Showing results by publisher "Recorded Books" in Management

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.

In this compelling book, strategy guru Roger L. Martin and Skoll Foundation President and CEO Sally R. Osberg describe how social entrepreneurs target systems that exist in a stable but unjust equilibrium and transform them into entirely new, superior, and sustainable equilibria. All of these leaders - call them disrupters, visionaries, or changemakers - develop, build, and scale their solutions in ways that bring about the truly revolutionary change that makes the world a fairer and better place.

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.

The lesson seems so basic. Yet time after time, good companies stumble and lose their stride - just when they were poised for rapid growth. Why? Because their leaders treated hiring as a tedious chore. They posted an ad hoc ad. Took the first person with the right skills. Hired for immediate needs, rather than future flourishing. In Hire Smart from the Start, Dave Carvajal distills lessons gained from 20 years in the trenches, building out and staffing two enormously successful Internet startups and helping firms like Tumblr, and Shutterstock land the talent they need to reach their greatest potential.

Will Africa be the world's next hub of manufacturing? China is answering in the affirmative and investing accordingly. This book dispels the notion that this crucial story is merely about China's exploitation of Africa's resources, illuminating deep questions about our own Western approach to development and the implications for the future of manufacturing. The fact that China sees Africa not for its poverty but for its potential wealth is a striking departure from the attitude of the West, in particular the United States.

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.

Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a third way that is neither sustaining nor disruptive.

Goliath's Revenge is the practical guide for how executives and aspiring leaders of established companies can run the Silicon Valley playbook for themselves and capitalize on digital disruption. Technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, internet of things, blockchain, and immersive experiences are changing the basis of competition in every industry. New competitors are emerging while traditional ones are falling behind.

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....

After speaking to companies such as Merck, Land O'Lakes, and Cargill, and 2,000 audiences across the world, Damian Mason, successful businessman, agriculturalist, podcaster, and writer, wants to help you achieve your entrepreneurial goals and live a better life. While other business books claim to tell you how to reach success, they fall short because they don't address the fact that success is different for each of us. Do Business Better helps you define success on your terms, then shows you how to achieve it.

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".

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.

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.

Connectional intelligence unlocks the 21st-century secret to getting "big things done" regardless of who you are, where you live, or what you do. We typically associate success and leadership with smarts, passion, and luck. But in today's hypercompetitive world, even those gifts aren't enough. Get Big Things Done argues that the game changer is a thoroughly modern skill called connectional intelligence.