Career Social

No matter what the speaking challenge is, this inspirational book will help listeners perform with passion, power, and persuasion - at the top of their game. Whether chasing a job, planning a pitch, giving a speech at a wedding, or presenting to one or 1,000 people, listeners of It's Not What You Say will discover how to use the rule of three to win any audience over.

Story isn't just one way to persuade. It's the way. It's built into the architecture of the brain, and has been since early humans gathered around the camp fire, trying to figure out how to outsmart the lion next door. In Story or Die, story coach Lisa Cron sets out to decode the power of story, first by examining how the brain processes information, translates it into narrative, and then guards it as if your life depends on it.

We pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings”. We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: We don’t subtract. Leidy Klotz’s pioneering research shows why.

How will we live well in a super-networked, information-soaked, yet predictably irrational world? The only way to know is to understand how the way we think is changing. As economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows in Create Your Own Economy, the way we think now is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the Industrial Revolution has a man-made creation - in this case, the World Wide Web - so greatly influenced the way our minds work and our human potential.

Leonard Mlodinow, the best-selling author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking), gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world and how, for instance, we often misperceive our relationships with family, friends, and business associates, misunderstand the reasons for our investment decisions, and misremember important events.

This step-by-step guide to mastering LinkedIn will teach you how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, make high-quality connections, and create compelling content, with 60 LinkedIn lessons that are short enough to understand, and implement in 15 minutes or less. If you complete one each day, within 60 days, you’ll fully master LinkedIn. If you’re looking to find a new job, your LinkedIn profile will attract the best employers. If you’re recruiting, you’ll find and connect with top talent. And if you’re growing a business, you’ll attract your ideal customer to you.

Every day, most working professionals entrust their most important messages to a form of communication that doesn't build trust, provide differentiation, or communicate clearly enough. It's easy to point to the sheer volume of emails, text messages, voicemails, and even social messaging as the problem that reduces our reply rates and diminishes our effectiveness. But the faceless nature of that communication is also to blame.

We all experience unwieldy feelings. But between our emotion-phobic society and the debilitating uncertainty of modern times, we usually don't know how to talk about what we're going through, much less handle it. Over the past year, Liz Fosslien and Mollie West Duffy’s online community has laughed and cried about productivity guilt, pandemic anxiety, and Zoom fatigue. Now, Big Feelings addresses anyone intimidated by oversized feelings they can't predict or control.

In Difficult Conversations Don't Have to be Difficult, bestselling author Jon Gordon and veteran human resources professional and executive coach Amy P. Kelly deliver an inspiring new take on how to make tough workplace conversations an asset in building a stronger team and organization. The book, written as a business fable, follows Ruth, the CEO of a successful multinational company who has been instructed by her board to prepare her company for sale.

Public speaking can be terrifying. For David Nihill, the idea of standing in front of an audience was scarier than cliff jumping into a thorny pit of spiders and mothers-in-law. Without a parachute or advanced weaponry. Something had to change.

In what doesn't sound like the best plan ever, David decided to overcome his fears by pretending to be a comedian called "Irish Dave" for one full year, crashing as many comedy clubs, festivals, and shows as possible.

In this sharp and controversial international best seller, an award-winning economist debunks the pervasive myth that the government is sluggish and inept, and at odds with a dynamic private sector. She reveals in detailed case studies that the opposite is true: The state is, and has been, our boldest and most valuable innovator. Denying this history is leading us down the wrong path. A select few get credit for what is an intensely collective effort, and the US government has started disinvesting from innovation.

Emotions are inseparable from how we humans think, choose, and act. In Emotional Design, cognitive scientist Don Norman shows how the principles of human psychology apply to the invention and design of new technologies and products. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman made the definitive case for human-centered design, showing that good design demanded that the user's must take precedence over a designer's aesthetic if anything, from light switches to airplanes, was going to work as the user needed.

You don't need dozens or hundreds of employees to be a boss, says financial expert and serial entrepreneur Nicole Lapin. Hell, you don't need even one. You just need to be confident, savvy, and ready to get out there and make your success happen. You need to find your inner boss bitch - your most confident, savvy, ambitious self - and own it.

Award-winning executive and journalist Shari Dunn combines deep research with enlightening interviews and anecdotes from across the broad spectrum of her career to uncover the history of Competency Checking, how it manifests in the workplace, and what can be done to change it. Competency checking, Dunn argues, continues to be practiced consciously and unconsciously and is the key reason why Black people and other people of color are underrepresented in so many industries and why there continues to be a revolving door of Black talent even after the hiring surges of 2020.

How are you supposed to tell someone that they're not meeting expectations without crushing their spirit? Regular feedback, when delivered skillfully, can turn average performers into the hardest workers and stars into superstars. Yet many see it as an awkward chore: Recent studies have revealed 37 percent of managers dread giving feedback, and 65 percent of employees wish their managers gave more feedback. This trail-blazing new model eliminates the guesswork.

Success starts with a simple act: doing something new. It can be starting a new job or school, or moving to a new neighborhood. It can be meeting a prospective client or attending a networking event. To achieve anything in life, you have to put yourself out there, meet new people, and try new things. But sometimes we freeze.

Ideas are everywhere, but those with the greatest problem-solving, business-transforming, and life-changing potential are often hard to identify. Even when we recognize good ideas, applying them to everyday obstacles - whether in the workplace, our homes, or our civic institutions - can seem insurmountable. According to Matthew Syed, it doesn't have to be this way. In Rebel Ideas, Syed argues that our brainpower as individuals isn't enough. To tackle problems from climate change to economic decline, we'll need to employ the power of "cognitive diversity".

As a celebrated cultural critic and a writer for national publications like The Atlantic and Harper's, Alan Jacobs has spent his adult life belonging to communities that often clash in America's culture wars. And in his years of confronting the big issues that divide us - political, social, religious - Jacobs has learned that many of our fiercest disputes occur not because we're doomed to be divided, but because the people involved simply aren't thinking.

For too long, the term insubordination has evoked negative feelings and mental images. But for ideas to evolve and societies to progress, it’s vital to cultivate rebels who are committed to challenging conventional wisdom and improving on it. Change never comes easily. And most would-be rebels lack the skills to overcome hostile audiences who cling desperately to the way things are. Based on cutting-edge research, The Art of Insubordination is the essential guide for anyone seeking to be heard, make change, and rebel against an unhealthy status quo.

In 2014's The Accidental Superpower, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan made the case that geographic, demographic, and energy trends were unravelling the global system. Zeihan takes the story a step further in The Absent Superpower, mapping out the threats and opportunities as the world descends into disorder.