Management Problem Solving

For decades, Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn have championed simplicity as a competitive advantage and a consumer right. Consulting with businesses and organizations around the world to streamline products, services, processes and communications, they have achieved dramatic results.

Truly resilient, thriving organizations are those that are purpose driven and focus on more than pure profits. Purpose, or an underlying company philosophy, not only drives strategic change but also encourages customer loyalty and employee engagement. In order to succeed, leaders must be willing to discard old ways of thinking and detrimental business habits - and recognize their blind spots. Authors Jim Haudan and Rich Berens identify the five most common leadership blind spots that hamper success: purpose, story, engagement, trust, and truth.

You might've talked about innovation with your IT department or software development agency lately and the words "design thinking" were surely mentioned. So what is it? Just another piece of business jargon to add to your arsenal or a useful tool? Or maybe even an overestimated hype? Nowadays every organization or business runs into a myriad of problems as business models become increasingly more complex. Globalization and advances in communication and technology, all add up to creating unique opportunities but also new challenges that are not easy to solve applying the old tested methods.

This elegant method prompts listeners to engage with three deceptively simple questions: What? So what? Now what? The first leads to careful observation. The second invites you to thoughtfully consider options and implications. The third ignites effective action. Together, these questions, and the tools that support them, produce a dynamic and creative dance with uncertainty.

Serial Innovators: How Individuals Create and Deliver Breakthrough Innovations in Mature Firms zeros in on the cutting-edge thinkers who repeatedly create and deliver breakthrough innovations and new products in large, mature organizations. These employees are organizational powerhouses who solve consumer problems and substantially contribute to the financial value to their firms.

Every manager makes tough calls - it comes with the job. And the hardest decisions are the "gray areas" - situations where you and your team have worked hard to find an answer, you've done the best analysis you can, and you still don't know what to do. But you have to make a decision. In Managing in the Gray, Joseph Badaracco offers a powerful, practical, and even radical way to resolve these problems.

Big Data Revolution is a guide to improving performance, making better decisions, and transforming business through the effective use of big data. Listeners are guided through tried-and-true methodologies for getting more out of data and using it to the utmost advantage. This audiobook describes the major trends emerging in the field, the pitfalls and triumphs being experienced, and the many considerations surrounding big data, all while guiding listeners toward better decision-making from the perspective of a data scientist.

Despite the dizzying amount of data at our disposal today - and an increasing reliance on analytics to make the majority of our decisions - many of our most critical choices still come down to human judgment. This fact is fundamental to organizations whose leaders must often make crucial decisions: to do this they need the best available insights. This book introduces a model that taps the collective judgment of an organization so that the right decisions are made, and the entire organization profits.

As organizations strive to do more with less, many are turning to Lean methodology, which is based on the same techniques that propelled the legendary turnaround of Japan's industrial sector after World War II. Few leaders, however, understand that the real secret behind Lean is a comprehensive approach to management that differs significantly from what is taught in business school. The Lean CEO reveals the true power of Lean through in-depth interviews with CEOs who have gone beyond tool adoption and established Lean as a corporate-wide management system.

I have been in hospitality management for over 40 years and have been “mismanaging” my own life for over 60. Management One-Point-Oh is the culmination of what I have learned and what I have not learned. It's about both. I wrote it mostly for fun but also with the aim of saving some folks, particularly young managers, from themselves and to describe, in simple detail, what I think are the primary differences between bad, good, and great managers.

Former consultant Dr. Paul Friga distills the guiding principles first presented in the best-selling The McKinsey Way and the tested-in-the-trenches methodologies outlined in The McKinsey Mind, and combines them with many of the principles and procedures implemented by the military and other organizations. The result is nothing less than the business equivalent of a Special Forces Field Manual.

Manager 3.0 is the first-ever management guide for Millennials. They will master crucial skills such as dealing with difficult people, delivering constructive feedback, and making tough decisions - while gaining insight into the four generations in the workplace and how they can successfully bring out the best in each. Packed with interviews and examples from companies like Zappos, Groupon, Southwest Airlines, and Google, Manager 3.0 will help these new managers enhance their unique talents while developing a leadership style all their own.

Management teams and boards are facing disruption on all sides, from morphing customer preferences to the COVID pandemic to climate change. At the same time they are floundering in strategy confusion with too many concepts and not enough clarity. In this book, strategy expert and regular Harvard Business Review author Graham Kenny releases managers and directors from their strategy haze. His simple and effective framework allows managers to navigate the current maze of ideas and approaches and maximize their competitive advantage.

Mathematics is full of better ways of thinking, and with more than 2,000 years of knowledge to draw on, Oxford mathematician Marcus du Sautoy interrogates his passion for shortcuts in this fresh and fascinating guide. After all, shortcuts have enabled so much of human progress, whether in constructing the first cities around the Euphrates 5,000 years ago, using calculus to determine the scale of the universe or today’s algorithms that help us find a new life partner.

Contrary to popular belief, the business world is not that complicated. While every industry and every profession requires specific expertise, the truth is that the "business of business" is relatively simple. In Business Without the Bullsh*t, listeners will learn surprising but tried-and-true secrets about being an extraordinary boss, about coping with annoying coworkers, and navigating the thorny problems that recur in every workplace.

As a leader, changing your mind has always been perceived as a weakness. Not anymore. In a world that's changing faster than ever, successful leaders realize that a genuine willingness to change their own minds is the ultimate competitive advantage. Drawing on evidence from social science, history, politics, and more, business consultant Al Pittampalli reveals why confidence, consistency, and conviction are increasingly becoming liabilities.

Detonate explains how organizations built up bad habits, identifies which ones masquerade as "best practices", and suggests alternatives that can contribute to winning in the marketplace. With a focus on optimism and empowerment, it focuses on an approach and mindset which are critical to successfully compete in an era characterized by profound technological advances and uncertainty.

Every one of us gets anywhere in life due to three things: someone observes us, forms an opinion about us, and decides to give us an opportunity...or not. Likewise, we do the same thing with others. People have played this essential role in our lives, and we play it in the lives of those around us - and no matter how skilled we’ve become, we can play it even better.

Decision Making for Dummies is a candid resource that helps leaders understand the impact of their choices, not only on business, but also on their credibility and reputation. Designed for managers, business owners, and anyone else who makes tough decisions on a daily basis, this guide helps you figure out if the decisions you're making are the right ones.

There is so much buzz around big data. We all need to know what it is and how it works. But what will set you apart from the rest is actually knowing how to use big data to get solid, real-world business results - and putting that in place to improve performance. Big Data shows you how to implement the same practices that leading firms have used to access new dimensions of profitability. You'll learn from clear explanations and countless examples how successful organisations large and small use the SMART model to get ahead.