Management Problem Solving

In Super Bowl XLIX, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll made one of the most controversial calls in football history: With 26 seconds remaining, and trailing by four at the Patriots' one-yard line, he called for a pass instead of a handing off to his star running back. The pass was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost. Critics called it the dumbest play in history. But was the call really that bad? Or did Carroll actually make a great move that was ruined by bad luck? Even the best decision doesn't yield the best outcome every time.

In How to Kill a Unicorn, Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm, and offers inside accounts of how they solved their biggest challenges. Embedded in their approach to new ideas are hard-earned lessons about what separates innovations that work from those that don’t.

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.

Negotiation has always been at the heart of solving problems at work. Yet today, when people in organizations are asked to do more with less, be responsive 24/7, and manage in rapidly changing environments, negotiation is more essential than ever. What has been missed in much of the literature of the past 30 years is that negotiations in organizations always take place within a context - of organizational culture, of prior negotiations, of power relationships - that dictates which issues are negotiable and by whom.

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.

FonoLibro se enorgullece en presentar el audiolibro Las 5 Elecciones: Las Cinco El Camino Hacia Una Productividad Extraordinaria escrito por Kory Kogan, Adam Merrill, y Leena Rinne, una continuación de la saga de productividad de Franklin Covey. En esta oportunidad, los autores nos brindan una solución que viene como anillo al dedo para alcanzar una productividad grandiosa. En este sentido, la habilidad para discernir entre lo importante, lo menos importante, y lo no importante será una competencia clave para seguir adelante.

Leadership is all about others - inspiring them to believe, then enabling that belief to become reality. That's the essence of Leadership U: it starts with U but it's not about U. Those timeless words are timelier than ever today, as leaders look to accelerate through the crisis curve. As author Gary Burnison observes, "There will likely be more change in the next two years than we have seen in the last 20." Now, in Leadership U, Burnison lays out a framework - his Six Degrees of Leadership - to show leaders how to create change.

In his latest engrossing work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Ben Horowitz offers essential advice on building and running a startup - practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art. In When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Pink shows that timing is really a science.

In business, the right behaviors matter. But getting it right is tricky. Even when we acknowledge the need to change what we do and how we do it, life has a habit of getting in the way, upsetting even the best-laid plans. And just how do we manage those situations that can provoke even the most rational among us into behaving in ways we would rather forget?

Ori Brafman and management consultant Judah Pollack dramatically demonstrate how even the best and most efficient organizations - from Fortune 500 companies to today's US Army - can become more innovative by allowing a little unstructured space and "contained chaos" into their planning and decision-making. Through their consulting work, they realized that while structure and hierarchy are essential both in large corporations and small groups, too much of either can stifle creativity.

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) has been successfully applied in almost every area of human endeavor. And while Eli Goldratt is indeed a scientist, an educator and a business leader, he is first and foremost a philosopher. He is a thinker who provokes others to do the same. Dr. Goldratt exhorts his readers to examine and reassess their lives and business practices by cultivating a different perspective. In his latest book, The Choice, Goldratt once again presents his thought provoking approach.

This game-changing book puts you behind the curtain at Toyota, providing new insight into the legendary automaker's management practices and offering practical guidance for leading and developing people in a way that makes the best use of their brainpower. Drawing on six years of research into Toyota's employee-management routines, Toyota Kata examines and elucidates, for the first time, the company's organizational routines - called kata - that power its success with continuous improvement and adaptation.

The coauthors of the New York Times best-selling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: How we see ourselves. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice.

Difficult people are the worst part of a manager's job. Whether it comes from direct reports or people above, outbursts, irrational demands, griping, and other disruptions need to be dealt with - and it's your responsibility to do it. Leading the Unleadable turns this dreaded chore into a straight forward process that gently, yet effectively, improves behaviors.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the Design Sprint, created at Google by Jake Knapp. This method is like fast-forwarding into the future, so you can see how customers react before you invest all the time and expense of creating your new product, service, or campaign.

High-level executives, it turns out, are often the least able to diagnose—much less solve—an organization's systemic problems. Hans Norden draws on a wealth of experience in in-house change management to help both established and up-and-coming C-suite leaders analyze the problems and create authentic, sustainable solutions. In The Root Cause, listeners will learn how executing change initiatives requires a different form of leadership than routine operations. Norden shows leaders a way to solve the seemingly unsolvable problems—and prevent more from arising in the future.

Through nine easy-to-follow strategies, Dr. David H. Rosmarin demonstrates how to harness the power of anxiety to learn about ourselves, deepen our relationships with others, and achieve our deepest goals and dreams.

Art Thinking combines the mind-sets of art and the tools of business to protect space for open-ended exploration and manage risks on your way to success. Art Thinking takes you from "Wouldn't it be cool if...?" to realizing your highest aims, helping you build creative skills you can apply across all facets of business and life. Warm, honest, and unexpected, Art Thinking will help you reimagine your work and life-and even change the world-while enjoying the journey from point A.