Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition

Leaders in all fields-business, medicine, law, government-make crucial decisions every day. The harsh truth is that they mismanage many of those choices, even though they have the right intentions. These blunders take a huge toll on leaders, their organizations, and the people they serve.

Why is it so hard to make sound decisions? We fall victim to simplified mental routines that prevent us from coping with … [ Read more ]

Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help

In this seminal book on helping, corporate culture and organizational development guru Ed Schein analyzes the dynamics of helping relationships, explains why help is often not helpful, and shows what any would-be-helper must do to insure that help is actually provided.

Many words are used for helping — assisting, aiding, advising, coaching, consulting, counseling, supporting, teaching, and many more — but they all have common dynamics … [ Read more ]

Leadership Ensemble: Lessons in Collaborative Management from the World-Famous Conductorless Orchestra

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1972 in New York, designed to rely on the skills, abilities, and passionate commitment of its members rather than on the leadership of a conductor. Power, responsibility, and motivation rest entirely in the hands of the musicians. Jointly its members make the artistic decisions that are ordinarily the work of a conductor, and they participate in choosing the … [ Read more ]

Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence

Phenomenon: Keirsey and Bates’s Please Understand Me, first published in 1978, sold nearly 2 million copies in its first 20 years, becoming a perennial best seller all over the world. Advertised only by word of mouth, the book became a favorite training and counseling guide in many institutions — government, church, business — and colleges across the nation adopted it as an auxiliary text in … [ Read more ]

Community: The Structure of Belonging

Modern society is plagued by fragmentation. The various sectors of our communities–businesses, schools, social service organizations, churches, government–do not work together. They exist in their own worlds. As do so many individual citizens, who long for connection but end up marginalized, their gifts overlooked, their potential contributions lost. This disconnection and detachment makes it hard if not impossible to envision a common future and work … [ Read more ]

Punching In:The Unauthorized Adventures of a Front-line Employee

Curious to know just what happens behind the “employees only” doors of big companies, journalist Alex Frankel embarked on an undercover reporting project to find out how some of America’s well-known companies win the hearts and minds of their retail and service employees. Frankel knew the only way to find answers was to go native.

During a two-year urban adventure through the world of commerce, Frankel … [ Read more ]

Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation

Who’d have thought fighting with each other would be good for employees? Or that ignoring superiors would be a wise business practice? Sutton, consultant and professor at the Stanford Engineering School, advocates taking a nontraditional approach to innovation and management in this quirky business manual. He advises taking unorthodox actions, suggesting managers should forget the past, especially successes; hire people who make them uncomfortable and … [ Read more ]

Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine

British journalist Jeffreys (Aspirin: The Remarkable Story of a Wonder Drug) presents a compelling account of the comprehensive collaboration of Germany’s major chemical conglomerate with Adolf Hitler’s genocidal dictatorship. The fourth largest industrial concern in the world, IG Farben was a key element of German foreign policy. Its employees were well treated. Its scientists won Nobel prizes. Its administrators created an international network controlling the … [ Read more ]

Mavericks at Work

In Mavericks at Work, Fast Company cofounder William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre, a longtime editor at the magazine, give you an inside look at the “most original minds in business” wherever they find them: from Procter & Gamble to Pixar, from gold mines to funky sandwich shops. Want to stop doing business as usual? Then take some lessons from the 32 maverick companies Taylor … [ Read more ]

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Brafman and Beckstrom, a pair of Stanford M.B.A.s who have applied their business know-how to promoting peace and economic development through decentralized networking, offer a breezy and entertaining look at how decentralization is changing many organizations. The title metaphor conveys the core concept: though a starfish and a spider have similar shapes, their internal structure is dramatically different—a decapitated spider inevitably dies, while a starfish … [ Read more ]

The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

Kleiner’s freewheeling portrait gallery focuses on corporate mavericks of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s who pioneered self-managing work teams, responsiveness to customers, grassroots organizing and other ways to imbue corporations with a sense of the value of human relationships. Starting with British management scientist Eric Trist, whose experiments in industrial democracy in the 1940s laid the groundwork for U.S. managerial innovations of the 1980s, Kleiner … [ Read more ]

The Logic of Failure

The Chernobyl atomic-plant explosion, observes Dorner, was entirely due to human error involving the breaking of safety rules by a team of experts who reinforced one another’s puffed-up sense of competence. This German psychology professor believes people court failure through sloppy or ingrained mental habits, whether the mistakes involve cleaning dead fish out of a garden pool, adding rooms to a schoolhouse, launching economic development … [ Read more ]

Understanding and Changing Your Management Style

Understanding and Changing Your Management Style, by psychologist and business consultant Robert Benfari, is a hands-on guidebook for determining the type of leader you are–and becoming the kind you want to be. It includes methods that you can use to influence others, problem-solving techniques, and exercises that reveal your psychological nature according to the widely used Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Using the resultant patterns, the book … [ Read more ]

Change the Way You Lead Change: Leadership Strategies that Really Work

Popular wisdom suggests that fewer than 20% of all change initiatives are really successful. More alarming still for top managers, a survey of 1087 corporate directors, reported in BusinessWeek in 2005, found that 31% of CEOs fired by their boards were removed because they mismanaged change; more than any other cause. Why is this happening—and why do we need another book purporting to have “the … [ Read more ]

Reward Systems: Does Yours Measure Up?

It’s one of the thorniest management problems around: dealing with unmotivated, low-performing employees. It’s easy to point the finger of blame at them. But in most companies, it’s the reward system, not the workforce, that’s causing poor attitudes and performance: many reward systems actually discourage desired behaviors while rewarding the very actions that drive executives crazy.

In Reward Systems: Does Yours Deliver? Steve Kerr describes the … [ Read more ]

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

Irrational behavior is a part of human nature, but as MIT professor Ariely has discovered in 20 years of researching behavioral economics, people tend to behave irrationally in a predictable fashion. Drawing on psychology and economics, behavioral economics can show us why cautious people make poor decisions about sex when aroused, why patients get greater relief from a more expensive drug over its cheaper counterpart … [ Read more ]

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices

Harvard Business School professors Lawrence and Nohria here present a sociobiological theory of motivation, claiming that humans possess four basic drives to acquire, to bond, to learn, and to defend. What makes their theory novel is the way they apply it to the workplace. The authors use historical case studies to show that successful organizations are those that give their employees opportunities to fulfill all … [ Read more ]

Cultivating Communities of Practice: A Guide To Managing Knowledge

From the time our ancestors lived in caves to that day in the late ’80s when Chrysler sanctioned unofficial “tech clubs” to promote the flow of information between teams working on different vehicle platforms, bands of like-minded individuals had been gathering in a wide variety of settings to recount their experiences and share their expertise. Few paid much attention until a number of possible benefits … [ Read more ]

Management and Organizational Behavior Classics

The authors focus on presenting the reader with outstanding contributions to the management and organizational behavior literature. The readings include works of recognized, respected, and pioneer scholars in the field while also broadening the understanding of management and organizational behavior topics found in textbooks. The readings also incorporate theorists from the economics, sociology, statistics, mathematics, engineering, and psychology disciplines to reflect the complex and dynamic … [ Read more ]

Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Diversity in Global Business

With over 50,000 copies sold in its first edition, Riding the Waves of Culture dispelled the idea that there is only one way to manage, and was the first book to show professional managers how to build the cross-cultural skills, sensitivity, and awareness required in today’s global business environment. In this second edition, Fons Trompenaars and co-author Charles Hampden-Turner reveal the seven key dimensions of … [ Read more ]