Business Performance

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.

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.

When Denver Mayor Michael Hancock took office in 2011, he inherited an $80 million budget shortfall and a government workforce that had been through multiple rounds of cuts and furloughs. Morale was low. He needed a way to drive greater efficiencies, cost savings, and improved performance - and he had to do it in-house, on a shoe-string budget. Enter Peak Academy, the coaching and innovation program Mayor Hancock created to teach frontline city employees how to tackle small problems and deliver big results.

We have entered a new world of work. It’s a world where successful leaders embrace a human-centric approach, prioritizing the mental health and personal responsibilities of their employees alongside their professional ones. However, post-pandemic, a dark side to the empathetic workplace has emerged and many well-intentioned business leaders are struggling to keep both productivity and morale high. In The Empathy Dilemma, author, speaker and empathy advocate Maria Ross explores the difficulties organizational leaders are having, and the solutions they need to get back on track.

Whether you are a CEO, senior executive, manager or an employee looking to raise his or her performance, The A Player is packed with proven strategies to get you to "A Player" status. Businesses filled with "A Players" are not only more profitable and able to share in that prosperity, but those "A Players" are happier and lead more purpose-filled lives as well. The A Player will teach everyone on your team the required steps to achieve and sustain "A Player" performance and lead the charge in creating remarkable steps both personally and professionally.

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.

Inspired Manufacturing Leadership answers the question of how to systematically incorporate Kaizen, metric management, problem solving, people development, culture change, and many more improvement efforts into one cohesive system of implementation. It reveals to leaders how to effectively and systematically challenge all processes having them to become predictable and repeatable. Once implemented, it facilitates the achievement of breakthrough results.

In this timely and essential guide, McKinsey alumni Gaurav Bhatnagar and Mark Minukas present a proven approach to workplace anxiety that reduces stress, boosts well-being, and overcomes blocks that get in the way of success. It begins with changing our relationship with fear and then developing strategies that improve outlook and performance, leading to greater profits, sustainable growth, and personal rewards. It’s only possible with a culture of unfear.

Revealingly candid, this Hollywood memoir is the story of Jay Bernstein, an entertainment industry fixture who helped launch and sustain the careers of many celebrities including Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers. From his childhood in Oklahoma City and his first job in a Hollywood mail room to the ownership of his own public relations firm and his work as a television producer, Bernstein’s life is chronicled in his own words.

Leadership Isn't for Cowards offers straightforward steps to leading courageously and practical tips for driving performance. Courageous leadership means toughening your approach by being rigorous in the application of your values through the company culture. It means confronting and challenging people, and not letting them get away with being less than you know they can be.

The Dealmaker's Ten Commandments contains a practical, no-nonsense methodology for negotiating deals, managing your time, and handling crisis all at the highest level. Peppered with entertainment industry war stories, The Dealmaker's Ten Commandments has been forged in the white-hot crucible of brutal transactional combat.

The Confident Mind is a complete guide to self-belief for professionals in any field: how to understand it, how to build it, how to protect it and how to apply it when your performance matters. Nathaniel Zinsser has spent decades helping army elites, Olympic and top-tier athletes and business professionals overcome self-doubt so that they can perform to the best of their ability. In The Confident Mind, Zinsser shares his a step-by-step logical approach to building confidence and breaks the process down into easy-to-practice steps that everyone can utilise.

It is taken for granted in the knowledge economy that companies must employ the most talented performers to compete and succeed. Many firms try to buy stars by luring them away from competitors. But Boris Groysberg shows what an uncertain and disastrous practice this can be.

It's not enough to build a company full of people with leadership skills. The Performance Pipeline digs deep into the real work of executing business results at each leadership layer. It is filled with lessons and examples from the author's 40 years of experience, and explains how to set performance standards, make sure the right work is being done, and remove performance barriers.

Not everyone can be Bradd Pitt or Denzel Washington. Most aspiring actors end up as waiters, or pursuing other odd jobs while they wait for their big break. What if there was a path to making a living while waiting for your opportunity? What if there were philosophies and actions one could take that could potentially make their journey into Hollywood easier to grasp? This book will give you examples of what I have done over the last twenty-five years making a living in the entertainment business.

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.

With passion, humor, and a rare insight into what motivates all of us to do our best, Culbert offers all of us a chance to be better managers, better employees and, indeed, better people. Culbert has long said his goal is to make the world of work fit for human consumption. Get Rid of the Performance Review!shows us how to do just that.

As a leader, is it possible to be both successful and humble? Studies show that today's emerging leaders not only prioritize achievement over humility but also see the two as mutually exclusive. Does this signal an existential crisis for healthcare - an industry that, at its essence, is supposed to embody humility and compassion? Thankfully, no, according to Intangibles: The Unexpected Traits of High-Performing Healthcare Leaders, which demonstrates that you can embrace humility and still be excellent at your job.

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.

As companies evolve to adopt, integrate, and leverage software as the defining element of their success in the 21st century, a rash of processes and methodologies are vying for their product teams' attention. In the worst of cases, each discipline on these teams - product management, design, and software engineering - learn a different model.