First Break All of the Rules
Author(s): Marcus Buckingham, Curt Coffman
ISBN: 0684852861
Citing a 25-year study of management practices, the Gallup Organization's Buckingham and Coffman offer unconventional approaches to tackling employee-retention issues. The authors advise managers to focus on sound human-relations practices instead of feel-good maxims and corporate perks.
Now, Discover Your Strengths
Author(s): Marcus Buckingham
ISBN: 0743201140
The premise of this new management study, a follow-up to Buckingham's First, Break All the Rules (S. & S., 1999), is that the most effective method for motivating people is to build on their strengths rather than correcting their weaknesses. The authors, researchers at the Gallup Organization, have analyzed results of interviews conducted by Gallup of over 1.7 million employees from 101 companies and representing 63 countries. When asked, only 20 percent of these employees stated that they were using their strengths everyday. So that they can take a test revealing their strengths, readers are given access to the StrengthsFinder web site and a special ID number; once they learn their profile, they can read the analysis in the book. A description of each type is included, together with case studies, and managers are shown how to handle various types. This book offers a unique perspective on successful management strategy and developing employees' strengths.
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
Author(s): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
ISBN: 0060920432
Aristotle observed 2300 years ago that more than anything men and women seek happiness. Csikszentmihalyi (psychology, Univ. of Chicago) has for 25 years made similar observations regarding "flow," a field of behavioral science examining connections between satisfaction and daily activities. A flow state ensues when one is engaged in self-controlled, goal-related, meaningful actions. Data regarding flow were collected on thousands of individuals, from mountain climbers to chess players. This thoroughly researched study is an intriguing look at the age-old problem of the pursuit of happiness and how, through conscious effort, we may more easily attain it. Recommended for general readers.
- Terry McMaster, Utica Coll. of Syracuse Univ. Lib., N.Y.
Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning
Author(s): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
ISBN: 014200409X
In psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of leadership, the personal is political. The best-selling author of Flow interviewed several dozen exemplary CEOs whose wisdom provides the radical job description of the book’s premise: "Leaders must make it possible for employees to work with joy, to their heart’s content, while responding to the needs of society." Csikszentmihalyi leverages his definition of "flow"—-the capacity for full engagement in an activity—-to create a blueprint for a workplace in which bringing out the best in workers comes before products and profit. When leaders select and reward employees who find satisfaction at work, they can create an upwardly moral organization.
The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace
Author(s): Daniel Goleman, Cary Cherniss
ISBN: 0787956902
How does emotional intelligence as a competency go beyond the individual to become something a group or entire organization can build and utilize collectively? Written primarily by members of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations, founded by recognized EI experts Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, this groundbreaking compendium examines the conceptual and strategic issues involved in defining, measuring and promoting emotional intelligence in organizations. The book's contributing authors share fifteen models that have been field-tested and empirically validated in existing organizations. They also detail twenty-two guidelines for promoting emotional intelligence and outline a variety of measurement strategies for assessing emotional and social competence in organizations.
Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes
Author(s): Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton
ISBN: 1591391342
Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy-implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation-depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital.
The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment
Author(s): Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton
ISBN: 1578512506
In today's business environment, strategy has never been more important. Yet research shows that most companies fail to execute strategy successfully. Behind this abysmal track record lies an undeniable fact: many companies continue to use management processes-top-down, financially driven, and tactical-that were designed to run yesterday's organizations.
The Seven Languages for Transformation
Author(s): Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey
ISBN: 078796378X
Why is the gap so great between our hopes, our intentions, even our decisions-and what we are actually able to bring about? Even when we are able to make important changes-in our own lives or the groups we lead at work-why are the changes are so frequently short-lived and we are soon back to business as usual? What can we do to transform this troubling reality?
In this intensely practical book, Harvard psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey take us on a carefully guided journey designed to help us answer these very questions. And not just generally, or in the abstract. They help each of us arrive at our own particular answers that can solve the puzzling gap between what we intend and what we are able to accomplish. How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work provides you with the tools to create a powerful new build-it-yourself mental technology.
1001 Ways to Energize Employees
Author(s): Bob Nelson, Ken Blanchard, Barton Morris
ISBN: 0761101608
Take the brakes off your business. In the perfect follow-up to 1001 Ways to Reward Employees, the innovative book that has sold over one million copies, Bob Nelson reveals what real companies across America are doing to get the very best out of their employees-and why it's the key to their success. Energizing is listening-AT&T's Universal Card Service's employee suggestion system yields 1,200 ideas a month and millions of dollars in savings. Energizing is encouraging risk-taking-Hershey Foods gives out The Exalted Order of the Extended Neck Award. Energizing is Starbuck's making employees partners, Saturn creating teams that function as independent small businesses, Springfield Remanufacturing's opening its books to all employees.
With case studies, examples, techniques, research highlights, and quotes from business leaders, 1001 WAYS TO ENERGIZE EMPLOYEES is invaluable for managers seeking to increase employee enthusiasm and involvement.
Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work
Author(s): Deborah Tannen
ISBN: 0380717832
Tannen probes the way gender roles shape the ways men and women communicate in the workplace, and how these differences lead to misunderstandings.
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
Author(s): Stephen R. Covey
ISBN: 0671708635
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, author Stephen R. Covey presents a holistic, integrated, principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. With penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes, Covey reveals a step-by-step pathway for living with fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity -- principles that give us the security to adapt to change and the wisdom and power to take advantage of the opportunities that change creates.
Finding Flow
Author(s): Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
ISBN: 0465024114
From the author of "Flow" comes an illuminating guide to improving the quality of our lives through stimulating challenges. Though they appear simple on the surface, the lessons in "Finding Flow" are life-altering.
Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence
Author(s): Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis & Annie McKee
ISBN: 157851486
At the height of the dot-com era, traditional notions of leadership, many of which favored a strictly hierarchal command structure, came under attack from writers who prophesied the emergence of a business culture defined by lateral, fluid, and loosely affiliative relationships. The problem, of course, with this management ethos is that it was not based on carefully researched principles or a deep appreciation of the fundamentals of human behavior; instead, the pundits of the day seemed to take the prevailing view of corporate identity -- which privileged mobile, volatile, reactive organizations like Enron -- and transpose it onto the workplace, creating a philosophy of leadership that was merely a mirror image of their theory of market dynamics
Selling the Dream
Author(s): Guy Kawasaki
ISBN: 0887306004
Guy Kawasaki's phenomenal success at Apple Computer and as a start-up entrepreneur was the result of an innovative approach to sales, marketing, and management called evangelism. Evangelism means convincing people to believe in your product or ideas as much as you do, by using fervor, zeal, guts, and cunning to mobilize your customers and staff into becoming as passionate about a cause as you are.Selling the Dream is a handbook and workbook for putting evangelism into action.
The Leadership Challenge, 3rd Edition
Author(s): James M. Kouzes
ISBN: 0787968331
When it was initially written in 1987, few could have predicted that The Leadership Challenge would become one of the best-selling leadership books of all time. Now, faced with the new challenges of our unpredictable global business environment, Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner--two of the country's premier leadership experts--have completely revised and updated their classic book. Building on the knowledge base of their previous books, the third edition of The Leadership Challenge is grounded in extensive research and based on interviews with all kinds of leaders at all levels in public and private organizations from around the world. In this edition, the authors emphasize that the fundamentals of leadership are the same today as they were in the 1980s, and as they've probably been for centuries. In that sense, nothing's new. Leadership is not a fad. While the content of leadership has not changed, the context has-and in some cases, changed dramatically.
1001 Ways to Reward Employees
Author(s): Bob Nelson
ISBN: 156305339X
This book should be required reading for managers. The author presents a compelling case for recognition and positive reinforcement in management practice. And for some old-time micro-managers, he shows that employee coercion is no longer an option.
