Workplace Success

There’s a message getting a lot of airtime these days. It says to be successful, you have to step into the spotlight, climb the ladder, become the boss, or chase whatever version of success that’s been dangled in front of you.

Imagine what you could do with the time you spend writing emails every day. Complexity is killing companies' ability to innovate and adapt, and simplicity is fast becoming the competitive advantage of our time. Why Simple Wins helps leaders and their teams move beyond the feelings of frustration and futility that come with so much unproductive work in today's corporate world to create a corporate culture where valuable, essential, meaningful work is the norm.

For us to thrive - not simply survive - in this accelerating economy, we need to adopt small, intentional behaviors and practice them each day. From simply taking care of our rest and exercise to building our self-confidence and embracing challenges, author Shawn Hunter's latest book Small Acts of Leadership will guide you through a series of incremental steps you can take to build a stronger version of yourself and make a broader impact in the world.

Driven entrepreneurs often have a burning need to succeed. But that same relentless brilliance that propels them in their career often takes a toll on their teams, personal relationships, and even their health. Gino Wickman, bestselling author of Traction, teams up with mindfulness expert Rob Dube to share their journeys and help listeners strike a crucial balance between their inner and outer worlds while taking their success to new heights. In Shine, they share ten disciplines to help them stay sharp and energetic without burning out.

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.

Is your workplace riddled with gossip, power struggles, and confusion? Do you seek clarity in your management and cohesiveness in your team? Do you have a personal obstacle affecting your professional success? If so, there is good news-help is on the way. Stop Workplace Drama offers down-to-earth, practical methods to help business owners, entrepreneurs, and private practice professionals maximize success, increase productivity, and improve teamwork and personal performance.

We've all read about the experts: the artists, the scientists, the engineers - that special group of people known as Imagineers for The Walt Disney Company. But who are they? How did they join the team? What is it like to spend a day in their shoes?

Where can a person go to learn how to become a better team player? Your choices are definitely limited. John C. Maxwell takes the pain out of knowing what makes a team tick. If you want to have a better team, you have to develop better players. Great team players, like great teams, are formed from the inside out. The qualities Maxwell teaches quickly take you to the heart of teamwork. Anybody can understand them and apply them - whether at home, on the job, at church, or on the ball field.

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.

Find Your Why is the follow up to Start with Why, the global best seller and the subject of the third most watched TED Talk of all time. With Start With Why, Simon Sinek inspired a movement to build a world in which the vast majority of us can feel safe while we are at work and fulfilled when we go home at night. Now, along with two of his colleagues, Peter Docker and David Mead, Sinek has created a guide to the most important step any business can take: finding your why.

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?

We've long been told our ability to succeed depends on our IQ, talent, education level, gender, job title, or when and where we were born. Great Work turns that conventional thinking on its head to reveal that innovation can come from anyone, anywhere.

"There is no 'i' in 'team'." "No man is an island." "A chain is only as strong as its weakest link." You may roll your eyes at these age-old clichés, but you can’t afford to breeze over their point. Individual all-stars can take you only so far. Ultimately, success - whether in business, family, church, athletic teams, or any other organization - is entirely dependent on teamwork. But how does one build that team? Leadership expert and New York Times best-selling author John C. Maxwell knows that building and maintaining a successful team is no simple task.

Want employees that go the extra mile? Love them or hate them, employee engagement surveys are here to stay. As manager, you're expected to digest the data and come up with a plan for improving the numbers. But it's not just busy work. Raising engagement scores matters because engagement matters. An enthusiastic workforce translates into higher productivity and profitability with less turnover and absenteeism. Fully committed workers will give their all every day - and it's your job to make that happen.

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.

My Boss Is a Moron is the book every frustrated employee didn’t know they were waiting for—a bold, hilarious, and genuinely helpful guide to navigating bad management with your sanity and career intact. It meets you exactly where you are: stuck under leadership that’s clueless, careless, or downright toxic. And, more importantly, gives you real-life strategies for managing up, recognizing dysfunction, setting boundaries, advocating for yourself, and knowing when it’s time to walk away.

So many people are trying to navigate a corporate world that is laden with secrets; cleverly hidden and unspoken rules to a game that most employees don’t know they are playing. In order to find the success that most people want in their careers, it requires navigating this unspoken set of guidelines effectively. Secrets of the Career Game is geared towards arming individuals with the knowledge they need to understand how to evaluate their own competencies, build their toolset to open doors for progression, and establish a network that will accelerate their growth.

Here, drawing on revealing, honest stories from his five decades in business - the company's many successes as well as its stumbles - Koch walks the listener step by step through the five dimensions of Market-Based Management to show stockholders, entrepreneurs, leaders, students - and innovators, supervisors and employees of all kinds, in any field - how to apply the principles to generate Good Profit in their organizations, companies, and lives.

Research data show that most people do not come close to making full use of their assets at work—in fact, only seventeen percent of the workforce believe they use all of their strengths on the job. Go Put Your Strengths to Work aims to change that through a six-step, six-week experience that will reveal the hidden dimensions of your strengths. Buckingham shows you how to seize control of your assets and rewrite your job description under the nose of your boss.

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.