An organisation's fate hinges on its CEO - right? Not according to the authors of Senior Leadership Teams. They argue that in today's world of neck-snapping change, demands on leaders in top roles are rapidly outdistancing the capabilities of any one person - no matter how talented. Result? Chief executives are turning to their enterprise's senior leaders for help. Yet many CEOs stumble when creatinga leadership team. One major challenge is that senior executives often focus more on their individual roles than on the top team's shared work. Without the CEO's careful attention to setting the team up correctly, these high-powered managers often have difficulty pulling together to move their organisation forward. Sometimes they don't even agree about what constitutes the right path forward.The authors explain how to determine whether your organisation needs a senior leadership team. Then, drawing on their study of 100+ top teams from around the world, they explain how to create a clear and compelling purpose for your team, get the right people on it, provide structure and support, and sharpen team members' competencies - and your own. Timely and practical, this book enables you to create and sustain a leadership team whose members learn from one another while collaborating to pursue your company's objectives.

Every educator knows that the most effective way to learn is by 'doing' - and nowhere is that truth more clearly seen than in management development. This wide-ranging book explains what is involved in planning and running project-based management development programmes and demonstrates the benefits for both the individuals and the organizations concerned. Drawing on the unrivalled experience of PA-Sundridge Park Management Centre in this field, the authors: c show how to set up the necessary frameworks c describe programmes for different levels of management, including 'top teams' c examine the role of the sponsor c point out the potential pitfalls and indicate how to avoid them c look at the influence of national culture. With summaries and checklists, and case studies focusing on ICI, Allied Domecq, Volvo, Gestetner, Lloyds Bank Insurance Services, The Inland Revenue, London Underground and others, the emphasis throughout is very much on the practical. For anyone concerned with improving managerial performance, this is a book that will repay careful study.

The command-and-control leadership techniques of the past are increasingly ineffective. Instead, today's business leaders need to be alert, agile, enterprising, and skilled in the art of diplomacy. Leading People will show readers it's not enough to have courage and charisma. For the twenty-first century, leaders also need communication, conflict-resolution, and motivational skills. After all, leaders not only cope with change - they create it Readers will learn to: Set a Direction; Inspire Followers; Craft Your Vision; and Drive Change.

From three partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process for solving tough problems, proven at more than a hundred companies.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint. Designer Jake Knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. He joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, healthcare, finance, and more.

A practical guide to answering critical business questions, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from small startups to Fortune 100s, from teachers to nonprofits. It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.

Empowers managers with over 75 key strategic tools to ensure both short-term and long-term success for their business.

This book delivers professional-level information in the practical and accessible framework synonymous with the Key series. This book provides readers with the full gamut of tools and techniques needed to create their own strategic plan, breaking the subject down into over 75 accessible tools and models.

Key Strategy Tools be will help cherry-pick the most useful approaches for business and create a robust strategy that withstands investor scrutiny and becomes the roadmap to success.

Thought leader John Adair provides the techniques and insights you need to find solutions, spark creativity and confidently make the right decisions. This 5th edition now features even more practical exercises, useful templates, and top tips to provide a clear framework that can generate ideas and inspire confidence in your team - so you can spot the solution in every problem, and create ideas to rival even the best strategists. The Creating Success series of books... Unlock vital skills, power up your performance and get ahead with the bestselling Creating Success series. Written by experts for new and aspiring managers and leaders, this million-selling collection of accessible and empowering guides will get you up to speed in no time. Packed with clever thinking, smart advice and the kind of winning techniques that really get results, you'll make fast progress, quickly reach your goals and create lasting success in your career.

At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century's interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.

"Brick by Brick" takes you inside the LEGO you've never seen. By following the teams that are inventing some of the world's best-loved toys, it spotlights the company's disciplined approach to harnessing creativity and recounts one of the most remarkable business transformations in recent memory.
"Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO failed to keep pace with the revolutionary changes in kids' lives and began sliding into irrelevance. When the company's leaders implemented some of the business world's most widely espoused prescriptions for boosting innovation, they ironically pushed the iconic toymaker to the brink of bankruptcy. The company's near-collapse shows that what works in theory can fail spectacularly in the brutally competitive global economy.
It took a new LEGO management team - faced with the growing rage for electronic toys, few barriers to entry, and ultra-demanding consumers (ten-year old boys) - to reinvent the innovation rule book and transform LEGO into one of the world's most profitable, fastest-growing companies.
Along the way, "Brick by Brick" reveals how LEGO:
- Became truly customer-driven by co-creating with kids as well as its passionate adult fans
- Looked beyond products and learned to leverage a full-spectrum approach to innovation
- Opened its innovation process by using both the "wisdom of crowds" and the expertise of elite cliques
- Discovered uncontested, "blue ocean" markets, even as it thrived in brutally competitive red oceans
- Gave its world-class design teams enough space to create and direction to deliver
built a culture where "profitable" innovation flourishes
Sometimes radical yet always applicable, "Brick by Brick" abounds with real-world lessons for unleashing breakthrough innovation in your organization, just like LEGO. Whether you're a senior executive looking to make your company grow, an entrepreneur building a startup from scratch, or a fan who wants to instill some of that LEGO magic in your career, you'll learn how to build your own innovation advantage, brick by brick.

Human decisions, especially in management and personnel selection, are based on making judgments about people analytically and intuitively. Yet in business and scientific contexts, judgments are expected to be based on a rational analysis rather than intuitions or emotions. Intuition is often seen as something mystical that should not be trusted and thus eliminated from human decision-making. Our empirical and theoretical research shows that this is impossible when people are dealing with people. Instead, intuitions and emotions have significant power in the decision-making process. Neuroscience even shows that humans are incapable of switching off their emotions or intuitions when making decisions. Therefore, intuition and emotions as evolutionary achievements of human beings should be looked at more closely to use the wisdom they offer. This book provides an insight into the current state of research on rational-analytical procedures in personnel selection and complements this with research on intuitions and emotions in personnel diagnostics. By integrating scientifically verifiable rational-analytical decision-making procedures with the inner experiential knowledge of people, this book bridges two complementary ways of recognizing and making good decisions. It demonstrates how intuitions are developed and used in different fields of practice and cultures and how scientific research results from rational-analytical and intuitive-emotional selection procedures are successfully integrated by practitioners.

Colorfull provides a roadmap for creating a company culture that is truly inclusive, welcoming, and equitable. With actionable strategies supported by first-hand interviews with Fortune 500 CEOs and CHROs, Colorfull unlocks the secrets for creating workplaces that consistently attract, develop, and retain professionals of color. Rich in substance, candor, and reassurance, Colorfull cuts to the heart of why so many organizations struggle to make meaningful progress with DEI initiatives. Without blame or recrimination, the author articulates the unspoken fears that prevent most leaders from seeing the results they want-and need-in order to remain competitive in an evolving market. Colorfull shows leaders how to step outside comfort zones, lead DEI from the top down, and create corporate cultures that will truly attract and retain top talent of color. Any hiring manager, CEO, or DEI manager will benefit from the insights throughout, empowering them to bring truly transformative change to their organizations. This one-of-a-kind read is packed with real world scenarios, true stories from those who've tried, failed, tried again, and are still on the journey by using the leadership strategies presented here. Colorfull pulls back the curtain in a non-threatening, engaging way that makes success with DEI both accessible and attainable.

Most teams underperform. Yours can beat the odds. If you read nothing else on building better teams, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you assemble and steer teams that get results. Leading experts such as Jon Katzenbach, Teresa Amabile, and Tamara Erickson provide the insights and advice you need to: Boost team performance through mutual accountabilityMotivate large, diverse groups to tackle complex projectsIncrease your teams' emotional intelligencePrevent decision deadlockExtract results from a bunch of touchy superstarsFight constructively with top-management colleagues

This book is about increasing team performance. It focuses on building system dynamics models when tackling a mix of interrelated strategic problems to enhance team learning, foster consensus, and create commitment. The book is intended to be applied in the organizations of today. As the "command and control" organization evolves into one of decision-making teams, so these teams have become the critical building blocks upon which the performance of the organization depends. The team members face an increased complexity of decision making with the interrelation of several strategic problems. What this means is that people have different views of the situation and will define problems differently. However, research shows that this can in fact be very productive if and when people learn from each other in order to build a shared perspective. Learning in this way might prove to be the only sustainable competitive advantage for organizations in the future. As a result, team leaders want to create "learning teams" and are confronted with issues such as how to:

• create a situation where people doubt their ideas rather than stubbornly cling to dearly held views
• create a learning atmosphere rather than trying to "win" the discussion
• create a shared understanding of a problem in a team
• foster consensus and create commitment with a strategic decision
• facilitate Group Model Building

This book is intended as a text covering the central concepts and techniques of Competitive Markov Decision Processes. It is an attempt to present a rig orous treatment that combines two significant research topics: Stochastic Games and Markov Decision Processes, which have been studied exten sively, and at times quite independently, by mathematicians, operations researchers, engineers, and economists. Since Markov decision processes can be viewed as a special noncompeti tive case of stochastic games, we introduce the new terminology Competi tive Markov Decision Processes that emphasizes the importance of the link between these two topics and of the properties of the underlying Markov processes. The book is designed to be used either in a classroom or for self-study by a mathematically mature reader. In the Introduction (Chapter 1) we outline a number of advanced undergraduate and graduate courses for which this book could usefully serve as a text. A characteristic feature of competitive Markov decision processes - and one that inspired our long-standing interest - is that they can serve as an "orchestra" containing the "instruments" of much of modern applied (and at times even pure) mathematics. They constitute a topic where the instruments of linear algebra, applied probability, mathematical program ming, analysis, and even algebraic geometry can be "played" sometimes solo and sometimes in harmony to produce either beautifully simple or equally beautiful, but baroque, melodies, that is, theorems."

The logical and enduring way to innovate. Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage. This distinctive approach has three key elements: It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive. The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose. Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way. In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies, including CarMax, GoPro, LEGO, Gatorade, Disney, USAA, Novo Nordisk, and many others, used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges. Aimed at leaders seeking strategies for sustained innovation, and at the quickly growing numbers of managers involved with creating new products, The Power of Little Ideas provides a logical, organic, and enduring third way to innovate.

Learn how to take risks, thrive and build your dream career. 'Sukhinder is one of Silicon Valley's most well-respected leaders. Her unique style of authenticity, optimism and hustle will help anyone unlock their career potential' - Eric Schmidt, former chairman & CEO, Google Each one of us dreams of possibility - in our careers and in our personal lives. But our pursuit of possibility is hamstrung by 'The Myth of the Single Choice' that has led us to believe that one large choice stands between us and success, and that a single failure may topple us should we choose 'wrongly'. We let fear trump possibility: we become paralyzed. Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is one of the most well-respected leaders in Silicon Valley, but her path to success has been far from linear. While she has started three companies including theBoardlist, and has served as president of StubHub, she's also encountered failed choices, misfires, and all other types of pitfalls that she had to learn how to overcome and incorporate into her new path forward. Drawing on her own experience and those of other leaders, Sukhinder shows that when people thrive, it's because their fear of missing out on an opportunity overtakes their fear of failure, and compels them to take action. Better yet, they keep acting, building a fundamental risk-taking muscle that under weighs the importance of any single choice in favour of continually 'choosing'. Choose Possibility is a thrilling and insightful new way to approach risk-taking and achieve lasting success. 'An excellent guide to help anyone learn how to take risks in their own careers and thrive' - Kai-Fu Lee, chairman & CEO, Sinovation Ventures and author of bestseller AI Superpowers

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Smart industry requires better management. As industrial and production systems are future-proofed, becoming smart and interconnected through use of new manufacturing and product technologies, work is advancing on improving product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency, and cost, optimally using supply chains. Presenting innovative, evidence-based, and cutting-edge case studies, with new conceptualizations and viewpoints on management, Smart Industry, Better Management explores concepts in product systems, use of cyber physical systems, digitization, interconnectivity, and new manufacturing and product technologies. Contributions to this volume highlight the high degree of flexibility in people management, production, including product needs, volume, timing, resource efficiency and cost in being able to finely adjust to customer needs and make full use of supply chains for value creation. Smart Industry, Better Management illustrates how industry can enabled by a more network-centric approach, making use of the value of information and the latest available proven manufacturing techniques.

To understand public policy decisions, it is imperative to understand the capacities of the individual actors who are making them, how they think and feel about their role, and what drives and motivates them. However, the current literature takes little account of this, preferring instead to frame the decisions as the outcomes of a rational search for value-maximising alternatives; or the result of systematic and well-ordered institutional and organisational processes.

Yet understanding how personal and emotional factors interact with broader institutional and organisational influences to shape the deliberations and behaviour of politicians and bureaucrats is paramount if we are to construct a more useful, nuanced and dynamic picture of government decision making. This book draws on a variety of approaches to examine individuals working in contemporary government, from freshly-trained policy officers to former cabinet ministers and prime ministers. It provides important new insights into how those in government navigate their way through complex issues and decisions based on developed expertise that fuses formal, rational techniques with other learned behaviours, memories, emotions and practiced forms of judgment at an individual level.

This innovative collection from leading academics across Australia, Europe, the United Kingdom, and North America will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students and practitioners working in the fields of political science, public management and administration and public policy.

What distinguishes great leaders? Exceptional leaders capture passion. They lead for real: from the heart, smart and focused on the future, and with a commitment to being their very best. As Annie McKee and Richard Boyatzis have shown in their bestselling books Primal Leadership and Resonant Leadership, they create resonance with others. Through resonance, leaders become attuned to the needs and dreams of people they lead. They create conditions where people can excel. They sustain their effectiveness through renewal. McKee, Boyatzis, and Frances Johnston share vivid, real-life stories illuminating how people can develop emotional intelligence, build resonance, and renew themselves. Reflecting twenty years of longitudinal research and practical wisdom with executives and leaders around the world, this new book is organized around a core of experience-tested exercises. These tools help you articulate your strengths and values, craft a plan for intentional change, and create resonance with others. Practical and inspiring, Becoming a Resonant Leader is your hands-on guide to developing emotional intelligence, renewing and sustaining yourself and your relationships, and taking your leadership to a whole new level. This book is ideal for anyone seeking personal and professional development and for consultants, coaches, teachers, and faculty to use with their clients or students.

We've known for years now that demands on leaders are only increasing. Yet we have lacked widely understood, empirically grounded and rigorous ways to support the development of adequate maturity of heart, complexity of mind and skilful practice for leaders to meet these demands. Over the past three decades, a growing number of scholars and practitioners have explored the value of a developmental approach to these issues. In Maturing Leadership, Jonathan Reams brings together a cast of expert contributors to introduce this work to a wider audience. While this approach has previously been on the margins of mainstream leadership development research, Reams brings it to the centre, moving beyond the cliched characterizations of 'inner work' to bring a finer granularity, precision and rigor to the subjective workings of leaders. The chapters explore how applying insights from the field of constructivist cognitive development can be a key driver for supporting improvements in how we approach leadership development. For researchers and students of leadership, this is an essential addition to the leading theories of developmental approaches to leadership. Increasing complexity in the world is not a passing fad, and the need for leaders to grow in the maturity and sophistication of their responses is a long-term need.