Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Management

Leaders already know that innovation calls for a different set of activities, skills, methods, metrics, mind-sets, and leadership approaches. And it is well understood that creating a new business and optimizing an already existing one are two fundamentally different management challenges. The real problem for leaders is doing both simultaneously. How do you meet the performance requirements of the existing business-one that is still thriving-while dramatically reinventing it?

More than anything else, you need to understand exactly how your employer evaluates you, and your annual performance review doesn't tell the whole story. In The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace, Cy Wakeman shows how to calculate how your true value to your organization by understanding your current and future potential against your "emotional expense" - the toll your actions and attitudes take on the people around you.

What is your digital business model? While many leaders of companies recognize the threat from digital - and the potential opportunity - they lack a common language or a compelling framework to help them assess it and, more importantly, to direct them. They don't know how to think about their digital business model. In this probing and practical book, Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner provide much-needed tools, self-assessments, motivating examples, and key financial analyses of where the profits will likely be made.

Why are some organizations more innovative than others? How can we tap in to, empower, and leverage the natural innovation within our organizations that is so vital to our future success? Now more than ever, companies and institutions of all types and sizes are determined to create more innovative organizations. In study after study, leaders say that fostering innovation and the need for transformational change are among their top priorities.

It's very likely that best practices - ideas, processes, and strategies that are commonplace in your industry - are actually hurting your business. Although best practices can help businesses operate more competitively and efficiently, they are often outdated, harmful, and a hindrance to innovation. In Breaking Bad Habits, Freek Vermeulen, a strategy professor at London Business School, offers the tools to identify bad practices, eliminate them from your organization, and then move on to create new sources of innovation and growth by outthinking your competitors.

The author of the classic best seller Lincoln on Leadership answers the question: How would President Lincoln handle the pressing crises of our modern world? Abraham Lincoln is recognized as one of history's finest leaders, a great president when the United States was under tremendous strain. But suppose he were alive today. How would Lincoln deal with today's high-pressure issues, from politics to business?

The Risk-Driven Business Model will help you manage risk better by showing how the key choices you make in designing your business models either increase or reduce two characteristic types of risk - information risk, when you make decisions without enough information, and incentive-alignment risk, when decision makers' incentives are at odds with the broader goals of the company. Leaders who understand how the structure of their business model affects risk have the power to create wealth, revolutionize industries, and shape a better world.

The unprecedented access to other humans that technology provides has ironically freed us from engaging with them. According to social psychologist Adam Waytz, our increasingly human-free lives come with a serious cost that we’ve already begun to pay: the loss of our humanity. Humans have superpowers. More than any other psychological stimulus, our presence can make experiences feel significant, inspire moral behavior, and encourage action. The Power of Human shows us how to rehumanize and harness these unique abilities to improve our lives, beginning with our jobs.

Your employees and teams may be quite capable of handling their specific areas of focus, but unless you get them to work together, your products, services, and profits will suffer. While progress has been made, maximizing collaboration is still a challenge for many companies. They need a new approach. Over the last quarter century, California's Silicon Valley has become synonymous with building complex, successful businesses. Companies and leaders there have succeeded because they did more than apply existing business models - they created a new model.

You have a great idea. Now what? That first mile - where an innovation moves from an idea on paper to the market - is often plagued by failure. In fact less than 1 percent of ideas launched by big companies end up having real impact. The ideas aren't the problem. It's the process. The First Mile focuses on the critical moment when an innovator moves from planning to reality. It is a perilous place where hidden traps snare entrepreneurs, and roadblocks slow innovators inside large companies.

Society largely praises early risers, while maligning so-called "night owls." However, countless research studies have consistently shown that night owls are more successful and wealthier than early risers. The Morning Myth is intended to show that, indeed, night owls are generally more successful in life than early risers. The book is intended to restore self-confidence to night owls and help them to achieve more on their natural schedules, and also to inform employers on just how much productivity they're losing by forcing night owls to be at work bright and early....

You subscribe to the basic idea that business can do more than make money, but you're not sure how to act on that conviction or how to share it with the rest of your organization. The Conscious Capitalism Field Guide - the authoritative follow-up to the best-selling book Conscious Capitalism, by John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, and leadership expert Raj Sisodia - gives you the tools for sharing and implementing the principles of higher purpose and conscious business throughout your organization.

Based on the success story of a small Seattle coffee shop, this little book is a tasty brew of sound principles and instructive anecdotes. As the coffee shop owner looks for ways to retain his customer base, a consultant helps him focus on what really matters. Authors Yerkes and Decker, renowned for their consulting and business savvy, have done their homework and turned Beans into "a business fable taken from real life".

In today's volatile economic environment, filled with uncertainty and sudden change, the forces pushing you to stay focused on the core business are extremely powerful. Profiting from the core is crucial, but the danger is that overfocusing on the core can blind companies. Scanning the horizon for new markets and new products can also be tempting, but risky. Fixating too much on either strategy can cause you to miss the substantial opportunities for growth that are often hidden in plain sight, at the edge of the core business.

Your company is turning in regular profits every year, and its market share is only getting bigger. Competitors can't touch you. So why is your stock price so sluggish? The answer is as simple as it is cruel: Investors aren't interested in history, and they already know you're profitable and competitive - that knowledge is baked into your stock price. The hard reality is that a competitive advantage just isn't enough.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid show us how to look beyond mere information to the social context that creates and gives meaning to it. Arguing elegantly for the important role that human sociability plays, even - perhaps especially - in the digital world, The Social Life of Information gives us an optimistic look beyond the simplicities of information and individuals.

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

Go ahead, be skeptical about big data. The author was - at first. When the term "big data" first came on the scene, best-selling author Tom Davenport ( Competing on Analytics, Analytics at Work) thought it was just another example of technology hype. But his research in the years that followed changed his mind. Now, in clear, conversational language, Davenport explains what big data means - and why everyone in business needs to know about it.

The latest edition of this Wall Street Journal best-seller offers 26 simple strategies - from A to Z - that managers can use to address their employees' real concerns and keep them engaged. The fifth edition has been revised and updated throughout and includes many more international examples, reflecting the fact that Love 'Em or Lose 'Em is available in 22 languages, from Albanian and Arabic to Thai and Turkish. Its message is truly one that spans continents and cultures.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Reverse Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan, comes a new, comprehensive playbook for developing your corporate strategy for the future.