Showing results by publisher "Macmillan Audio" in Management & Leadership

An updated edition of the blockbuster best-selling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two US Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

Every leader must be ready and willing to take charge, to make hard, crucial calls for the good of the team and the mission. Something much more difficult to understand is that in order to be a good leader, one must also be a good follower. This is a dichotomy - a Dichotomy of Leadership. It is, as authors Jocko Willink and Leif Babin explained in their best-selling first audiobook, Extreme Ownership, “Simple, Not Easy”.

"Silos" are organizations' vertical structures—but the word has become synonymous with barriers to workplace effectiveness and connotes deep political infighting. Silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate goals. They cause stress, exasperation, and disappointment by forcing employees to fight bloody, unwinnable battles with people who should be teammates.

The pressures on organizations to change will only increase over the next decades. Yet the methods managers have used to strengthen their companies—total quality management, reengineering, right sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds—routinely fall short. In Leading Change, Kotter identifies an eight-step process that every company must go through to achieve its goal, and shows where and how people—good people—often derail.

Businesses everywhere are plagued by managers who seem to think that keeping their staff miserable is the best way to deliver profits. This is a failure of leadership that also hurts the bottom line; research has shown that maintaining a happy, engaged workforce consistently drives measurably better business results across the board. In When They Win, You Win, Russ Laraway, the Chief People Officer at Qualtrics, provides a simple, coherent, and complete leadership standard that teaches organizational planners and managers how to develop incredible levels of employee engagement.

In his latest engrossing work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary.

Holacracy distributes authority and decision-making throughout an organization and defines people not by hierarchy and titles, but by roles. Holacracy creates organizations that are fast, agile, and that succeed by pursuing their purpose, free from the tyranny of top-down planning that's instantly out of date.

This isn't anarchy - it's quite the opposite. When you start to follow Holacracy, you learn to create new structures and ways of making decisions that empower the people who know the most about the work your company does: your frontline colleagues. Some of the many champions of Holacracy include Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com (and author of the number one New York Times best seller Delivering Happiness), Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium), and David Allen.

Mike Hayes has lived a lifetime of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. He has been held at gunpoint and threatened with execution. He’s jumped out of a building rigged to explode, helped amputate a teammate’s leg, and made countless split-second life-and-death decisions. He’s written countless emails to his family, telling them how much he loves them, just in case those were the last words of his they’d ever read. Outside of the SEALs, he’s run meetings in the White House Situation Room, negotiated international arms treaties, and developed high-impact corporate strategies.

Even if we live within sight of the sea, it is easy to forget that our world is an ocean world. The open ocean, that vast expanse of international waters, begins just a few miles out and spreads across three-fourths of the globe. It is a place of storms and danger, both natural and manmade. And at a time when every last patch of land is claimed by one government or another, it is a place that remains radically free.

Few people have made decisions as momentous as Eisenhower, nor has one person had to make such a varied range of them. From D-Day to Little Rock, from the Korean War to Cold War crises, from the Red Scare to the Missile Gap controversies, he was able to give our country eight years of peace and prosperity by relying on a core set of principles. These were informed by his heritage and upbringing, his strong character and his personal discipline, but he also avoided making himself the center of things. He tried to be the calmest man in the room, not the loudest.

With their 1994 international bestseller, Drs. Rick Brinkman and Rick Kirschner armed a civility-starved world with no-nonsense strategies for dealing with difficult people with tact and skill. Since then, the world has changed dramatically: technology designed to bring people closer together has only made it that much harder to avoid "people you can't stand." At best, such people can make life stressful and unpleasant. At worst, they can keep you from achieving important goals.

Kotter and co-author Dan S. Cohen delve deeper into the subject of change to get to the heart of how change actually happens. Through compelling, real-life stories from people in the trenches, in all kinds of organizations, the authors attack the fundamental problem that underlies every major transformation: How do you go beyond simply getting your message across to truly changing people's behavior?

How Life Imitates Chess is a primer on how to think, make decisions, prepare strategies, and anticipate the future. Kasparov has distilled the lessons he learned over a lifetime as a chess grandmaster to cover the practical side - tactics, strategy, preparation, as well as the subtler, more human arts of using memory, intuition, and imagination.

No one knows leadership like Jack Welch, former chairman and CEO of General Electric. Along with his wife and best-selling co-author, Suzy Welch, he explores with Daniel Goleman what it means to be a great leader, and what elements must be present for any leader to be successful. Key elements of emotional intelligence, from self-awareness to the ability to instill core values in a team, are part of that success.

Samit has been at the helm of businesses in the ecommerce, digital video, social media, mobile communications, and software industries, helping to navigate them through turbulent economic times and guide them through necessary transformation so that they stay ahead of the curve and profitable. In Disrupt You!, he reveals how specific strategies that help companies flourish can be applied at an individual level. By challenging assumptions, pinpointing one's unique value, and identifying weaknesses in the structure of current industries, anyone can achieve success and lasting prosperity.

A leadership book by former Navy SEAL and New York Times best-selling author Mark Divine, Staring Down the Wolf focuses on harnessing the principles of purpose and discipline in life to achieve success. What does it take to command a team of elite individuals? It requires a commitment to seven key principles: Courage, Trust, Respect, Growth, Excellence, Resiliency, and Alignment. All of these are present in an elite team which commits to them deeply in order to forge the character worthy of uncommon success.

How does one become a CEO? Many people know they want to climb the corporate ladder, but don't have a clue about how to ascend that ladder without losing their grip. In this insightful, controversial program, Jeffrey J. Fox offers solid, practical advice and recommendations on how to fulfill your ambition to better yourself, to be a contributor, to make a difference, to grow professionally, and to be more successful.

What makes a successful business? How can we work most effectively as a team? What are the keys to being a great leader? Best-selling authors Daniel Goleman and Peter Senge address these questions in Working with Presence. From the importance of harmonized thinking to the role that tacit knowledge plays in every organization, they discuss how companies can transform themselves into learning organizations.

A life-changing guide to achieving your goals, by the 2013 NCAA champion college basketball coach and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Rick Pitino is famous as one of the most dynamic and successful basketball coaches of our time, leading the University of Louisville Cardinals to the NCAA basketball championship in 2013, and is renowned for writing the #1 New York Times best-selling success and leadership book, Success is a Choice.

Founder of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of Samuel Adams Boston Lager, and a key catalyst of the American craft beer revolution, Jim Koch offers his unique perspective when it comes to business, beer, and turning your passion into a successful company or career.