Organizational Leadership

In 2001, when Jacqueline Novogratz founded Acumen, a global community of socially and environmentally responsible partners dedicated to changing the way the world tackles poverty, few had heard of impact investing - Acumen’s practice of “doing well by doing good”. Nineteen years later, there’s been a seismic shift in how corporate boards and other stakeholders evaluate businesses: Impact investment is not only morally defensible, but now also economically advantageous, even necessary.

“I can’t wait to get to work!” When was the last time you felt that way? Have you ever? Mark McClain has and still does. He and his leadership teams have focused on creating companies that make the quality of their employees’ work experiences of equal importance to the quality of the solutions those employees create.

Mark Schwartz, author of leadership classics A Seat at the Table and The Art of Business Value, reveals a new (empowering) model for the often soul-shattering, frustrating, Kafkaesque nightmare we call bureaucracy. Through humor, a healthy dose of history and philosophy, and real-life examples from his days as a government bureaucrat, Schwartz shows IT leaders (and the whole of business) how to master the ways of the Monkey, the Razor, and the Sumo Wrestler to create a lean, learning, and enabling bureaucracy.

A decade ago, Millennials came of age, and many workplaces were not prepared to integrate a new generation that thought and worked differently. As a result, some organizations lost out on the best in young talent or were paralyzed by generational infighting.

Does your organization manage complexity by making things more complicated? If so, you are not alone. According to The Boston Consulting Group's fascinating Complexity Index, business complexity has increased sixfold during the past 60 years. And, all the while, organizational complicatedness - that is, the number of structures, processes, committees, decision-making forums, and systems - has increased by a whopping factor of 35.

Drive long-term profits and growth by making the company a place your employees love. In Great Company presents a practical approach to ensure that your employees perform at their highest possible levels. It's not about increasing salaries, offering huge bonuses, or investing in the latest employee engagement tools. The real answer is simpler, deeper, and longer-lasting: getting your people to love where they work.

Create loyal, engaged, and results-focused teams and organizations using a practical five-part servant leadership formula. Think of a world where people go to work completely engaged, are inspired to do more than they ever thought possible, remain 100% loyal to the teams and organizations they belong to, are achieving mind-blowing results, and gladly and even passionately follow their leader's direction. Is that a world you want to be a part of? The reality is, you really can!

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).

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.

What could your company accomplish if it could attract and retain employees who buy into your organization's mission 100 percent? Culture Wins is a practical yet challenging modern guidebook for organizations that want to own the future. Its firsthand insights into building a contagious culture will drive sustainable growth and innovation for any organization. You will build a healthy workplace, increase revenue, and change the world with the lessons you'll learn. Stop losing employees, grow your team, and build a contagious company culture that outlasts the competition.

While experiencing firsthand the chaos at Wisdom Health Care Center, Grace Holden, its new CEO, questions if she made the right decision in accepting the job. Yet Grace knows she couldn’t have turned it down. It was an opportunity she had worked for her entire career. Still, what she could not have anticipated was just how broken the culture was at the health care center. She quickly discovers Wisdom will challenge her in ways she never imagined. In The Wisdom Story, best-selling author Tim Burningham presents another compelling and enlightening leadership fable. Using his storytelling ...

Find Your Why is the follow up to Start with Why, the global best seller and the subject of the third most watched TED Talk of all time. With Start With Why, Simon Sinek inspired a movement to build a world in which the vast majority of us can feel safe while we are at work and fulfilled when we go home at night. Now, along with two of his colleagues, Peter Docker and David Mead, Sinek has created a guide to the most important step any business can take: finding your why.

Enchantment, as defined by bestselling business guru Guy Kawasaki, is not about manipulating people. It transforms situations and relationships. It converts hostility into civility and civility into affinity. It changes the skeptics and cynics into the believers and the undecided into the loyal. Enchantment can happen during a retail transaction, a high-level corporate negotiation, or a Facebook update.

Leaders today must navigate their teams and organizations through unprecedented levels of uncertainty. It feels like every year there is some-game changing technology or catastrophe that gives rise to a “new normal” and sends businesses scrambling for how to rethink themselves to operate under these new conditions. K. Scott Griffith, a former airline pilot, socio-technical physicist, and author of the first independently audited high reliability and just culture model, offers practical and proven methods to build processes that will withstand the winds of uncertainty while driving success.

Attention Pays spotlights on the power of attention and absolute focus. In an on-demand, 24/7 society, where distractions cost millions of people productivity, profitability, relationships, and peace, it's time to pay attention to what matters most. This book includes powerful tips and tricks to increase profitability, describes how to achieve maximum accountability and results, provides strategies to help you productively manage daily tasks, and offers guidance on improving your daily attention and focus.

Going well beyond the recycled, superficial tactics in most leadership books, Thrive by Design introduces you to the triggers of exemplary workplace behavior at a neurological level. Tapping into these triggers leads to increased productivity, well-being, accountability, and retention. As you apply the practical approaches and tools outlined in the book, you will see less absenteeism, corrosive gossip, employee drama, accidents, and quality shortfalls.

Human beings have been organizing to accomplish work for as long as we’ve existed. So why is organizational behavior still so elusive and mysterious? In this book, one of the greatest scholars in his field reframes his career’s work around the seven forces that drive all organizations. Mintzberg identifies them as efficiency, proficiency, consolidation, collaboration, culture, division, and conflict.

We are living in an epidemic of disengagement and despair that calls us to action. Awakening Compassion at Work answers the call, showing us new ways to enliven the humanity of work and in so doing address the suffering of the world and create an innovative, optimistic, and engaged workforce.

Is it possible to create a positive workforce in negative times? Yes, it is, says speaker, strategist and consultant Liz Jazwiec, RN. But first, you have to get real about how tough a job in healthcare really is and also about the negative things you and your staff members do to make it even tougher. In her audiobook, Liz gets real about all that and more. In her darkly humorous, ever-so-slightly sarcastic style - after all she was an ER nurse - she builds a case for the powerful benefits of a positive workplace.

When fast-scaling startups and global organizations get stuck, they call Aaron Dignan. In this book, he reveals his proven approach for eliminating red tape, dissolving bureaucracy, and doing the best work of your life.