800-CEO-READ New Releases

Unstuck

by Keith Yamashita, Sandra Spataro

(Penguin USA, 208 Pages)

Everyone gets stuck sooner or later. The big question is how do you get unstuck?

People and organizations get stuck because the most ambitious and rewarding work brings with it the most challenges.

Unstuck is a smart, fearless, totally practical guide to turn to for inspiration and immediate solutions. It’s meant to be acted on, not just read. And it’s based on the proven practices the authors have discovered while working with IBM, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nike, Gap Inc., and many other major companies.

Whether you need to step back to move forward, motivate a struggling team, change your goals, or create a clearer vision, Unstuck helps you diagnose your situation, identify the most important challenges, and implement the right tools and techniques to get things moving again. Now with updated case studies, this is the perfect book to get you and your team unstuck.

Growing Great Employees

by Erika Andersen

(Portfolio, 288 Pages)

"If life were fair, employees would be perfect. They would do exactly what we asked them to do, exactly when we asked them to do it - except, of course, for the fantastic ideas they would cook up on their own ... Back to reality. Your employees are, like you and me, flawed and hopeful human beings whose success is at least partly dependent on your skill as a manager, human beings who will thrive with skillful and consistent attention and wither without it."

In business today we're told that management development is a thing of the past. Staying limber, preparing to change hats at a moment's notice, and keeping your finger on the pulse of the "new" - that's what we're told is critical.

At this moment when companies and managers aren't focusing on the long haul, Erika Andersen says just the opposite. If you want to compete with the market leaders, grow your business, and succeed in your field, you need support: an all-star staff that epitomizes your company's mission and has the skills to implement it.

How do you achieve this? Grow great employees.

For twenty-five years Erika Andersen has been helping some of the best-managed companies in the world develop their employees. In Growing Great Employees you'll learn how they stay ahead of the competition by investing in their people. You'll discover that:

Whether you're a manager or a senior executive, Growing Great Employees is your guide to creating a dynamic workplace where the efforts you make with your employees today will blossom into success for years to come.

About the Author:

Erika Andersen is the founder of Proteus International, a consulting firm that works with CEOs and top executives of many major corporations, including Molson Coors Brewing, MTV Networks, Union Square Hospitality Group, ESPN, Comcast, Lifetime Television, and Madison Square Garden.

Know-how

by Ram Charan

(Random House Inc, 288 Pages)

The new grand theory of leadership by Ram Charan . . . The breakthrough book that links know-how—the skills of people who know what they are doing— with the personal and psychological traits of the successful leader.

How often have you heard someone with a commanding presence deliver a bold vision that turned out to be nothing more than rhetoric and hot air? All too often we mistake the appearance of leadership for the real deal. Without a doubt, intelligence, vision, and the ability to communicate are important. But something big is missing: the know-how of running a business—the capacity to take it in the right direction, do the right things, make the right decisions, deliver results, and leave the people and the business better off than they were before.

For well over four decades, Ram Charan has been learning in the most visceral way the underlying reasons why leaders succeed and fail. As one of the most influential advisers to top management teams of leading companies around the world, he has had a front-row seat to observe the cause and effect of leadership practices and behaviors.

Ram Charan’s insight into the real content of leadership provides you with the eight fundamental skills needed for success in the twenty-first century:

• Positioning (and, when necessary, repositioning) your business by zeroing in on the central idea that meets customer needs and makes money
• Connecting the dots by pinpointing patterns of external change ahead of others
• Shaping the way people work together by leading the social system of your business
• Judging people by getting to the truth of a person
• Molding high-energy, high-powered, high-ego people into a working team of leaders in which they equal more than the sum of their parts
• Knowing the destination where you want to take your business by developing goals that balance what the business can become with what it can realistically achieve
• Setting laser-sharp priorities that become the road map for meeting your goals
• Dealing creatively and positively with societal pressures that go beyond the economic value creation activities of your business

Know-How is the missing link of leadership. By showing how the eight know-hows link to, interact with, and reinforce personal and psychological traits, Ram Charan provides a holistic and innovative portrait of successful leaders of the twenty-first century.

Hot Spots

by Lynda Gratton

(Pub Group West, 230 Pages)

Sometimes within an organization, condensed periods of growth and innovation occur. For a short period of time, new ideas flow freely and cooperation and success attain levels that exceed all expectations. These periods are called “hot spots.” This book takes a detailed look at how and why hot spots happen, and shows that it’s possible to create them. In order to do so, entrenched rules about command and control must be discarded, since hot spots can’t be commanded, nor can they be controlled. Instead, they are a naturally emerging phenomena. But, that doesn’t mean that organizations have to wait for them to arise. Gratton offers techniques and strategies that can create a more productive environment, one in which hot spots are anticipated, recognized, and embraced — an environment that carries the organization beyond its pre-set goals and boundaries and to new levels of growth and energy.

The No Asshole Rule

by Robert I. Sutton

(Warner Books Inc, 224 Pages)

Today's deluge of business books exhaustively addresses problems with leadership, corporate strategy, sales, budgeting, incentives, innovation, execution, and on and on. But scant attention is devoted to a problem that plagues every workplace: Assholes. In a landmark Harvard Business Review essay, Stanford Professor Robert Sutton showed how assholes weren't just an office nuisance, but a serious and costly threat to corporate success and employee health. In his new book, Sutton reveals the huge TCA (Total Cost of Assholes) in today's corporations. He shows how to spot an asshole (hint: they are addicted to rude interruptions and subtle putdowns, and enjoy using "sarcastic jokes" and "teasing" as "insult delivery systems"), and provides a "self-test" to determine whether you deserve to be branded as a "certified asshole." And he offers tips that you can use to keep your "inner jerk" from rearing its ugly head. Sutton then uses in-depth research and analysis to show how managers can eliminate mean-spirited and unproductive behavior (while positively channeling some of the virtues of assholes) to generate an asshole free--and newly productive--workplace. Enlightening case studies include an analysis of how Google's "don't be evil" maxim helped launch the company to unprecedented early growth, how JetBlue and Southwest Airlines "fire" passengers who demean their employees, and how a "belligerent" e-mail from Cerner CEO Neal Patterson made his company's stock plunge 22% in three days (and how his graceful apology helped the stock bounce back).

Change to Strange

by Dan Cable

(Pearson P T R, 300 Pages)

To achieve sustained competitive advantage, you must create and deliver something that's valuable, rare, and hard to imitate -- and you can't do that with a run-of-the-mill workforce. Your workforce needs to be strikingly different, obsessively focused on delivering on your unique value proposition. Compared with everyone else's workforce, your people need to be downright strange. This book is about everything it takes to build a workforce that's strange and extraordinary enough to execute on your most powerful strategies and your unique value proposition. It's about understanding exactly how your workforce needs to be different... creating an end-to-end Strange Workforce Value Chain... implementing workforce systems that support your unique goals... establishing detailed metrics based on what makes you unique... using those metrics to drive clarity throughout your entire organization, and steer it towards success. If you're tasked with executing strategy through people, and "balanced scorecards" and "strategy maps" just haven't been enough, take your next and greatest leap forward: make The Change to Strange.

Show Me the Money

by Jack J. Phillips Ph.D., Patricia Pulliam Phillips

(Berrett-Kohler, 300 Pages)

From IT to HR, from boardroom to shop floor, increased accountability for achieving high-value results for new initiatives is the norm in every organization and department. Jack and Patricia Phillips, the world’s leading experts on Return On Investment (ROI) strategy, distill their years of experience and research into proven, step-by-step tools for determining the value of any project before, during, and after implementation. They present a comprehensive method for measuring the hard-to-measure, and placing monetary value on the hard-to-value. They even show how to measure and place value on "intangible" qualities like leadership, creativity, customer loyalty, employee engagement, and more. Developed in an easy-to-read format and fortified with case studies, checklists, tips, and tools, Show Me the Money clarifies and resolves the mystery surrounding the allocation of monetary value. It gives change agents everything they need to provide concrete, detailed evaluations of the potential and actual financial benefits of any project or program.

Mobilizing Minds

by Lowell Bryan, Claudia Joyce

(McGraw-Hill, 300 Pages)

A new, forward thinking management strategy for creating wealth and overcoming complexity in today's high-growth global economy

Mobilizing Minds takes a bold stand: companies need to put the same energy and focus into designing their organizations as they have devoted to the design of new products, processes, or entry into new markets.

After years of analysis of the world's highest performing firms, two senior executives at McKinsey have created a 21st-century strategy that shatters the 'complexity frontier'. In the most important book to be published from McKinsey in years, Bryan and Joyce show managers and leaders how to overcome the burdens of corporate bureaucracy with a new organizational model that can generate tens of thousands of dollars of profit per employee by improving how firms mobilize talent, improve worker satisfaction, and leverage their intangible assets.

Shattering the Dilbert syndrome by empowering managers to engage their workers, Mobilizing Minds provides nine principles for rethinking the entire corporation allowing senior executives to unleash a new collaborative environment that gives managers the power to create new teams and drive fresh profit to the bottom line.

The Hiring Secrets of The NFL

by Isaac Cheifetz

(Davies-Black Publishing, 120 Pages)

Sports metaphors speak the language of business--whether describing the unbridled arrogance of eccentrics, the overpriced payouts for underperforming stars, or the need for fierce competition, team work, and strategic alignment. For every manager and human resource professional searching for today's best and brightest, Hiring Secrets of the NFL sets out an entertaining new rule book for improving the efficiency, speed, and results of corporate hiring to recruit and retain talent like a Super Bowl winner.

The Hiring Secrets of The NFL

by Isaac Cheifetz

(Davies-Black Publishing, 120 Pages)

Sports metaphors speak the language of business--whether describing the unbridled arrogance of eccentrics, the overpriced payouts for underperforming stars, or the need for fierce competition, team work, and strategic alignment. For every manager and human resource professional searching for today's best and brightest, Hiring Secrets of the NFL sets out an entertaining new rule book for improving the efficiency, speed, and results of corporate hiring to recruit and retain talent like a Super Bowl winner.

Giving Notice

by Freada Kapor Klein

(Jossey-Bass, 275 Pages)

A groundbreaking book that offers approaches for changing the hidden biases in the workplace

This is an eye-opening examination of the causes and dynamics of bias in the workplace, offering a psychological, political, and societal analysis of the actual cost of bias to the bottom line. The authors make the hurdles that women and minorities face in the workplace as personal to the reader as they are to those who face them. Giving Notice is filled with sensible approaches for solving the current imbalance and challenges us to rethink unconscious ideas about stereotypes and commonly accepted business practices.

Freada Kapor Klein (San Francisco, CA) is an internationally noted consultant and diversity expert. She has been quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and on the Today show, Nightline, and NBC Nightly News.

Giving Notice

by Freada Kapor Klein

(Jossey-Bass, 275 Pages)

A groundbreaking book that offers approaches for changing the hidden biases in the workplace

This is an eye-opening examination of the causes and dynamics of bias in the workplace, offering a psychological, political, and societal analysis of the actual cost of bias to the bottom line. The authors make the hurdles that women and minorities face in the workplace as personal to the reader as they are to those who face them. Giving Notice is filled with sensible approaches for solving the current imbalance and challenges us to rethink unconscious ideas about stereotypes and commonly accepted business practices.

Freada Kapor Klein (San Francisco, CA) is an internationally noted consultant and diversity expert. She has been quoted in the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and on the Today show, Nightline, and NBC Nightly News.

Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals

by Karen Berman, Joe Knight

(Harvard Business School Press, 256 Pages)

As an HR manager, you're expected to use financial data to make decisions, allocate resources, and budget expenses. But if you're like many human resource practitioners, you may feel uncertain or uncomfortable incorporating financials into your day-to-day work.

Using the groundbreaking formula they introduced in their book Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean, Karen Berman and Joe Knight present the essentials of finance specifically for HR experts.

Drawing on their work training tens of thousands of managers and employees at leading organizations worldwide, the authors provide a deep understanding of the basics of financial management and measurement, along with hands-on activities to practice what you are reading. You'll discover:

Authoritative and accessible, Financial Intelligence for HR Professionals, empowers you to "talk numbers" confidently with your boss, colleagues, and direct reports -- and understand how the financials impact your part of the business.

Topgrading for Sales

by Greg Alexander, Bradford Smart

(Portfolio, 128 Pages)

Book Description
A concise extension of the business classic Topgrading, targeted to sales managers.

Brad Smart’s Topgrading has sold more than 150,000 copies since 1999, making it the definitive book for executives who want to hire, coach, and retain top talent. Now Smart has teamed up with Greg Alexander, who used Topgrading to radically improve his sales force at EMC.

In Topgrading for Sales, they have boiled down the key Topgrading ideas to a pithy 112 pages while focusing on the unique needs of sales managers and sales directors.

Great sales forces don’t just depend on strategies— they depend on hiring the best possible reps. But surveys show that about half of all hires and promotions put an underqualified person in the wrong job. No wonder the average tenure for sales managers is only nineteen months.

Topgrading for Sales takes the guesswork out of hiring by teaching readers how to interview systematically for A-level talent instead of relying on hunches and prejudices. It also shows how to coach B-level reps to turn them into A-players and how to weed out C-players before they do too much damage.

The Change Cycle

by Lillie R. Brock, Ann Salerno

(Berrett-Koehler Pub, 180 Pages)

However necessary, organizational change is likely to be angst ridden and frustrating to the workforce. The Change Cycle will help readers to more resourcefully cope with change at work by helping them understand and predict their behavior and the behavior of others. Authors Salerno and Brock teach readers about six predictable and sequential stages that accompany any sort of change. This model is firmly grounded in recent discoveries in social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, but is presented in a straightforward, conversational style peppered with humor. Salerno and Brock describe how we think, feel and act during each stage, utilizing stories of common work/life transitions and how organizations have successfully dealt with the challenges accompanying the stages. They offer tools and success strategies needed for individuals at all levels, helping them understand what they ought to expect, from themselves and others, as they move through each stage of The Change Cycle.