Behavior Business

The ever-increasing pace of change in today's organizations requires us all to understand and quickly adapt to constant shifts in the way our companies operate and how work gets done. Developing your own and your team's learning agility will keep your skills fresh, and help you stay flexible, grow from mistakes, and successfully respond to unexpected challenges.

Will Guidara was twenty-six when he took the helm of Eleven Madison Park, a struggling two-star brasserie that had never quite lived up to its majestic room. Eleven years later, EMP was named the best restaurant in the world. How did Guidara pull off this unprecedented transformation? Radical reinvention, a true partnership between the kitchen and the dining room—and memorable, over-the-top, bespoke hospitality.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Bruce Barton was a household name in America - a hugely successful advertising man who revolutionized his industry by treating customers like people, not like sheep to be fleeced. He created some of the most memorable and long-lived advertising slogans and campaigns in history. He understood how to succeed in business and advertising, and he set down his principles for success in best-selling books that put his name on everyone's lips.

Your organization's culture can feel like something that has a life of its own; it's long-standing, inherited, and seemingly impermeable - in fact, a strong culture is often an obstacle to doing new things or going in new directions. But leaders are the stewards of a company's culture and have the power to shape it. The best leaders know that organizational culture is a fundamental and powerful management tool that can drive positive outcomes.

Few would disagree that inclusion is both the right thing to do and good for business. Then why are we so terrible at it? If we believe in the morality and the profitability of including people of diverse and underestimated backgrounds in the workplace, why don't we do it? Because, explains Ruchika Tulshyan in this eye-opening book, we don't realize that inclusion takes awareness, intention, and regular practice. Inclusion doesn't just happen; we have to work at it. Tulshyan presents inclusion best practices, showing how leaders and organizations can meaningfully promote inclusion.

It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day demands of your current job and lose sight of the big picture, but with a typical career spanning fifty years or more, you do so at your own peril. It's up to you to chart your own course to professional success. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the 10 most important ones to help you develop yourself, make the right career moves, navigate inevitable detours and disruptions, and turn your professional dreams into reality.

Too many workplaces are driven by cynicism, paranoia, and self-interest. But the best ones foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a "Circle of Safety" that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside. Sinek illustrates his ideas with fascinating true stories that range from the military to big business, from government to investment banking.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

This book will inspire you to: better understand the path women must take to leadership; learn the root causes of the barriers that exist for women in the workplace; check your own gender biases and distinguish between confidence and competence in your colleagues; manage a more effective gender-diversity program; recognize the issues women face when speaking up about bias or harassment; and help women reenter the workforce after taking time off-and create opportunities for them to reach their ambitions.

Muhammad Yunus, the practical visionary who pioneered microcredit and won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for his world-changing efforts, here develops his revolutionary new concept that promises to redeem the failed promise of free enterprise: social business.

As Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli implied, you're either predator or prey, and the animal you most resemble determines your position on the food chain. In The Wolf in CIO's Clothing Gartner analyst and author Tina Nunno expands on Machiavelli's metaphor, examining seven animal types and the leadership attributes of each. Nunno posits the wolf - a social animal with strong predatory instincts - as the ideal example of how a leader can adapt and thrive.

Radical uncertainty changes the way we should think about decision-making. For over half a century economics has assumed that people behave rationally by optimizing among well-defined choices. Behavioral economics questioned how far people are rational, pointing to the cognitive biases that seem to describe actual behavior.

This book will inspire you to: overhaul performance management practices to jump-start motivation and engagement; use agile processes to transform how you hire, develop, and manage people; establish diversity programs that increase innovation and competitiveness as well as inclusion; use people analytics to bring unprecedented insight to hiring and talent management; prepare your company for the double waves of artificial intelligence and an older workforce; and close the gap between HR and strategy.

Intriguing and entertaining, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a Freakonomics approach to the economics and psychology of the contemporary art world. Why were record prices achieved at auction for works by 131 contemporary artists in 2006 alone, with astonishing new heights reached in 2007? Don Thompson explores the money, lust, and self-aggrandizement of the art world in an attempt to determine what makes a particular work valuable while others are ignored.

Cynthia Shapiro is a former human resources executive who's pulling back the curtain on the way that companies really work. In Corporate Confidential, she unmasks startling truths and what you can do about them. Shapiro pulls no punches, giving listeners an inside look at a secret world of hidden agendas they would never normally see: a world of insider information and insights that can save a career.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

The hallmark of any exceptional career is the ability to devise innovative solutions for work challenges. Creative thinking skills are vital for your professional advancement.

All of us constantly broadcast information to others, even when we don't say a word. Sales professionals broadcast to potential clients in a way that wins new business. Managers broadcast to their teams about projects. Colleagues broadcast to one another about available resources. The messages we choose to broadcast shape others' beliefs in the potential for success and their ability to create positive change.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

One of the most inspiring and impactful books ever written, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People has captivated people for nearly three decades. It has transformed the lives of presidents and CEOs, educators, and parents - millions of people of all ages and occupations. Now, this 30th anniversary edition of the timeless classic commemorates the wisdom of the seven habits with modern additions from Sean Covey.