Showing results by publisher "Ascent Audio" in Management

Countless tools and frameworks claim to make decisions objective and bias-free. But in reality, the defining decisions that leaders face are complex ones with subjective information sources and conflicting courses of action. That's why the toughest choices are left to the leaders, and that's why formulas won't answer them. In Difficult Decisions: How Leaders Make the Right Call with Insight, Integrity, and Empathy, leadership expert Eric Pliner delivers a set of practical tools for listeners to make sense of these complex, subjective decisions quickly and with integrity.

Every leader will agree that managing people is challenging and growing more complex. Since The Big Book of HR was first published, dramatic changes have taken place in the workplace and the workforce. This tenth anniversary edition incorporates discussions and reflections on these changes which are useful for any business owner, manager, or HR professional.

How often have you sat in team meetings complaining to yourself, "Why does it take forever for this group to make a simple decision? What are we even trying to achieve?" As a team leader, you have the power to improve things. It's up to you to get people to work well together and produce results. Written by team expert Mary Shapiro, the HBR Guide to Leading Teams will help you avoid the pitfalls you've experienced in the past by focusing on the often-neglected people side of teams.

Leadership is a very different skill from day-to-day management. This is because leadership is focused on the business, whereas management is devoted to solving problems that arise in the business. That may seem to suggest that leadership is the easier of the two paths, but the truth is that leadership is far harder for many people, because it is less tactical. Not all sales managers are sales leaders, but sales managers can learn to be sales leaders.

Leading with Strategic Thinking reveals what effective leaders do differently. Eschewing the one-size-fits-all leadership model, this helpful guide outlines four general leadership types and demonstrates how each type achieves success - whether through personal vision, structured process, collaboration, or empowering others. The authors identify the actions and skills that distinguish strategic leadership, drawn from interviews and focus groups with over 300 leaders from around the world.

Michael Watkins' best-selling book The First 90 Days has become the business bible for accelerating leadership transitions. Now, Watkins zeroes in on the most critical skill leaders must master to secure new roles and accelerate their transitions: negotiation. In Shaping the Game: The New Leader's Guide to Effective Negotiating, Watkins draws from extensive research and practical consulting work to reveal four fundamental objectives that should guide new leaders' actions in every negotiation.

Your new leadership role begins the moment you accept the offer, the deal is done, or the re-organization is announced. The New Leader's 100-Day Action Plan gives you a concrete framework for successful leadership and a clear roadmap to the critical first 100 days.

Agile is here to stay and is poised to move beyond IT and project management teams into other business units, even HR. If you're still using top-down planning across your organization, your company will fall to competitors that are nimbler than you. This audiobook will help you understand today's most essential thinking on the latest agile practices so your company can develop offerings faster, react to fluctuations in the market, and ensure your strategy and people can adapt at a moment's notice.

Growing the Top Line: Four Key Questions and the Proven Process for Scaling Your Business delivers the step-by-step approach to topline growth used by some of the word's most successful companies. In this book, leading growth strategy consultant and author Cliff Farrah reveals the copyrighted growth strategy that he has developed over the last 20 years through 1,400 successful client engagements and input from leaders at Fortune 500 organizations.

In the current digital age, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to stay focused. Smartphones, tablets, smart watches, and other devices constantly vie for our attention. In both business and life, we are constantly bombarded with tweets, likes, mentions, and a constant stream of information. The inability to pay attention impacts learning, parenting, prioritizing, and leading. Noise: Living and Leading When Nobody Can Focus teaches managers and leaders how to help themselves and others sharpen their focusing skills.

Let's face it: Our current approach to change is running out of steam. And the cost of unaware people is too high to pay. In this age of acceleration, we need a fresh approach to living and leading. Conscious is our wake-up call-to be aware, awake, and accountable. Nothing is more important than understanding ourselves, our relationships, and our surroundings. Being conscious helps us think deeper, learn faster, and collaborate better. The more conscious we are, the faster we adapt, and the higher performing we become. Conscious is the new smart.

Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data—to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started? Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others.

Renowned disruption thinker and bestselling author Terence Mauri delivers a compelling set of mindset shifts for today's unique leadership challenges. In the book, you'll find the future-ready insights and tools you need to lead for today and prepare your organization for tomorrow. The author explains why so many of us continually overestimate the risks of bold decisions while underestimating the downsides of standing still for too long in an increasingly complex and volatile world.

An open position on your team presents both a challenge and an opportunity. You need to understand what skills and capabilities will add value now and in the future, all while juggling the hiring process with the day-to-day demands of your job as a manager. The HBR Guide to Better Recruiting and Hiring provides the practical tips, research, stories, and advice you need to successfully attract, identify, and hire people whose values, competencies, and potential align with your team and your organization.

Hone: How Purposeful Leaders Defy Drift argues this thinking is itself in need of an overhaul. Rather than devote time to expensive, long, and often unsuccessful transformations, leaders should instead focus on holistically designing and honing the management systems that are the nervous systems of their businesses.

HBR's 10 Must Reads are definitive collections of classic ideas, practical advice, and essential thinking from the pages of Harvard Business Review. Exploring topics like disruptive innovation, emotional intelligence, and new technology in our ever-evolving world, these books empower any leader to make bold decisions and inspire others.

The best of Peter F. Drucker's articles on management, all in one place. That "management" exists as a concept, a practice, and a profession is largely due to the thinking of Peter F. Drucker. For nearly half a century, he inspired and educated managers—and powerfully shaped the nature of business—with his iconic articles in Harvard Business Review.

In today’s world of rapid, disruptive change, strategy can’t be separate from execution - it has to emerge from execution. You have to continually adjust your strategy to fit new realities. But if your organization isn’t set up to be fast on its feet, you could easily go the way of Blockbuster or Borders. Laura Stack shows you how to quickly drive strategic initiatives and get great results from your team. Stack will equip you with the knowledge, skills, and inspiration to help you hit the ground running!

By breaking the art of stakeholder management into simple lessons and frameworks, this practical book shows product managers how to manage the crucial relationships that will help you make an impact and advance your career. You'll learn how to build trusting relationships with stakeholders, optimize your communication for different audiences, get buy-in for your ideas and roadmaps, and have stakeholders appreciate it when you say no.

In Stop Selling & Start Leading, you'll discover that the very same behaviors that make leaders more effective also work to make sellers more effective, too. This critical shift in the selling mind-set, and in the sales role itself, is the key to boosting your overall sales effectiveness.