Bosses are human - some good, some bad. They have a huge impact on your job satisfaction, your day-to-day happiness, your workload - and yes - your paypacket. If you're lucky they will be understanding, supportive, encouraging and inspiring. Then again they might be lazy, unmotivated, weak, over-emotional, sarcastic, rude, or just downright - well - bossy. But you're no powerless victim.When it comes to your boss, then you're more in control than you think. It's a case of understanding what makes them tick, why they react as they do, and then approaching situations in the right way to get the best out of your boss. Here's how.

"Strategy and Business" 2012 Organizational Culture Book of the YearThis third edition of the classic resource, "Productive Workplaces" is smart, well-written and well-researched, thoughtful, somewhat provocative, and a one-of-a-kind review of the integration of economics, technology, and people. It covers such topics as: the work on self as integral to organizational change; the revision of Lewinian concepts for a new era; and the history behind "getting everybody improving whole systems" as a response to fast change and increasing diversity (not the same as using any particular method). The themes, case studies (many revisited), and models are as relevant as ever.

Women make up the majority of university graduates. They enter the workplace in equal numbers with men. But many workplaces still operate with cultures developed over a century ago to reflect a predominantly male workforce and vastly differing social expectations. So all too often as women become parents they are forced to fix things in the only way they can - by downgrading their job expectations or dropping out of the corporate world. Anna Meller believes it's high time we #Upcycled our jobs and careers to fit today's lifestyles and meet women's changed expectations. Her PROPEL model offers ambitious working mothers new possibilities for progressing their corporate careers. In this book, Anna leads you through an evidence-based six step process that supports you in finding the balance you need. Practical exercises enable you to craft a working arrangement that meets your employer's expectations as well as your own aspirations, and to develop the key skills you need to maintain it.

JetBlue Chairman Joel Peterson provides the playbook for establishing and maintaining a culture of trust that breaks down the operational silos and CYA mentality that plague many organizations. Trust is the glue that holds an organization together. It turns deflection into transparency, suspicion into empowerment, and conflict into creativity. With it, a tiny company like John Deere grew into a worldwide leader. Without it, a giant corporation like Enron toppled. How does it feel to work for a firm where leaders and colleagues trust one another? Freed from micromanagement and rivalry, every employee contributes his or her best. Risk-taking and innovation become the norm. With compelling examples, JetBlue Chairman Joel Peterson details how to establish and maintain a culture of trust, including: Start with integrity Invest in respect Empower everyone Require accountability Create a winning vision Keep everyone informed Budget in line with expectations Embrace conflict Forget "you" to become an effective leader This fully expanded edition includes a powerful self-assessment tool for organizations to evaluate their culture of trust and discover areas for improvement. Peterson has also added rich new case studies and chapters on the theme of betrayal, including how to manage and guard against it. With The 10 Laws of Trust Expanded Edition in hand, you'll be able to plant the seeds of trust-and reap the rewards of reputation, profits, and success.

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive.
In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure--a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture--presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix.
While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, "Corporate Culture" draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.

Growing numbers of us work not only from home, but from anywhere; job flexibility has become a key requirement for employers and workers alike. This, in turn, has created new challenges for architects and designers - many of whom themselves start out working from home - who are tackling demand head on with innovative solutions that allow clients to transform their spaces to suit a wide range of needs, from multifunctional studios to homes that seamlessly combine work and family life. Divided into five thematic sections, this book explores the exciting variety of ways that the workplace can be integrated into the domestic environment. From stand-alone multifunctional furniture to mobile room dividers and dynamic solutions that fold out or pop up to create new work areas, each design addresses the unique needs of the space, client and working practices for which it was required, and tackles new questions about the rapidly evolving relationship between work and domestic life in the 21st century. This essential and timely resource for homeworkers and practitioners offers fresh ideas for how to strike the perfect balance between living and working at home.

Are you fed up with your work/life balance? Do you feel burnt out and uninspired? Are you stuck in a job you hate and desperate for change but don't know where to start? Then you need this refreshingly honest book that will change your relationship with work for good. One evening after missing the train home, standing on the cold platform, exhausted and quietly sobbing, Anniki Sommerville realized she wouldn't get to see her kids before bedtime for the fourth time that week, she knew it was time for a major change. When podcaster, author, and journalist Anniki first landed her dream job, she was overjoyed. But she very quickly felt trapped in a toxic work culture that was making her miserable and anxious. We're constantly told we should be doing work that is 100% fulfilling and makes us feel authentic and bursting with happiness at every moment. But the perfect job doesn't exist. What if there was another way? From running a multi-million-pound company to becoming a freelancer and everything in between, Anniki has learnt some valuable life lessons about what work means to her. She's figured out that 'nailing it' is a one-way ticket to burnout and disillusionment, and instead found a more joyful path to contentment. In this essential guide to getting your work life back on track, The Big Quit will show you how to: 1. Spot the early signs of burnout 3. Embrace trying new things and overcome fear of failure 4. Navigate your way through work anxieties 4. Create boundaries with your work and home life 5. Benefit from slowing down and looking after yourself 6. Build your confidence up after a career break 7. Enjoy your job! Packed with real and practice advice, fans of Arianna Huffington, Everything is Figureoutable, Roxie Nafousi's Manifest and Caitlin Moran will love The Big Quit. Read what everyone is saying about Anniki Sommerville: 'I loved this book. Full of wit and wisdom, Anniki tells it like it is.' Clover Stroud 'I LOVED this book... I couldn't put down... so refreshingly honest...The language used made the book feel like I was talking to a friend...really helpful and full of useful advice...such a brilliant read!' NetGalley reviewer ?????????? 'Laugh-out-loud funny! As a woman in her 40s, I thoroughly enjoyed this book... Spot-on for many of the thoughts & worries & oddities running through my head too.' NetGalley reviewer ??????????

Increasing customer needs, the globalization of markets and the evolution of e-commerce add to the complexity of logistic processes. In today's business, it is well understood that an effective management of logistic processes is impossible without the use of computer-based tools and quantitative methods. This book presents in a systematic way quantitative approaches to distribution logistics and supply chain management. The main orientation of the book is towards practical problem solving, and numerous case studies and practical applications are presented. The topics covered include: supply chain management, revers logistics, e-commerce, facility location and network planning, vehicle routing, warehousing, inventory control.

Managing Projects for success is a how to do it book of considerable value to practitioners and students alike. It provides the challenge of theory application through a series of exercises and is comprehensively illustrated. Managing Projects for Success equips the reader with specialist skills that can be immediately applied in practice and is written in three inter-related parts - Part 1: The framework; Part 2: Planning for control and Part 3: The tool kit - to promote clarity of understanding and study.

A radical new business book from business trailblazers Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson that offers a reappraisal of business best practice - advocating stripping everything back to bare essentials. With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. It will COMPLETELY change your approach to work. Every once in a while, a book comes out that changes just about everything. This is one of those books. Ignore it at your peril' -- Seth Godin, New York Times bestselling author 'Inspirational...REWORK is a minimalist manifesto that's profoundly practical. In a world where we all keep getting asked to do more with less, the authors show us how to do less and create more' -- Scott Rosenberg, Co-Founder of Salon.com 'Filled with excellent plain English advice, it's one of the best books out there for business productivity' -- ***** Reader review 'Every word is well-crafted, well-chosen, and easy to both digest and engage with' -- ***** Reader review 'Thought-provoking and truthful' -- ***** Reader review 'A must-read for today's managers' -- ***** Reader review ********************************************************************************************** From the founders of the trailblazing software company 37signals, here is a different kind of business book - one that explores a new reality. Today, anyone can be in business. Tools that used to be out of reach are now easily accessible. Technology that cost thousands is now just a few pounds or even free. Stuff that was impossible just a few years ago is now simple. That means anyone can start a business. And you can do it without working miserable 80-hour weeks or depleting your life savings. You can start it on the side while your day job provides all the cash flow you need. Forget about business plans, meetings, office space - you don't need them. The key is stripping everything back to the bare minimum and basics and then rebuilding; keeping everything simple and under control. You'll learn how to begin, why you need less than you think, when to launch, how to promote and whom (and when) to hire. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work. Perfect for readers of Tim Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week, Seth Godin's Purple Cow and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail.

Investing in your returning talent Becoming a parent is life-changing. Our experience as employers, practitioners, researchers and working parents tells us this is a critical time for offering support to new parents as they navigate the transition, plan for their return and re-engage with work and career. At an organisational level, there are huge costs associated with losing experienced and talented employees when they start a family and, in the interest of building a more diverse and balanced workforce, organisations need their people to return engaged and motivated to progress their career. Written in partnership by two established coaching and mentoring professionals, Mentoring New Parents at Work makes the case for dedicated mentoring programmes in the workplace as a sustainable way of supporting new parents and improving talent retention for employers. The authors offer timely, practical guidance for each stage of the mentoring journey, from building the business case through to ideas for mentoring workshops. The book is grounded in theory and practice, and provides tools, techniques and real life case studies from a range of countries and organisations to illustrate good practice. Mentoring New Parents at Work will be invaluable to all HR practitioners and line managers who want to retain and support new parents, helping to pave the way for gender diversity at all levels of their organisations. Its themes and insights will also be of interest to students and researchers of HRM, diversity management, and coaching and mentoring.

______________________ 'Too much to do? Stop and read this' - Guardian 'For a fresh take on an eternal dilemma, Overwhelmed is worth a few hours of any busy woman's life - if only to ensure that she doesn't drop off the bottom of her own "To Do" list' - Mail on Sunday ______________________ In her attempts to juggle work and family life, Brigid Schulte has baked cakes until 2 a.m., frantically (but surreptitiously) sent important emails during school trips and then worked long into the night after her children were in bed. Realising she had become someone who constantly burst in late, trailing shoes and schoolbooks and biscuit crumbs, she began to question, like so many of us, whether it is possible to be anything you want to be, have a family and still have time to breathe. So when Schulte met an eminent sociologist who studies time and he told her she enjoyed thirty hours of leisure each week, she thought her head was going to pop off. What followed was a trip down the rabbit hole of busy-ness, a journey to discover why so many of us find it near-impossible to press the 'pause' button on life and what got us here in the first place. Overwhelmed maps the individual, historical, biological and societal stresses that have ripped working mothers' and fathers' leisure to shreds, and asks how it might be possible for us to put the pieces back together. Seeking insights, answers and inspiration, Schulte explores everything from the wiring of the brain and why workplaces are becoming increasingly demanding, to worldwide differences in family policy, how cultural norms shape our experiences at work, our unequal division of labour at home and why it's so hard for everyone - but women especially - to feel they deserve an elusive moment of peace. ______________________ 'Every parent, every caregiver, every person who feels besieged by permanent busyness, must read this book' - Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Why Women Still Can't Have It All

Find a way to work that works for you. The 9-to-5 office routine no longer exists. Many employees have the option to work anywhere, any time. But how do you find the flexible arrangement that's right for you? And how do you manage a team when they're all working in different places and on different schedules? The HBR Guide to Managing Flexible Work is filled with practical tips and advice to help you and your team stay productive and connected, no matter when or where you work. You'll learn how to: Set a flexible work schedule that meets your needs Remain connected and visible Get more done-in less time Make the most of hybrid meetings Keep your team engaged, both in person and virtually Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

In the age of multiple equity movements, it is critical to explore an unspoken nuance--the silencing of women leaders. Carrie Lynn Arnold calls attention to the history and complex dynamics that can suppress a leader's voice while offering solutions for change. Women are taught to speak up, develop confidence, leverage their strengths, polish their interpersonal skills, widen their competencies, and fight to sit at the table. But once they make it to that executive chair, they rarely examine the unspoken dynamics that impact their success. The silencing of female voices is an all too common epidemic, preventing women from harnessing their full capabilities and leading with maximum potential. This phenomenon of isolating women by subduing their voices is a decades-old tradition. It can be impossible to avoid encounters, organizational cultures, and even feelings of self-suppression that all foster silencing. It is no longer about questioning competency or confidence. It is about understanding the complex factors and biases that are deeply embedded in relationships between men and women, amongst women, and within the dynamics of systems and the self that allows for this trend to continue despite growing successes in equity. Carrie Lynn Arnold examines silencing, which is essential to name and recognize, as a pre-requisite to effective leadership. By understanding where we have been before, we may fully appreciate and call attention to where we need to go. Regardless of your gender or whether you are an emerging leader or a CEO of a large corporation, the silencing virus is capable of infecting everyone. Silenced and Sidelined explores what it means to feel suppressed, giving words to the experience so that leaders can begin different types of conversations about voice and leadership. There are no shortcuts or simple, easy steps; this call to leadership is a call for courage. It requires the ability to communicate with a voice that carries currency--one, people will not just hear, but follow. Given the complexity of our world and the challenges society faces, we can no longer afford leaders with silenced voices.

Is work taking over your life? Is your life interfering with your success at work? Work-life balance is ever-evolving and can be hard to find and maintain, especially as your career develops and circumstances change. Get A Life! is a highly practical handbook to help you do just that. Written by experienced coach, counsellor and wellbeing consultant Rick Hughes, this book covers everything from assessing your own needs, delegation and workload management and the myths of perfectionism, to managing and investing in relationships at work and at home, considering professional and personal development, and creativity and self-worth. With a wealth of advice, case studies and useful action plans founded in over 25 years of real-world experience, Get A Life! will help you find the balance that works for you, now.

Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women's weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework. This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions - recognition, representation, rights and redistribution - to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them. Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.

Over the past two decades the use of flexible employment relations has increased in most developed countries. The growth of temporary agency work constitutes a significant component of this development. Organizations are now facing the challenges of managing a 'blended workforce', i.e. a workforce consisting of both direct hires and contractors. At a time when Europe, as well as the rest of the world, is facing enhanced global competition and a severe labor market crisis, an understanding of temporary employment practices becomes all the more acute. With the evolution of the use of agency work in the Western world over the past decade, the chapters in this volume show how a focus on the management and organization of temporary agency work can be helpful to see possibilities and pitfalls for the use of temporary employment in the wake of changed employment practices and challenges to labor market stability and welfare structures. Together, the new case studies presented in this volume provide a wide scope of analysis of the organization and management of temporary agency work, offering a much-needed contribution to the discussion of issues and priorities that guide and shape organizational practices today. Its particular uniqueness lies in the empirical richness and variety of local case studies and the way in which these are related to wider policy aims, ideological shifts, and the dynamics of organizational practice, with a particular focus on the organization and management of 'blended workforces'.

Book 6 of the Smart Skills series: practical guides to mastering vital business skills and techniques. Using proven strategies from business experts, these essential smart skills can empower anyone with the tools to get ahead. Maximise your opportunities by mastering the art of persuasion The underappreciated skill of persuasion is vital not just for negotiations, but in every aspect of business life. Taking on more responsibility, motivating your team, getting that big promotion: everything is possible once you've mastered the art of convincing people. By following these simple steps you can learn first how to recognise your power in any professional situation, and then how to harness that power to your advantage. The key persuasive tactics covered in this concise Smart Skills guide include: Mastering persuasive language Personalising your pitch: "the tailored approach" Conveying credibility Handling and overcoming objections Dealing with "maybe" Take advantage of every opportunity, starting today.

Revised and updated with the latest scientific research and updated case studies, the business classic that offers a revealing look at psychopaths in the workplace-how to spot their destructive behavior and stop them from creating chaos in the modern corporate organization. Over the past decade, Snakes in Suits has become the definitive book on how to discover and defend yourself against psychopaths in the office. Now, Dr. Paul Babiak and Dr. Robert D. Hare return with a revised and updated edition of their essential guide. All of us at some point have-or will-come into contact with psychopathic individuals. The danger they present may not be readily apparent because of their ability to charm, deceive, and manipulate. Although not necessarily criminal, their self-serving nature frequently is destructive to the organizations that employ them. So how can we protect ourselves and our organizations in a business climate that offers the perfect conditions for psychopaths to thrive? In Snakes in Suits, Hare, an expert on the scientific study of psychopathy, and Babiak, an industrial and organizational psychologist and a leading authority on the corporate psychopath, examine the role of psychopaths in modern corporations and provide the tools employers can use to avoid and deal with them. Together, they have developed the B-Scan 360, a research tool designed specifically for business professionals. Dr. Babiak and Dr. Hare reveal the secret lives of psychopaths, explain the ways in which they manipulate and deceive, and help you to see through their games. The rapid pace of today's corporate environment provides the perfect breeding ground for these "snakes in suits" and this newly revised and updated classic gives you the insight, information, and power to protect yourself and your company before it's too late.

The Simple Truths of Service is a customer service classic that will grab your heart and not let go! More than five million people have been touched by this story. Have you? Your competitive edge in today's business environment is in how your customers are treated. If you want to succeed, then it's time to get creative about customer service! The Simple Truths of Service is an unforgettable true story about a very special young man who takes a chance and changes the culture of a grocery store. Each and every member of your team will be coming up with their own ideas of how to deliver that extra special service after they read this book. Johnny is young man living with Down Syndrome who changes the culture of a grocery store by being creative and giving the customers more than they expect. He puts his own personal signature on each and every interaction. Read about Johnny and other great customer experience stories that will have your customer service team bursting with new ways to make your company stand out from the crowd.

Organizations are about conversations. For any organization to achieve its goals, people need to interact and those interactions require dialogue and conversation. Yet, thanks to technology, we seem to be having fewer genuine conversations. This book seeks to change this, through "how to skills" and wider cultural change advice.

A groundbreaking look at why our interactions with others hold the key to success, from the bestselling author of Think Again and Originals For generations, we have focused on the individual drivers of success: passion, hard work, talent, and luck. But in today's dramatically reconfigured world, success is increasingly dependent on how we interact with others. In Give and Take, Adam Grant, an award-winning researcher and Wharton's highest-rated professor, examines the surprising forces that shape why some people rise to the top of the success ladder while others sink to the bottom. Praised by social scientists, business theorists, and corporate leaders, Give and Take opens up an approach to work, interactions, and productivity that is nothing short of revolutionary.

This volume provides valuable insights into how organizations are changing and evolving and how human resource personnel, employers, and employees are reacting to these emerging workplace transitions. Today's successful organizations must be learning organizations in that they must keep abreast and change with the new workplace dynamics. The volume explores the new and future challenges and opportunities for employees and employers, particularly in reference to service organizations in the 21st century. It explores many of the new trends in conjunction with a focus on work-life balance, globalization, redefining leadership, contingent work force, stress management, telecommuting, work force diversity, ergonomics, life satisfaction/subjective well-being, and more.

Organizational Identity and Memory analyzes the relationship between organizational identity and organizational memory, in particular history and commemoration. The goal is to further our understanding of the role of this relationship in processes critical to today's organizations: the evolution of organizational identity, the creation and use of organizational memory, organizational learning and change, and employee identification with organizations. The literature on organizational memory and organizational identity has developed independently and at times in separate disciplines. Scholars have debated whether organizational identity is mutable or enduring. In this debate, organizational history, a form of organizational memory, has been a key factor, but neither side of the debate has pursued indepth the well-developed literature on collective memory to understand this relationship and its impact on organizational identity. Organizational memory defined as commemoration and history has been connected to different forms of identity, both national and organizational, but this relationship and its impact on organizational memory processes has not been explored. Organizational Identity and Memory takes a multidisciplinary approach to explore and articulate the dynamic relationship between organizational identity and memory, drawing on work from anthropology, history, organizational studies, and sociology. A multidisciplinary theoretical framework for future research on organizational identity and memory is presented. Implications for managers are discussed with engaging insights from organizational research and practices in creating corporate museums, galleries, visitor centers, and other displays of this relationship.

Why do only a few people get to say I love my job? It seems unfair that finding fulfillment at work is like winning a lottery; that only a few lucky ones get to feel valued by their organizations, to feel like they belong.
Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled.
This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders are creating environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things.
In his travels around the world since the publication of his bestseller Start with Why, Simon Sinek noticed that some teams were able to trust each other so deeply that they would literally put their lives on the line for each other. Other teams, no matter what incentives were offered, were doomed to infighting, fragmentation and failure. Why?
The answer became clear during a conversation with a Marine Corps general.
Officers eat last, he said.
Sinek watched as the most junior Marines ate first while the most senior Marines took their place at the back of the line. What's symbolic in the chow hall is deadly serious on the battlefield: great leaders sacrifice their own comfort--even their own survival--for the good of those in their care.
This principle has been true since the earliest tribes of hunters and gatherers. It's not a management theory; it's biology. Our brains and bodies evolved to help us find food, shelter, mates and especially safety. We've always lived in a dangerous world, facing predators and enemies at every turn. We thrived only when we felt safe among our group.
Our biology hasn't changed in fifty thousand years, but our environment certainly has. Today's workplaces tend to be full of cynicism, paranoia and self-interest. But the best organizations foster trust and cooperation because their leaders build what Sinek calls a Circle of Safety that separates the security inside the team from the challenges outside.
The Circle of Safety leads to stable, adaptive, confident teams, where everyone feels they belong and all energies are devoted to facing the common enemy and seizing big opportunities.
As he did in Start with Why, Sinek illustrates his ideas with fascinating true stories from a wide range of examples, from the military to manufacturing, from government to investment banking.
The biology is clear: when it matters most, leaders who are willing to eat last are rewarded with deeply loyal colleagues who will stop at nothing to advance their leader's vision and their organization's interests. It's amazing how well it works.