Career Leadership

If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.

Danny Meyer started Union Square Cafe when he was 27, with a good idea and scant experience. He is now the CEO of one of the world's most dynamic restaurant organizations, one that includes 11 unique dining establishments, each at the top of its game. How did he do it? How has he consistently beaten the odds in one of the toughest trades around?

Leadership is all about others - inspiring them to believe, then enabling that belief to become reality. That's the essence of Leadership U: it starts with U but it's not about U. Those timeless words are timelier than ever today, as leaders look to accelerate through the crisis curve. As author Gary Burnison observes, "There will likely be more change in the next two years than we have seen in the last 20." Now, in Leadership U, Burnison lays out a framework - his Six Degrees of Leadership - to show leaders how to create change.

Sir Tony Blair learnt the precepts of governing the hard way: by leading a country for over ten years. In that time he came to understand that there were certain key characteristics of successful government that he wished he had known when he started. Now Sir Tony has written the manual on political leadership that he would have wanted back in 1997, sharing the insights he has gained from his personal experience and from observing other world leaders at first hand, both while he was in office and since, through his Institute’s work with political leaders and governments globally.

In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle goes inside some of the world's most successful organizations - including Pixar, the San Antonio Spurs, and the US Navy's SEAL Team Six - and reveals what makes them tick. He demystifies the culture-building process by identifying three key skills that generate cohesion and cooperation and explains how diverse groups learn to function with a single mind.

In the years following the publication of Patrick Lencioni's best seller, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, fans have been clamoring for more information on how to implement the ideas outlined in the book. In Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni offers more specific, practical guidance for overcoming the five dysfunctions, using tools, exercises, assessments, and real-world examples.

Corporate Turnaround Artistry is a complete guide for entrepreneurial companies in times of financial distress - presenting effective strategies and proven methods to revive and rehabilitate your business. Uncertain economic times have significantly altered the financial resources available to struggling businesses. Narrowing margins and mounting internal and external pressure has taken their toll on many companies. Fortunately, most businesses can be repaired while maintaining their existing revenue structure.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve.

Agile is here to stay and is poised to move beyond IT and project management teams into other business units, even HR. If you're still using top-down planning across your organization, your company will fall to competitors that are nimbler than you. This audiobook will help you understand today's most essential thinking on the latest agile practices so your company can develop offerings faster, react to fluctuations in the market, and ensure your strategy and people can adapt at a moment's notice.

Extensively updated, the second edition of Fundamentals of Enterprise Risk Management examines the latest technologies, such as Riskonnect and High Tech Electronic Platform (HTEP), and helps listeners recognize both internal and external exposures, understand crucial concepts such as risk mapping and risk identification, and align risk opportunities with their organizations' business models.

The major difference between achieving people and average people is their perception of and response to failure. John C. Maxwell takes a closer look at failure - and reveals that the secret of moving beyond failure is to use it as a lesson and a stepping-stone. He covers the top reasons people fail and shows how to master fear instead of being mastered by it. Listeners will discover that positive benefits can accompany negative experiences - if you have the right attitude.

Organizations are facing an engagement crisis. Not surprisingly, these stakeholders have developed deflector shields to protect themselves. Only a privileged few organizations are allowed to penetrate the shield, and even less will meaningfully engage. To penetrate the shield, and engage the audience, organizations need an edge. Gamification has emerged as a way to gain that edge and organizations are beginning to see it as a key tool in their digital engagement strategy.

Are there actually tried and true principles that are always certain to help a person grow? John Maxwell says the answer is yes. He has been passionate about personal development for over 50 years, and in the 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, he teaches everything he has gleaned about what it takes to reach our potential.

How do some people bounce back with vigor from daily setbacks, professional crises, or even intense personal trauma? This collection of articles from HBR includes "How Resilience Works", by Diane Coutu; "Resilience for the Rest of Us", by Daniel Goleman; "How to Evaluate, Manage, and Strengthen Your Resilience", by David Kopans; "Find the Coaching in Criticism", by Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone; and much more.

James Dallas' Mastering the Challenges of Leading Change is an informative, insightful guide to effectively leading the transition through change. While most change management books present case studies about what happened at other companies, this audiobook is based on the author's own experiences managing over 10 transformational and turnaround initiatives, 15 acquisition integrations, and five operations/quality shared services centers of excellence.

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.

The missing link to long-term Lean success! Despite the fact that companies worldwide have adopted Lean production, none has sustained the same levels of excellence as Toyota. Why? Leadership. In The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, Jeffrey Liker and Gary L. Convis, a former executive V.P. and managing officer of Toyota, help executives and senior managers get employees to refocus their efforts - from simply performing their singular function to continuously improving in collaboration across the organization.

John C. Maxwell has been a public speaker and motivational teacher for more than fifty years. He is one of only eight people on the planet who have been awarded Toastmaster’s Golden Gavel and been inducted into the National Speakers' Association Hall of Fame. In The 16 Undeniable Laws of Communication: Apply Them and Make the Most of Your Message, he shares everything he’s learned from a lifetime of communication.

Why are you struggling to grow your business when everyone else seems to be crushing their goals? If you needed to triple revenue within the next three years, would you know exactly how to do it? Doubling the size of your business, tripling it, even growing 10 times larger isn't about magic. It's not about privileges, luck, or working harder. There's a template that the world's fastest-growing companies follow to achieve and sustain much, much faster growth.

During his storied career as head coach of the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers, Phil Jackson won more championships than any coach in the history of professional sports. This is the story of a preacher's kid from North Dakota who grew up to be one of the most innovative leaders of our time. Eleven times, Jackson led his teams to the ultimate goal: the NBA championship - six times with the Chicago Bulls and five times with the Los Angeles Lakers. This book is full of revelations.