Leadership

Ira Chaleff's bestseller (over 40,000 copies sold across two editions) becomes even more relevant today as failures in leadership grow astronomically requiring greater vigilance and oversight on the part of the citizenry.

Find out how bold actions by visionary leaders can inspire powerful stories that drive culture change.

Data indicates that most strategic efforts to change a company's culture fail. So how do companies succeed in this endeavor?

A top strategy professor and two highly successful CEOs found that, in companies that had successfully changed their culture, leaders had taken dramatic actions that embodied the new cultural values. These actions inspired stories that became company legends, repeated in every department and handed on to new employees.

Through compiling and analyzing 150 stories from business leaders who have achieved change, they identified 6 attributes that every successful culture change story has in common:

1. The actions are authentic
2. They revolve around the CEO
3. They signal a clean break with the past, and a clear path to the future
4. They appeal to employee heads and hearts
5. They're often theatrical or dramatic
6. They're told, and re-told, throughout the organization

With extensive and inspiring examples of stories containing these attributes, the authors illustrate how readers can harness the power of stories within their company in order to change or create a winning culture to align with any strategy.

Four innovation experts from the startup world, large enterprises, nonprofits, and academia come together to reveal the secret of uncovering authentic demand to build successful innovations.

Books on innovation mostly focus on how to nurture innovative cultures and brainstorm ideas. The Heart of Innovation is the first popular book to concretely delve into what innovations really are and how to create them. Many attempts at innovation fail because customers turn out to be indifferent. The key to success is to uncover unmet authentic demand; what customers cannot be indifferent to. Through fresh case studies, ranging from how SoulCycle revolutionized the fitness industry, to how IBM built an $8 billion business on the Web, to a single mother ending abuse in a slum in Africa, The Heart of Innovation explores how authentic demand is often hidden or taken for granted.

The first half of the book explores cases where people accidentally found their way to meeting an unmet authentic demand-or failed to. The second half of the book provides a field guide to methodically identifying and building products, services, and businesses around authentic demand.

At Georgia Tech, IBM, and elsewhere, the authors have worked with scores of startups and large companies, developing a unique methodology that unpacks the “black box” of authentic demand and shows innovators how to search for it, recognize it, and create situations for their customers that catalyze it. They explore the differences, and different challenges, to the three types of innovation-incremental improvement, company transformation, and radical “formative” innovation.

Authors Chanoff, Furst, Sabbah, and Wegman take innovators and people who work with them on a new journey through innovation. Their fresh case studies, from IBM's entry to the Web, to a single mother in a slum in Kenya, make The Heart of Innovation as obsessively readable as it is informative.

If customers are already pulling your innovation from your hands, you don't need this book. Otherwise, reach for The Heart of Innovation.

A new edition of the bestselling book (75,000 copies sold) that shows how the teachings of Jesus can bring a new angle to your leadership style. No matter what your religious background, this book will help you map out the high road to your personal and professional goals.

The iconic Henry Mintzberg provides a crystal-clear map to the forms and forces that shape all human organizations, synthesizing his fifty years of research.

We live in a world of organizations, from our birth in hospitals until our burial by funeral homes. In between, we are educated, employed, entertained, and exasperated by organizations. We had better understand how these strange beasts really work. But where can we go to find out?

Welcome to Understanding Organizations . . . Finally! For half a century, Mintzberg has been observing organizations, advising them, engaging them, and escaping them. Here he offers a masterful update and revision of his 1983 classic, Structure in Fives.

Believing there is one best way to structure organizations is the worst way to do so. A better place to start is by recognizing different species of organizations. Mintzberg identifies seven-personal enterprises, programmed machines, professional assemblies, project pioneers, and others. He explores these forms and the seven forces that drive them toward hybrids and across their life cycles.

You will find no better guide to the care and feeding of these extraordinarily varied and vital creatures than this book.

Learn how frictionless organizations cut costs, grow revenue, and create loyal fans by creating products and services that work so well, their customers never have to contact them for the wrong reasons.

Many organizations focus so intently on improving the way customers interact with them that they don't ask the more fundamental question of whether the interactions are needed in the first place. Every contact channel adds cost and complexity. And while customers appreciate that they can now call, chat, text, or email to check an order or resolve a problem, they appreciate not having to do anything even more.

Veteran customer service experts Bill Price and David Jaffe explain how service, support, and sales can be made invisible, reducing costs and providing a better customer experience. Drawing on examples from four continents and over twenty-five countries, they provide a logical and sequential methodology that every reader can follow.

Reducing contact with customers means proactively focusing on the customer perspective, which is always a good idea. This means organizations need to rethink all aspects of their business, from product and services design to quality and control. It is a whole enterprise initiative, but one with a huge upside.

In a world of persistent and often overwhelming chaos, this book makes one simple promise: If you close the gaps in the three areas of your life, you will achieve fulfillment, success, and inner peace.

We all ask ourselves the question, “Has my life made a difference?” We want our lives to have meaning. We want to live balanced, productive lives in which we contribute through our work, our relationships, and our example to others. And we search for inner peace to deal with all of the chaos that exists in the world today.

In this new book, Franklin Covey cofounder Hyrum Smith shows that the key to achieving a meaningful, fulfilling, and peaceful life is closing three gaps that we all struggle with. The first is the BELIEF GAP: the gap between what we believe to be true and what is actually true. The second is the TIME GAP: the gap between what we plan to do-our goals and dreams-and what we actually get done. The third is the VALUES GAP: the gap between what we value-what matters most to us-and what we actually do.

Using inspiring true stories of people who have overcome difficult challenges, the author tells how to close each of these three gaps in our personal and work lives. Smith provides new understanding and tools to move from the life we currently have to the life we really want.

Sustainable company growth isn't just a pipedream. This 3-part blueprint is your guide to avoiding the traps that cause growth to stall.

As companies mature, their underlying growth naturally slows-this is called the ‘growth curse'. It's a pervasive problem that plagues companies, CEOs, and board members alike. In order to safeguard a company's future, a strategic form of governance in which the board plays a more active role on behalf of all stakeholders, must be activated.

This book is comprised of 3 parts. First it shows companies how to identify the traditional traps that hinder growth. The second part provides companies with a blueprint for building their board, defining long-term strategy, and adjustments necessary to serve continued growth. The final part delves into the specific ways that the board and executives must collaborate in relation to strategic renewal.

Reimagining the limits of growth and how companies are run as a consequence provides an escape from the ‘growth curse' at last.

This essential playbook shows how companies can scale success by coupling digital strategies with an investment in the health of their organizations and the people within.



To scale and grow, a company must get the organizational elements right. That begins with having the right strategy, the right leadership to drive it, and the right talent, culture, and organizational design to realize a company's potential. This is especially true in the AI era, where a company's most valuable assets are its people.

To begin with, leaders must rethink their value creation strategies. To hone their organizational edge, leaders must prioritize their organization's health in seven vital areas: strategic direction, culture, leadership, talent, organizational design, EID (equity, inclusion, and diversity), and well-being. No matter what type or size of business, those essential conditions must be leveraged for increased value and growth. Put simply: organizational matters matter. To hone their digital edge, leaders must understand AI, as advances in technology allow leaders to build organizations that can compete and win in the future. Finally, an investor mindset will enable leaders to invest wisely in the technology (and leverage that tech) that sets their organizations apart.