Management & Leadership Audiobooks | Business & Economics

Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team's Productive Power

Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization-resources that are too often squandered. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article 'Your Scarcest Resource,' Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag-the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy-and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.

Eric Garton, Michael C. Mankins (Author), Gregory St. John (Narrator)

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HBR's 10 Must Reads on Managing Projects and Initiatives

Everyone is now a project leader-learn how to manage them more effectively. If you read (or listen to) nothing else on managing projects and initiatives, listen to these ten articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you lead initiatives that will inspire your people, tackle your biggest challenges with agile, and prepare yourself and your organization for a world driven by projects. This book will inspire you to deliver on time and within budget; become a better project sponsor; allocate resources to the highest-potential projects; understand when agile versus traditional methods are best; get deeper insight into your organization's project portfolio; and prioritize your projects and stop what needs stopping. HBR's 10 Must Reads series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. The series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself.

Harvard Business Review (Author), Kitty Hendrix, Lyle Blaker (Narrator)

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The First-Time Manager: DEI: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Alida Miranda-Wolff (Author), Lisa Larsen, TBD (Narrator)

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First-Time Manager: HR

The must-have resource for HR managers who want to lessen the learning curve, succeed in their role, and set themselves up for future growth. The world of work continues to grow more complex with hybrid work, a shortage of talent, and a mandate for more inclusive environments with a true DEI perspective. These changes have created many exciting opportunities but also carry big risks for HR managers on the front lines in organizations in transition. Bestselling author and Human Resources expert Paul Falcone breaks down the landscape for new managers to quickly get up to speed covering recruitment, employee relations, compensation and benefits, "HR Defense" legal and compliance strategies to keep your organization safe, as well as "HR Offense" strategies to help drive organizational strategy and performance. This one-of-a-kind guide will: - Round out your exposure to the full gamut of disciplines within the HR suite of services. - Share deeper-dive knowledge and insights into particular areas of the HR world to shortcut the natural learning curve. - Maximize certain features of HR programs and service offerings to help you attract, develop, and retain top talent - Raise red flags in areas that could potentially expose you or your organization to unwanted legal liability - Help you master the levers of HR so that you can perform agilely and skillfully across the full HR spectrum - Provide a tool for your own personal and professional development as you progress within your own HR career

Paul Falcone (Author), John Behrens, TBD (Narrator)

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You Are A F*cking Success: Change Your Story. Manifest Your Dream Life

Noor Hibbert (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict: What to Say Next to Destress the Workday, Buil

An essential guide to master any workplace conflict with confidence and ease, have less drama, better results, and thrive at work. In many workplaces today, workplace conflict is an escalating issue. The shift to remote work and hybrid teams has left many people longing for deeper human connection. On top of this, add a younger generation clamoring for more feedback and impatient for change, steady advances in technology that can feel threatening to job security, or people reexamining priorities and quietly quitting. Take the increase in anxiety, stress, and depression, mix in the loss of human relationships, and you get less tolerance and understanding leading, ultimately, to more unresolved workplace conflict. Powerful Phrases for Dealing with Workplace Conflict is an essential resource for all employees (and their managers) who are looking for help on how to navigate frequent workplace conflicts, including with their boss and other difficult people, so they can rebuild trust, collaboration, and ultimately enjoy more influence at work. Leadership and workplace culture experts Karin Hurt and David Dye share practical and easy-to-follow tactics such as: - Over 300 actual phrases you can use to deescalate common workplace conflict situations, build trust, and make better decisions. - Clear examples and explanations of how phrasing will improve interactions. - Critical communication tools to ensure workplace issues are addressed before they fester and become more difficult to manage. - Findings, real-world cases, and inspiring stories from the World Workplace Conflict and Collaboration Survey of 5000+ people in more than 45 countries conducted by the authors.

David Dye, Karin Hurt (Author), David Dye, Karin Hurt (Narrator)

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The Problem With Change: The Essential Nature of Human Performance

Brought to you by Penguin. Change and innovation are the cornerstones of dynamic and modern business. Or so we are told. Whether it’s a merger or re-org; a new process, policy, or IT “solution”; or reconfiguring the office layout, change has become the ultimate easy button for leaders, who pursue it with abandon and thereby unleash an endless torrent of disruption on employees. The result is life in the blender: a perpetual state of upheaval, uncertainty, and unease. Yes, companies need to grow, innovate, and adapt to changing needs. But stressed-out employees rarely go the extra mile, chaos rarely produces agility or speed, and it’s hard innovate or grow while bleeding talent to turnover and quiet quitting. This is how change stymies the very progress that it seeks. Drawing on decades spent leading HR operations at Deloitte and Cisco, Ashley Goodall explores the essential nature of human performance and offers a radical new alternative to the constant turbulence that defines corporate life. By prioritizing team cohesion (instead of reshuffling teams at will), by communicating in real words (rather than corporate speak), by striving for predictability (instead of charisma), by honoring shared rituals (instead of corporately-mandated bonding), by fixing only the things that are truly broken (instead of moving fast and breaking everything in sight) and more, leaders at every level can create environments that allow people to do the best work of their lives. ©2024 Ashley Goodall (P)2024 Penguin Audio

Ashley Goodall (Author), Ashley Goodall, TBD (Narrator)

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A Leader's Destiny: Why Psychology, Personality, and Character Make All the Difference

A psychiatrist puts leadership "on the couch," with a provocative exploration of its crucial, often ignored, psychological and personal character foundations. Elias Aboujaoude's distinctive exploration of leadership provides unusual insight into understanding who should and should not be striving for leadership positions. Dr Aboujaoude takes on the culture at large, explaining how our cult-like obsession with leadership gives narcissists an edge and results in leadership failure everywhere we look-and how resisting the imperative to rise at all costs can leave many with an inferiority complex. His takedown of the "leadership industrial complex," an unholy alliance of gurus, coaches, business school professors, and TED-talkers, from Harvard on down, pokes a very sharp elbow into an industry seemingly united in a modern form of alchemy to create leadership gold-a waste of time, money, and effort, since leadership cannot be taught through books or coaching and cannot be bought. Rather, Dr Aboujaoude vividly illustrates, leaders emerge from a unique combination of personal, psychological, and situational factors that may not be easily controlled. To a large degree, great leaders are born, or happen, with the help of innate temperament, talent, opportunity, circumstances, and timing. Frank and unflinching, this refreshing take on a classic subject, with its focus on the art of knowing yourself, provides new insight into whether your psychology is aligned with the requirements of effective and happy leadership. The effect is to empower readers to understand themselves and step up if they have what it takes to lead-or find equally, often superior, ways to achieve fulfillment and leave their mark if they don't.

Elias Aboujaoude (Author), Pej Vahdat, TBD (Narrator)

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The Bonfire Moment: Bring Your Team Together to Solve the Hardest Issues Startups Face

Unique insights from pioneers of Google’s Startup Accelerator on why building teams is harder than building tech—and a proven way to develop a strong, resilient and effective team. Most startups fail not because of a bad product, poor timing, or mismanaged cash, but because of people problems: conflicts over strategy, decision-making, and team culture. Even the smartest entrepreneurs have been derailed by these soft problems: How do you fire a loyal friend who’s not up to par? How do you motivate your team to give their all? What happens when egos and emotions overpower facts and reason? The soft stuff can be shockingly hard. Martin Gonzalez and Josh Yellin outline the common traps startup teams fall into, and share their powerful one-day workshop that helps teams escape those traps. The unique process of The Bonfire Moment brings colleagues together for a full day of facing hard truths, noticing hidden dynamics, and gearing up for the intense challenges of startup life. When the constant hustle feels overwhelming, a team’s Bonfire Moment pulls them out of the day-to-day intensity to reflect and reboot. The Bonfire Moment has proven effective with hundreds of teams of all sizes around the world—from the smallest startups to large organizations—significantly improving their cohesion, focus and effectiveness. Now this book will teach leaders the principles behind The Bonfire Moment and how to run the workshop on their own. It’s ideal for anyone who needs a committed and resilient team to achieve big goals.

Joshua Yellin, Martin Gonzalez (Author), Sean Patrick Hopkins (Narrator)

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The Leader as Communicator: Strategies and Tactics to Build Loyalty, Focus Effort, and Spark Creativ

This insightful book demonstrates how to become a stronger, more confident leader -- one who can use communication to build alignment, enthusiasm, and productivity. In turbulent times, the ability to communicate with power and purpose becomes a crucial leadership competency. Smart executives realize that leadership communication isn't a matter of 'making nice,' but a strategic necessity. Organized around an original model defining the important communication roles a leader must fill, The Leader as Communicator examines roles as diverse as: - trust-builder and critic, - renewal champion and navigator, - learning advocate and provocateur. The book presents case studies of organizations including Cadillac, Emerson, and Saturn, plus dozens of other examples. Packed with strategies and tactics showing how leaders can shape the communications climate of their organizations, The Leader as Communicator culminates with assessment exercises that let readers measure their own communication skills.

Alan Akerson, Robert Mai (Author), Eric A. Altheide, TBD (Narrator)

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When We Are Seen: How to Come Into Your Power--and Empower Others Along the Way

From one of the first and few women of color to reach the c-suite in Silicon Valley, Apple's former chief of HR, co-creator of the Apple Store culture, and first VP of inclusion and diversity, comes a heartfelt story of growing up Black and female in a world with little regard for either and a practical road map for embodying the best in yourself and emboldening others along the way. For her work as a co-creator of the Apple Store cultural experience, Denise Young has been deemed by leadership experts as one of the most emotionally intelligent leaders of her era. In this stirring narrative, part-memoir, part blueprint for action, she shares her vision of what it means to be truly seen at the workplace. As a "first and only" woman of color in boardrooms and leading roles across the Bay Area's booming tech industry, Denise was a trailblazer in a business that was never built for her. The first black and female senior executive under both Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Denise was often in "the room where it happened." But within a white male-centric professional culture, she still had to work harder, smarter, and differently to get heard. She speaks candidly to that experience in these pages, offering lessons to those coming up behind her. In When We Are Seen, Denise shares insights on using your own story, empathy, intuition, and more to unlock the potential in yourself and others. Her story serves as both solace and strategy for anyone who has ever felt left out, unseen, ostracized; anyone who has been an only or a first. This is a book for anyone interested in upending perpetual cycles of exclusion, and in reclaiming our individual agency in the ongoing quest to thrive and belong. Denise argues that bringing your true self to work-from wearing your beloved locs to sharing your artistic passion-and, in turn, holistically seeing the attributes others have to offer is not a passive experience; it is a specific skill we can and should build. And the result is a deeper understanding of what it means to be inclusive, and powerfully human on the job.

Denise Young (Author), Denise Young, TBD (Narrator)

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Seen Yet Unseen: A Black Woman Crashes the Tech Fraternity

Part memoir, part searing revelation, Seen Yet Unseen takes readers behind the scenes of some of the world’s biggest tech companies and exposes the way their exclusion of and, at times, hostility toward Black women have lasting impacts on the technology we use every day. Over the years the products of big tech companies and Silicon Valley have become indispensable to our lives. They impact the way we socialize, make purchases, and even our medical decisions. But what happens when a major segment of the population—in this case Black women—isn’t included in these companies? For over a decade, Bärí A. Williams has worked to carve a space for herself as a Black woman in the incredibly white male sphere of major tech companies, eventually becoming a lead counsel at Facebook and architect of their supplier diversity program. However, she also experienced the peculiar feeling familiar to Black women in the workforce: being both unseen and too seen. In raw and personal stories, Williams recounts balancing on glass cliffs while battling the burnout that so often forces Black women out of these companies, and how the industry’s lack—and loss—of Black women not only harms the businesses themselves but has troubling ramifications for their products, particularly as the promises of AI and the Metaverse loom large. In a tone both forthright and revealing, Williams dissects how a culture that has largely excluded Black women—and people of color more generally—is at a tipping point and that only through embracing and listening to Black women can we prevent the further weaponization of these technologies against marginalized communities. From fledgling in-house diversity initiatives to gentrification and the rise of AI, Seen Yet Unseen takes the reader inside the obscured machinations of big tech companies and makes a case for why diversity is essential to the future of technology.

Bärí A. Williams (Author), Bärí A. Williams, TBD (Narrator)

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Management & Leadership Audiobooks in Business & Economics