Business Performance

Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it....

Did you ever wish you could tell a story that leaves others spellbound? Storytelling teacher and champion Margot Leitman will show you how! With a fun, irreverent, and infographic approach, this guide breaks a story into concrete components with ways to improve content, structure, emotional impact, and delivery through personal anecdotes, relatable examples, and practical exercises.

In Diversity and Inclusion Matters: Tactics and Tools to Inspire Equity and Game-Changing Performance, award-winning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) expert Jason R. Thompson delivers a practical and engaging handbook for implementing a DE&I program in your organization. The CAPE technique, developed by the author, gives you a clear blueprint and the tools you'll need to make your diversity program a success. In this book, you'll learn how to achieve early and significant wins to create the necessary long-term organizational change needed for successful DE&I programs.

George Kohlrieser - an international leadership professor, consultant, and veteran hostage negotiator - explains that it is only by openly facing conflict that we can truly progress through the most difficult business challenges. In this provocative book, he reveals how the proven techniques and psychological insights used in hostage negotiation can be applied successfully to any personal or business relationship.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

We live in digital time. Our pace is rushed, rapid-fire, and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We're wired up, but we're melting down. Time management is no longer a viable solution. Managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness, and life balance. The Power of Full Engagement provides a powerful, step-by-step program that will show you how.

How many audiobooks have you listened to on project management? On leadership? Too many, right? But no other book combines the practice of project management and leadership into one balanced approach with practical examples—except this book. You don’t even need Project Manager in your title to employ these lessons. You can be any person on any team who has stepped up to take a leadership role on a critical initiative. You’ll learn what it takes to become the binding agent—the glue—that creates cohesive, engaged, high-performing project teams.

Walt Disney left behind big dreams when he died in 1966. Perhaps none was greater than the hope that his son-in-law, Ron Miller, would someday run his studio. Under Miller’s leadership, Disney expanded into new frontiers: global theme parks, computer animation, cable television, home video, and video games. Despite these innovations, Ron struggled to expand the Disney brand beyond its midcentury image of wholesome family entertainment, even as times and tastes evolved.

Every day there are moments when you must persuade, inform, and motivate others effectively. Each of those moments requires you, in some way, to play a role, to heighten the impact of your words, and to manage your emotions and nerves. Every interaction is a performance, whether you're speaking up in a meeting, pitching a client, or walking into a job interview.

If you've ever dreamed of being in charge of your own network, cable, or web series, then this is the book for you. The TV Showrunner's Roadmap provides you with the tools for creating, writing, and managing your own hit show. Combining his 20+ years as a working screenwriter and UCLA professor, Neil Landau expertly guides you through 21 essential insights to the creation of a successful show, and takes you behind the scenes with exclusive and enlightening interviews with showrunners from some of TV's most lauded series.

A former Gallup Global Leadership Research and Development leader and the New York Times bestselling coauthor of Strengths-Based Leadership draw from original research comprising interviews with high-performing global leaders to present for the first time a new model that demystifies the aura and complexity surrounding high performing leaders.

Here is the story of Jerry Weintraub: the self-made, Brooklyn-born, Bronx-raised impresario, Hollywood producer, legendary deal maker, and friend of politicians and stars. No matter where nature has placed him - the club rooms of Brooklyn, the Mafia dives of New York's Lower East Side, the wilds of Alaska, or the hills of Hollywood - he has found a way to put on a show and sell tickets at the door.

Clarity is key for any successful leader, so much so that top corporations, such as Micorsoft. Nike, Proctor and Gamble, Kimberly Clark, and many more, have incorporated storytelling into their leadership training programs. These companies know that before you can become a strong leader, you must first master the art of storytelling so you can communicate your vision to your team and inspire them to execute on objectives.

In The Scrum Fieldbook, he draws on his firm’s extensive experience in the field to take leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and new opportunities organizations face in an Agile transformation. He shows how the Scrum framework can be successfully applied to any project in any industry, from automobile manufacturers in the US and Europe to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from fighter plane builders in Sweden to US Navy Special Forces teams.

A revolutionary new understanding of identity, showing how our groups have a powerful influence on our feelings, beliefs, and behavior - and how these shared identities can inspire both personal change and social movements.

Researchers now have a clear understanding of the key drivers that make meetings successful. In The Surprising Science of Meetings, Steven G. Rogelberg, researcher and consultant to some of the world's most successful companies, draws from extensive research, analytics and data mining, and survey interviews with over 5,000 employees across a range of industries to share the proven practices and techniques that help managers and employees enhance the quality of their meetings.

Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines - the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films - that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse.

The New York Times best-selling author of The Power of Broke and "Shark" on ABC's hit show Shark Tank explores how grit, persistence, and good old-fashioned hard work are the backbone of every successful business and individual, and inspires listeners to Rise and Grind their way the top.

Employees that don't take ownership of their work. Friction between departments. Inconsistent results. These are the top challenges that face most businesses today. These common issues create high turnover and force managers into crisis mode where they're consumed putting out daily fires. Over time, the very nature of the business changes and a new culture emerges; one shaped by the lowest level of acceptable behavior.

Improving the performance of your employees involves one of the hardest challenges in the known universe: changing the way they think. In constant demand as a coach, speaker, and consultant to companies around the world, David Rock has proven that the secret to leading people (and living and working with them) is found in the space between their ears. "If people are being paid to think," he writes, "isn't it time the business world found out what the thing doing the work, the brain, is all about?"