Creative Leadership

In 2008, Steven Haines started a global shift toward the professionalization of product management with his groundbreaking books about product management. Starting with The Product Manager’s Desk Reference, The Product Manager’s Survival Guide, and Managing Product Management. Since then, more than 100,000 readers around the world have referred to Steven’s books to raise the bar on product management excellence. Leading Product Management is the 2nd edition (retitled) of Managing Product Management to encompass a broad array of practices needed to organize any company to focus on ...

While writers, designers, editors, and other creative professionals spend years learning and refining creative craft skills, those skills do nothing to prepare us for the human, organizational, and operational challenges that come with promotions to leadership. And as your responsibility grows, it’s those organizational and leadership skills that will hold you and your team back.

What we, as parents and teachers, need to focus on is discovering. Teach shows you how to help your students become independently responsible learners. Once our students know how they can be independently responsible in how they learn, the whole world is available to them. Literally. They become self-directed. They become inspired. They discover what is most important to them!

In a world of hustle culture and burnout, women don’t want to lean in, they want to lie down. Now more than ever, women are looking to leave the corporate grind to break out into their own entrepreneurial ventures in a way that feeds their life rather than consumes it. But they don’t know exactly where to start. Kathleen Griffith has been in these exact shoes. When she set out to launch her own business she found that the women’s business space was big on “go, girl” messages, but short on the gritty details of actually building a business.

All projects are inherently risky, and complex ones can potentially be the downfall for even the most experienced project manager. From technical challenges and resource issues to unrealistic deadlines and problems with your subcontractors, any number of things can go wrong. Fully updated, consistent with PMI® standards, and addressing “VUCA” (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), this book remains the definitive resource for project managers seeking to be proactive in their efforts to guard against failure and minimize unwanted surprises.

When you have a great opportunity or face a challenging threat, Create the Future (CTF) gives you the tools you and your leadership team will use for making critical decisions without a hefty price tag. Rick Williams has been a management consultant, company founder, and CEO. He has worked with large international companies, nonprofits, early-stage growth companies, and large government agencies. Drawing on his broad expertise and first-hand observations of top executives in action, Create the Future is the essential guidebook for leaders when they must make difficult decisions.

Using brilliantly simple math that illuminates universal emotional truths, Emotional Equations crystallizes some of life’s toughest challenges into manageable facets that listeners can see clearly—and bits they can control. Popular motivational speaker and best-selling author Chip Conley has created an exciting, new, immediately accessible visual lexicon for mastering the age of uncertainty. Making mathematics out of emotions may seem a counterintuitive idea, but it’s an inspiring and incredibly effective one in Chip Conley’s hands.

Building a fully engaged, energized workforce is the key to business success. The Power of Thanks reveals how leading companies like Intuit, JetBlue Airways, IHG, Symantec, ConAgra Foods, and The Hershey Company empower employees through social recognition, in which the practice of mutual appreciation and trust directs and rewards higher performance. Eric Mosley and Derek Irvine, executives at the world-renowned employee recognition firm Globoforce, explain why social recognition is so powerful and how you can apply it in your company.

Discover profound peace of mind and unlock striking success in just 30 days, even if the incessant chatter of your mind has always been your constant companion. Tired of getting lost in the labyrinth of your thoughts? Ever wondered if the reins to a healthier, happier, and more successful self were within you all along? Have you been searching for a truly life-changing guide who understands your struggles and helps you navigate the complexities of mind programming? You have come to the right place. Mastering the mind does not have to feel like you’re trying to solve a Rubik’s cube ...

A year's worth of management wisdom, all in one place. We've reviewed the ideas, insights, and best practices from the past year of Harvard Business Review to keep you up to date on the most cutting-edge, influential thinking driving business today. With authors from Ginni Rometty to Robert I. Sutton and company examples from Maersk to Nvidia, this volume brings the most current and important management conversations right to your fingertips.

Scott Wozniak leverages his decades of brand-building experience within some of America’s most-loved companies to show you how to create world-class customer experience. After years of battle-tested work, Scott realized that there was a set of systems that all the great brands used to create raving fans. He captured these practices in an engine diagram, a simple tool to help leaders become legends. If you use this approach, you can build a Customer Experience Engine that will create those same kinds of raving fans that always seem to dominate dinner-party conversations and water-cooler chats.

In Applied Empathy, Michael Ventura, CEO and founder of Sub Rosa, a design firm that finds creative solutions for iconic brands and institutions such as GE, Nike, Citibank, Nikon, and Warby Parker and also West Point and the White House, offers entrepreneurs and executives a radical new business book and way forward. Applied Empathy presents real strategies, based on Sub Rosa’s design work as well as the popular class Ventura and his team have taught at Princeton University, on how to make lasting connections and evolve your business internally (your employees, culture, and product/services) as well as externally (your brand, consumers, and value).

From years of research and practical experience as a consultant, Jeff DeGraff has learned that when it comes to any innovation initiative, disharmony is crucial. We innovate when we disrupt, and we first have to disrupt each other.

Extraordinary organizations have extraordinary cultures. Fully engaged team members find personal meaning in their jobs—and in the company. Driven by a sense of purpose, they feel responsible, and accountable, for results. Personal development becomes the primary driver of organizational growth, leading to significant improvements in retention, quality, and profitability. In the wake of the Great Resignation, it’s more apparent than ever that an engaging culture is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Much has changed in the world since the original publication of Leading Out Loud, Terry Pearce's book on authentic leadership communication. Now, more than ever, the development of a leader's message is as crucial to success as the delivery of that message. In the third edition of his classic book, Terry Pearce shows leaders in all sectors how to communicate their values and vision to inspire commitment. In this important resource, Pearce continues to broaden the application of core principles, putting the spotlight on everyday, spontaneous communication.

Adam Braun began working summers at hedge funds when he was just 16 years old, sprinting down the path to a successful Wall Street career. But while traveling as a college student, he met a young boy begging on the streets of India. When Braun asked the boy what he wanted most in the world, he simply answered, "A pencil." This small request became the inspiration for Pencils of Promise, the organization Braun would leave a prestigious job at Bain & Company to start with just $25 at the age of 24.

In this authoritative and fascinating new audiobook, Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, tears down some of the most popular myths about creativity and erects new principles in their place. He reveals that creativity is always collaborative: even when you're alone. Sawyer's audiobook is filled with compelling stories about the inventions that changed our world.

With so many forces of change buffeting the business world today, a scary state of flux has replaced any sense of certainty, stability, and familiarity, delivering a wake-up call to make crucial changes happen, make them happen quickly, and make them stick. Traditional approaches to change management fall into one of two categories, but neither of these models offer a full picture to what really happens in an organization. Siobhan McHale offers a third option: organizations are complex ecosystems that require a Hive Mind or Group Intelligence (GQ) to bring about meaningful and lasting change.

Though technology has evolved at hyper-speed over the past 100 years, management styles have mostly stayed the same. The higher-ups make the decisions, and the employees grind it out, often without knowing the endgame. In 1983, Jack Stack created a new game: the great game of business. Get in the Game further explains the rules of this game: To win, you must get everyone, at all levels of the business, as informed, involved, and engaged as the owner.

What qualities come to mind when you think about a good leader? Good listener, empathetic, good communication skills, humble, and clear expectations. Whether you're leading a small or large team, How to Be a Leader by former Honeywell CEO David Cote is a resource that will help you become the leader everyone respects and follows.