Organizational Management

Increasingly, new employees and junior members of any profession are encouraged - sometimes stridently - to "find a mentor!" Four decades of research reveals that the effects of mentorship can be profound and enduring; strong mentoring relationships have the capacity to transform individuals and entire organizations.

Some people have it, and others don’t. Jeffrey Pfeffer explores why in Power. One of the greatest minds in management theory and author or co-author of thirteen books, including the seminal business-school text Managing With Power, Jeffrey Pfeffer shows listeners how to succeed and wield power in the real world.

For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: Passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today’s dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton’s highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom.

Are your organization's ideas growing stale? Do your employees need to refresh their thinking? We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the 10 most important ones to help you instill creativity across your organization.

Every year, millions of top performers are promoted to management-level jobs - only to discover that the tactics that got them promoted are not the tactics that will make them effective in their new role. In Welcome to Management, Ryan Hawk provides practical, actionable advice and tools designed to ensure that transition is a successful one.

Our Iceberg Is Melting is a simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world. Based on the award-winning work of Harvard's John Kotter, it is a story that has been used to help thousands of people and organizations. The fable is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home - and pretty much no one listens to him.

Pulitzer Prize winner James B. Stewart shows for the first time how four of the biggest names on Wall Street - Michael Milken, Ivan Boesky, Martin Siegel, and Dennis Levine - created the greatest insider-trading ring in financial history and almost walked away with billions - until a team of downtrodden detectives triumphed over some of America's most expensive lawyers to bring this powerful quartet to justice.

The iconic Sydney to Hobart Race, a 723-mile deepwater challenge - often called the “Everest” of offshore ocean racing - is considered one of the toughest in the world. Unpredictable weather and seas make each race demanding, but in 1998, an unexpected “weather bomb” hit the fleet, creating 80-foot waves and 100-mile-per-hour winds. Many bigger, better-equipped boats tried to maneuver around the storm, but the crew of the AFR Midnight Rambler chose to head directly into its path.

Evidence shows culture drives fiscal performance. It's no secret that a toxic work culture can drive away employees and drive down profits. Creating a dynamic work culture that promotes both employee and business growth is key to ensuring an organization's success. However, culture is a moving target and hard to get right. In Great Mondays, brand strategist Josh Levine introduces a proven formula for building and managing a workplace culture that maximizes employee engagement, performance, and retention for long-term business success.

Peter Senge's groundbreaking ideas on building organizations have made him a household name among corporate managers. His theories help businesses to clarify their goals, to defy the odds, to more clearly understand threats, and to recognize new opportunities. He introduces managers to a new source of competitive advantage, and offers a marvelously empowering approach to work.

In his last book, Turn the Ship Around!, Marquet told the incredible story of abandoning command-and-control leadership on his submarine and empowering his crew to turn the worst performing submarine to the best performer in the fleet. Now, with Leadership is Language he gives businesspeople the tools they need to achieve such transformational leadership in their organizations.

Productivity and effective time management end with multitasking. The false idea that multitasking is productive has become even more prevalent and damaging to our productivity and well-being since the first edition of The Myth of Multitasking was published in 2008. In this revised and updated second edition, author and productivity expert Dave Crenshaw provides a solution for the chaos of distraction that multitasking creates - and a way to combat the temptation to constantly switch between tasks.

Become the effective, proactive leader you aspire to be with this practical tool kit for leading people and organizations.

Kindness and leadership aren't often synonymous. The purpose of this book is to teach leaders how to lead with kindness so they can influence the people they lead to create kinder workplaces, organizations, and the world. This book gives you a deep theoretical understanding of the importance of leading with kindness and also provides practical exercises for you to use. By the time you finish the book, you will feel confident in your ability to lead with kindness and also to address organizational problems at work, at home, and in the community with kindness.

Based upon research of what successful teams do to overcome severe odds, Do Big Things presents an intuitive, seven-step process that equips teams with how to quickly and consistently operate in a manner necessary for success. Filled with practical tools and engaging stories of teams today, Do Big Things equips leaders with “the how” to quickly identify and activate the behaviors needed to achieve more than you or your team ever thought possible.

Classrooms are like small organizations, and just as in any successful organization, effective leadership is key. Many teachers enter the classroom with limited training in classroom management and virtually none in leadership—a missed opportunity. While teachers hold positions of authority, true leadership goes beyond that. Building classroom leaders across a school creates a model of shared leadership, where both teachers and students see leadership in action. Empowered teachers model leadership behaviors for their students, fostering a collaborative environment where everyone ...

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.

The world’s best teams don’t win because of leadership alone. They win because of teamship. Yet when it comes to success, it is leaders who are lauded; too little attention is given to the transformation of the team itself. We’ve all but ignored how to extract billions of dollars of shareholder value from the interdependency of talent in teams, Keith Ferrazzi argues. Upgrading teams is one of the least curated and under-leveraged opportunities for success. It is time to focus on teamship.

While your compliance efforts may have served you well compared to industry standards, your best efforts that yield only "acceptable" results are not nearly good enough. You are missing an essential yet elusive component. Good leaders who lead good organizations adhere to both OSHA and industry standards. But that is just the foundation. They also own their moral responsibility to ensure safe outcomes and likewise require all team members to be worthy partners in keeping themselves and the people they work beside safe.

Cheryl Bachelder joined an ailing restaurant chain and turned it into the darling of the industry - by daring to serve the people in her organization well. When Bachelder was named CEO of Popeyes in the fall of 2007, guest visits had been declining for years, restaurant sales and profit trends were negative, and the company stock price had dropped from $34 in 2002 to $13. The brand was stagnant, and relations between the company and its franchise owners were strained.