Business Performance

A self-empowerment guide to achieving your fullest professional and personal potential, Don’t Take Yes for An Answer explains why positive feedback limits personal and professional growth and then teaches you how to embrace hard truths and critical feedback to escape mediocrity and break away from the pack. To stand out, attract the attention of those who can raise your profile, protect yourself during lean times, or gain the interest of future employers, you must harness three critical communication traits that human beings respond to most: AWE: Authority. Warmth. Energy.

Over six years, long-time Sports Illustrated editor Don Yaeger was invited by some of the greatest companies in the world to speak about the habits of high-performing individuals. From Microsoft and Starbucks to the New England Patriots and San Antonio Spurs, what do some organizations do seemingly better than most of their opponents? Don identified 16 habits that drive high-performing teams. Building on stories, examples, and first-hand accounts, each chapter in Great Teams comes with applicable examples on how to apply these characteristics in any organization.

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.

Our industry has always dealt with change. But the environment we re navigating now requires change at a whole different level. We ve moved from experiencing episodic change to continuous change and as John Kotter has famously noted, that requires a whole different set of skills and a whole different level of urgency. In his new book, thought leader Quint Studer explains how to leverage the powerful values that have always defined healthcare people passion, fortitude, willingness to learn to meet the challenges of our disruptive external environment.

Developing successful relationships is critical to our success in both our personal and professional lives. The Power of Understanding People shows you how to establish and develop extremely effective relationships by providing you with techniques to better identify and understand the intrinsic needs of others. As a result, you will achieve better team dynamics, increased sales and client satisfaction, higher levels of employee engagement and performance, and even more satisfying marriages and friendships.

It’s harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films. From predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them, the odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model for making money with your film is broken, and there needs to be a change.

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.

Gapology is the term Mark Thienes and Brian Brockhoff coined to describe what winning leaders do to identify and close performance gaps in their teams. Gapology is their process. For more than a decade, they analyzed the results, leadership behaviors and tactics of winning leaders as compared to those of leaders who were not winning. They wanted to understand how winning leaders win and if winning could be replicated. They were deeply curious about whether winning can be taught to those not winning or if winning leaders are simply born with the skills to win.

In the newly revised Second Edition of Clarity: Clear Mind, Better Performance, Bigger Results, renowned speaker, writer, and coach Jamie Smart delivers a practical roadmap to turning that infinitely long to-do list into manageable and focused tasks. In the book, you'll learn to de-clutter your mind and concentrate on one important thing at a time. You'll also discover how to clear your mind, become less stressed, and achieve greater levels of productivity.

The Leadership Contract provides the manual that leaders around the world need. With only seven percent of employees feeling confident in senior leadership, the problem is evident: disappointing, and often disgraceful leaders. Employees deserve better than that; organizations need better than that - and this book provides a robust framework for stepping up and making the decision to lead. If you're not exceptional, step up or step aside - this book helps you toughen up and put your commitment to great leadership in writing for yourself as much as everyone else.

The Operator’s Dilemma There’s a moment every builder hits. It happens quietly, after success. After the systems are in place. After the routines feel solid. It happens when you look at everything you’ve built — your business, your strategies, your life — and realize something unthinkable: This isn’t working anymore. Not because you got lazy. Not because you lost your edge. But because the very instincts that made you dangerous are the ones now holding you hostage. This is the Operator’s Dilemma. It doesn’t happen to beginners. It happens to people who know exactly what ...

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.

When Denver Mayor Michael Hancock took office in 2011, he inherited an $80 million budget shortfall and a government workforce that had been through multiple rounds of cuts and furloughs. Morale was low. He needed a way to drive greater efficiencies, cost savings, and improved performance - and he had to do it in-house, on a shoe-string budget. Enter Peak Academy, the coaching and innovation program Mayor Hancock created to teach frontline city employees how to tackle small problems and deliver big results.

Demand is exceeding our capacity. The ethic of "more, bigger, faster" exacts a series of silent but pernicious costs at work, undermining our energy, focus, creativity, and passion. Nearly 75 percent of employees around the world feel disengaged at work every day. The Way We're Working Isn't Working offers a groundbreaking approach to reenergizing our lives so were both more satisfied and more productive, on the job and off.

The key to landing that dream job or big promotion often comes down to how you perform in the job interview. After bombing some interviews early in his career, Sam Owens vowed that would never happen to him again and began work on a system to ensure he was ready for even the most oddball questions in future interviews. In I Hate Job Interviews, Sam shares his proven methodology and provides simple frameworks and demonstrations on how to answer any type of job interview question.

Dive into the world of illustration and freelancing with The Illustrator’s Guide, the complete creative companion to developing an exceptional and fulfilling illustration career. Whether you are fresh out of college, changing careers or in your early years as an illustrator, The Illustrator’s Guide offers a unique insight into the industry for beginners and aspiring illustrators. The Illustrator’s Guide walks you through the highs and lows you can expect as an Illustrator, with thoughtful insights and advice to ensure you are working towards sustainable and achievable goals as a creative.

No single factor - not sales, marketing, finance, strategy, or operations - has more influence over the ultimate success of an organization than its culture. In the game-changing first edition of Culture by Design, David Friedman cut through the fog and provided a simple, clear, and practical road map that thousands of organizations have now used to build high-performing cultures. In this new updated edition, you'll learn how to take the strategies he originally taught and adapt them to meet the unique challenges presented by today's remote work environment.

Most people associate performance management with the annual review, which is universally dreaded by employees, management, and HR professionals alike. It's a cookie-cutter, fear-based, top-down approach that emphasizes negatives over positives and stifles healthy career conversations. It's never been shown to motivate anyone to do anything but try to avoid it, but nobody feels like they have any alternative. Tamra Chandler has one - and it works.

You can’t sell without listening to your customers—and yourself. In Listen to Sell, sales coaches Mike Esterday and Derek Roberts draw on their decades of industry experience to reveal the conversations, mindset, and skillset needed to amplify your sales confidence and bring purpose back to your customer relationships. With self-analysis exercises and customized strategies, you’ll learn how your mindset—which encompasses your attitude, what you believe about yourself, and the confidence you have to succeed—is the foundation of top sales performance.

In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, veteran journalist Chris Taylor traces the series from the difficult birth of the original film through its sequels, the franchise’s death and rebirth, the prequels, and the preparations for a new trilogy. Taylor provides portraits of the friends, writers, artists, producers, and marketers who labored behind the scenes to turn Lucas’s idea into a legend.