Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Business & Careers

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Art of Life Admin, written and read by Elizabeth Emens. This book will give you many hours of your life back. Every day, an unseen form of labour creeps into our lives, stealing precious moments of free time, placing a strain on our schedules and relationships, and earning neither appreciation nor compensation in return. Scheduling doctor's appointments. Planning a party. Buying a present. Filling out paperwork. This labour is 'life admin' - the kind of secretarial and managerial work necessary to run a life and a household.

Are you tired of sending out dozens of job applications every day and never hearing back? Or, when you do land interviews, not getting an offer, and never knowing why? As a former recruiter and head of HR at multiple companies, Madeline Mann has seen every kind of job application under the sun, and she’s here to tell you that the antiquated job search advice you’ve been told before is all wrong.

When successful people begin to feel uncertain or challenged at work, the one thing they want to know most is why things are going wrong after they have gone right for so long. In The Leadership Gap, Lolly Daskal reveals the consequences highly driven, overachieving leaders face when they continue to rely on a skill set that has always worked for them, even when it is no longer effective.

Disruption is everywhere, from artificial intelligence to economic uncertainty to the pandemic's effect on the workplace. Enter world-renowned storyteller and entrepreneur, James Patterson, and leadership expert, Patrick Leddin, PhD, who both know disruption to be one of the most powerful and misunderstood forces in this fast-changing world. Now they show you how to turn disruption on its head too, using invaluable insights and practical tools to help you leverage this force for positive change.

Few organizations solve as many impossible problems as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and nobody knows more about leading rocket scientists to unlikely breakthroughs than Adam Steltzner. As the phase lead and development manager for EDL (entry, descent, and landing) of the Curiosity rover to Mars, Steltzner spearheaded the creation of one of engineering's wackiest kluges - the sky crane, which allowed the heaviest rover in the history of space exploration to land on Mars unscathed.

In Lessons from a Warzone, Al Roumani shares his very personal account of coping with the day-to-day realities of leading an organisation in dangerous and hostile conditions. His story shows how inspiration can come from the unlikeliest of places - from the timeless wisdom of merchants in ancient souks to the changing patterns of military checkpoints. During that time, not only did the bank remain robust when others faltered - it thrived and became the undisputed leading bank as people's trust in its capability to safeguard their lifelong savings strengthened.

Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations.

Musicians know how to stay ahead of the beat. Forced to find new ways to adapt to accelerating change, musicians are masters of innovation. Demystifying their process for the first time, Two Beats Ahead reveals what we can learn from today's top musical minds. Drawing from interviews and case studies with masterminds like Quincy Jones, Jimmy Iovine, Dr Dre, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and Pharrell Williams, as well as leaders at Google X and Amazon, this book identifies the key lessons and skills musicians can teach us about innovation.

The changes that Charles Handy foresaw in The Age of Unreason are happening. Endless growth can make for a candy-floss economy, and capitalism must be its own sternest critic. Charles Handy reaches here for a philosophy beyond the mechanics of business organisations, beyond material choices, to try and establish an alternative universe where the work ethic can contain a natural sense of continuity, connections, and a sense of direction.

This book explains why top performers inevitably turn into terrible managers when their behaviour, compounded by the power and pressure that come from climbing the corporate ladder, engenders toxic work cultures and saps everyone else's enthusiasm around them. The very traits that they believe have gotten them to top, may that be loose personal boundaries, perfectionism or a bullish communication style, when at the altitude of leadership, self-sabotage their efforts and that of their team.

It was the biggest leak in history. WikiLeaks infuriated the world's greatest superpower, embarrassed the British royal family and helped cause a revolution in Africa. The man behind it was Julian Assange, one of the strangest figures ever to become a worldwide celebrity. Was he an internet messiah or a cyber-terrorist? Information freedom fighter or sex criminal? The debate would echo around the globe as US politicians called for his assassination.

In 1962, Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley created a software company when the concept of software barely existed. Freelance Programmers employed women to work on complex projects such as Concorde's black box recorder from the comfort of their own homes. Shirley empowered a generation of women in technology, giving them unheard of freedom to choose their own hours and manage their own workloads. The business thrived, and Shirley gradually transferred ownership to her staff, creating 70 millionaires in the process.

In Eyes Wide Open, Isaac Lidsky draws on his experience of achieving immense success, joy, and fulfillment while losing his sight to a blinding disease to show us that it isn't external circumstances but how we perceive and respond to them that governs our reality.

Tony Hsieh's first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion. The secret to his success? Making his employees happy. At its peak, Zappos's employee-friendly culture was so famous across the tech industry that it became one of the hardest companies to get hired at, and CEOs from other companies regularly toured the headquarters.

More than 20 years ago, sociologist and University of California, Berkeley, professor Arlie Hochschild set off a tidal wave of conversation and controversy with her best-selling book, The Second Shift. In it, she examined what really happens in dual-career households. Adding together time in paid work, child care, and housework, she found that working mothers put in a month of work a year more than their spouses.

Too many people focus on their destination—having a perfect, fulfilled life on paper—and not their direction, what they enjoy doing and what makes them feel good. This leaves us feeling frustrated and stuck. Directional Living will help you to find work that doesn't feel like work, to look forward to Monday as much as Friday, and to wake up every morning and think "I am doing exactly what I'm meant to be doing". It's a powerful new philosophy packed with practical tools to help you find meaning in your career and therefore life.

The Playbook is an exposé of the extraordinary lengths that corporations will go to in order to deny the scientific facts—around climate change, public health risks and worker safety—when they don't suit their agenda. Written in the form of a corporate handbook for tobacco, oil and pharmaceutical company executives, it is a litany of obfuscation techniques, denial, delays and outright lies.

How did a balloonist circumnavigate the earth without fuel? How did an inventor design a device that creates electrical power from human footsteps? How did the WHO figure out how to treat and reduce the transmission of Ebola? They all used alien thinking. For over a decade, innovation experts Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux and Michael Wade have studied individuals around the world who have made leaps of creative genius. Their research shows that they are five patterns of thinking that distinguish true innovators from the rest of us.

Since rising out of the New York City streets over 25 years ago, Russell Simmons has helped create such ground breaking ventures as Def Jam Records, Phat Farm, and Def Comedy Jam, in the process becoming known the world over as "The CEO of Hip Hop". Russell might have helped introduce hip-hop to the world, but he credits his success to his belief in a strong set of principles, or laws, which he shares for the first time in this audio.

There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how. Nathan Jamail, a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses, trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies and learned that it takes not only different skills to achieve success, but a truly effective coach needs an organizational culture that creates and multiplies the success of every motivated team member.