If you've ever thought, "There must be more to life than this," The Art of Non-Conformity is for you. Based on Chris Guillebeau's popular online manifesto "A Brief Guide to World Domination," The Art of Non-Conformity defies common assumptions about life and work while arming you with the tools to live differently. You'll discover how to live on your own terms by exploring creative self-employment, radical goal-setting, contrarian travel, and embracing life as a constant adventure. Inspired and guided by Chris's own story and those of others who have pursued unconventional lives, you can devise your own plan for world domination-and make the world a better place at the same time.

Is there such a thing as a shortcut to self-knowledge? CRazYZoo! is a fable filled with action and with relationship challenges that illustrate the use of a novel but proven method of learning to understand oneself and others and of charting one's own road to success. You are invited to make an initial decision about yourself as you start reading the book and another one as you progress through the story -- and you are on your way to self-discovery! This highly successful method of self-knowledge is being used by a growing number of trainers and facilitators, as it enables participants to increase their self-esteem, develop open-mindedness and tolerance, strengthen their ability to communicate and to discover opportunites for improvement and to solve problems. YOU can use it now on your own to learn to know yourself better and to become greater and more successful as a person.

Do you supervise people? If so, this book is for you. One of a manager’s toughest—and most important—responsibilities is to evaluate an employee’s performance, providing honest feedback and clarifying what they’ve done well and where they need to improve. In How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals, Dick Grote provides a concise, hands-on guide to succeeding at every step of the performance appraisal process—no matter what performance management system your organization uses. Through step-by-step instructions, examples, do-and-don’t bullet lists, sample dialogues, and suggested scripts, he shows you how to handle every appraisal activity from setting goals and defining job responsibilities to evaluating performance quality and discussing the performance evaluation face-to-face. Based on decades of experience guiding managers through their biggest challenges, Grote helps answer the questions he hears most often: • How do I set goals effectively? How many goals should someone set? • How do I evaluate a person’s behaviors? Which counts more, behaviors or results? • How do I determine the right performance appraisal rating? How do I explain my rating to a skeptical employee? • How do I tell someone she’s not meeting my expectations? How do I deliver bad news? Grote also explains how to tackle other thorny performance management tasks, including determining compensation and terminating poor performers. In accessible and useful language, How to Be Good at Performance Appraisals will help you handle performance appraisals confidently and successfully, no matter the size or culture of your organization. It’s the one book you need to excel at this daunting yet critical task.

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism, delivered to produce better results and help employees develop their skills and boundaries of success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Kim Scott Malone has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Drawing on years of first-hand experience, and distilled clearly to give actionable lessons to the reader, Radical Candor shows how to be successful while retaining your integrity and humanity. Radical Candor is the perfect handbook for those who are looking to find meaning in their job and create an environment where people both love their work, their colleagues and are motivated to strive to ever greater success.

Are your employees meeting their goals? Is their work improving over time? Understanding where your employees are succeeding—and falling short—is a pivotal part of ensuring you have the right talent to meet organizational objectives. In order to work with your people and effectively monitor their progress, you need a system in place. The HBR Guide to Performance Management provides a new multi-step, cyclical process to help you keep track of your employees' work, identify where they need to improve, and ensure they're growing with the organization. You'll learn to: Set clear employee goals that align with company objectives Monitor progress and check in regularly Close performance gaps Understand when to use performance analytics Create opportunities for growth, tailored to the individual Overcome and avoid burnout on your team Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

The tools you need to enrich the performance-appraisal experience as you streamline the process Whether you're a manger looking to implement employee appraisals for the first time, concerned with improving the quality and effectiveness of the appraisal process, or simply trying to save time and mental anguish Performance Appraisals & Phrases For Dummies provides the tools you need to save time and energy while presenting fair and accurate evaluations that foster employee growth. This convenient, portable package includes a full-length appraisal phrasebook featuring over 3,200 spot-on phrases and plenty of quick-hitting expert tips on making the most out of the process. You'll also receive online access to writable, customizable sample evaluation forms other timesaving resources. Includes more than 3,200 phrases for clear, and helpful evaluations Helps make evaluations faster, more effective, and far less stressful Offers far more advice and coaching than other performance appraisal books Serves as an ideal guide for managers new to the appraisal process With expert advice from Ken Lloyd, a nationally recognized consultant and author, Performance Appraisals and Phrases For Dummies makes the entire process easier, faster, and more productive for you and your employees.

"In this definitive guide to the ever-changing modern workplace, Kathryn Minshew and Alexandra Cavoulacos, the co-founders of popular career website TheMuse.com, show how to play the game by the New Rules. The Muse is known for sharp, relevant, and get-to-the-point advice on how to figure out exactly what your values and your skills are and how they best play out in the marketplace. Now Kathryn and Alex have gathered all of that advice and more in The New Rules of Work. Through quick exercises and structured tips, the authors will guide you as you sort through your countless options; communicate who you are and why you are valuable; and stand out from the crowd. The New Rules of Work shows how to choose a perfect career path, land the best job, and wake up feeling excited to go to work every day-- whether you are starting out in your career, looking to move ahead, navigating a mid-career shift, or anywhere in between"--

“Ever felt like you weren’t reaching your goals as fast as you would like? HARD GoalsK shows you how to change your thinking and get on the path to tremendous achievement!” --Marshall Goldsmith, world-renowned executive coach and author of the New York Times bestsellers MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “Hard Goals is full of fascinating insights regarding how to get yourself to achieve things you never thought possible, and Murphy’s key ideas have strong research support. . . . If you want to achieve something great or important in your life, this is the book for you.” —Edwin A. Locke, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland “If you want a mediocre life, set ho-hum goals. If you want a life filled with excellence and meaning, set HARD Goals. This book shows you how to set HARD Goals and love every minute of achieving them. The end result? Winning in life and unparalleled fulfillment.” Lyle Nelson, four-time Olympian and author of Spirit of Champions “Every company has goals these days. So why do most goals fall short? Why do leaders keep setting the same failed goals year after year? HARD Goals gives you the cutting-edge science to engage every employee in pursuing and achieving extraordinary goals. No more procrastination, foot-dragging, or giving up. With HARD Goals, your organization will achieve astonishing results. Every CEO, manager, and employee needs to read this book!” Kevin M. Andrews, President, SmartBen Want to increase sales? Get promoted? Change the world? There’s a goal for that . . . Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, the school teacher next door who amassed a million-dollar fortune . . . Did these people succeed because they were more motivated or because they were more disciplined? The answer to both questions is yes—but not in the ways you might think. Anyone can achieve extraordinary things. The secret is setting goals that test the very limits of your abilities. In Hard Goals, Mark Murphy, the acclaimed author of Hundred Percenters, explains the science behind getting from where you are to where you want to be in your career, business, and life. Leadership IQ, Murphy’s top-rated leadership training consultancy, studied nearly 5,000 workers from virtually every field and found that extraordinary goals—the kind that got America to the moon and back, developed the iPod, created nanotechnology, and helped individuals overcome tremendous personal adversity—stimulate and engage the brain in ways that are profoundly different from the goals most people set. Research conducted for this book revealed that people who set Hard goals are up to 75 percent more fulfilled than people with easy goals. In these pages, Mark Murphy explains how success, and the satisfaction it brings, comes from knowing how to set goals that are: Heartfelt—have an emotional attachment, “scratch an existential itch.” Animated—motivated by a vision, that movie that plays over and over in your mind. Required—imbued with such a sense of urgency that you have no other choice but to start acting on them right here, right now. Difficult—the greatest achievements come from the toughest challenges—but they also leave you feeling stronger, smarter, and more fulfilled. People set goals all the time, but the majority end up unfulfilled or abandoned. With all the challenges facing us today, we could use a little more achievement. Hard Goals can help us get there by offering the hard science and practical techniques to conquer procrastination and unlock your brain’s potential for realizing your goals.

We are in the middle of an urgency epidemic. People find themselves are overwhelmed and at a loss as to how to proceed in an environment that cuts them no slack, provides no respite, and is ever pushing them on. The sensation is akin to the one where it feels like hot sauce is on everything. The purpose of this book is to guide you through the urgency epidemic and put you back in charge. Like a great chef, you'll learn the nuances of adding just the right amount of sauce to bring out the deep flavor and potential of yourself, your team, and your family, creating a menu of balance and perfect spice so that you are in charge of urgency and it no longer consumes your world.

The performance review. It is one of the most insidious, most damaging, and yet most ubiquitous of corporate activities. We all hate it. And yet nobody does anything about it. Until now... Straight-talking Sam Culbert, management guru and UCLA professor, minces no words as he puts managers on notice that -- with the performance review as their weapon of choice -- they have built a corporate culture based on intimidation and fear. Teaming up with Wall Street Journal Senior Editor Lawrence Rout, he shows us why performance reviews are bogus and how they undermine both creativity and productivity. And he puts a good deal of the blame squarely on human resources professionals, who perpetuate the very practice that they should be trying to eliminate. But Culbert does more than merely tear down. He also offers a substitute -- the performance preview -- that will actually accomplish the tasks that performance reviews were supposed to, but never will: holding people accountable for their actions and their results, and giving managers and their employees the kind of feedback they need for improving their skills and to give the company more of what it needs. With passion, humor, and a rare insight into what motivates all of us to do our best, Culbert offers all of us a chance to be better managers, better employees and, indeed, better people. Culbert has long said his goal is to make the world of work fit for human consumption. "Get Rid of the Performance Review!" shows us how to do just that.