Career Organization

The new edition of the best-selling employee development classic includes advice on talent retention in the gig economy and a new chapter on creating a career-development culture in your organization.

Any cursory online search will reveal thousands of books and articles that try to help you become a better manager or a better leader. In this audiobook, we propose a third set of skills that are often neglected but are just as essential for effective leadership: the ability to clarify individual and organizational values and to find a way forward when these values conflict. This audiobook will help you develop those skills and apply them in your organization to become a better leader.

Michael D. Watkins, an expert on leadership transitions and organizational success, returns to the page with a new how-to guide for the modern leader. Here, he presents the six disciplines that separate the great from the good. Developed over the course of his storied career, Watkins’ approach to strategic thinking—"a set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward”.

This book is the definitive guide for leaders of high-growth organizations seeking to understand and execute the people-management principles that are essential to continued success. Andrew Bartlow and T. Brad Harris offer a practical toolkit that founders, functional leaders, and managers of people can use to rethink their practices to meet their organizations' needs.

Kotter and co-author Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

What if a company did everything in its power to create a culture in which everyone could overcome their own internal barriers to change and use errors and vulnerabilities as prime opportunities for personal and company growth? Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey have found and studied such companies - deliberately developmental organizations. A DDO is organized around the conviction that organizations will best prosper when they are more deeply aligned with people's strongest motive, which is to grow.

Becoming an AI-First Organization is a strategic playbook for transforming traditional businesses into AI-powered enterprises. It goes beyond the technology to address cultural, operational, ethical, and leadership changes needed to embed AI throughout an organization. The book defines being “AI-first” as integrating AI deeply into decision-making, customer experience, and product development—not as a tool, but as a foundation.

The nonprofit sector of our society is growing rapidly, creating a major need for guidelines and expert advice on how to manage these organizations effectively. Management guru Peter F. Drucker provides excellent examples and explanations of mission, leadership, resources, marketing, goals, people development, decision-making, and much more. Included are interviews with nine experts that address key issues in the booming nonprofit sector.

In Amplifiers, entrepreneur and expert management and technology consultant Tom Finegan delivers an insightful new way to think about human behavior in the execution of corporate transformations. Through an exploration of the career journeys of several leaders and analyses of "True Amplifiers" in action, the book demonstrates how to deliver strategic and transformative change by relying on the efforts of key, exemplary followers. This important book:

We are not positive because life is easy. We are positive because life can be hard. As a leader, you will face numerous obstacles, negativity, and tests. There will be times when it seems as if everything in the world is conspiring against you and your vision seems more like a fantasy than a reality. That's why positive leadership is essential! Positive leadership is not about fake positivity. It is the real stuff that makes great leaders great.

We live, say Edgar and Peter Schein, in a culture of “tell". All too often we tell others what we think they need to know or should do. But whether we are leading or following, what matters most is we get to the truth. We have to develop a commitment to sharing vital facts and identifying faulty assumptions - it can mean the difference between success and failure. This is why we need Humble Inquiry more than ever.

In the hospitality space, Three and Jackie Carpenter know full well the importance of leading teams who are loyal, engaged, and happy. Working in an industry where customer expectations are at an extreme, Three and Jackie have applied a mindset of treating employees like customers. They've developed a five-step roadmap to creating positive employee experiences and company cultures where connection is the crux of the team's success.

Successful Leaders Aren't Bullies empowers good leaders to choose leadership and to understand the benefits of leading with healthy behaviors and to intervene and to stop bullying. It will inspire and mobilize bullied victims to overcome and to thrive by presenting examples of resilient and healthy individuals and organizations.

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality - called "innovation capital" - is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. The authors have spent decades studying how people get great ideas (the subject of The Innovator's DNA) and how people test and develop those ideas (explored in The Innovator's Method).

In his new audiobook, The Heart-Led Leader, Spaulding turns his focus to ourselves - to who we are. Authentic leaders, Spaulding says, live and lead from the heart. The values and principles that guide our lives and shape our ability to lead others is far more important than our titles or our ability to crunch numbers or the impressive degrees we display on our walls. To effect true transformational change, heart-led leaders draw on the qualities of humility, vulnerability, transparency, empathy, and love.

In a tight market, your most powerful growth engine - and your best protection from competitive inroads - is this: Put everything you can into cultivating true customer loyalty. Loyal customers are less sensitive to price competition, more forgiving of small glitches, and, ultimately, become "walking billboards" who will happily promote your brand.

In Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit, insiders Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon reveal the secrets of providing online and offline customer service so superior it nearly guarantees loyalty.

Everyone seems to understand that healthy organizations nurture flourishing individuals and societies—what Jesus desires for all. How can Christian business and ministry leaders create a positive organizational culture and identity? Justin Irving has spent twenty years studying, teaching, and reflecting on organizational leadership. Drawing wisdom from the Bible, contemporary leadership theory, and the insights of over two hundred executive leaders, Irving provides a theological framework that makes human flourishing the driving motivation for leading organizations well.

Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don identified 16 habits that drive high-performing teams. Building on stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization.

The audio that shows how to get the job done and deliver results...whether you're running an entire company or in your first management job. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, who Jack Welch calls "a great practitioner and an insightful theorist," collaborate on a "compelling business story of 'how to get it done.'"

Our government organizations face political fallout, media scrutiny, reduced funding, and the many challenges involved in motivating large, multi-layered and highly regulated organizations. It's no surprise that many government organizations report that their employees are less engaged than ever and that leaders feel helpless to change the situation. In many cases, employees and government leaders are caught in a vicious cycle. Performance declines, scrutiny increases, and employee paralysis ensues. How do you break this cycle and begin building successful government?