Category: Management and Human Resources

Rise Above by John Jupp

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The Blurb On The Back:

What can you learn from the RAF to transform your own leadership skills?

The Royal Air Force is a well-oiled machine.  Much of that is down to its unique leadership style where seniority doesn’t automatically imply leader: anyone can be a leader on a mission.  Rise Above unpicks the RAF leadership model to provide a fresh perspective on how to:

– Deploy the shared leadership style to get the best results for your team

– Improve your personal leadership competences to guide your own development and enhance your skills as a leader

– Embrace diversity and inclusion, technology, innovation and adaptability, which have long been a reality for the RAF.

John Jupp combines practical strategies with real-life examples from over 100 years of the RAF, illustrating how leadership works, so you will be better equipped to lead effectively.

Whatever your level, you can lead.

Thanks to the Amazon Vine Programme for the review copy of this book.

You can order RISE ABOVE: LEADERSHIP LESSONS FROM THE RAF by John Jupp from Amazon UK, or Waterstone’s.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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High-Impact Tools For Teams by Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Alex Osterwalder, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos

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The Blurb On The Back:

Make every project a success with the Team Alignment Toolkit.  Bring mutual clarity to the table, boost the contribution of every team member, and get successful results.

Create Alignment

Align Stakeholders visually, clarify roles, and manage risks as a team using the Team Alignment Map

Communicate Better

Ask good questions and surface facts with the Fact Finder.  Manage conflict constructively with the Nonviolent Request Guide.

Build Trust

Quickly set the rules a team will play by and create an environment of appreciation and respect between team members with the Team Contract and the Respect Card

You can buy HIGH-IMPACT TOOLS FOR TEAMS by Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Alex Osterwalder, Alan Smith and Trish Papadakos from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Build It: The Rebel Playbook For World-Class Employee Engagement by Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey

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The Blurb On The Back:

The old way of treating employees at work has failed.  Only 30% of employees are engaged in their jobs and, in this fast-paced world, that’s just not enough.

The world’s most successful companies have been quietly doing things differently for nearly two decades.  Over that time, they’ve generated stock market returns of twice the norm and the’ve had half the employee turnover of their peers.  Their staff innovate more, deliver better customer service and beat the competition.  These companies outperform and disrupt their markets.

They break the rules of traditional HR.  They rebel against the status quo.  Build It has found the rebels and the rulebreakers, and shares their best secrets for engaging their people.

A decade in the making, the Engagement Bridge is approved model for building an engaged company culture.

Developed from working with almost 2,000 organisations worldwide – big to small, public to private – the model is a lens that will help you examine the places in your business where engagement is made, or broken. 

You can order Build It: The Rebel Playbook For World-Class Employee Engagement by Glenn Elliott and Debra Corey from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Unlocking Creativity by Michael A. Roberto

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The Blurb On The Back:

Creativity is an elusive but essential component of innovation and success in competitive, changing markets.  The old way of thinking had it that creativity was a kind of mystical property possessed only by certain innately talented people.  If an organisation wasn’t innovative enough, its leaders simply needed to find and hire those rare creative people.  The past few decades of constant disruption by newcomers has roundly proven this theory false, even if organisational leaders don’t recognise it yet.  Years of trying to recruit and retain creative workforce’s just hasn’t helped the established players keep up.

If hiring creativity isn’t helping, it means that organisations have all the creativity they need but aren’t harnessing it properly.  What’s going wrong?  Some people point to the pressure to keep shareholders happy and to other external pressures, claiming that market forces prevent them from giving creativity the space to develop.  But the supersonic rise of companies like Netflix and Amazon show that market forces aren’t stopping the people who really know how to innovate.  In Unlocking Creativity Michael A. Roberto draws on years of investigation to reveal the true nature of the problem: enterprise-wide mindsets that stifle creativity on a daily basis.

Every organisation is full of creative minds just waiting for an opportunity to shine.  Unfortunately, deeply entrenched organisational cultures and ways of thinking frustrate people when they try to present original ideas.  Without knowing it, we may be falling victim to one of the six mindsets that prevent talented people from experimenting, discovering, innovating and helping the organisation flourish.

Unlocking Creativity presents the six mindsets that block creativity, bringing them to life through colourful examples and abundant research evidence, to help leaders recognise the habits that might be preventing creativity from taking flight.  With illustrations taken from far and wide – academic research, corporate case studies, hit TV shows, and rock and roll legends all make eye-opening appearances in the pages of this book – Michael Roberto clears the fog around creativity and equips leaders with the insight they need to shift to supportive mindsets and cultures where creativity can thrive. 

You can order Unlocking Creativity by Michael A. Roberto from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything by Charles Conn and Robert McLean

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The Blurb On The Back:

7 straightforward steps to solving any problem with creativity and rigor

Complex problem solving is the core skill for twenty-first century teams.  It’s the only way to keep up with rapid change.  Winning organisations now rely on nimble, iterative problem solving, rather than traditional planning processes.  In this book you’ll learn the seven-step systematic approach to creative problem solving that will work in any field or industry.  It employs a highly visual, logic-tree method that can be applied to any problem, from strategic business decisions to global social challenges.  Charles and Rob, with decades of experience at McKinsey & Company and other institutions, provide a toolkit with 30 detailed real-world examples, so you can see exactly how the technique works in action.

You can order Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything by Charles Conn and Robert McLean from Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Master Your Mind by Roger Seip and Robb Zbierski

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The Blurb On The Back:

Fed up with trying to get ahead in business by working longer hours and continually racing your brain at a hundred miles an hour?  Unfortunately, success in business is spelled M-O-R-E: better results, faster growth, more revenue, greater efficiency.  Do more.  Make more.  Achieve more.  And do it now.  Master Your Mind offers an antidote to the endless (and pointless) cycle of “doing more” in order to succeed.  Throughout the book, Roger Seip and Robb Zbierski – Seip is the author of the bestselling book Train Your Brain For Success – explain how the counterintuitive approach of slowing down can help optimise your performance and get you the positive results you’ve been searching for.

Master Your Mind reveals the tactics and methods that lead to increased energy, revenue, and good health in a self-sustaining way.  The approaches presented are not pie-in-the-sky but have proven to be effective with the authors’ thousands of clients.  The book shows how to stop thinking your success relies on quantity, and start on the road to improving the quality of your effort.  The book clearly demonstrates what it takes to up-your-game by combining the right amount of effort (after all, it takes work) with a high degree of presence, focus, intentionality, and being in the “Zone”.  Filled with illustrative examples, Master Your Mind shows why slowing down your brain gives you a much better understanding of what is really going on in your head that will get your desired results.  The book also explores the obstacles that are holding you back.

Drawing on discoveries in neuroscience (the authors don’t claim to be scientists), Master Your Mind offers a basic understanding of the root causes and benefits of slowing down and includes techniques for applying the scientific lessons.  The approaches and tactics outlined in Master Your Mind work because they align with what’s most deeply important to you and they are done in a way that actually works for your brain.

Once you apply the book’s lessons and put the winning strategies into practice, you will be amazed that success will come your way with little or no extra effort.  

You can order Master Your Mind by Roger Seip and Robb Zbierski from Amazon USA,  Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Free-Time Formula by Jeff Sanders

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The Blurb On The Back:

How many hours have you worked this week? When you’re working, do you constantly feel stressed, rushed, and under pressure?  Has it reached the point where you delay restroom visits because three minutes away from your desk will throw everything off-schedule?  You, my friend, are overworked – and you’re not alone. We are all being asked to do more and more with less and less, and it’s all so vitally important and has to be done ASAP.  Lacking a magic wand, we work at a furious pace for hours on end, only to collapse into bed so we can wake up and do it all again tomorrow.  There is always more to be done, but the days aren’t getting any longer; something’s got to give, but don’t let it be your sanity.

The Free-Time Formula is your lifelines back to happiness, focus, and true productivity.  Action-packed and to-the-point, this sanity-saving guide will help you reclaim your days as you discover just how much power you have. Prioritising is key, but deprioritising is even more critical – and this book gives you a clear and workable framework for becoming the focused, efficient achiever you’ve been trying to be for so long.  You’ll begin with a time assessment that gauges your current levels of stress, strategies, and output, then you’ll work step-by-step toward a new daily routine that will reawaken your spirit as you start to get it all done – with time left over!

  • Gain an extra hour of free time – every day – to read, exercise, or spend time with friends and family.
  • Double your productivity without feeling overworked or overwhelmed.
  • Ask the right questions, clarify what matters, and cut out the nonsense to reclaim your day.
  • Predict and prevent distractions in order to stay on track with the important stuff.
  • Formulate a seven-day action plan for revamping your calendar and revitalising your life!

Productivity is not about cramming more “stuff” into each day.  It’s about focusing on what matters to you and your current goals, and building the habit of saying “no” when you want to.  It’s about never again missing a deadline or being late for a meeting, but also attending every single one of your kid’s recitals.  It’s about climbing the ladder while building a life, and feeling absolutely a-okay about leaving your phone in the hotel room on vacation. Life is what happens outside of work, and The Free-Time Formula helps you reformulate your day to enjoy more of it. 

You can order THE FREE-TIME FORMULA by Jeff Sanders from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Empowered Manager by Peter Block

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The Blurb On The Back:

When the first edition of this book was published, the United States was in a time of recession, financial crises and growing unemployment.  Sound familiar?  Many companies rose to acclaimed success from these conditions by improving the quality of their products and services by shifting control from top management to employees closer to the work.  This revised and updated edition of The Empowered Manager casts fresh eyes on the theory and practice of optimizing the human system in your organisation in the context of how today’s businesses are changing at the speed of technological innovation.

Business has changed a lot in thirty years, but the philosophies and practices managers use to lead teams are still stuck in a patriarchal mindset.  This brilliantly reimagined Second Edition is for everyone who wants to be a force for change and improvement in a stagnant workplace culture where safety, advancement, control, and the desire to hold someone else responsible is forefront on people’s minds.  The potent blend of theory and actionable practices provides a clear path for embracing the technology eliminating the tedious tasks from employees’ job descriptions and empowering them with the abilities to better serve customers. Whether you’re a manager or an employee, the inspiring guidance inside lets you step out of the negative office politics fuelling the status quo and gives you the skills to act with autonomy and compassion in service of a vision in order to “own” the performance of your team.

Bring out the entrepreneurial spirit in your entire team and get them invested and excited about the work by:

  • creating a unit that exemplifies your deepest personal beliefs about your employees and the organisation and puts in place the systems to make it a reality
  • developing high-integrity strategies for neutralising adversaries, motivating fence sitters and focusing mostly on allies
  • mastering practical tips for aligning your vision with everyday practice, including how to handle meetings, restructure teams, and manage communications.

The Empowered Manager, Second Edition gives you a clear path to becoming the leader your organisation needs to positively impact performance, build accountability and enhance job satisfaction for everyone – including top management. 

You can order THE EMPOWERED MANAGER by Peter Block from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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Lean Six Sigma For Leaders by Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo Dowdall

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The Blurb On The Back:

Outstanding quality control and continuous improvement shouldn’t be complicated and burdensome.  Now, you can quickly understand and practice the next-level solution to operations management with Lean Six Sigma For Leaders.

Written by industry influencers with a long, brilliant record of producing high-performing teams, this practical manual opens up the world of Lean Six Sigma in a way senior management can immediately use to create the optimal environment for improving operations every day.

A diverse collection of illuminating case studies reveal how organisations in several industries succeeded or failed using the Lean Six Sigma approach.  First-hand insights from the managers leading the initiative offer valuable advise on what they learned and might do differently next time.

Start your new path to ever-increasing levels of excellence with Lean Six Sigma For Leaders. 

You can order LEAN SIX SIGMA FOR LEADERS by Martin Brenig-Jones and Jo Dowdall from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, or Waterstone’s.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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The Art of Doing Business Across Cultures by Craig Storti

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The Blurb On The Back:

50 common cultural mistakes made in business settings are presented in the form of short conversations which show that there’s always a reason why people do the strange things they do, the reason is almost never to upset you, and there’s always a way forward. 

You can order THE ART OF DOING BUSINESS ACROSS CULTURES by Craig Storti from Amazon USA, Amazon UK, Waterstone’s or Bookshop.org UK.  I earn commission on any purchases made through these links.

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