Business Performance

Unlocking Excellence: 25+ Years of Insights on Leadership and Personal Growth as Your Blueprint for Success Are you ready to unlock your potential and accelerate your success? Unlocking Excellence combines 25+ years of personal notes, lessons learned, and practical insights from leadership, innovation, and high performance into one powerful blueprint for personal and professional growth. This book offers actionable steps, backed by scientific research and real-world examples, to help you become a better leader, master personal growth, and develop the grit needed to overcome challenges. ...

Management teams and boards are facing disruption on all sides, from morphing customer preferences to the COVID pandemic to climate change. At the same time they are floundering in strategy confusion with too many concepts and not enough clarity. In this book, strategy expert and regular Harvard Business Review author Graham Kenny releases managers and directors from their strategy haze. His simple and effective framework allows managers to navigate the current maze of ideas and approaches and maximize their competitive advantage.

More than 85 years after his untimely death at just age 37, Irving Thalberg remains a legendary Hollywood figure. Called the “Boy Wonder of Hollywood,” Thalberg quickly climbed the ranks at MGM studios to become one of the most powerful and high-profile producers of the time, elevating filmmaking to an art form. In this definitive biography, Bob Thomas brings Thalberg's legend to life, recounting how the producer's remarkable talent for developing stars and scripts led to the creation of beloved movies such as Ben-Hur, Romeo and Juliet, and Camille.

This new edition of this best-selling guide offers an integrated approach to process improvement that delivers quick and substantial results in quality and productivity in diverse settings. The authors explore their Model for Improvement that worked with international improvement efforts at multinational companies as well as in different industries such as healthcare and public agencies. This edition includes new information that shows how to accelerate improvement by spreading changes across multiple sites.

In The Storytelling Edge, the strategy minds behind Contently, the world renowned content marketing technology company, reveal their secrets that have helped award-winning brands to build relationships with millions of advocates and customers. Join as they dive into the neuroscience of storytelling, the elements of powerful stories, and methodologies to grow businesses through engaging and accountable content.

Much more than a showbiz memoir, Hot Pants in Hollywood tells of a baby boomer's life on steroids. Susan Silver was one of the first female TV comedy writers with credits like the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Bob Newhart, among others. From Milwaukee, Susan went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood, had a successful career as one of the first women in TV sitcoms, and reinvented herself in different prominent arenas in New York. Though her story is unique, her life is relatable to all women looking for advice in work or love.

Written by Shingo Prize winner Jacob Stoller, Productivity Reimagined shows how most companies are constrained by deeply engrained myths that prevent employees from reaching their full productive potential, causing frustration, poor decisions, and disappointing results. Evidence is drawn from Toyota and dozens of other companies that have countered these myths to build strong collaborative cultures and achieve sustainable growth.

With Results, Not Reports, Peter Follows, CEO of Carpedia International, provides business leaders with a framework for lasting improvements in performance and profitability. Carpedia has a remarkable success rate in large-scale improvement programs, helping clients achieve their improvement goals over 90 percent of the time. In this book, Peter explains how to achieve sustainable improvement through the dynamic management of process, performance, and people, emphasizing that all three components have an interdependent relationship and that the key is to address them concurrently.

Are you sick of feeling like the only one who really moves the needle forward in your business is you? Would your life change if you had A-Players showing up in your business every day, ready to solve problems, take work off your plate, and innovate? What would it mean to you if you had so much trust in your team members that you could actually work 40 hours a week and then be present at home (and finally take time for yourself, your family, and your LIFE)?

Tradition says there are three ways to grow a company's revenue: fire up the sales team with empty promises, cut costs and downsize, or cook the books. But what if there's a better way, a way that nine amazingly profitable and well-run companies are already embracing.

Do you want to be a transformational coach, powerfully supporting your clients in their journey from where they are today to where they have only dared dream of until now? This Is Coaching was written to help you unlock your full potential as a coach, wherever you are along the path.

Many leaders miss out on their teams’ full potential because navigating the complex and ever-changing business landscape is more and more challenging. Traditional leadership models often fail to address the intricate interplay of organizational intentions, external factors, and internal dynamics resulting in subpar performance and disengaged teams. As a result, executives find themselves ill equipped to set their organization and leaders up for success in an increasingly complex world.

All humans have an innate drive to make great things. In The Innovation Mindset, Jennifer Kenny shows you exactly how to implement practices that will drive greater innovation, differentiate your products and solutions through better innovation, and maximize the innovation capacity of your team.

Close more deals by understanding what your customer really wants. Too often, we hear the message that selling is shallow. In reality, it's the opposite. The most effective salespeople are the ones who dive deeper—who prioritize relationships and stay focused on the big picture of what they're playing for. Iceberg Selling is a technique based on the understanding that, for every person, company, and situation, you can only see 10% of what's really going on. Using single-serving lessons and real-life anecdotes, you’ll learn a series of mindsets and best practices.

In What's Your Story? Using Stories to Ignite Performance and Be More Successful, author, entrepreneur, professor and master story teller Craig Wortmann demonstrates the powerful impact stories have on the three most common performance challenges: leadership, strategic selling, and motivation. While the technique of telling stories is the oldest form of communication, it's also the one form that rises above the din of our information-saturated environment.

People are the problem. They're always the problem. If a business person goes home frustrated, if they talk with their significant other about it, if they lay awake at night stewing about it, inevitably the problem is some person at work - a colleague, subordinate, or boss. Handling people issues is every leader's major headache. It's what takes up the majority of their time and - more important - the bulk of their head space. Every leader can and must develop this most important of all management skills.

A self-empowerment guide to achieving your fullest professional and personal potential, Don’t Take Yes for An Answer explains why positive feedback limits personal and professional growth and then teaches you how to embrace hard truths and critical feedback to escape mediocrity and break away from the pack. To stand out, attract the attention of those who can raise your profile, protect yourself during lean times, or gain the interest of future employers, you must harness three critical communication traits that human beings respond to most: AWE: Authority. Warmth. Energy.

The definitive biography of movie executive and philanthropist Sherry Lansing traces her groundbreaking journey to become the first female head of a major motion picture studio, shares behind-the-scenes tales from movie sets and Hollywood boardrooms, and explains what inspired her to walk away from it all to start the Sherry Lansing Foundation.

Today's most acclaimed film directors reveal intimate behind-the-scenes details of their most influential work and their unique approaches to their art. In the companion to the Silver Plaque-winning Starz/Encore documentary series, this book offers interviews with 13 top filmmakers. Contains each director's filmography, complete listings of major awards, and cast credits for all films discussed.

Whether it is a director insisting on a final cut, a star demanding a bigger motor home, a producer holding the line on a budget, or a grip with a gripe, it seems that the world of moviemaking is nothing but Sturm und Drang. Shoot Out presents a raucous look at how movies get made and the players involved, from writers, producers, directors, and stars to agents and marketers. For film buffs, aspiring filmmakers, students, and anyone else intrigued by the inner workings of Hollywood, this is the quintessential take on the how, who, what, and why of the film business.