Leaders have talked about the importance of corporate culture for decades, but the success of iconic companies like GE, Apple, and Google shows how culture is a strategic lever that can be utilized for driving growth, change, and innovation. In this new age of globalization, rapid technology shifts, and constant disruption, the 21st century marketplace is more volatile and uncertain than ever. To thrive, businesses need a new kind of emphasis around culture. Sara Roberts, former CEO and founder of Roberts Golden and a seasoned executive consultant to dozens of Fortune 500 companies and CEOs, sees how flourishing companies—from established market leaders to the surprising upstarts—share three distinct attributes: Nimble: They are much faster and more agile than ordinary organizations Focused: They use their sense of purpose as a lens to understand and meet the needs of customers and markets Feisty: They play big and act bold to capitalize on advantages and out-muscle the competition For successful companies in this new era, culture is not about playing defense but about going on offense. It's purposely designed, leveraged, and honed to deliver value and drive growth. In Nimble, Focused, Feisty, Roberts provides not only a look into what these organizations are doing differently but also a blueprint and framework so your company can create a cultural strategy to thrive in the new era.

The book covers numerous tech entrepreneurial founders and software developers, and the exciting brands or products that they created. It goes deep on a handful of them, narrowly divulging exactly how a few software developers and startup founders created breakthrough tech products like Gmail, Dropbox, Ring, Snapchat, Bitcoin, Groupon, and more. It highlights and unpacks the general hero-worship that the media and our own minds practice about tech founders and tech entrepreneurs. This idealization of tech success can create a paradox, preventing average tech professionals from their own successful journeys. This book provides hard evidence that anyone in tech can create, and anyone on the peripheral of tech can break through to the center where innovation, creativity, and opportunity meet. The anecdotes, stories, evidence, facts, arguments, logic, principles, and techniques provided in this book have helped individuals and businesses engage in slow creation cycles, improve the morale of their development teams, and increased their delivery potential of their technology solutions overall. Average Joe covers: Genius - The systematic deconstruction and debunking of the commonly held assumptions in the tech industry around supreme intelligence, and how that intelligence has been worshipped and sought after, despite the facts. Slow Creation - How to force-manufacture creative ideation. How conscious and subconscious cycles of patterns, details, and secrets can lead to breakthrough innovations, and how those P.D.S. cycles, and systematic mental grappling, can be conjured and repeated on a regular basis. Little-C Creativity - The conscious and miniature moments of epiphany that leak into our active P.D.S. cycles of Slow Creation. Flow - Why it's great, but also - why it's completely unreliable and unnecessary. How to perpetually innovate without relying on a flow state. Team Installation - How teams and companies can engage their employees in Slow Creation to unlock dormant ideas, stir up creative endeavors, and jumpstart fragile ideas into working products. User Manipulation - How tech products are super-charged with tricks, secret techniques, and neural transmitters like Dopamine, Oxytocin, and Cortisol; how those products leverage cognitive mechanisms and psychological techniques to force user adoption and user behaviors. Contrarianism - How oppositional and backward-thinking leaders create brand-new categories and the products which dominate those categories. Showmanship - How tech players have presented their ideas to the world, conjured up magic, manufactured mystique, and presented compelling stories that have captured their audiences. Sustainable Mystique Triad – A simple model for capturing audiences consistently without relying on hype and hustle.

Building Smarter Organizations is the antidote for your zombie organization. Building Smarter Organizations is an actionable survival guide for our complex, uncertain, and digital world. Slow-moving and uncoordinated zombie organizations can change. Utilizing the latest in industry research, Vala-Webb has assembled the complete anti-zombie kit to help you rebuild your organization so it can learn quickly, predict accurately, and execute on decisions effectively using: An "open" mindset that fosters innovation and employee engagement Fast-flow communications with visual work management Accelerated, collaborative decision making Don't keep stumbling and lurching around. Lead the change and equip your organization to thrive.

This book can help you create, encourage, and participate in an environment that is conducive to creativity, helping make change a more natural and organic part of the library's culture.

16-year-old Digger thrives as a spy and sneak-thief among the feuding religious factions of Gerse. But when a routine job goes horribly wrong and her partner and lover Tegen is killed, she disguises herself in a group of young nobles and sneaks out of the city. Accepted as a lady-in-waiting at the stronghold of the powerful Nemair, she finds new peace and friendship (and some new targets). But when an old client from the city comes to the castle, she realizes her hosts may be planning the ultimate uprising against the king - and rather than true peace, she may be at the heart of the rebellion.Now with an extensive excerpt of the daring sequel, LIAR'S MOON!

Managing a high-growth organization requires both strategy and adaptability. Unfortunately, start-up founders and executives seeking to scale up to the next level find all too frequently that growth turns into chaos. Rather than laying the groundwork for the future, organizations get stuck by covering up complex problems with unsustainable band-aids and duct-tape fixes, implementing anecdote-based solutions from the latest tech-industry unicorns or leadership books, and relying on too much on-the-fly learning from inexperienced managers. This book is the definitive guide for leaders of high-growth organizations seeking to understand and execute the people-management principles that are essential to continued success. Combining a wealth of practical experience, well-grounded academic research, and easy-to-apply frameworks, Andrew Bartlow and T. Brad Harris offer a practical toolkit that founders, functional leaders, and managers of people can use to rethink their practices to meet their organizations’ needs. They help readers identify the core people-management programs and practices that are best for an organization at its current stage and size while also supporting a foundation for continued development and the capacity to adapt to inevitable surprises. Practical, actionable, and supplemented with numerous diagnostic tools and illustrative examples, Scaling for Success is a must-have playbook for organizational leaders pursuing smart and sustainable growth.

First-Class Leadership is a comprehensive book that all managers and leaders should read. The amount of information is second to none. A brilliant book based on research and experience brings to the fore everything you need to know about being a first-class leader. The techniques and advice in this book are simple yet effective—you will wonder why you have never done them. In First-Class Leadership, Hamid Safaei discusses specific and actionable points from getting people to believe in your vision, building effective teams, communicating, inspiring, encouraging, and developing employees so they give their very best, caring and nurturing your workforce, to finding and keeping talent that will take your company to the next level. This book will change your perspective on how leaders should lead and how managers should manage. Inspired by icons such as Mahatma Gandhi, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs, what Hamid Safaei brings together is a wealth of information that will pave the way for everyone to become a first-class leader. A must-read gem on successful and effective leadership! Have you ever dreamed of making tough calls in fractions of seconds? What does it mean when the author says: “If it’s not a HELL YES it’s a NO”? Why is it important that you remain connected to your biggest WHY? What if you don’t love what you do? How do great leaders hold ground when the going gets tough? What does the author of First-Class Leadership mean by QPA building blocks which stand for Qualities, Principles, and Attitudes? How have the greatest leaders on Earth mastered premium leadership qualities? What is the first thing the greatest leaders do in every new situation? What profound leadership lessons can we learn from the rules of nature ruling for millions of years? How have greatest leaders built highly effective teams? And how do they keep their highfliers happy? How did they achieve glory so you can follow in their footsteps? These questions and many more have been answered in First-Class Leadership.

Are you ready for the next wave of Steampunk? Then it's time for something that captures the spirit of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, an era of ebullient progress in the arts, literature, science, and technology. Call it Deco Punk, and let's rock with the bootleg Twenties and roll with the grim Thirties. It was a time of heady optimism, and-fittingly-the era when modern science fiction was born.

“The most interesting book ever written about Google” (The Washington Post) delivers the inside story behind the most successful and admired technology company of our time, now updated with a new Afterword. Google is arguably the most important company in the world today, with such pervasive influence that its name is a verb. The company founded by two Stanford graduate students—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—has become a tech giant known the world over. Since starting with its search engine, Google has moved into mobile phones, computer operating systems, power utilities, self-driving cars, all while remaining the most powerful company in the advertising business. Granted unprecedented access to the company, Levy disclosed that the key to Google’s success in all these businesses lay in its engineering mindset and adoption of certain internet values such as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk-taking. Levy discloses details behind Google’s relationship with China, including how Brin disagreed with his colleagues on the China strategy—and why its social networking initiative failed; the first time Google tried chasing a successful competitor. He examines Google’s rocky relationship with government regulators, particularly in the EU, and how it has responded when employees left the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. In the Plex is the “most authoritative…and in many ways the most entertaining” (James Gleick, The New York Book Review) account of Google to date and offers “an instructive primer on how the minds behind the world’s most influential internet company function” (Richard Waters, The Wall Street Journal).

If you love the danger and sword-fighting of MERLIN, you'll like this! In a discontent kingdom, civil war is brewing. To unify the divided people, Conner, a nobleman of the court, devises a cunning plan to find an impersonator of the king's long-lost son and install him as a puppet prince. Four orphans are recruited to compete for the role, including a defiant boy named Sage. Sage knows that Conner's motives are more than questionable, yet his life balances on a sword's point - he must be chosen to play the prince or he will certainly be killed. As Sage's journey continues, layer upon layer of treachery and deceit unfold, until finally a truth is revealed that proves more dangerous than all of the lies put together.