Business Problem Solving

Whether you're rolling out a new product from a city-view office or rolling up your sleeves to deliver a social service in the field, learning why and how to embrace failure can help you do better faster. Smart leaders, entrepreneurs, and change agents design their innovation projects with a key idea in mind: ensure that every failure is maximally useful. In Fail Better, Anjali Sastry and Kara Penn show how to create the conditions, culture, and habits to systematically, ruthlessly, and quickly figure out what works in three steps.

High conflict is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority, and everything we do to try to end the conflict, usually makes it worse. Eventually, we can start to mimic the behavior of our adversaries, harming what we hold most dear. In this book, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.

In The Intentional Leader, Tim Hebert explores the various actions that define and shape leadership. From those decisive moments in which a difficult decision must be made, to the unguarded moments when our emotional, authentic selves manifest themselves for better or worse.

Business gurus come and go. But not Peter Drucker, who remains a towering figure, widely regarded to be the father of modern management and the world’s most influential business thinker. Drucker’s uncanny ability to codify management practices and predict future trends has ensured his lasting impact. i>The Practical Drucker culls 40 of Drucker's most important how-to lessons, each interpreted for today’s business challenges and illustrated with fascinating stories and examples.

Finite games, like football or chess, have known players, fixed rules, and a clear endpoint. The winners and losers are easily identified. Infinite games, games with no finish line, like business or politics, or life itself, have players who come and go. The rules of an infinite game are changeable, while infinite games have no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers - only ahead and behind. The question is, how do we play to succeed in the game we’re in? In this revelatory new audiobook, Simon Sinek offers a framework for leading with an infinite mindset.

Mohan and Oliver have been very fortunate to have intimate views into the data challenges that face the largest organizations and institutions across every possible industry - and what they have been hearing about for some time is how the business needs to use data and analytics to their advantage. To really address the data concerns of today's enterprise, they wanted to find a way to help enterprises achieve the success they seek. Not as a prescriptive process - but a methodology to become agile and leverage data and analytics to drive a competitive advantage.

Art Thinking combines the mind-sets of art and the tools of business to protect space for open-ended exploration and manage risks on your way to success. Art Thinking takes you from "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" to realizing your highest aims, helping you build creative skills you can apply across all facets of business and life. Warm, honest, and unexpected, Art Thinking will help you reimagine your work and life-and even change the world-while enjoying the journey from point A.

“The Creative Dealmaker” isn’t a technical business book. It’s a fable. A story about a buyer and seller who meet and transact on a business acquisition. It’s a gritty tale of a motivated buyer and seller who embark on their first ever business acquisition and exit.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) has been successfully applied in almost every area of human endeavor. And while Eli Goldratt is indeed a scientist, an educator and a business leader, he is first and foremost a philosopher. He is a thinker who provokes others to do the same. Dr. Goldratt exhorts his readers to examine and reassess their lives and business practices by cultivating a different perspective. In his latest book, The Choice, Goldratt once again presents his thought provoking approach.

Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the cliches they hear about how to make a start-up succeed - from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions. This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of start-ups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey.

Have you or your colleagues ever worked hard on something, only to find out you were focusing on the wrong problem entirely? Most people have. In a survey, 85 percent of companies said they often struggle to solve the right problems. The consequences are severe: Leaders fight the wrong strategic battles. Teams spend their energy on low-impact work. Startups build products that nobody wants. Organizations implement “solutions” that somehow make things worse, not better. Everywhere you look, the waste is staggering.

In the tradition of A Whole New Mind and The War of Art, graffiti artist and corporate thought leader Erik Wahl explores the power of creativity to achieve superior performance. Somehow we've come to believe that creativity is reserved for the chosen few: the poets, the painters, the writers. The truth is creativity is in all of us and re-discovering it is the key to unlocking your fullest potential.

Tanja Hester and her husband Mark left their crazed careerist lifestyle to live their dream life in Lake Tahoe, retiring early from high-stress careers. Now Tanja will help you map out a customized plan for freedom and make it easy to succeed, whether you're good at math and budgeting - or not! Work Optional is more than just a financial plan: it's a plan for your whole life-designed by you, not by an employer or clients.

Bob DeKoch and Phil Clampitt draw on their years of innovative practice and research to describe how leading with care enriches people and transforms organizations in our challenging times.

What if you could brainstorm innovative solutions to your company's challenges? What if you could dream up new businesses that capture markets? What if you could tap the creative genius driving Silicon Valley's success stories? The truth is you can! Analytical thinkers, numbers people, non-artists - everyone can generate imaginative ideas. All it takes is letting go of the "I'm not creative" mindset and employing a proven process.

Written by the former Executive Creative Director of Creations at Cirque du Soleil, this audiobook shows you how to step up your game, flex your creativity, and make big things happen. Whether you work independently or as part of a team, whether you're self-employed or part of an organization, and even if you think creativity isn't a part of the work that you do - this book gives you the perspective, courage, and kick-start you need to think differently about the things you do every day.

You want to pursue meaningful work and succeed professionally, and you know that personal pursuits matter and fuel your happiness, too. But in today's world, the pressure to do it all can leave you stretched thin and questioning everything—your direction, your choices, and even your ambitions themselves. Time-management techniques and productivity hacks aren’t enough. The endless search for balance feels like chasing a mirage.

In seven simple, yet vital steps Dan Solin, New York Times best-selling author of The Smartest Investment Book You'll Every Read, takes the mystery out of successful investing and shows everyone, no matter what their income or expertise in money matters, how to take control of their financial lives, ignore the "experts", and grow a nest egg. Solin's approach mirrors that of the most successful investors in the world.

High-level executives, it turns out, are often the least able to diagnose—much less solve—an organization's systemic problems. Hans Norden draws on a wealth of experience in in-house change management to help both established and up-and-coming C-suite leaders analyze the problems and create authentic, sustainable solutions. In The Root Cause, listeners will learn how executing change initiatives requires a different form of leadership than routine operations. Norden shows leaders a way to solve the seemingly unsolvable problems—and prevent more from arising in the future.