Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Organizational Behavior

How many people does the ideal team contain? How do groups bond, earn trust and forge shared identities? How can leaders build environments adaptable enough to respond to shocks and still enable people to thrive together? How can you feel close to people if your only point of contact is a phone or a computer? In The Social Brain leading experts from the worlds of evolutionary psychology and business management come together to offer a primer on great team working. They explain what size groups work and how to shape them according to the nature of the task at hand.

Throughout his storied career, Aswath Damodaran has searched for the universal key to demystify corporate finance and valuation. Now, at last, he offers the groundbreaking answer to listeners everywhere. It turns out there is a corporate lifecycle very much like our own—with unique stages of growth and decline. And just as we must learn to act our age, so too must companies.

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives celebrates the benefits that messiness has in our lives: why it’s important, why we resist it, and why we should embrace it instead. Using research from neuroscience, psychology, social science, as well as captivating examples of real people doing extraordinary things, Tim Harford explains that the human qualities we value – creativity, responsiveness, resilience – are integral to the disorder, confusion, and disarray that produce them.

After five years of ground-breaking research, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom share some unexpected answers, gripping stories, and a tapestry of unlikely connections. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: traditional “spiders,” which have a rigid hierarchy and top-down leadership, and revolutionary “starfish,” which rely on the power of peer relationships. The Starfish and the Spider explores what happens when starfish take on spiders (such as the music industry vs. Napster, Kazaa, and the P2P services that followed).

The founder of Menlo Innovations and author of the business culture cult classic Joy, Inc. offers an inspirational guide to leaders seeking joy in the challenge of leading others. Filled with colorful anecdotes from Sheridan's personal journey and wisdom from many leadership mentors, Chief Joy Officer offers an approachable, down-to-earth philosophy and practice that will help even the most disillusioned of middle managers bring a renewed sense of purpose to their work building others.

Far away from Silicon Valley, in familiar, traditional, even unglamorous fields, ordinary people are unleashing extraordinary advances that amaze customers, energize employees, and create huge economic value. Their secret? They understand that the work of inventing the future doesn't belong just to geeks designing mobile apps and virtual-reality headsets or to social-media entrepreneurs hoping to launch the next Facebook. Some of today's most compelling organizations are doing brilliant things.

Award-winning entrepreneur and journalist Shane Snow reveals the counterintuitive reasons why so many partnerships and groups break down - and why some break through. The best teams are more than the sum of their parts, but why does collaboration so often fail to fulfill this promise? In Dream Teams, Snow takes us on an adventure through history, neuroscience, psychology, and business, exploring what separates groups that simply get by together from those that get better together.

Scaling up excellence is the key to creating a great organisation. It's how a small enterprise expands without losing focus. It's how a brilliant new idea or plan developed by the few goes on to be adopted by the many. And, in hard times and tough situations, it's how pockets of smart new thinking overcome cultures of indifference or negativity. An organisation that doesn't know how to scale up what is best within it won't achieve long-term success.

Leaders love to say that any company is only as good as its people but tend to evaluate candidates and employees more by their measurable accomplishments than by their "softer" qualities, like integrity, compassion, and other values. Best-selling author Anthony Tjan is leading a movement to change the way we think about goodness so that we can become better judges of people and create more goodness in ourselves, in others, and in our organizations.

Today’s leaders recognize the potential for diverse teams to unleash superior innovation, creativity, and problem solving. But if you want to see tangible business results, you can’t just throw people from different backgrounds in a room together and expect them to figure it out. You must develop leadership with the skillset of facilitating collaboration and dialogue across differences.

The way we work is broken. It takes forever to get anything done. Meetings and emails are incessant. Bureaucracy stifles talent and creativity. After decades of management theory and multiple waves of technological and societal change, is this really the best we can do? Aaron Dignan teaches companies how to eliminate red tape, tap in to collective intelligence and rethink long-held traditions that no longer make sense. In Brave New Work, he shows you how to revolutionize the way your company works forever.

Britain's leading guru looks to the future. Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management - including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management - have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends - such as Beyond Certainty - has changed the way we view society. In The Second Curve, Handy builds on a life's work to glimpse into the future and see what challenges and opportunities lie ahead.

An entertaining and engaging exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life - and how understanding them can improve everything you do. The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don't even realize it. And you don't even realize it. Every day and in all walks of life, we overlook the enormous power of situations, of context in our lives. That's a mistake, says Sam Sommers in his provocative new book.

Once upon a time, a clan of meerkats lived in the Kalahari, a region in Southern Africa. After years of steady growth, a drought has sharply reduced the clan's resources, and deadly vulture attacks have increased. As things keep getting worse, the harmony of the clan is shattered. The executive team quarrels about possible solutions, and suggestions from frontline workers face a soul-crushing response: "That's not how we do it here!"

Why are some people so much better than everyone else at spotting future stars? How do the best talent pickers in any field recognize future greatness? George Anders set out to find the best talent hunters in the worlds of business, sports, pop music, movies, venture capital, academia, medical research, and the military. As radically different as these fields may seem, all share an intense belief in the importance of finding high achievers. And Anders reveals some surprising insights.

J. J. Sutherland has the solution. In his international best seller Scrum, he introduced a simple, revolutionary tool to turbo-charge the output of every team. Based on decades of research and road-tested at the headquarters of Google and Amazon, the Scrum method transformed how a generation of leaders work - first in Silicon Valley, and then in boardrooms around the world.

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Art of Life Admin, written and read by Elizabeth Emens. This book will give you many hours of your life back. Every day, an unseen form of labour creeps into our lives, stealing precious moments of free time, placing a strain on our schedules and relationships, and earning neither appreciation nor compensation in return. Scheduling doctor's appointments. Planning a party. Buying a present. Filling out paperwork. This labour is 'life admin' - the kind of secretarial and managerial work necessary to run a life and a household.

How do companies get ahead in the digital age? In this lively, accessible guide, Ram Charan - best-selling author and advisor to some of the world's top CEOs - reveals that the tech giants have radically rewritten the rules of business. If you want to be competitive, you need to learn to play a new game. Drawing on behind-the-scenes stories from the likes of Netflix, Amazon and Alibaba, Charan sketches out a map of today's business landscape.

Today, the pay gap between chief executive officers of major US firms and their workers is higher than ever before - depending on the method of calculation, CEOs get paid between 300 and 700 times more than the average worker. Such outsized pay is a relatively recent phenomenon, but despite all the outrage, few detractors truly understand the numerous factors that have contributed to the dizzying upward spiral in CEO compensation.

In this engaging and insightful book, management strategist and Wharton Fellow Baba Prasad sheds new light on the subject, and offers practical advice for executives, entrepreneurs, and anyone else who'll need the skills to face the unpredictability, risk, and deep uncertainty that lies ahead. Filled with vivid examples and insights from around the world and throughout history - from the Brazilian rainforest and the "frugal innovation" of 19th century Indian engineers to Ericsson, Lego, Burt's Bees, and Zara - Nimble reveals what sets the most nimble leaders and organizations apart.