Behavior Business

Thrive in a world with unwritten rules… before now. The Corporate Life Survival Guide is a detailed how-to book on mastering office politics. With chapters on workplace life, situations to avoid, and achieving a work/life balance, it draws on the author’s quarter century of experience as an employee, contractor, and consultant. Insightful guidance and illustrative anecdotes will help you understand important missteps, the consequences, and how to prevent them. Always practical, the book will quickly improve the savvy of workers who are new to office life, making a successful career ...

According to the Leisure Studies Department at the University of Iowa, true leisure is “that place in which we realize our humanity.” If that’s true, argues Brigid Schulte, then we're doing dangerously little realizing of our humanity. In Overwhelmed, Schulte, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asks: Are our brains, our partners, our culture, and our bosses making it impossible for us to experience anything but “contaminated time”?

The New York Times best-selling authors of Switch and Made to Stick explore why certain brief experiences can jolt, elevate and change us - and how we can learn to create such extraordinary moments in our life and work. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember 20 years later? What if a doctor or nurse knew how to orchestrate moments that would bring more comfort to patients?

Driven entrepreneurs often have a burning need to succeed. But that same relentless brilliance that propels them in their career often takes a toll on their teams, personal relationships, and even their health. Gino Wickman, bestselling author of Traction, teams up with mindfulness expert Rob Dube to share their journeys and help listeners strike a crucial balance between their inner and outer worlds while taking their success to new heights. In Shine, they share ten disciplines to help them stay sharp and energetic without burning out.

What can you learn from the most successful companies in the world? The Spanx Story will help you understand and adopt the competitive strategies, workplace culture, and daily business practices that enabled entrepreneur Sara Blakely to dominate the shapewear industry and become a billionaire.

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.

Race, Work, and Leadership is a rare and important compilation of essays that examines how race matters in people's experience of work and leadership. What does it mean to be Black in corporate America today? How are racial dynamics in organizations changing? How do we build inclusive organizations?

How do you maintain a family-friendly office without discriminating against singles? What’s the difference between showing romantic interest and sexual harassment? Which colleagues should be invited to family weddings? When should you be unavailable, at or away from work? Don’t convene a focus group or appeal to Human Resources - consult Miss Manners! With wit and wisdom, Miss Manners restores civility, guiding you around your coworker’s messy cubicle, past your overly prying boss, around the bridal shower for the new temp, and through tedious staff meetings.

Conklin’s audiobook is an interesting and informal discussion with the listener about the five principles of human performance; principle by principle, section by section. These five theories about how humans perform in organizations are principles, the building blocks of human performance, through which we have established a new way to think about safety and reliability in our worlds...and changing the way we think about work is a vital step toward improvement.

Carl Hiaasen doesn't like the Walt Disney Company. A native of Florida, Hiaasen comes by his dislike for Disney honestly. He has witnessed the relentless success of the Disney machine firsthand with the development of Disney World and other properties around Orlando. In Team Rodent, Hiaasen paints a witty and sarcastic portrait of a company that can control the press, manipulate local governments, and—because it's Disney—get away with it. Entertaining and enlightening, the book takes a critical view of the Disney corporate giant, tracing its destructive impact.

Why are people named Kim, Kelly, and Ken more likely to donate to Hurricane Katrina victims than to Hurricane Rita victims? Are you really more likely to solve puzzles if you watch a light bulb illuminate? How did installing blue lights along a Japanese railway line halt rising crime and suicide rates? Can decorating your walls with the right artwork make you more honest? The human brain is fantastically complex, having engineered space travel and liberated nuclear energy, so it's no wonder that we resist the idea that we're deeply influenced by our surroundings.

Unstoppable Teams show managers at every level, at both large and small organizations, including private, public, and nonprofit, how to inspire, motivate, and lead the people around them.

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online life: their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed.

High performance has always required shrewd strategy and superb execution. But Rich Karlgaard - Forbes publisher, entrepreneur, investor, and board director - takes a surprising turn and argues that there is now a third element that's required for competitive advantage - your company's values. Karlgaard examined a variety of enduring companies and found that they have one thing in common; all have leveraged their deepest values alongside strategy and execution, allowing them to fuel growth as well as weather hard times.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

In Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek, internationally best-selling author of Start With Why, investigates these great leaders from Marine Corps Officers, who don't just sacrifice their place at the table but often their own comfort and even their lives for those in their care, to the heads of big business and government - each putting aside their own interests to protect their teams.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.

A few rare leaders have learned to embrace a new organizational shape and mindset: Constellations. Organizations designed as constellations are dynamic and flexible networks of distinct yet interwoven individuals. Each member of the team feels like a singular star and is also connected to others to form something greater. That is how Visa reimagined how we pay for things, how Wikipedia beat the richest company in the world and how Barack Obama and his grassroots team revolutionized political campaigning. These leaders did what most leaders dread - they gave away power.

In their acclaimed best seller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted many longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned their research and analysis to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a new book that turns the conventional wisdom on its head. The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty.

In The Humor Habit, veteran speaker, corporate trainer, and comedian Paul Osincup delivers a hilarious and effective new take on how to make yourself and your team more productive and resilient by focusing on the funny side of work and life. In the book, you'll learn why humor isn't an in-born quality you're either born with or without. Instead, it's a habit you can develop over time.