Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Audio, Inc." in Leadership

The only lasting way to enhance your productivity and growth is to focus on a handful of basic concepts and repeat them week after week - and teach your staff to do the same. This audiobook explains how to tune up virtually every area of your business systematically, with just a little disciplined focus. Spend an hour per week on each "impact area" of your business, and you will be astonished at how much you can accomplish.

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline. It clearly explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Peter Drucker, the most influential and widely-read thinker and writer on modern organizations, gives us a superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer.

The employer-employee relationship is broken, and managers face a seemingly impossible dilemma: the old model of guaranteed long-term employment no longer works in a business environment defined by continuous change, but neither does a system in which every employee acts like a free agent. The solution? Stop thinking of employees as either family or free agents. Think of them instead as allies.

This is clearly abook every manager should listen to. One of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job - most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original book into a lean, action-oriented shortened version. The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra.

It's not enough to build a company full of people with leadership skills. The Performance Pipeline digs deep into the real work of executing business results at each leadership layer. It is filled with lessons and examples from the author's 40 years of experience, and explains how to set performance standards, make sure the right work is being done, and remove performance barriers.

Best selling author Jack Trout doesn't beat around the bush. He takes marketers to task for taking the easy route too often, employing high-tech razzle-dazzle and sleight of hand when they should be working to discover and market their product's uniquely valuable qualities. He examines successful differentiation initiatives and outlines the many ways you can achieve differentiation.

Imagine a world where personal and professional growth are combined, where improving your relationships and owning your strengths at work translate directly into the rest of your life. Creating a company culture like that is not a dream. Through personal stories and real-life conversations, Jonathan Raymond takes you into the room with managers and employees where real culture change happens and shows you a new kind of employee mentoring where each person gets the real-time feedback, support, and clear boundaries we all need.

With a deep understanding of both strategy and human nature, this military treatise illustrates the fine craft of knowing one’s enemy and oneself. From military officers to CEOs to those simply looking to be more powerful in their own life, The Art of War has become required reading for anyone seeking a path of success through the modern world.

An expert in dignity studies, Donna Hicks contributes a specific, practical guide to achieving a culture of dignity. Most people know very little about dignity, and when leaders fail to respect the dignity of others, conflict and distrust ensue. She highlights three components of leading with dignity: what one must know in order to honor dignity and avoid violating it; what one must do to lead with dignity; and how one can create a culture of dignity in any organization.

This is a history of the transformation of Verizon and the telecommunications industry told through the eyes of founding CEO Ivan Seidenberg and his leadership team, with highlights and commentary from best-selling global leadership guru Ram Charan.

Kim Kristensen has been in some of the most demanding situations a leader can experience. As an officer he led soldiers into battle many times, where making decisions was literally a matter of life and death. Later he applied his experiences of leadership to the worlds of business, local government, and diplomacy as well as at the Danish royal house, where he currently serves as master of ceremonies.

Set against the colorful backdrop of the California wine industry, True to Our Roots is the story of how Paul Dolan led his California company, Fetzer Vineyards, to become a model for sustainable businesses everywhere. His respect for the environment, responsibility to his community, avoidance of chemicals, and a humanistic approach to his employees will provide inspiration and guidance for executives and managers attempting to build or sustain a modern and healthy organization, while creating value.

The Journey of Not Knowing offers a fast paced, entertaining read that gets to the heart of a critical state in today’s business climate and society overall: the constantly changing, ambiguous 21st Century with uncharted waters ahead. This book offers a new leadership approach that will inspire leaders of any size organization to view the discomfort of the new as a source of adventure rather than an obstacle to building a better future. Through the vehicle of a story about an eight-member leadership team of a fictional company, The Journey of Not Knowing follows the defended behaviors of its recognizable characters through their efforts to avoid and then solve the mystery of why a client fired them. The reward of the discovery is a critical piece of business and significant personal growth. The book opens with an experience of the author as an executive in Amazon’s early days and ends with the Journey of Not Knowing leadership model.

It can be messy and overwhelming to figure out how to solve thorny problems. Where do you start? How do you know where to look for information and evaluate its quality and bias? How can you feel confident that you are making a careful and thoroughly researched decision? Whether you are deciding between colleges, navigating a career decision, helping your aging parents find the right housing, or expanding your business, Problem Solved will show you how to use the AREA Method to make complex decisions.

The benefits of the levity effect are not conjecture but are built on extensive research and case studies from some of the world's most successful organizations. New York Times best-selling authors Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher provide powerful examples from Boeing, Nike, KPMG, Yamaha, Enterprise, Zappos, and dozens of others, showing how lightening up can drive real business results.

Today's heads of big companies are as recognizable to us as the most popular entertainers or sports stars, but the heart and soul of every organization are those leaders below the CEO. Today's celebrity CEO has become either a figurehead or an egomaniac, and often too public a personality to get the real work done. That work is done instead by teams of leaders - exceptional deputies who forge great partnerships to maximize both organizational and personal success.

Popular creative coach Gail McMeekin, author of the best-selling The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women, offers a wealth of advice for the specific challenges creative women face today: thinking too small, underestimating the need for change, fearing the future, and lacking self-confidence. McMeekin combines interviews with some of today’s most successful women and her own proven success strategies to help readers transcend their “blocks” and achieve success.

When companies like Wal-Mart, Kinko's, and Service Corp. International adopted active, consumer-driven marketing strategies in place of traditionally passive supplier/consumer relationships, they not only became more profitable - they became market leaders. Roger Blackwell explores what it means to be a mind-to-market leader and how any company, large or small, can beat its competition by employing visionary leadership strategies.

Kelly Perdew, winner of The Apprentice 2, has what it takes to lead. His secret weapon: the principles he learned at West Point, as a U.S. Army Intelligence officer, and as an Airborne Ranger, principles that he's applied to business with the same firepower determination that makes our military the best on the battlefield.