Business Problem Solving

In Whale Done!, Ken Blanchard shows how positive reinforcement and redirection can help increase productivity. These techniques are remarkably easy to master and can be applied equally well at home, allowing listeners to become better parents and more committed spouses and have happier personal lives.

In The Book of Beautiful Questions, Berger shares illuminating stories and compelling research on the power of inquiry. Drawn from the insights and expertise of psychologists, innovators, effective leaders and some of the world's foremost creative thinkers, he presents the essential questions readers need to make the best choices when it truly counts, with a particular focus in four key areas: decision-making, creativity, leadership and relationships.

The world's greatest problem-solvers, forecasters, and decision-makers all rely on a set of frameworks and shortcuts that help them cut through complexity and separate good ideas from bad ones. They're called mental models, and you can find them in dense textbooks on psychology, physics, economics, and more. Or, you can just listen to Super Thinking, a fun, illustrated guide to every mental model you could possibly need.

Captain David Marquet was used to giving orders. In the high-stress environment of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, it was crucial his men did their job well. But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance and the worst retention in the fleet. Marquet took matters into his own hands and pushed for leadership at every level. Before long, his crew became fully engaged and the Santa Fe skyrocketed from worst to first in the fleet. No matter your business or position, you can apply Marquet's approach to create a workplace where everyone is a leader.

Most problems are fairly easy: they have a few likely potential root causes. The most important problems often have hundreds or thousands of potential root causes within very complex systems. Such problems are hard problems, and are highly resistant to guessing, brainstorming, or problem-solving methodologies that require conjuring a list of possible causes. Great problem-solvers are armed with a set of behaviors that allows them to avoid guessing.

Klein proposes a naturalistic approach to decision making, which views people as gaining experience that enables them to use a combination of intuition and analysis to make decisions. To illustrate this approach, Klein tells stories of people - from pilots to chess masters - acting under such real-life constraints as time pressure, high stakes, personal responsibility, and shifting conditions.

Enjoy figuring out creative solutions to real-world problems that have led to important inventions, discoveries, and innovations throughout history! The problems in this audiobook are related to erudition in fundamental areas - nature, technology, business, science, how things work, or why things are made in a certain way. But, unlike in trivia or jeopardy, you most probably do not know the answer. Instead, logic, out-of-the-box thinking, or intuition leap should be added to your knowledge to puzzle out the correct solution.

Discover the practical, fail-proof tools that will help you to fine-tune your leadership skills, solidify respect among your workforce, and ensure your company's lasting success.

There's no one-size-fits-all model for the important decisions that can alter the course of a life, an organization, or a civilization. But Farsighted explains how we can approach these choices more effectively and how we can appreciate the subtle intelligence of choices that shaped our broader social history.

In this irreverent and illuminating audiobook, acclaimed writer and scientist Leonard Mlodinow shows us how randomness, chance, and probability reveal a tremendous amount about our daily lives, and how we misunderstand the significance of everything from a casual conversation to a major financial setback. As a result, successes and failures in life are often attributed to clear and obvious causes, when in actuality they are more profoundly influenced by chance.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

In 2015 Manoush Zomorodi, host of WNYC's popular podcast and radio show Note to Self, led tens of thousands of listeners through an experiment to help them unplug from their devices, get bored, jump-start their creativity, and change their lives. Bored and Brilliant builds on that experiment to show us how to rethink our gadget use to live better and smarter in this new digital ecosystem. In this fascinating new audiobook, Manoush explains the connection between boredom and original thinking.

Meet Justin Campbell. He’s a newly minted MBA who’s landed a coveted job in consulting. He’s headed to Chicago to serve HGS, a large client with an intriguing new technology its executives haven’t yet decided how to exploit. Constrained by a short timeline and limited information, Justin and his team use state-of-the-art strategy tools to analyze various possibilities. But Justin soon finds the application of his strategy toolkit isn’t as straightforward as he’d expected.

Today's business environment brings with it an onslaught of data. Now more than ever, managers must know how to tease insight from data—to understand where the numbers come from, make sense of them, and use them to inform tough decisions. How do you get started? Whether you're working with data experts or running your own tests, you'll find answers in the HBR Guide to Data Analytics Basics for Managers. This book describes three key steps in the data analysis process, so you can get the information you need, study the data, and communicate your findings to others.

Being able to take innovative and creative approaches to new challenges is crucial for leadership success. Decision Making and Problem Solving will help you to learn key techniques and models to confidently make the best decisions and solve the hardest problems. Using checklists, exercises, case studies and tried-and-tested methods, leadership guru John Adair provides a clear framework that can generate ideas and inspire confidence in your team - so you can spot the solution in every problem, and create ideas to rival even the best strategists.

Pastor and leadership development expert Steve Cuss explains how personal anxiety and leadership frustration is the result of not being “self-aware” and provides simple tools listeners can use to do something about it. Listeners will be empowered to take back control of their lives and lead in mature and vibrant ways.

In his groundbreaking book Predictably Irrational, social scientist Dan Ariely revealed the multiple biases that lead us into making unwise decisions. Now, in The Upside of Irrationality, he exposes the surprising negative and positive effects irrationality can have on our lives. Focusing on our behaviors at work and in relationships, he offers new insights and eye-opening truths about what really motivates us on the job.

Whether you're 20, 40, 60 or older, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question: 'what do I want to be when I grow up?' In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want - and how to get it. Their phenomenally successful Life Design course has been tried and tested by thousands of people, from students to midcareer professionals to retirees contemplating whole new futures.

We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you combat new competitors and define the best strategy for your company. With insights from leading experts including Michael E. Porter, A. G. Lafley, and Clayton M. Christensen, this book will inspire you to: choose a strategy that meets the demands of your competitive environment; identify the signals of disruption and take steps to avoid it; understand lean methodology and how it is changing business; and more.

If you want to improve your critical thinking and problem-solving skills and become a master at decision-making, then keep going...Critical thinking skills are essential in the new knowledge economy. Jobs require increasing demands of flexible intellectual skills, and the ability to analyze information and integrate diverse sources of knowledge in solving problems. But the truth is that even though the demand for critical thinking is rising, people are still making costly decisions on a daily basis. Most people make the same mistakes - with both their thinking and decision-making.