Are meetings taking over your life? You’re not alone. Meet Iris, a sales director so overwhelmed by meetings that she feels like a hamster on a wheel—in fact, she’s turned into one. Just in time, she meets a coach—a leading meeting efficiency expert—with a simple system that helps her regain her sanity and humanity. The coach’s secret is a laser-like focus on the five biggest meeting pain points: 1. Meeting overload: Professionals waste twenty-four days a year in useless meetings. 2. Missing success ingredients: ninety percent of all professionals attend meetings that lack a clearly stated objective and agenda. 3. Virtual-meeting chaos: Disinterested participants + endless technical glitches huge amounts of wasted time. 4. Agenda adrift: Goals are missed when meetings veer off course. 5. Action distraction: Incomplete action items result in delayed projects and missed deadlines. The coach demonstrates that these five challenges are damaging Iris’s career and costing the world over a trillion dollars each year. He provides practical new solutions that rapidly transform Iris from victim to victor. These solutions are tailored to the technology-driven world in which Iris lives—she discovers how to use e-calendars, PDAs, and virtual meetings to make her life easier, not more complicated. She applies the solutions, gets immediate results, and reclaims her life. The Hamster Revolution for Meetings focuses on a small number of high-impact best practices that really work. Included is a landmark case study that shows how 3,000 Capital One associates reclaimed ten days per year while improving meeting effectiveness by over 35 percent.
Change Is Everybody's Business challenges readers to realize the power they have to make things happen-to support, stymie, or redirect change. Pat McLagan draws on her thirty years of experience consulting on change projects worldwide to outline the beliefs, character traits, and actions that will enable anyone to welcome change and take advantage of it rather than fear and resist it. Taking a conversational approach to a serious subject, she uses stories, examples, and illustrations to drive home the message that everybody in an organization has the power to make changes for the better. And she includes questionnaires throughout the book that enable readers to evaluate how ready they are to make the most of change. Change is happening all around us, both planned and unplanned. How we react to change determines personal success and self-esteem, and ultimately the success of the entire organization. Change Is Everybody's Business will show readers precisely what they need to know to become more conscious participants in determining their own destiny at work-and in life.
A bestseller–more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune • Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives • Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our times We live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science–the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works–offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists "for free." It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there. Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape. You'll learn that: • Relationships are what matters–even at the subatomic level • Life is a vast web of interconnections where cooperation and participation are required • Chaos and change are the only route to transformation In this expanded edition, Wheatley provides examples of how non-linear networks and self-organizing systems are flourishing in the modern world. In the midst of turbulence, Wheatley shows, we create work and lives rich in meaning.
If you were a mouse trapped in a maze and someone kept moving the cheese, what would you do? Over a decade ago the bestselling business fable Who Moved My Cheese? offered its answer to this question: accept that change is inevitable and beyond your control, don’t waste your time wondering why things are the way they are, keep your head down and start looking for the cheese. But success in the areas of innovation, entrepreneurship, creativity, leadership, and business growth—as well as personal growth—depends on the ability to push the boundaries, reshape the environment, and play by a different set of rules: our own. With that in mind, Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra offers a radically different answer to this question. Malhotra tells an inspiring story about three unique and adventurous mice—Max, Big, and Zed—who refuse to accept their reality as given. As we watch their lives unfold and intersect, we discover that instead of just blindly chasing after the cheese, each of us has the ability to escape the maze or even reconfigure it to our liking. In the face of established practices, traditional ideas, scarce resources, and the powerful demands or expectations of others, we often underestimate our ability to control our own destiny and overcome the constraints we face—or think we face. I Moved Your Cheese reminds us that we can create the new circumstances and realities we want, but first we must discard the often deeply ingrained notion that we are nothing more than mice in someone else’s maze. As Zed explains, “You see, Max, the problem is not that the mouse is in the maze, but that the maze is in the mouse.”
Leadership from the Inside Out, Kevin Cashman’s breakthrough business bestseller that clearly connected personal growth to leadership effectiveness, is now completely revised and updated with: • an explosion of new validating independent research • impressive new case studies • new tools and practices • an even more powerful virtual coaching experience Still framed in seven simple yet profound “mastery areas,” this book serves as an integrated coaching experience that helps leaders understand how to harness their authentic, value-creating influence and elevate their impact as individuals, in teams, and in organizations. Cashman demonstrates that his trademark “whole-person” approach—we lead by virtue of who we are—is essential to sustained success in today’s talent-starved marketplace and provides a measurable return on investment. For everyone from CEOs to emerging leaders, this long-awaited second edition advances the art and science of leadership and is even more relevant today than when it was first published.
The lessons of Full Steam Ahead! are revealed through the inspirational story of two people who were able to create a vision for the place they worked and for their own lives. Jim Carpenter, president of a mid-sized insurance agency, didn't get the "vision thing." The agency was doing well, but Jim had a strong sense that things could be much better. Ellie Atkins offered a fresh perspective. Together they discover the three elements of a compelling vision: a significant purpose, clear values, and a picture of the future. They also discover how to ensure that the vision comes alive through understanding the principles of: how it is created, how it is communicated and how it is lived and demonstrate that vision is not only necessary, but also possible and achievable.
Brian Tracy shares the most important principles for sales success he has discovered in 30 years of training more than a half million sales professionals in 23 countries. Based on Tracy’s detailed discussions with top salespeople and his keen observation of their methods, as well as his own experiences as a record-breaking salesman, these guidelines address both the inner game of selling—the mental component—and the outer game of selling—the methods and techniques of actually making the sale. Concise and action-oriented, Be a Sales Superstar is a handbook for busy sales professionals, providing key ideas and techniques that will immediately increase your effectiveness and boost your results. Brian Tracy shows you how to: • Get more and better appointments, easier; • Build high rapport in the first few minutes; • Make better, more effective sales presentations • Close more sales faster than ever before Apply Tracy’s 21 great ways to be a superstar salesperson, and your success in selling will become unlimited.
This phenomenal bestseller – over 700,000 copies sold – changes readers’ lives and helps them transform their organizations. In this new edition, the text has been updated and revised throughout to make it even more readable and powerful and a new section has been added that details the many different ways that people are using the book.
All of us in the today's workforce are called upon more and more to work effectively in teams. But do you know how to build a team that truly takes advantage of the knowledge, experience, and motivation of its members? Most of us don't, and we quickly become frustrated, give up, and opt to go it alone-not a good solution in today's business environment. Fortunately, there is a better way. Here, expert authors Ken Blanchard, Alan Randolph, and Peter Grazier outline a 3-step process that will help you transform any kind of team into a Next-Level Team-one that uses all team members' ideas and motivation more effectively, makes better use of team members' and team leaders' time, and generates benefits for individual team members, the team, and the organization. Designed as a working guide filled with detailed instructions for people who want to build high performing teams, Go Team! will lead you, step by step, to great results. Through discussions, case examples, and questions to consider, you and your teammates will learn how to share information to build high levels of trust and responsibility; set clear boundaries to create the freedom for team members to act responsibly; and develop self-managing skills to make good team decisions. With Go Team! as a guide, you'll find that working in a team can be fun, satisfying, and highly productive.
Empowerment Takes More Than a Minute tells the story of a young manager whose attempts to turn his troubled company around through traditional top-down, command-and-control management are failing. Reluctantly, he contacts an expert in empowerment, even though he feels like he's already tried that too. Step by step, the expert helps him understand why his past and present efforts have fallen short and exactly what he needs to do to create an empowered workforce. The process as it unfolds is complex, paradoxical and counterintuitive -but well worth the effort. The new introduction dispels the notion that empowerment is a bygone fad. No matter what its name, the essential concept-that organizations can achieve extraordinary results by recognizing and taking advantage of the skills, experience, and knowledge already existing in the organization-will always be relevant. The new epilogue describes obstacles companies have encountered and overcome and outlines empowerment strategies that have proved successful during the fifteen years the authors have been consulting, researching, and refining these concepts. Although sometimes arduous, the journey to empowerment is well worth making. In fact, unleashing the power of people in an organization may be the only way to continue to do business in a competitive, complicated marketplace.