Business Leadership Management

Harvard Business Review is the foremost destination for smart management thinking. Now, at its 100th anniversary, this commemorative volume brings together the most influential ideas since its inception. With thought leaders including Michael E. Porter, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Peter Drucker, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book puts HBR's greatest concepts at your fingertips. You'll learn how these groundbreaking ideas continue to be relevant in today's business context—and what to keep in mind as you prepare for the future.

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance - for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship. In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes.

Managing stress comes down to understanding - and solving - what therapist Megan Bruneau calls the stress equation. According to Bruneau, stress is the result of thinking that your perceived responsibilities are greater than your perceived capacity to take them on. In this workshop, Bruneau tells us how to change those perceptions to manage stress, whether it originates at the office or elsewhere. From understanding that you can’t do everything yourself to taking time to boost your mood, Bruneau identifies concrete ways to help you de-stress and handle life’s messiness.

In Startup Boards, Brad Feld - a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist - shares his experience in this area by talking about the importance of having the right board members on your team and how to manage them well. Along the way, he shares valuable insights on various aspects of the board, including how they can support you, help you understand your startup's milestones and get to them faster, and hold you accountable.

Real Madrid is the most successful sports team on the planet. The soccer club has more trophies than any other sports team, including 11 UEFA Champions League trophies. However, the story behind the triumph goes beyond the players and coaches. Generally unnoticed, a management team consisting mostly of outsiders took the team from near bankruptcy to the most valuable sports organization in the world. How did Real Madrid achieve such extraordinary success? Columbia Business School adjunct professor Steven G. Mandis investigates.

Best-selling author Denis Waitley, in conversation with Dan Strutzel, offers timeless and timely advice on how to apply his philosophy to the digital age and attain personal and professional excellence today.

Discover the benefits of being positive. We all have two dogs inside of us. One dog is positive, happy, optimistic, and hopeful. The other dog is negative, mad, sad, pessimistic, and fearful. These two dogs often fight inside us, but guess who wins the fight? The one you feed the most. So begins the story about a negative mutt named Matt and a big dog named Bubba who teaches him how to feed himself with positivity each day and in the process Matt transforms his own life and the shelter they call home.

In Change Proof, business and personal development expert Adam Markel shows how you can move beyond managing change to actively embracing it—and actually using times of uncertainty, crisis, and chaos to create opportunities and stimulate positive growth. You'll learn how to choose change before it chooses you, what it takes (and what it means) to become truly change proof, and how to leverage your relationship to change. This book will help you take the art and science of resilience to the next level—and look forward to future and all the changes it will bring.

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to - and approach for - overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy”.

It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.

It is always easy to find people who want a job, but it's never easy to find and hire A-players. In How to Hire A-Players, consultant Eric Herrenkohl shows owners, executives, and managers of small and medium-size businesses where and how to find A-player employees. It is these individuals who will help keep quality high and growth and profits strong. Herrenkohl explains how to use your existing marketing, sales, and networking efforts to find top candidates. He provides current examples of companies that consistently hire A-players without big recruiting departments....

Stuck in a "win-win versus win-lose" mind-set, most negotiators focus on the face-to-face process at the table. David Lax and James Sebenius urge bargainers to look beyond tactics at the table. Persuasive tactics are only the "first dimension" of the authors' path-breaking approach, developed from their decades of doing deals and analyzing great dealmakers.

The bar is set high for inventory control professionals - and well-ordered stock rooms and records are just the beginning. Beyond core tasks such as locating items, you've got to project future business needs, hold down costs, and fix supply chain problems. You need strategic and financial knowledge and the skills to manage many moving parts. Essentials of Inventory Management is the answer audiobook on which practitioners and students rely. It breaks down the job into easy concepts and concrete steps.

Every leader must be ready and willing to take charge, to make hard, crucial calls for the good of the team and the mission. Something much more difficult to understand is that in order to be a good leader, one must also be a good follower. This is a dichotomy - a Dichotomy of Leadership. It is, as authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explained in their best-selling first audiobook, Extreme Ownership, “Simple, Not Easy”.

Years ago, developing and sustaining a book of business was not as big a problem for accountants, attorneys, financial planners, and other professionals as it is today. Clients were more loyal to the firms they worked with, and unlikely to shop your services, compare rates, or jump ship. Times have changed! And if you don't change along with them...well, you're not going to enjoy yourself or have as much control over your career as you deserve. Believe it or not, you can enjoy the process of expanding your client base.

A "brilliant, fun, and wise" (Cass R. Sunstein) tour of nine common business decision-making traps - and practical tools for avoiding them - from a professor of strategic thinking.

Are your employees meeting their goals? Is their work improving over time? Understanding where your employees are succeeding—and falling short—is a pivotal part of ensuring you have the right talent to meet organizational objectives. In order to work with your people and effectively monitor their progress, you need a system in place. The HBR Guide to Performance Management provides a multi-step, cyclical process to help you keep track of your employees' work, identify where they need to improve, and ensure they're growing with the organization.

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.

Best selling author Jack Trout doesn't beat around the bush. He takes marketers to task for taking the easy route too often, employing high-tech razzle-dazzle and sleight of hand when they should be working to discover and market their product's uniquely valuable qualities. He examines successful differentiation initiatives and outlines the many ways you can achieve differentiation.

In QBQ! The Question Behind the Question, John G. Miller revealed how personal accountability helps to create opportunity, overcome obstacles, and achieve goals by eliminating blame, complaining, and procrastination. The result? Stronger organizations, more dynamic teams, and healthier relationships. Now Miller takes listeners to the next level to show how they can use the power of the QBQ! and personal accountability every day. When a light switch is flipped the flow of energy that is released reaches the lightbulb in an instant, bringing it to life.