Showing results by publisher "Ascent Audio" in Decision-Making & Problem Solving

Best-selling author and scholar Michael Roberto presents a thorough investigation of organizational obstacles to creative thought. Highly relevant to the growth crises many enterprises face in today's economic landscape, this book examines how to break barriers to spark creativity and foster new ideas.

Renowned environmental strategist, speaker, world traveler, and author Paula DiPerna brings a unique voice and optic to demystify and unveil today's most fascinating financial disruption—pricing the priceless to flip conventional ideas of how we value natural assets and why. She asks the provocative question long ignored: Why do we value the indispensable atmosphere at zero, but dispensable production in the trillions? She digs into alternatives, with real-life examples from around the globe of fascinating and pioneering financial innovations.

No business can afford to ignore the theory of disruptive innovation. But the nuances of Clayton Christensen's foundational thinking on the subject are often forgotten or misinterpreted. To achieve continuing growth in your business while defending against upstarts, you need to understand clearly what disruption is and how it works, and know how it applies to your industry and your company.

Social innovation and entrepreneurship are rising forces in the world. As stakeholder capitalism takes root, and as the extent of systemic challenges becomes clear - from climate change to income inequality to food security to health care and beyond - more and more of the best and brightest will hear the calling to become innovators and entrepreneurs who develop and deploy solutions to the world's thorniest problems.

Our ability to foresee and protect against natural catastrophes has never been greater; yet we consistently fail to heed the warnings and protect ourselves and our communities, with devastating consequences. What explains this contradiction? In The Ostrich Paradox, Wharton professors Robert Meyer and Howard Kunreuther draw on years of teaching and research to explain why disaster preparedness efforts consistently fall short.

This practical guide introduces managers to a powerful new engagement and retention tool: the stay interview. Smart companies have begun conducting these periodic reviews in order to discover why their important talent might leave and to solve any problems before they actually quit.

In Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions, accomplished sales, negotiation, and influence experts Andres Lares, Jeff Cochran, and Shaun Digan, PhD, deliver a concise and insightful take on how to transform your ability to persuade others regardless of the setting.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Data Leadership for Everyone is a game-changing book for anyone who believes in the power of data and is ready to create revolutionary change in their organization. Whether you're a C-suite executive, a manager, or an individual contributor, this book will propel your career by unlocking the mystery of how raw data transforms into real outcomes.

What is the best way for a company to innovate? That's exactly the wrong question. The better question: How can organizations get the maximum possible value from their innovation investments? Advice recommending "innovation vacations" and the luxury of failure may be wonderful for organizations with time to spend and money to waste. But this audiobook addresses the innovation priorities of companies that live in the real world of limits. They want fast, frugal, and high-impact innovations.

Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the cliches they hear about how to make a start-up succeed - from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions. This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of start-ups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey.

For more than twenty years, major innovations—the kind that transform industries and even societies—seem to have come almost exclusively from startups. Established companies still dominate most markets, but despite massive efforts and millions of dollars, they can't seem to achieve the same kinds of foundational breakthroughs. The problem, say Tony Davila and Marc Epstein, is that the very processes and structures responsible for established companies' enduring success prevent them from developing breakthroughs. This is the innovation paradox.

While everyone is talking about "big data", the truth is that understanding the "little data" - the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on - is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. Everydata explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.

A renowned business innovation leader teams up with a social-personality psychologist to offer that something else—a collection of ten visionary principles to obliterate barriers to change and ignite a whole new level of creative problem-solving. Drawing upon decades of experience working with the world's best-known organizations and their teams, the authors provide practical advice that goes beyond "business as usual" for successfully tackling intractable challenges. The Breakthrough Manifesto explores why these principles are critical for the current times.

In The Startup Story: An Entrepreneur's Journey from Idea to Exit, renowned serial entrepreneur Martin Warner takes a fledgling company all the way from zero to hero, selling it for $50 million after a mere seventeen months. It's a memoir of whirlwind entrepreneurial success, a nonfiction narrative that puts the listener in the CEO's seat, giving the feel of what it's really like to steer a company around the toughest of tracks and come out with a massive payday.

In A Symphony of Choices, workplace culture and strategy expert Gerald Leonard delivers a fascinating narrative following one Jerry Hall, the new Symphony Orchestra manager at a prestigious symphony concerned about the challenging plans for an upcoming season. In the book, you'll watch Jerry connect with a former college professor and learn the skills necessary to successfully manage his way through these unprecedented times in his business and personal life.

For Marc Lesser the key to healthy relationships and effective workplaces is compassionate accountability—a practical and trainable way to clarify and achieve shared visions of success. Marc works from the premise that problems are inevitable and that the success of an enterprise or relationship relies on how they are resolved. This applies to any joint effort—in a workplace, a family, a civic organization, a community, a country, or the world at large.

We all travel along various rivers in life, which means at any moment we can find ourselves navigating their uncertainty—whether a global pandemic, a new boss, a shift in employment, business restructuring, a new role on a team, the birth of a child, divorce, or responding to a setback on a project or personal goal. Change is going to happen. It's a fact of life. Understanding your reactions and making good choices could make the difference between capitalizing on an opportunity or resisting and missing an important chance.

People issues. They seemingly arise out of nowhere and just don't go away. It's critical that managers handle them right. As a manager, you need to know so many things about managing people, but you don't even know what to ask! The Decisive Manager can help. With examples of typical situations that managers encounter and advice on how to handle them, it's an easy-to-use guide for people managers and has information on hiring to firing, and everything in between.

The essays in How I Did It teach and inspire. Pulled directly from the pages of one of the most popular columns in Harvard Business Review, these essays offer firsthand accounts of the most difficult management challenges faced by the men and women who occupy the corner office. It's the next best thing to sitting down and talking face-to-face with these corporate leaders.