Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Management & Leadership

Working with difficult people can reduce your morale, threaten your productivity, deplete your energy, and waste your time. But you don't have to be helpless in the face of other people's craziness! Knowing how to handle coworkers' disruptive behavior is one of the most important career skills you can have, allowing you to become a more valuable employee and a more self-reliant person.

For years, marketers have held on to unwavering beliefs that have dictated how they market to their consumers. But the hard truth is that the changes we see in marketing and business are based on one undeniable factor - the size of the generations we are selling to. As each generation ages, what they buy and how much they buy will change.

In the last decade, incompetent leadership has done more to change the face of our world than perhaps in any other time in history. Recent events like Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq have proven that blind faith in our rulers is more than foolish - it can be downright dangerous. The world has grown more complicated and more volatile, and making intelligent decisions about the people in charge has never been more crucial.

As our society continues its transition from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age, new challenges are being introduced into the workplace, giving rise to a new phenomenon, Virtual Distance.

Generation Blend ventures deep into the technology age gap and provides real-world solutions to combine the best that younger and older workers have to offer. It explores how generational attitudes toward technology affect issues as diverse as recruitment and retention, employee training, management decision-making, collaboration, knowledge sharing, work/life balance, and ordinary workday activities.

Whether it's at home or at work, so much of our lives involves negotiating to get what we want. From negotiating a higher salary, to lowering costs from suppliers, to hammering out a new contract with a major customer, or even deciding where to go on vacation, the only way to consistently arrive at successful conclusions is to master the art of negotiation.

When designer and computer scientist John Maeda was tapped to be president of the celebrated Rhode Island School of Design in 2008, he had to learn how to be a leader quickly. He had to transform himself from a tenured professor - with a love of argument for argument’s sake and the freedom to experiment - into the head of a hierarchical organization. The professor is free to speak his mind against “the man.” The college president is “the man.” Maeda has had to teach himself, through trial and error, about leadership.

How can your organization increase its agility, alignment, and accountability to improve performance? Developing performance management capabilities means changing the way people are empowered to make better decisions. It requires a transition from a restrictive, command-and-control approach to a management style that includes more participants in the performance-management process.

A Culturematic is a little machine for making culture. It’s an ingenuity engine. The Culturematic acts as a probe into the often-alien world of contemporary culture, to test the atmosphere, to see what life it can sustain, to see who responds and how. Culturematics start small but can scale up ferociously, bootstrapping themselves as they go. Because they are so inexpensive, we can afford to fire off a multitude of them simultaneously. This is evolutionary strategy, iterative innovation, and rapid prototyping all at once.

Being a responsive leader means playing to win. Responsive leadership can thrive anywhere, unlike systematic leadership. The latter imposes methods and laws; principles govern action. In contrast, responsive leadership is a living, changing set of traits and skills that adapts to new people and environments. You may have an impressive grasp of how to influence, inspire, and build teams, but you must know how to adapt your abilities to each new organization, or to changes within the organization - new board members, new staff members, new shareholders.

Serve Up, Coach Down tells leaders in the middle just how powerful they are without pretending that leading employees and reporting to bosses don't require different skills. It fills the gap between the books those leaders consume and the information they actually need and answers the big questions that constantly confound leaders and their companies: Why do leaders who care about their teams still struggle to gain their boss's approval? Why do those same leaders who feel they serve their teams have so much difficulty getting teams to step it up and go beyond the basic requirements of their jobs?

Talent in the workplace is increasingly identified as a key factor in determining success. If effectively managed it has the potential to be a productive resource capable of adding value and competitive advantage to an organization. The Talent Powered Organization takes a strategic yet practical view of talent. Drawing on research and real-life experiences with clients, the authors provide a series of conceptual frameworks to attract, develop, and retain the best workforce.

Why are the New Zealand All Blacks the best rugby team in the world? How does the Kirov Ballet produce generation after generation of exceptional ballerinas? How did Southwest Airlines evolve from being an idiosyncratic Texan airline to become one of the most successful businesses internationally? How does the Finnish School Education System deliver great results by breaking conventions? Powerhouse uncovers the performance secrets of some of the most impressive organizations around the world and reveals the key principles they have in common....

Political observers have long attached a near-talismanic status to the first 100 days of a new administration. For an executive taking the new role as a corporate leader, the first 100 days are no less consequential. The New Boss is a guide for newly appointed senior managers to make a successful leadership transition. Written by Peter Fischer, an industrial psychologist and psychotherapist, this book provides new bosses with tried and tested models and self-assessment techniques for managing expectations, building key relationships, and implementing change....

Innovation expert Marion Debruyne explains how to become an outside-in organization by constantly connecting with the market to anticipate changes, converting customer insights into actionable change and collaborating with others where their own capabilities fall short. Packed with real world examples from leading global companies, Customer Innovation provides the framework needed to shift from a product-oriented to a solutions-oriented focus and from a transaction-based to a co-creation-based customer relationship.

Organizational structures are ineffective when they do not delineate and define accountabilities. Brian Dive focuses upon the implications of clear accountability for leadership, with an in-depth analysis of “distributed leadership” - a concept neglected in the leadership literature to date. Dive explores the relationship between leadership, accountability, and organizational structure. He argues that the majority of leadership-related problems arise not from ineffective individuals but from organizational structures that lack accountable jobs.

An expert guide for senior executives who want to quickly understand what really matters in digital business and what it takes to win. Today’s technology demands lightning-fast changes. But speed without purpose is not progress. In Fast Times, McKinsey leaders cut through the hype to provide a listenable inside look into what digital winners do best: set direction, learn, and adapt faster than anyone else.

Your management mentor in a book! This is the go-to guide on making good decisions, helping teams work together, dealing with people problems, and achieving goals when you're newly in charge or looking to brush up on your leadership skills. Wait, I'm the Boss?!? is chock-full of useful information, tips, and checklists that can be used by anyone who aspires to become a skilled manager. While it’s written with the new manager in mind, it can also serve as a useful refresher for any manager, no matter how experienced he or she may be.

Leading in the Global Matrix offers a real-world perspective of working in a matrix while using examples from the authors’ actual coaching of business leaders. This book tackles the critical, “unspoken” dimensions that are often underestimated and unaddressed in the global business world, helping listeners learn specific skills and insights that can help them be successful in the trenches; how to deal with day-to-day realities - which include complexity, pressure, and demand to deliver results with speed; what to do, why it’s important, and how to accomplish each task.

By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters. The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations - many of them his clients - avoid business disasters.