Behavior Business

The best and the brightest use advisors and experts. Whether in business, sports, entertainment, academia, or politics—expert help is a fundamental enabler of success. That means that the demand for expert advice will grow and the competition will increase for such help. This isn't a matter of "certificates" and "universities," it's a matter of specific skill and behavioral sets that create a trusting bond and reliance. Trusted advisors are beyond coaches—they are comprehensive resources and supporters.

Decoding the New Consumer Mind provides marketers with practical ways to tap into this new consumer psychology, and Yarrow shows how to combine technology and innovation to enhance brand image; win love and loyalty through authenticity and integrity; put the consumer's needs and preferences front and center; and deliver the most emotionally intense, yet uncomplicated, experience possible. Armed with Yarrow's strategies, marketers will be able to connect more effectively with consumers - driving profit and success across the organization.

Often the decision between a customer choosing you over someone like you is your ability to know exactly what to say, when to say it, and how to make it count. Phil M. Jones has trained more than two million people across five continents and over 50 countries in the lost art of spoken communication. In Exactly What to Say, he delivers the tactics you need to get more of what you want.

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea - that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Why do we lose money? It's easy to blame the economy or the financial markets - but the real trouble lies in the decisions we make. As a financial planner, Carl Richards grew frustrated watching people he cared about make the same mistakes over and over. They were letting emotion get in the way of smart financial decisions. He named this phenomenon - the distance between what we should do and what we actually do - "the behavior gap". He found that once people understood it, they started doing much better.

When Fortune announced its list of the World’s Greatest Leaders, the top spot was awarded - not to a captain of industry - but to the new pontiff. In the year since his election, Pope Francis earned that accolade - and more. He has achieved the remarkable: breathed life into an aging institution, reinvigorated a global base, and created real hope for the future.How did a man who spent his life laboring in slums far from the Vatican manage to do this and so quickly?

Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems - everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive.

In The Small Big, three heavyweights from the world of persuasion science and practice describe how, in today's information overloaded and stimulation saturated world, increasingly it is the small changes that you make that lead to the biggest differences. In the last few years, more research-from fields such as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and behavioral economics-has helped to uncover an even greater understanding of how influence, persuasion, and behavior change happens.

Are you making it difficult for your potential customers to buy from you? Today's buyers are overloaded - overwhelmed by too much information and suffering from decision fatigue. Across industries, customers are delaying purchasing decisions or even choosing to stick with the status quo so they can avoid the dreaded "sales process". In response, many sales professionals are overcompensating with behaviors that are either too accommodating or that create high pressure - and alienating potential buyers in the process.

As Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli implied, you're either predator or prey, and the animal you most resemble determines your position on the food chain. In The Wolf in CIO's Clothing Gartner analyst and author Tina Nunno expands on Machiavelli's metaphor, examining seven animal types and the leadership attributes of each. Nunno posits the wolf - a social animal with strong predatory instincts - as the ideal example of how a leader can adapt and thrive.

Whereas the first edition of Beyond Performance introduced the authors' "Five Frames of Performance and Health" approach to change management, the fully revised and updated Beyond Performance 2.0 has been transformed into a truly practical "how to" guide for leaders. Every aspect of how to lead change at scale is covered in a step-by-step manner, always accompanied by practical tools and real-life examples.

Hiring and firing are hard to get right - and potentially costly to get wrong. Two of the most crucial tasks you face as a manager, they are vital to both the success of the enterprise...and your own career. No need to worry. This handy guide breaks down the simple but powerful strategies you can use to bring better employees onboard - and weed out the weaker ones.

Emotional Branding is the best-selling revolutionary business book that has created a movement in branding circles by shifting the focus from products to people. The “10 Commandments of Emotional Branding” have become a new benchmark for marketing and creative professionals, and emotional branding has become a coined term by many top industry experts to express the new dynamic that exists now between brands and people.

Sun Tzu's Art of War for Women helps women find the peaceful path to success through strategies made famous in the ancient Chinese text, The Art of War. Female wisdom, or common sense, is about avoiding needless confrontation, conserving energy for the things that matter, and seeking an outcome in which everyone wins. And for women, as for Sun Tzu, success doesn't come simply from knowing what to do, but from knowing who you are.

When it comes to improving customer experiences, trying out new business models, or developing new products, even the most experienced managers often get it wrong. They discover that intuition, experience, and big data alone don't work. What does? Running disciplined business experiments. And what if companies roll out new products or introduce new customer experiences without running these experiments? They fly blind. That's what Harvard Business School professor Stefan Thomke shows in this rigorously researched and eye-opening book.

The traditional attitude toward creativity in the American business world is to "think outside the box": to brainstorm without restraint in hopes of coming up with a breakthrough idea, often in moments of crisis. Sometimes it works, but it’s a problem-specific solution that does nothing to engender creative thinking more generally. Inside the Box demonstrates Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), a method that systemizes creativity as part of the corporate culture. SIT requires thinking "inside the box", working in one’s familiar world to create new ideas independent of specific problems.

Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have. The new opportunity is that it's easier than ever to find, organize, and lead a tribe. The Web has enabled an explosion of all kinds of tribes - and created shortage of people to lead them. This is the growth industry of our time. Tribes will help you understand exactly what's at stake, and why YOU can and should lead a tribe of your own.

Patagonia, named by Fortune in 2007 as the coolest company on the planet, has earned a reputation as much for its ground-breaking environmental and social practices as for the quality of its clothes. In this exceptionally frank account, Chouinard and Stanley recount how the company and its culture gained the confidence, by step and misstep, to make its work progressively more responsible, and to ultimately share its discoveries with companies as large as Wal-Mart or as small as the corner bakery.

In his classic best-selling book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni laid out a groundbreaking, new approach for attacking the dangerous group behaviors that destroy teamwork. Here, he turns his focus to the individual member of a team, revealing the three indispensable virtues that make some people better team players than others. Lencioni’s latest fable is the story of a leader desperate to save his company by cracking the code on the virtues that define a true team player.

Executive coaching is a professional and personal development intervention that organizations introduce to address and improve those areas in managers' and leaders' behavior, attitude, and interactions with others that do not allow him/her to work at full potential and also to further improve one's own strengths. The end objective, besides the development of the managers and leaders, is for the organization to benefit in the long-run from the coachee's improved performance.