Workplace Development

Eileen Sharp and Vic Hightower were frustrated. After years of profitable, predictable growth, Swan Services was in a rut. Meetings were called and discussions held, but few decisions were made and even less got done. People were pointing fingers and assigning blame, but nothing happened to solve Swan’s mounting problems. It felt as though they were working harder than ever but with less impact. The company Eileen and Vic had founded and built for 10 years was a different place. It just wasn’t fun anymore.

Drawing on his experience as a psychiatrist, business consultant, and coach, author Mark Goulston combines his background with the latest scientific research to help listeners turn the "impossible" and "unreachable" people in their lives into allies, devoted customers, loyal colleagues, and lifetime friends. Just Listen provides simple but powerful techniques listeners can use to really get through to people.

We used to think of failure as the opposite of success. Now, we’re often torn between two “failure cultures”: one that says to avoid failure at all costs, the other that says fail fast, fail often. The trouble is that both approaches lack the crucial distinctions to help us separate good failure from bad. As a result, we miss the opportunity to fail well. After decades of award-winning research, Amy Edmondson is here to upend our understanding of failure and make it work for us. In Right Kind of Wrong, Edmondson provides the framework to think, discuss, and practice failure wisely.

Finally, in the first productivity book by a woman in a decade, Erin Falconer will show you how to do less - a lot less. In fact, How to Get Sh*t Done will teach you how to zero in on the three areas of your life where you want to excel, and then it will show you how to offload, outsource, or just stop giving a damn about the rest. In How to Get Sh*t Done she shows how even the most perfectionistic among us can tap in to our inner free spirit and learn to feel like badasses rather than drudges.

As CEO, most everything that Rich O'Connor did had something to do with at least one of the four disciplines on his famed "yellow sheet." Rich never suspected that it would become the blueprint of an employee's plan to destroy the firm. Best selling author Lencioni brings us a fable that focuses on a leader's crucial role in building a healthy organization.

Award-winning professor, management consultant, and virtual communications expert Andrew Brodsky is here to tell you that, yes, that meeting could have been an email. And that email? Maybe it should have been a voice note (really!). And your camera—it’s okay to turn it off; sometimes it’s even better. If you’re crushed under the weight of your inbox or exhausted from back-to-back-to-back video calls, then Ping is here to help workers at all levels and of all stripes—remote, hybrid, and in person—who use communication technologies as part of their jobs.

Thrive in a world with unwritten rules… before now. The Corporate Life Survival Guide is a detailed how-to book on mastering office politics. With chapters on workplace life, situations to avoid, and achieving a work/life balance, it draws on the author’s quarter century of experience as an employee, contractor, and consultant. Insightful guidance and illustrative anecdotes will help you understand important missteps, the consequences, and how to prevent them. Always practical, the book will quickly improve the savvy of workers who are new to office life, making a successful career ...

As an introvert, do you ever feel like the things you're best at—deep thinking, keen observation, focused listening, and strategic planning—are not highly valued in your workplace because they are internal rather than external? Have you ever been ignored or passed over while the extrovert in the next office is recognized and rewarded? Do you feel like you have to pretend to be someone you're not in order to get ahead? Just because your greatest strengths are internal doesn't mean your workplace doesn't need them. In fact, your invisible skills are essential to any business's success!

What’s the secret to business growth and innovation and a purpose-driven career in a world that is becoming vastly more complicated by the day? According to Marc Benioff, the answer is embracing a culture in which your values permeate everything you do. In Trailblazer, Benioff gives listeners a rare behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of one of the world’s most admired companies. He reveals how Salesforce’s core values - trust, customer success, innovation, and equality - and commitment to giving back have become the company’s greatest competitive advantage.

Francesca Gino has been studying rebels in life and in the workplace for more than 15 years. She has discovered that rebels - those who practice "positive deviance" at work - are harder to manage, but they are good for the bottom line: their passion, drive, curiosity, and creativity raise the entire organization to a new level. And she has found that at home, rebels are more engaged partners, parents, and friends. Packed with strategies for embracing rebellion at work and in life, Rebel Talent encourages all of us to rebel against what’s comfortable, so that we can thrive.

Jay Steinfeld, founder and CEO of Blinds.com (acquired by Home Depot), never planned to create the biggest online window blinds retailer in the world. Against all odds to succeed, Steinfeld's journey in business included failed acquisitions, partnerships gone wrong, perpetual self-doubt, deaths in his family, corporate buy-outs, brutal market competition, and a complete disruption of industry leaders, including Amazon and big-box retailers. To build something meaningful like Steinfeld, you need to do more than dream about it. You need to Lead from the Core.

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.

Hard work is irrelevant. Be radically honest. Adequate performance gets a generous severance. And never, ever try to please your boss. These are some of the ground rules if you work at Netflix. They are part of a unique cultural experiment that explains how the company has transformed itself at lightning speed from a DVD mail-order service into a streaming superpower - with 125 million fervent subscribers and a market capitalisation bigger than Disney. Finally Reed Hastings, Netflix chairman and CEO, is sharing the secrets that have revolutionised the entertainment and tech industries.

Some people think that in today’s hyper-competitive world, it’s the tough, take-no-prisoners type who comes out on top. But in reality, argues New York Times bestselling author Dave Kerpen, it’s actually those with the best people skills who win the day. Those who build the right relationships. Those who truly understand and connect with their colleagues, their customers, their partners. Those who can teach, lead, and inspire.

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.

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.

The 25 Minute Meeting goes beyond "cut to the chase" and shows you how to take back your work day with smarter planning and more productive action. Meetings have become a de facto way of working, and as they pile up and stretch to interminable lengths, they eat up our days and sink productivity - if they are poorly planned and run. Done well, meetings are short, sharp, productive affairs that provide critical time and space for the interactions that drive business forward.

Every day we work hard to motivate ourselves, the people we live with, the people who work for and do business with us. In this way much of what we do can be defined as being motivators. From the boardroom to the living room, our role as motivators is complex, and the more we try to motivate partners and children, friends and coworkers, the clearer it becomes that the story of motivation is far more intricate and fascinating than we've assumed.

Nobody wants to fail. But in highly complex organizations, success can happen only when we confront our mistakes, learn from our own version of a black box, and create a climate where it's safe to fail. We all have to endure failure from time to time, whether it's underperforming at a job interview, flunking an exam, or losing a pickup basketball game. But for people working in safety-critical industries, getting it wrong can have deadly consequences.

In his trademark storybook style that has won tens of millions of fans, Dr. Spencer Johnson once again uses a simple tale to reveal profound truths that can allow you to have less stress and enjoy more success and fulfillment. In Who Moved My Cheese?, two mouse-sized characters named Hem and Haw were faced with unexpected change when the Cheese they loved suddenly disappeared. Haw learned how to deal with that change by setting off in search of New Cheese. But Hem remained stuck where he was.