Business & Economics

Do you face the challenge of building and leading a new team? Revitalizing a stagnant one?

Extreme Teams examines the team practices driving growth in seven of the world’s most cutting-edge firms. They do this by challenging conventional wisdom and doing things differently. The book takes you inside these bold companies and examines the teamwork approaches powering their results, including how:
-Pixar’s teams use rapid-cycle feedback and no-holds debate to transform initially flawed films into billion-dollar hits
-A culture of radical “freedom and responsibility” helps Netflix execute on the next big thing and transform its industry
-Whole Food’s super-autonomous teams embrace tough metrics and friendly competition to drive performance
-Zappos embraces the weirdness and fun that sustains its success

Times change, and so must teams. Designing and managing high-performance teams requires upgrading outdated beliefs and behaviors, and creating in your company the level of intensity and collaboration needed to face down any challenge.

The complexity and relentless pace of our world places exceptional demands on leaders today. They work incredibly hard and yet feel that they are not meeting their own expectations of excellence. They feel disconnected from their own values and overburdened. By the thousands, they seek out books on leadership skills, time management, and “getting things done,” but the techniques these volumes offer, useful as they are, often don’t speak to the leader’s fundamental sense that something is missing.

Janice Marturano, a senior executive with decades of experience in Fortune 500 corporations, explains how Mindful Leadership training integrates the practice of mindfulness–meditation and self-awareness–with the practical tools of management, enabling leaders to bring a wider range of their capacities to the challenges at hand. We already know from scientific research that mindfulness practices enhance mental health and improve clarity and focus. Finding the Space to Lead shows how this training has specific value for leaders.

This is not a new “leadership system” to add to the burden of already overworked people. It brings the concepts of mindfulness into the everyday life of anyone in a leadership role, through specific exercises that address practical issues–the calendar, schedule, phone usage, meetings, to-do list, and strategic planning, as well as interpersonal challenges such as listening and working with difficult colleagues.

Leaders who have experienced mindfulness training report that it provides a “transformative experience” with significant improvements in innovation, self-awareness, listening, and making better decisions. In Finding the Space to Lead, Marturano masterfully lays out her proven techniques for promoting mindfulness in the busy executive’s working life.

It’s an exciting time to be in marketing, with an array of equalizing platforms from the Internet to social media to content marketing, that have reset the playing field for businesses large and small. Yet, it’s also a challenging time, with much work to do and an ever-changing array of platforms, features, and networks to master–all on tighter budgets than ever before.

In Get Scrappy, chief brand strategist Nick Westergaard weaves hacks, tips, and idea starters together to provide a plan of attack for businesses of any size to:

– Demystify digital marketing in a way that makes sense for your business
– Do more with less
– Build a strong brand with something to say
– Create relevant and engaging content for your social media platforms
– Spark dialogue with your community of customers
– Measure what matter

The result will be a reliable, repeatable system for building your brand, creating engaging content, and growing your community of customers. Don’t wait for marketing to reinvent itself. Instead, proactively reinvent your company’s marketing to maximize its reach!

With increased pressure from digital natives, now is the time for established companies to address outdated and antiquated practices in order to respond quickly to the ever-increasing speed of market changes.

The pace of change in business today is such that it is becoming easier to go from a legendarily high-performing company to liquidation in a short period of time. Getting to Nimble shares the stories of organizations that were able to successfully transform their people practices, processes, technology, ecosystems and strategy for the digital era. The book also covers once dominant companies like Circuit City and Kodak that neglected to change and were impaired or died as a result.

Highlighting a framework to follow along with best practices that others can emulate, Getting to Nimble includes case studies from major organizations such as Capital One, FedEx, CarMax, The Washington Post, Domino’s Pizza, Walmart and the country of Estonia.