Award Winner: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
“A masterful and thought-provoking book that has reshaped my understanding of content in the digital landscape.”—Ariel Emanuel, co-CEO, WME | IMG
Harvard Business School Professor of Strategy Bharat Anand presents an incisive new approach to digital transformation that favors fostering connectivity over focusing exclusively on content.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BLOOMBERG
Companies everywhere face two major challenges today: getting noticed and getting paid. To confront these obstacles, Bharat Anand examines a range of businesses around the world, from The New York Times to The Economist, from Chinese Internet giant Tencent to Scandinavian digital trailblazer Schibsted, and from talent management to the future of education. Drawing on these stories and on the latest research in economics, strategy, and marketing, this refreshingly engaging book reveals important lessons, smashes celebrated myths, and reorients strategy.
Success for flourishing companies comes not from making the best content but from recognizing how content enables customers’ connectivity; it comes not from protecting the value of content at all costs but from unearthing related opportunities close by; and it comes not from mimicking competitors’ best practices but from seeing choices as part of a connected whole.
Digital change means that everyone today can reach and interact with others directly: We are all in the content business. But that comes with risks that Bharat Anand teaches us how to recognize and navigate. Filled with conversations with key players and in-depth dispatches from the front lines of digital change, The Content Trap is an essential new playbook for navigating the turbulent waters in which we find ourselves.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
Drawing inspiration from the epic story of the Apollo Moon Program, collected research, and his own life experiences, Dr. Anthony Paustian outlines the many small steps it takes to achieve anything great in life. With the practical tools described in this imaginative, easy-to-read book, A Quarter Million Steps teaches the reader how to affect change and create success through imagination, creative problem-solving, effective leadership, mental focus, work ethic, teamwork, and an understanding of the role of perception. The reader will learn less about what to think and more about how to think.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
Take your ego out of the equation, and watch your company thrive!
''I've got a solution,'' Encore's CFO tells Brandon, ''but it's unorthodox.'' It's 2005 and Brandon Black has just been promoted to CEO of Encore Capital, a company struggling to navigate an increasingly difficult business environment. Faced with a rapidly declining stock price and low workplace morale, Brandon knows he needs change—and fast. Following his CFO's advice, he and his executive team start working with Learning as Leadership (LaL) and its president, Shayne Hughes. Through their partnership, Encore's executive team learns to root out the unproductive ego habits that undermine collaboration and performance.
As they instill these more effective behaviors throughout the organization, Encore begins to solve problems collectively, prioritize resources without infighting, and focus on the initiatives with the greatest strategic value. When the financial crisis of 2008-09 forces 90 percent of its competitors out of business, Encore thrives, with its profits increasing by 300 percent and its stock price by 1200 percent. Told from two lively first-person perspectives, Ego Free Leadership brings readers along for Encore's incredible success story. They'll see a CEO overcome his unconscious resistance to modeling the change he wants in his team and discover a time-tested roadmap for eliminating the destructive effects of the ego in teams and organizations.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
Aristotle and Nike got it right – GREATNESS is what we humans DO – when given the challenge, the encouragement, the environment, and the opportunity.
At some point in this postmodern life, individual greatness has lost its appeal for many of us. It has been commodified and relegated to those who are measured by shortest/longest times, impressive distances, highest heights, lowest lows, medals won, honors given…and again…Aristotle and Nike got it right…GREATNESS is what we can DO…every day…without recognition or reward, but for the satisfaction that comes from meeting the challenge, creating a team, and overcoming the odds. And that is what Growing Weeders into Leaders is about.
It is an entertaining and thoughtful look into the hearts and the workday lives of ordinary people - just like you and me - who tapped into their inner greatness in pursuit of a vision. Creating one of America's most beautiful college campuses, at Ole Miss, did not happen overnight and, inside these pages, Jeff McManus describes the joys, the defeats, the brilliant problem-solving and the "best laid plans" that are proven worthless...until the bigger picture is told. It is the "bigger picture" told from the ground level. Growing Weeders into Leaders takes you through the practical applications of empowering people to experience not only what it means to grow outstanding landscapes, but also to grow greatness in themselves and encourage it in others.
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
Default Culture Has Met Its Match
After successfully leading her company through a transition as interim CEO, Carolyn earns her appointment as permanent CEO of Phossium. Although she is excited, Carolyn quickly realizes something’s wrong.
Early on, Carolyn recognizes a problem at the company—a very serious problem that threatens its growth and profitability. Carolyn identifies the problem as default culture—the complacency and discontent you’re left with when you stop intentionally generating a positive culture.
But changing the company culture isn’t easy, especially when employees, senior leaders, and even a board member push back. Taking it upon herself to spark change, Carolyn looks to enlist the help of anyone willing to help build a peak performance culture.
Together with other dissidents of the status quo, Carolyn has to find a way to change the company culture from “default” to “peak performance”—no small feat.
In his book Match in the Root Cellar, Chris McGoff—culture guru and bestselling author of The PRIMES—allows you to journey along with Carolyn, a composite character based on real-life people, to learn and see how it’s up to everyone to work through the struggles and find a way to redefine company culture and achieve peak performance.
By the end of Carolyn’s story, you will be equipped to break down that default culture and build a culture of peak performance!
Award Finalist: 2018 Best Book Awards Business: Management & Leadership
It can be messy and overwhelming to figure out how to solve thorny problems. Where do you start? How do you know where to look for information and evaluate its quality and bias? How can you feel confident that you are making a careful and thoroughly researched decision?
Whether you are deciding between colleges, navigating a career decision, helping your aging parents find the right housing, or expanding your business, Problem Solved will show you how to use the powerful AREA Method to make complex personal and professional decisions with confidence and conviction.
Cheryl's AREA Method coaches you to make smarter, better decisions because it:
Recognizes that research is a fundamental part of decision making and breaks down the process into a series of easy-to-follow steps.
Solves for problematic mental shortcuts such as bias, judgment, and assumptions.
Builds in strategic stops that help you chunk your learning, stay focused, and make your work work for you.
Provides a flexible and repeatable process that acts as a feedback loop.
Life is filled with uncertainty, but that uncertainty needn't hobble us. Problem Solved offers a proactive way to work with, and work through, ambiguity to make thoughtful, confident decisions despite our uncertain and volatile world.
Earl Morrison has held leadership positions in both his private life and professional life. Throughout his life he has encountered many different types of people and leaders. Earl has striven to be the best leader that he can be no matter the place or the title he holds. Earl rose to the top of his profession as a chief of police in 2014. Leadership Lessons Learned is a collection of the lessons he learned throughout his career and most recently as the head of an organization. These lessons hone in on his struggles and triumphs as he learned how to Lead and Learn with Character.
Employee engagement has become the hot topic in business circles over the past several years. Although many leaders have a basic understanding of what it is and how it affects business outcomes, they rely on a set of faulty assumptions about how to create an engaged workforce. These assumptions—mostly carry overs from an old-school management mindset—distort the true meaning of employee engagement.The Stepford Employee Fallacy tells leaders what they need to hear and what employees are too afraid to say: the truth. Employers cannot mistreat their employees and expect them to be happy, committed, high-performing corporate robots. This book dismantles the contemporary understanding of employee engagement by debunking the beliefs of business leaders who have unrealistic expectations for their workers. Using anecdotes from his consulting practice, third-party research, brain science, current events, and his own personal observations from the front lines, Jonathan D. Villaire explains why the majority of employees today are disengaged in their jobs. He then offers some radical solutions to make all organizations more engaging places to work. Employee engagement is often referred to as a win-win situation for workers and their employers. It is, but only if leaders let go of the falsehood that has become an unspoken managerial tenet of the modern workplace: The Stepford Employee Fallacy.
Conversations have consequences. Discussions lead to decisions that shape the future for individuals, families, companies, and nations.
Too often these decisions are derailed by faulty logic and false constraints. These pitfalls are not simply hidden, but deviously veiled in the guise of wisdom, truth, and common sense.
Expensive Sentencesexposes the clichéd wisdom that leads to lost time, money, and opportunity. Readers will discover how to hear decision-making traps in real time, and learn to guide teams back to fact and logic that will lead to better outcomes.
Through historic examples, business stories, and personal anecdotes drawn from decades of experience, the author illustrates the prevalence and impact of flawed reasoning. Equally important, the book includes a clear path to improvement: sample text to upgrade conversations and exercises to correct assumptions and clarify solutions.
