncratic way. Based on extensive research and using compelling examples ranging from orchestras to airline cockpit crews, Leading Teams identifies five essential conditions—a stable team, a clear and engaging direction, an enabling team structure, a supportive organizational context, and the availability of competent coaching—that greatly enhance the likelihood of team success. The book offers a practical framework that leaders can use to muster personal skills and organizational resources to create and sustain the five key conditions and shows how those conditions can launch a team onto a trajectory of increasing effectiveness. Authoritative and astutely realistic, Leading Teams offers a new and provocative way of thinking about and leading work teams in any organizational setting.

    That principle is the value of slack, the degree of freedom in a company that allows it to change. Implementing slack could be as simple as adding an assistant to a department and letting high-priced talent spend less time at the photocopier and more time making key decisions, or it could mean designing workloads that allow people room to think, innovate, and reinvent themselves. It means embracing risk, eliminating fear, and knowing when to go slow. Slack allows for change, fosters creativity, promotes quality, and, above all, produces growth. With an approach that works for new- and old-economy companies alike, this revolutionary handbook debunks commonly held assumptions about real-world management, and gives you and your company a brand-new model for achieving and maintaining true effectiveness.

    This book helps put you in the driver's seat to embrace the journey and love your career." —Rebecca Minkoff, Founder of Rebecca Minkoff & The Female Founder CollectiveYOU ARE DESERVING OF A CAREER YOU LOVE.Fran Hauser, best-selling author of The Myth of the Nice Girl , follows up with a workbook for women who want to get more out of their careers. Embrace the Work, Love Your Career combines accessible advice, time-tested strategies, creative prompts, and thoughtful exercises into one holistic resource. Stemming from years of experience in senior leadership at Time Inc.'s People, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly as well as AOL and Coca-Cola Enterprises, Hauser centers her career guidance around six main actions:Fall in love with your careerDesign your career action planCreate time and spaceKnow your valueBuild your dream teamReflect and resetEach chapter starts with practical advice and includes prompts and exercises to help readers create their own personal career action plans. Palate-cleansing meditations and coloring breaks conclude each chapter, offering chances for calming reflection. Through simple, inspiring, and actionable tools, Embrace the Work, Love Your Career teaches women to be empowered to focus on the things that truly matter, set boundaries and, ultimately, realize their full potential.PRAISE FOR FRAN HAUSER:Named one of the "6 Most Powerful Women in NYC's Tech Scene" by Refinery29 "Is it possible to be both kind and a total badass? Yes—and Fran Hauser tells us how." — goop "Fran Hauser turns the 'nice girl' notion on its head."— Forbes "Fran gets into the mess—and gets specific—explaining how she has learned to handle all kinds of uncomfortable moments with authenticity and grace" — Refinery29

    The old guard, rooted in tradition and resistant to change, will fall and new leaders will emerge. Hybrid marketing agencies that are more nimble, tech savvy, and collaborative will redefine the industry. Digital services will be engrained into the DNA of every agency and blended with traditional methods to execute integrated campaigns. The depth, versatility, and drive of their talent will be the cornerstones of organizations that pursue a higher purpose. The Marketing Agency Blueprint is a practical and candid guide that presents 10 rules for building such a hybrid agency.The new marketing agency model will create and nurture diverse recurring revenue streams through a mix of services, consulting, training, education, publishing, and software sales. It will use efficiency and productivity, not billable hours, as the essential drivers of profitability. Its value and success will be measured by outcomes, not outputs. Its strength and stability will depend on a willingness to be in a perpetual state of change, and an ability to execute and adapt faster than competitors. The Marketing Agency Blueprint demonstrates how to:• Generate more qualified leads, win clients with set pricing and service packages, and secure more long-term retainers.• Create diverse and recurring revenue streams.• Develop highly efficient management systems and more effective account teams.• Deliver greater results and value to clients, and win their loyalty.This is the future of the marketing-services industry. A future defined and led by underdogs and innovators. You have the opportunity to be at the forefront of the transformation.

    Unquestionably the best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation's massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy.In SPIN Selling, Rackham, who has advised leading companies such as IBM and Honeywell delivers the first book to specifically examine selling high-value product and services. By following the simple, practical, and easy-to-apply techniques of SPIN, readers will be able to dramatically increase their sales volume from major accounts. Rackham answers key questions such as "What makes success in major sales" and "Why do techniques like closing work in small sales but fail in larger ones?"You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won't work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real-world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies - and backed by hard research data - SPIN Selling is the million-dollar key to understanding and producing record-breaking high-end sales performance.

    This practical guide will save time and effort, helping you identify the vital parts of a project and communicate those parts and duties to other team members.

    The goal of this book is to expose you to the wisdom and knowledge from a group of the world's leading product management experts. Among the contributors, there are leading authors, professors, CEOs and vice presidents, bloggers, consultants, trainers, and even a few salespeople and engineers. In total, there are over five centuries of collected wisdom represented here.The contributors each share one rule they think is critical to succeed in product management based on their hands-on product management and product marketing experience with companies such as Apple, eBay, Intuit, SAP, and Yahoo!.Packed with pearls of product management wisdom, this book has something for everyone. You will learn: How to focus on market needs, not just individual requests How to clarify your product positioning before your next big decision How to align your product strategy with company strategy and then sell it Why agility is the key to product management success Why great execution trumps a great product ideaBest of all, it was written with the busy product manager in mind. Each rule is kept to two pages and designed to stand-on its own. The rules can be read in any order. In less than five minutes a day, you can learn from forty of the best product managers in the world. Whether you are a seasoned and experienced product manager or are just starting out, the "42 Rules of Product Management" will help you lead with greater effectiveness and influence.

    

    Now, hot on the heels of his acclaimed international bestseller The McKinsey Way, Ethan Rasiel brings readers a powerful new guide to putting McKinsey concepts and skills into action­­The McKinsey Mind. While the first book used case studies and anecdotes from former and current McKinseyites to describe how the firm solves the thorniest business problems of their A-list clients, The McKinsey Mind goes a giant step further. It explains, step-by-step, how to use McKinsey tools, techniques and strategies to solve an array of core business problems and to make any business venture more successful.Designed to work as a stand-alone guide or together with The McKinsey Way, The McKinsey Mind follows the same critically acclaimed style and format as its predecessor. In this book authors Rasiel and Friga expand upon the lessons found in The McKinsey Way with real-world examples, parables, and easy-to-do exercises designed to get readers up and running.

    But all too often when we interact with people—especially those who report to us—we simply tell them what we think they need to know. This shuts them down. To generate bold new ideas, to avoid disastrous mistakes, to develop agility and flexibility, we need to practice Humble Inquiry.Ed Schein defines Humble Inquiry as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” In this seminal work, Schein contrasts Humble Inquiry with other kinds of inquiry, shows the benefits Humble Inquiry provides in many different settings, and offers advice on overcoming the cultural, organizational, and psychological barriers that keep us from practicing it.

    Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

    Porter's Competitive Strategy has transformed the theory, practice, and teaching of business strategy throughout the world. Electrifying in its simplicity -- like all great breakthroughs -- Porter's analysis of industries captures the complexity of industry competition in five underlying forces. Porter introduces one of the most powerful competitive tools yet developed: his three generic strategies -- lowest cost, differentiation, and focus -- which bring structure to the task of strategic positioning. He shows how competitive advantage can be defined in terms of relative cost and relative prices, thus linking it directly to profitability, and presents a whole new perspective on how profit is created and divided. In the almost two decades since publication, Porter's framework for predicting competitor behavior has transformed the way in which companies look at their rivals and has given rise to the new discipline of competitor assessment. More than a million managers in both large and small companies, investment analysts, consultants, students, and scholars throughout the world have internalized Porter's ideas and applied them to assess industries, understand competitors,, and choose competitive positions. The ideas in the book address the underlying fundamentals of competition in a way that is independent of the specifics of the ways companies go about competing. Competitive Strategy has filled a void in management thinking. It provides an enduring foundation and grounding point on which all subsequent work can be built. By bringing a disciplined structure to the question of how firms achieve superior profitability, Porter's rich frameworks and deep insights comprise a sophisticated view of competition unsurpassed in the last quarter-century.

    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."

    His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, includingdemoting (or firing) a loyal friend;whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them;if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company;how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you;what to do when smart people are bad employees;why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one;whether you should sell your company, and how to do it.Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.