Management & Strategy

"Humans aren't a resource to be bought, used and discarded - they are the point of the workplace, the life essence of innovation, growth and success."From the bestselling author of Purple Cow and This Is Marketing comes an urgent manifesto for leaders facing unprecedented challenges in a rapidly-changing workplace.The workplace has undergone a massive shift. Remote work and economic instability have depressed innovation and left us disconnected and disengaged. Paychecks no longer buy loyalty, happiness, and effort. Quiet quitting runs rampant, and people show up without truly showing up. Alarmed managers are doubling down on keystroke surveillance, productivity tracking and back-to-the-office mandates, when what they should be doing is the opposite - affording employees the dignity necessary to inject purpose and motivation into their work.In The Song of Significance, legendary author and business thinker Seth Godin posits a new view of what industry leaders must do now. If you want your employees to live up to their full professional potential, you must give them the respect and autonomy they deserve as humans. The choice is simple: either keep treating your people as disposable and join in the AI-fueled race to the bottom, or build a significant organization that enrolls, empowers, and trusts employees to deliver their best work, no matter where they're working.

More and more leaders in the last few years have challenged their own pricing models, invested in price optimization, and confronted disruptive event after disruptive event, from the pandemic to inflation to supply chain constraints. But without an overarching pricing strategy ? and the structured framework to derive and support it ? these leaders have often overlooked opportunities to shape their markets to their advantage. The book is aimed at senior executives and business leaders who understand that pricing is a powerful lever, yet feel it is hard to act on. It offers the pricing strategies and tactics most leaders lack, with a logical, practical framework called The Pricing Triangle that will enable them to provide strategic pricing guidance to their functional teams with greater confidence, speed, and efficiency. The Triangle draws its shape from the need for companies to coordinate pricing decisions across three sets of three drivers: ? Inputs: Costs, competitors? prices, and most importantly, the value the company creates for customers ? Customer Behavior: Elasticity, price discrimination, and game theory ? Market forces: Commoditization, innovation, and market consolidation. The Strategic Pricing Triangle elevates the development of pricing strategy to the same level as other key strategies within the company.

In this specially-combined edition with a new foreword, Academy Award-winning producer Brian Grazer and acclaimed author Charles Fishman blend their insights from the bestselling books A CURIOUS MIND and FACE TO FACE to transform the art of connecting with and through curiosity.

Kill Bad Meetings will show you how to save yourself a day a week of unnecessary meetings and improve the face to face and virtual meetings that remain

"Many workers believe that to compete with other top talent they must embrace a culture that rewards long hours and constant connection to work. Businesses and society have encouraged this by endorsing busyness, overwork, and extreme commitment as the most valued traits in workers. Sometimes that endorsement is explicit, as when Elon Musk told Twitter employees to work "long hours at high intensity" or get fired. But more often it's an implicit contract, a buildup of organizational and cultural norms and the adoption of new technologies that increasingly make it easy to tether people to work. Either way, this workaholic behavior is unhealthy and counterproductive for workers and for organizations. It's time to fight back. Malissa Clark, the preeminent researcher on workaholic culture, shows you how in Never Not Working. Finally, a book that looks at overwork and burnout not just from the individual's perspective but from an organizational perspective, too. Clark delivers a comprehensive, nuanced definition of workaholism, busting myths along the way-such as the idea that the number of hours worked is the strongest predictor of workaholic tendencies. (It's not.) She also helps you see if you're creating workaholics in your organization or if you're falling prey to the phenomenon yourself. Clark shows you how to escape the trap of putting work at the center of everything and thus losing your well-being-or your company's performance, in the process. Deeply researched and written for everyone from leaders to individual contributors, Never Not Working is the essential guide to identifying workaholism in yourself and others and starting on the road to recovery"--

"Speed has gotten a bad name in business, much of it deserved. When Meta (Facebook) made "Move fast and break things" its motto-and then proceeded to deliver on it-they fueled a cynical but widely accepted assumption that a certain amount of wreckage is the price we must pay for inventing the future. Leadership experts Frances Frei and Anne Morriss argue that this belief is seriously wrongheaded-and that it keeps leaders from achieving excellence. Helping companies solve their toughest problems over the past decade, the authors have learned that the trade-off between speed and excellence is false. The best change leaders, according to Frei and Morriss, solve hard problems with fierce urgency while making their organizations-employees, customers, and shareholders-even stronger. They move fast and fix things. Based on their work with Uber, Riot Games, WeWork, and other fast-moving companies, Frei and Morriss reinvent the playbook for leading change. With trust as the foundation for a "move fast and fix things" approach, the authors reveal the five practices that the most effective leaders use to build trust, accelerate the pace of change, and improve their organizations: Identify the right problem to solve; run small experiments before scaling solutions; build the case for change while driving it; empower the organization; and champion difference. With chapters that provide a "one-week plan," Frei and Morriss show how to execute these five priorities on a fast cycle time of "one per day." By the end of the week, you won't just have a road map for solving your company's toughest problems-you'll already be well on your way, transforming your company at an exhilarating speed"--

"Do you feel like you're hiding in the shadows and not living up to your true potential? Do you lack the confidence to show the world who you really are and build the business you really want? Do you want to stop comparing yourself to other people on social media and start feeling empowered in your own personal journey? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then BE SEEN: Find Your Voice, Build Your Brand, Live Your Dream is the guide you need to break free from your fears and step into your spotlight. BE SEEN is a roadmap for building a personal brand that showcases your unique talents and strengths. Through relatable stories and actionable advice, Jen Gottlieb shares her own path to becoming a recognized expert in her field and takes you on a journey of self-discovery to help you find your voice and unleash your full potential. Divided into four parts, each with its own set of tactical strategies, BE SEEN helps you to: Be Courageous: This section focuses on mindset shifts and self-reflection exercises to break through the barriers holding you back and find the courage to take bold action. Be Creative: Here, you'll learn how to tap into your creativity and unlock the unique talents that make you stand out so you can build the future you dream of. Be Connected: Building meaningful relationships and cultivating a tribe of loyal supporters who align with your values and goals is the focus of this section. Jen provides networking tips and tricks to help you connect with others authentically. Be Visible: Finally, you'll learn how to step into your spotlight and showcase your talents to the world. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a creative professional, or just someone who wants to build a life that reflects your true self, BE SEEN will help you unleash your full potential and finally be seen for the incredible, unique person you are"--

In The Power of Value Selling: The Gold Standard to Drive Revenue and Create Customers for Life, accomplished sales leader and trainer Julie Thomas delivers a fresh and engaging perspective on how salespeople can adopt a customer-centric approach when selling to contemporary buyers. In the book, you'll discover a process that turns you into the trusted business advisor that buyers crave in unpredictable business environments. It's an actionable guide to better business conversations--the kind that build trust, forge human-to-human connections, and enable sellers to compete on value instead of price. The author explains the concept of value in modern sales, helping you to create winnable opportunities that result in premium pricing. You'll learn to make it easy for buyers to buy, sell to the C-suite, negotiate on value, close more business, expand your footprint, generate renewal sales year after year, and uncover additional buyer needs that will unlock new opportunities for more sales. The Power of Value Selling explains why how you sell is just as important as what you sell. You'll discover how to build credibility and rapport with your buyers, how to earn valuable time on their calendars, how to uncover business problems worth solving, and strategies to eliminate chances for buyers to delay or defer decisions. The Power of Value Selling is a comprehensive guide to a simple and powerful framework that accelerates sales, regardless of your product, service, or industry. It's an essential resource for both sales veterans and early-career sellers who want to keep things simple while driving real results in intensely competitive and challenging markets. For more, visit valueselling.com today.

How do today’s leaders move from playing it safe to playing for great?In a volatile time of climate crisis, global pandemics, and disruptive technologies, leaders may find themselves clinging to fear-based mindsets that favor individualism over collectivism – inadvertently controlling their teams rather than inspiring genuine commitment in them. To navigate uncertainty and seize emerging opportunities, leaders must move toward a more facilitative, enabling approach that centers on purpose before profit and the team before the individual.In Safe to Great, consultant, keynote speaker, and author Skip Bowman outlines an integrated organizational and leadership development process for implementing a growth mindset based on psychological safety. Grounded in more than 25 years of experience working with global organizations, Bowman’s model unites theory and practice in a set of practicable principles designed to meet the opportunities and challenges of leading and organizing in the twenty-first century and beyond.Bowman looks to the concept of psychological safety, as described in Amy C. Edmondson’s work on fearless organizations, to examine how a workplace that tolerates risk and exhibits a willingness to experiment can facilitate high levels of innovation. The tenets of a growth mindset, as popularized by Carol Dweck, also serve as a guiding philosophy: Bowman urges organizations to take a generative approach to managing people and resources, putting at least much back as they extract. In this relational model, success rests on the combined achievements and developmental growth of the collective rather than on the accumulation of power and wealth by a single executive or small group of stakeholders.Conversational in tone and packed with big hopes and uncomfortable truths, Safe to Great makes an impassioned appeal for a new standard of leadership that will move people and organizations from a place of relative comfort and little risk to a space of daring curiosity, engagement, and collaboration.

"Mental toughness, mental clarity, and mental health all have one thing in common: The journey begins in your mind. In this radical guide, the award-winning author of The Last Arrow illuminates a surprising path toward personal fulfillment and optimal performance. Throughout his thirty years of work as a mindset expert and leadership coach, Erwin Raphael McManus has been obsessed with these questions: Why do some people succeed despite having all the odds stacked against them? How do others achieve the unthinkable, only to watch their lives slip away? Are there mental structures for failure and success? McManus has come to realize that too many of us have "near-life" experiences. We almost pursue our dreams. We almost make the decision that changes everything. We are always one choice away. If we want to live without regret, we need to make a mind shift-trading beliefs that limit our potential for ones that help us move toward optimal performance and pursue the success of being fully alive. We must move from a life of obligation to a life of intention. In Mind Shift, McManus brings together twelve mental frameworks that have helped some of the most accomplished people on earth create internal structures of success. Sharing experiences from entrepreneurs, artists, professional athletes, and his own career, McManus shows us how to transform our thinking-and, in turn, transform our lives"--

Wonder Boy is a riveting investigation into the turbulent life of Zappos visionary Tony Hsieh, whose radical business strategies revolutionized both the tech world and corporate culture, based on rigorous research and reporting by two seasoned journalists. Tony Hsieh's first successful venture was in middle school, selling personalized buttons. At Harvard, he made a profit compiling and selling study guides. In 1998, Hsieh sold his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. About a decade later, he sold online shoe empire Zappos to Amazon for $1.2 billion. The secret to his success? Making his employees happy. At its peak, Zappos's employee-friendly culture was so famous across the tech industry that it became one of the hardest companies to get hired at, and CEOs from other companies regularly toured the headquarters. But Hsieh's vision for change didn't stop with corporate culture: Hsieh went on to move Zappos headquarters to Las Vegas and personally funded a nine-figure campaign to revitalize the city's historic downtown area. There, he could be found living in an Airstream and chatting up the locals. But Hsieh's forays into community-revival projects spun out of control as his issues with mental health and addiction ramped up, creating the opportunity for more enablers than friends to stand in his mercurial good graces. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with a wide range of people whose lives Hsieh touched, journalists Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans craft a rich portrait of a man who was plagued by the pressure to succeed but who never lost his generous spirit.

To be a top performer in the digital economyto become truly future readyyou need a playbook. Now you have one.It seems like almost every company you can think ofincluding your ownhas embarked on a digital transformation journey. The problem is, many companies start down the road without a good sense of where they are going or a clear idea of how they will create and capture digital value. Not surprisingly, this leads to problems: failure to realize the value from digital in their bottom lines, wasted resources and effort, added complexity and dysfunction.This compact, no-nonsense book provides a solution. In their years of working with senior executives around the world, MIT research scientists Stephanie Woerner, Peter Weill, and Ina Sebastian noticed that these leaders knew they had to transform their businesses, but lacked a coherent framework and a common languagea playbookto guide and motivate their employees and keep everyone focused on a common goal.Future Ready is that playbook. Based on years of rigorous research with data from more than a thousand companiesBBVA, CEMEX, DBS, Fidelity, Maersk, and many othersthe book provides a powerful, field-tested four pathways framework that offers insights into the important dimensions at which a firm must excel in order to be competitive, as well as the organizational disruptions that every firm must manage as part of the transformation journey.The book includes instructive examples, sharp analyses, assessments to help companies benchmark themselves against top performers, and many illuminating visuals to help crystallize the data and ideas.Woerner, Weill, and Sebastian show that the goal isn't digital transformation but rather a profound business transformation. Future Ready is your essential guide for becoming a top performer in the digital economy.

"Learn how to use design to fight for equity and inclusion, featuring ten strategies for taking creative risks to bring about change-from Stanford University's d.school"--

> > With this book, authors L. Y. Pratt and N. E. Malcolm fill this gap. They present a step-by-step method for integrating technology into decisions that bridge from actions to desired outcomes, with a focus on systems that act in an advisory, human-in-the-loop capacity to decision makers. > How can decision makers use data and technology to ensure desired outcomes? How can technology teams communicate effectively with decision makers to maximize the return on their data and technology investments? How can organizational decision makers assess and improve their decisions over time?

Revised edition of the authors' Humble leadership, [2018]

"Today's radically complex problems require people to lead with design. Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland armed with insights from some of today's top minds in business, tech, and social justice offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change"--

An essential resource for managers at every level of any organizationA management book written by managers for front-line managers, The Effective Manager, 2nd edition, is a concise, practical, and incisive take on what to do and say to get the best results possible from your co-located or remotely distributed team. The book's concrete advice will improve your relationships with your team members, increase your chances of being promoted, and generate trust amongst those you lead.You'll learn why managing remote teams is so much harder than managing one in a single location and how to meet that challenge head-on. You'll also discover how to introduce your ideas to your team, counter their concerns and pushback, and ensure your instructions are followed.In the place of vague bromides about being "impactful" or "candid," you'll get hands-on guidance on how to behave in the situations that managers find themselves in on a daily basis. The authors also offer:* Data- and evidence-driven advice that's been proven to work in the real world over the last 30 years* Ground-level, real-world tips on getting the best work out of your team without burning them out* Four critical manager behaviors that build success: Know your people, talk about performance, ask for more, and push work downA book for every manager at every level, The Effective Manager shows you what you can do now, today, with your team members to improve their performance, increase personnel retention, and get better results.

"In The Yellow Pad, former United States Secretary of the Treasury and co-chairman of Goldman Sachs Robert Rubin sets out a number of methods and processes that have guided him through moments of crisis. He offers both qualitative and quantitative ways of sifting through difficult economic and social problems, the sum of which is an original intellectual framework that can be applied to both the most global universal problems and the daily dilemmas individuals face. Rubin speaks across generations and the political divide, engaging with the most contested and emotional issues of our times, and seeking to propose realistic policy solutions to move society forward without leaving anyone behind"--