Also known as “Margaret Mead among the Starfleet,” I’m a Princeton professor who has been embedded with NASA missions for two decades as a social scientist. I’ve observed missions to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and beyond; consulted with NASA as a sociological expert; and written two books, with a third on the way. Growing up, I always loved science and technology, but not just for the ideas: for the people behind the findings, the passion they bring to their work, and the ways in which culture and politics play a role in how science gets done. Writing about this, I hope to humanize science and make it accessible for everyday readers.
What happens when a sociologist who studies white-collar crime and deviant behavior in corporations turns to one of the biggest technological catastrophes of the twentieth century?
Hauntingly, Vaughan finds that there were no evil masterminds, greedy administrators, or risk-taking rebels behind the Challenger launch after all—just a group of highly talented engineers doing their jobs.
I enjoyed her thick description of the routine checks, risk analyses, and exacting reviews that go into engineering a space shuttle, but they’re also deeply unsettling: because she shows us that the certainty that comes from our everyday activities can lead us all astray.
A masterpiece of historical sociology, rigorously documented down to the last detail, this classic changed how I think about the role organizations can easily play in producing disasters.
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded on January 28, 1986, millions of Americans became bound together in a single, historic moment. Many still vividly remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the tragedy. Diane Vaughan recreates the steps leading up to that fateful decision, contradicting conventional interpretations to prove that what occurred at NASA was not skullduggery or misconduct but a disastrous mistake. Why did NASA managers, who not only had all the information prior to the launch but also were warned against it, decide to proceed? In retelling how the decision unfolded…
I'm an executive coach, adjunct faculty at several top-tier business schools, and run a boutique firm consulting firm focused on organizational strategy solutions. My diverse and eclectic background in mergers & acquisitions, organization effectiveness, and strategy execution, coupled with two decades of experience in emerging markets in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, helps me grasp challenging people issues. I'm passionate about the topic of leaders as coaches having written several papers and columns. My research, and writing led Penguin to commission my book Coaching: The Secret Code to Uncommon Leadership that, released globally in late 2021 to much acclaim, is recommended by several academics as an essential read for aspiring and experienced managers.
Trillion Dollar Coach is an absolutely brilliant read about a legendary coach and business executive who coached some of the best and brightest leaders in Silicon Valley.
Campbell coached, among others, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt, and Sundar Pichai at Google, Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook.
Much like my own rather strong beliefs on this topic, Bill preached that to be a great manager, you have to be a great coach.
Success as a leader was about taking others along on the journey. The higher you climb in the corporate world, the more your success will depend on making other people successful. That is the hallmark of a good leadership coach.
The book is full of examples, life lessons, anecdotes, and practical tips on how leaders can become better coaches.
#1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller New York Times Bestseller USA Today Bestseller
The team behind How Google Works returns with management lessons from legendary coach and business executive, Bill Campbell, whose mentoring of some of our most successful modern entrepreneurs has helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value.
Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. In addition, this business genius mentored dozens of other important leaders on both coasts, from…
I have spent most of my adult life using entrepreneurial business practices and principles to redesign and transform nonprofits. From my very first nonprofit organizational acceleration, I was hooked. The wealth one receives from helping other people is so much richer and more satisfying than money–altruism is truly life's greatest pleasure. You know the movie The Sixth Sense where the little kid sees dead people everywhere? I am the same way, except everywhere I look, I see uncaptured opportunities for social impact. I live and breathe social impact strategy, governance, financing, evaluation, and change management. Because by fixing problems in those areas, organizations are able to do more to make the world a better place.
Good to Great is one of the best business books written, but it doesn't tell the full story. While Collins has other books, the most important companion to my prior recommendation is Great By Choice. Really, these books should be seen as a Part 1 and a Part 2.
The elements in this book are every bit as important–specifically, the "20 Mile March" piece is one that continues to resonate with me. More battle-tested wisdom from one of the world's greatest business scholars.
THE NEW QUESTION Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
THE NEW STUDY Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced…
I have been interested in leadership style since my teenage years. My father was a leader in a retailing organization, and I was entranced by behaviors that seemed to connect with others and those that did not. As I grew older, I started to think about leadership style behaviors and models that might capture the most effective ones. While I recognize that leadership needs vary based on industry, scope, and tenure, I do believe that we all should know the leadership styles that are important to us to the extent that we can describe them if we are asked to do so.
Leading with dignity is a core leadership behavior. As my journey as a leader has unfolded, I have been drawn to certain words I have experienced, and dignity is one of these words. Everyone has dignity and expects to be treated with dignity. Everyone.
As a leader, you must demonstrate a visible level of empathy and treat everyone you meet with dignity, as by doing so, your ability to impact and influence them grows exponentially. Although I consider myself a skilled leader, this book reminded me of the importance and existence of this basic human trait. I recognize there might be an occasional person I do not feel needs to be treated with dignity, yet their existence is infinitesimal. Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity.
Winner of the 2019 PROSE award in the Business, Management and Finance category
What every leader needs to know about dignity and how to create a culture in which everyone thrives
"With engaging intelligence, Hicks makes a lucid case for the importance of acknowledging a person's worth within organizations and businesses. . . . For anyone wanting to better understand how to bring about the best in themselves and those around them."-Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe This landmark book from an expert in dignity studies explores the essential but underrecognized role of dignity as part of good leadership. Extending the reach…
So many of the problems we face as a society stem from the way our economy works. But the economy is presented as something technical and dry, or even simply the ‘natural state of things’. It makes it hard for people to understand where power lies, or even to imagine how it could be otherwise. If we want things to be different – and we really need things to be different – we’ve got to find better ways of communicating what’s going on. I’ve chosen some books that do this – to explain how economic decisions are made. And always to point to the possibility of it all being very different and much better.
In the late 1990s, a new type of economy was being born, one dominated by massive corporations, whose logos were increasingly ubiquitous, and who were driving a culture of consumerism among young people.
Klein traced this corporate dominance to a new form of capitalism in which corporations were becoming ever less interested in the stuff they actually made, be it trainers, takeaway coffee, or jeans. Rather, they were selling a brand, and replacing our very notion of ourselves as citizens living in a democracy with one of consumers shopping in a marketplace.
Klein’s book looks at how companies like Nike and Starbucks transformed society – and what people were doing to challenge their dominance.
A Tenth Anniversary Edition of Naomi Klein's No Logo with a New Introduction by the Author
NO LOGO was an international bestseller and "a movement bible" (The New York Times). Naomi Klein's second book, The Shock Doctrine, was hailed as a "master narrative of our time," and has over a million copies in print worldwide.
In the last decade, No Logo has become an international phenomenon and a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As America faces a second economic depression, Klein's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever.
I've been selling professionally since 1973, and in the sales training and development business for more than 36 years. I founded Objective Management Group, the world’s leading provider of sales force evaluations and sales candidate assessments, and we have data on 2.2 million salespeople. OMG measures 21 Sales Core Competencies, so that’s around 250 findings on 2.2 million salespeople or close to 500 million data points! I've personally trained and coached tens of thousands of salespeople, sales managers, and sales leaders and I have published nearly 2,000 articles on my multi-award-winning blog, Understanding the Sales Force. I was installed in the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame in 2013.
Gap Selling is the best book written about selling in the past ten years. Keenan comes out swinging, keeps swinging, and swings hard. He pulls no punches, hits you with the truth, and you’d better be strong enough to handle what he dishes out. Keenan’s approach is modern, consultative, and it is the right book for these challenging times.
People don't buy from people they like. No! Your buyer doesn't care about you or your product or service. It's not your job to overcome objections, it's your buyer's. Closing isn't a skill of good salespeople; it's the skill of weak salespeople. Price isn't the main reason salespeople lose the sale. Gap Selling shreds traditional and closely held sales beliefs that have been hurting salespeople for decades.
For years, salespeople have embraced a myriad of sales tactics and belief systems that have unknowingly created many of the issues they have been trying to avoid such as: long sales cycles, price…
I’m passionate about Sales with Soul because being sold to is awful. I’m passionate about leaders, by title, actually leading and it bugs me when the balance between getting work done and caring for the human is out of balance. There’s an elegant way to do both, and as someone who struggles with that concept, I have embraced my struggle and put frameworks and systems around the concept and teach it. We host clients, colleagues, and peers on our Rev Shots show to bring our content and discussions to life and share with our audience. I hope you enjoy the books and content as much as I have!
For every business owner, there’s the question of scale. I never wanted my company to be big. Our purpose is to make the world a better place and we can’t do that if we’re spread too thin; we’d lose our personal touch.
This book gave me ideas to use and wording to use to stay small and excellent in our craft; which was a huge salve to my heart.
How maverick companies have passed up the growth treadmill — and focused on greatness instead.
It’s an axiom of business that great companies grow their revenues and profits year after year. Yet quietly, under the radar, a small number of companies have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals. Goals like being great at what they do, creating a great place to work, providing great customer service, making great contributions to their communities, and finding great ways to lead their lives.
In Small Giants, veteran journalist Bo Burlingham takes us deep inside fourteen remarkable…
As an organizational consultant, and a business writer, I’ve always been fascinated by Mark Twain’s comment that he would've written a shorter letter if he had more time. It’s a wonderful reminder that simplicity and clarity require hard work and won’t happen by itself. As part of the consulting team that worked with Jack Welch to transform GE in the 1990s, I saw firsthand that leaders actually have the power to simplify their organizations, and that it can make a huge difference. What they need is a playbook for how to do this, and that was my intention when I wrote Simply Effective. Since then I’ve seen “simplicity” become a driving force for business success.
Yes, Stella is a book – but it’s really a fable about how to cut through corporate inertia and bureaucracy to drive innovation.
When I first read it, I was blown away – a story about farm animals saving their farm from bankruptcy – with lots of clear and compelling messages. And it was actually fun to read. Since I first learned about it from one of the authors (we were working with a common client), I’ve recommended it to lots of other executives, and it’s made a difference.
One of the key lessons from Stella is that truly transformative innovation often needs to be separated from the core business – with different resources, budgets, metrics, and expectations. Otherwise it’s going to be in competition with the core business – and it will end up getting the short end of the stick in terms of money and people.
Inspired by George Orwell's Animal Farm and the international bestseller Our Iceberg is Melting, How Stella Saved the Farm is a simple parable about embracing change and managing innovation in difficult times.
Bankruptcy, or the grim prospect of being acquired by a hostile human competitor, threatens Windsor Farm. But when a young sheep called Stella comes up with a bold idea, will the other animals be able to respond to her ambitious call to action?
Grounded in over a decade of academic research, How Stella Saved the Farm will resonate for organizations of all types, from global corporations to small…
Jim Tamm was a Senior Administrative Law Judge for the State of California with jurisdiction over workplace disputes. In that role, he mediated more school district labor strikes than any other person in the United States. Ron Luyet is a licensed psychotherapist who has worked with group dynamics pioneers such as Carl Rogers and Will Schutz. He has advised Fortune 500 companies for over forty years specializing in building high-performance teams. Together they wrote Radical Collaboration and are excited to share this list with you today.
Stan captures the essence of the mindset needed to Collaborate. To quote Slap: “When an employee culture is repositioned as a newly precious, workable asset, a company will naturally protect it, same as with any asset. An employee culture can’t be protected without protecting their humanity. If we lose humanity in business, we’re all doomed. If we save it we will have saved ourselves. In case you fear this icy hand of altruism will grip your own company by the throat and choke the life out of revenue, not to worry: We’re talking here about making the business case for humanity. In any environment where meaning is determined by metrics, the point of view and processes in this book are going to cause measurable, sustainable results." We agree.
You can't sell it outside if you can't sell it inside.
You want maximum business performance? Look under the hood and you’ll find your employee culture: it is the power that drives the enterprise engine. To harness that rumbling power you’ve got to solve the mystery of what an employee culture actually is, how it operates and how to move it forward. These are the keys that this book will put right in your hands.
Renowned business culture expert Stan Slap knows the difference between understanding your employees and understanding your employee culture. The distinction isn’t semantics; it’s the key…
As a college professor, I taught MBA students about management and when I became an executive with a team of 50, I learned more about how to apply and understand theory in the workplace. I’ve always focused on the practical. Theory is great but needs to be practically applied in order to learn how to become more effective. I believe that we're all in control of our own destiny and that becoming a better manager is within our power. Developing the competencies we need can be done through training and on our own through focused, practical, and structured work. Self-directed learning can be applied to every aspect of work, whether you’re a manager or not.
Julie Zhuo has a Silicon Valley and technology background and writes about management in a very straightforward way that lets the reader both identify with the content and learn from it. The new manager is targeted in this book but the discussion and anecdotes are valuable for anyone. My experience is that managers, even those who have held the people manager role for many years, need to refresh their view and skills on a continuous basis. Organizations frequently don’t train managers as often or as deeply as is needed. Starting with a good foundation that talks about “people, purpose and process” as Zhuo discusses, is not only a good foundation, but a good refresher as well.
Congratulations, you're a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don't really know what you're doing.
That's exactly how Julie Zhuo felt when she became a rookie manager at the age of 25. She stared at a long list of logistics--from hiring to firing, from meeting to messaging, from planning to pitching--and faced a thousand questions and uncertainties. How was she supposed to spin teamwork into value? How could she be a good steward of her reports' careers? What…
