Workplace Problems

The hallmark of any exceptional career is the ability to devise innovative solutions for work challenges. Creative thinking skills are vital for your professional advancement.

Companies need to grow, innovate, and adapt to changing needs. But stressed-out employees rarely go the extra mile, chaos rarely produces agility or speed, and it’s hard innovate or grow while bleeding talent to turnover and quiet quitting. This is how change stymies the very progress that it seeks. Drawing on decades spent leading HR operations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall explores the essential nature of human performance and offers a radical new alternative to the constant turbulence that defines corporate life.

Best-selling author and scholar Michael Roberto presents a thorough investigation of organizational obstacles to creative thought. Highly relevant to the growth crises many enterprises face in today's economic landscape, this book examines how to break barriers to spark creativity and foster new ideas.

Hiring and firing are hard to get right - and potentially costly to get wrong. Two of the most crucial tasks you face as a manager, they are vital to both the success of the enterprise...and your own career. No need to worry. This handy guide breaks down the simple but powerful strategies you can use to bring better employees onboard - and weed out the weaker ones.

Being a dog walker isn't as glamorous as you might imagine. Unless, of course, you're walking a tech billionaire's German shepherd mix. And when your grumpy, gorgeous billionaire boss asks you to spend the evenings at his place to babysit his teenage niece, who are you to refuse? You think, what could possibly go wrong? I'll tell you what can go wrong: Your business implodes, your heart shatters, and you find out you're carrying his baby.

The subject of “design thinking” is the rage at business schools, throughout corporations, and increasingly in the popular press - due in large part to work of IDEO, a leading design firm, and its celebrated CEO, Tim Brown, who uses this audiobook to reveal how the techniques and strategies of design belong at every level of business. Change by Design is an audiobook for creative leaders seeking to infuse design thinking into every level of an organization, product, or service to drive new alternatives for business and society.

The companion to the blockbuster best seller, Getting Things Done. Since its publication in 2001, Getting Things Done has become, as Time magazine put it, "the defining self-help business book" of the decade. Having inspired millions of readers/listeners around the world, it clearly spoke to an urgent need in an increasingly time-pressured society. Now, in the highly anticipated sequel Making It All Work, Allen unlocks the full power of his methods across the entire span of life and work.

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.

Using stories from his time at Netscape, Apple, and Slack, Michael Lopp presents a series of small but compelling practices to help you build leadership skills. You’ll learn how to create teams that are highly productive, highly respected, and highly trusted. The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack. You’ll learn how to apply these lessons to your own experience.

Business is personal. A statement on life as a business owner. Being the leader of your own life is the greatest lesson in business. Your business is personal, as it is yours. We live in a fast-paced, overconnected world. Relying on your own instincts and knowing the dreams you hold for your version of success, ambition and happiness will ensure you have the life you want and not the life you compare yourself with.

In this insightful and comprehensive guide, Addy Osmani shares more than a decade of experience working on the Chrome team at Google, uncovering secrets to engineering effectiveness, efficiency, and team success. Engineers and engineering leaders looking to scale their effectiveness and drive transformative results within their teams and organizations will learn the essential principles, tips, and frameworks for building highly effective engineering teams.

As a savvy and motivated professional, you’re constantly on the lookout for high-impact leadership strategies to take your business to the next level and beyond—without bogging you down in abstract theories or exhaustive case studies. You need foolproof ways to lead your people to achieve outstanding results, even in challenging times. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, it’s time to get “brilliant on the basics.”

As CEO of the Consumer Technology Association ®, owner and producer of CES ®, Gary Shapiro has had a front row seat to the launch of nearly every recent major technology. He's seen tech companies rise and fall, and bankrupt entrepreneurs become billionaires. After more than four decades in the industry, he knows that leaders who make it in the tech world have one thing in common: they know how to pivot. Drawing upon detailed case studies, economic theory, and personal experience, Pivot or Die offers a behind-the-scenes look at the development of innovative technology and business strategies

Decades of research demonstrates that we often have an over-inflated sense of self and are rarely as good as we believe. Perfectly Confident is the first book to bring together the best psychological and economic studies to explain exactly what confidence is, when it can be helpful, and when it can be destructive in our lives.

If you want to make effective and informed decisions, through critical thinking and creative problem solving, then keep reading.... Do you keep jumping to the wrong conclusion? Are you tired of repeatedly making the same mistakes? Do you often find your decisions are based on assumptions rather than knowing the facts? The solution is critical thinking and problem solving, a valuable skill that you can use at work and in your personal life, to develop better decision making skills in order to create a healthier more rational environment.

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks.

In The High-Velocity Edge, the reissued edition of five-time Shingo Prize winner Steven J. Spear's critically acclaimed book Chasing the Rabbit, Spear describes what sets market-dominating companies apart and provides a detailed framework you can leverage to surge to the lead in your own industry. Spear examines the internal operations of dominant organizations across a wide spectrum of industries, from technology to design and from manufacturing to health care.

For decades, alarms have sounded about declining engagement. Yet companies continue to struggle with toxic cultures, and the low productivity and unhappiness that go with them. Why is "culture" so difficult to improve? What makes so many good employees check out? Neuroscientist Paul Zak shows that innate brain functions hold the answers. It all boils down to trust. When someone shows you trust, a feel-good jolt of oxytocin surges through your brain and triggers you to reciprocate.

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.

Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader in all other respects would also be an effective leader of innovation. The truth is, leading innovation takes a distinctive kind of leadership, one that unleashes and harnesses the "collective genius" of the people in the organization.