Design Leadership

Design sprints provide a problem-solving framework to get answers quickly and effectively. Learn to run sprints in any organization to reduce politics, increase collaboration, and put the focus on outcomes.

Talking to people about your designs might seem like a basic skill, but it can be difficult to do well. In many cases, how you communicate with stakeholders, clients, and other non-designers may be more important than the designs themselves. Because if you can't get their support, your work will never see the light of day - no matter how good it is. This practical guide focuses on principles, tactics, and actionable methods for presenting your designs.

Get your bearings as a leader, gain confidence, and learn tactical approaches from experts who have been in your shoes so you can support your team and advance your career. This book includes: how to become a design leader with insights from Netflix's Andy Law; learn how to hire people with the right balance of skills and find the best structure for your team; evaluating team members' performances, coaching to help them grow, and minimizing conflicts; and more.

Here we explore a shift from traditional command-and-control management to a system where colleagues build a deep sense of ownership. This transition moves the leader from being a central authority to acting as a Custodian of the work environment and a Curator of agency, identity, meaning, and kinship. The Core Premise: From Control to Ownership We argue that traditional leadership often relies on coercion—the quiet pressure of "do it or pay a price"—which may produce compliance but can never create true ownership. When leaders default to control, they become bottlenecks, and the work ...

Authors Eric Geiger (author of the best-selling Simple Church and Creature of the Word) and Kevin Peck argue that churches that consistently produce leaders have strong convictions to develop leaders, healthy cultures for leadership development, and helpful constructs to systematically and intentionally build leaders. All three are essential for leaders to be formed through the ministry of a local church.

No single factor—not sales, marketing, finance, strategy, or operations—has more influence over the ultimate success of an organization than its culture. Yet for many leaders, culture remains frustratingly vague: everyone knows it matters, but few know exactly what to do about it. In Culture by Design, David J. Friedman cuts through the fog and provides a clear, practical roadmap for intentionally creating a high-performing culture.

How to structure your business for exponential growth. Have you ever wondered why some businesses scale while others fail? For every company that triples in size, thousands lose their momentum and get stuck. Every business leader aspires to achieve and sustain growth, but most come up short. Usually this happens because the early start-up structure is not designed to support their next-stage business strategy. It is not designed to scale. Designed to Scale explains the principles of scalable organizational structure.

Real critique has become a lost skill among collaborative teams today. Critique is intended to help teams strengthen their designs, products, and services, rather than be used to assert authority or push agendas under the guise of "feedback". In this practical guide, authors Adam Connor and Aaron Irizarry teach you techniques, tools, and a framework for helping members of your design team give and receive critique.

Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific...

Our brains do their best to help us out, but every so often they can be real assholes - having meltdowns, getting addicted to things, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. Your brain knows it's not good to do these things, but it can't help it sometimes - especially if it's obsessing about trauma it can't overcome. That's where this life-changing book comes in. With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what's going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately....

No single factor - not sales, marketing, finance, strategy, or operations - has more influence over the ultimate success of an organization than its culture. In the game-changing first edition of Culture by Design, David Friedman cut through the fog and provided a simple, clear, and practical road map that thousands of organizations have now used to build high-performing cultures. In this new updated edition, you'll learn how to take the strategies he originally taught and adapt them to meet the unique challenges presented by today's remote work environment.

Most training works in theory. But fails when it matters. People complete the course. They understand the content. They even say it was useful. And then nothing changes. The same mistakes happen. The same issues return. The same question gets asked: “Didn’t we already train this?” This book solves that problem. Not by improving content. By changing how training is designed. Instead of focusing on what people need to know, this book shows you how to design for what people need to do—especially when: the situation is unclear time is limited pressure is high and there is no time to ...

THE LIFE-CHANGING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD “Essentialism holds the keys to solving one of the great puzzles of life: How can we do less but accomplish more?”—Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again Essentialism isn’t about getting more done in...

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under...

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life comes a revised, fully up-to-date edition of Designing Your New Work Life, a timely, urgently needed book that shows us how to transform our new uncharted work life into a meaningful dream job or company. With practical...

Being a father isn’t just about providing—it’s about leading, shaping, and being fully present in your child’s life. In Fatherhood by Design, former professional athlete, coach, and father of four, Erik Westrum, delivers a powerful blueprint for fathers who refuse to settle for passive parenting. This book is a call to action for men who want to lead their families with purpose, instill discipline, and create lasting impact—not just for today, but for generations to come. You’ll discover how to: ✅ Be fully present and engaged, making every moment count ✅ Balance fatherhood, ...

From the New York Times bestselling authors of Sprint comes “a unique and engaging read about a proven habit framework [that] readers can apply to each day” (Insider, Best Books to Form New Habits). “If you want to achieve more (without going nuts), read this book.”—Charles Duhigg...

Human Design is the next evolution after Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, and other innovative profiling systems. Whether your field is psychotherapy, recovery, coaching, or healing arts, and whether your clients are individuals, couples, families, or business teams, Understanding Your Clients through Human Design will empower your work and call you to reconsider how you approach people. Inspire your practice with this groundbreaking and accessible approach and take your work to the next level!

Innovative strategies for success from former Nike CMO Greg Hoffman, who had a major hand in crafting Nike’s singular brand and was instrumental in its most high-profile breakthrough campaigns. In EMOTION BY DESIGN, Hoffman shares lessons and stories on the power of creativity drawn from...

Lead a life of adventure, meaning and purpose—and earn a good living. “Thoughtful, funny, and compulsively readable, this guide shows how ordinary people can build solid livings, with independence and purpose, on their own terms.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of the #1 New York...