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Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete. There is a better way: one that increases the engagement of employees and managers alike, reduces micromanaging and other limiting approaches, and promotes organizational and individual success.

In this book, self-management expert Samantha Slade presents seven concrete practices to help your organization flatten its existing hierarchy and develop a horizontal organization. The result will be enhanced creativity, greater growth, and a increased employee retention and productivity—and a better bottom line.

These days, more than ever, successful organizations must respond quickly and nimbly to change—they need
every employee's best thinking. A horizontal organization creates an environment of true collaboration, respect, and openness. It allows everyone more freedom to express unconventional ideas or to work through issues that are getting in the way of organizational goals. And it's a more human way to organize—after all, we function perfectly well in our day-to day lives without someone telling us what to do.

But when an organization decides to go horizontal, it can be overwhelming for both managers and employees. Slade offers a practical, proven,
incremental method to help organizations of all kinds and sizes ease in to a non-hierarchical model. She includes techniques for using your organization's purpose to stay focused and aligned, developing shared decision-making, creating a mutual feedback culture, nurturing autonomy, holding co-managed meetings, and maintaining an environment of collective learning.

Going Horizontal will help organizations become more adaptive, collaborative and innovative, which is vital in today's highly competitive and constantly-evolving world.

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The Innovation Code
The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict

Harmony is sublime in music but deadly to innovation. The only way to create new, hybrid solutions is to clash. Innovation happens when we bring people with contrasting perspectives and complementary areas of expertise together in one room. We innovate best with people who challenge us, not people who agree with us.

It sounds like a recipe for chaos and confusion. But in
The Innovation Code, Jeff DeGraff, dubbed the “Dean of Innovation,” and Staney DeGraff introduce a simple framework to explain the ways different kinds of thinkers and leaders can create constructive conflict in any organization. This positive tension produces ingenious solutions that go far beyond “the best of both worlds.”

Drawing on their work with nearly half of the Fortune 500 companies, the DeGraffs help you harness the creative energy that arises from opposing viewpoints. They identify four contrasting styles of innovator—the Artist, the Engineer, the Athlete, and the Sage—and include exercises and assessments for building, managing, and embracing the dynamic discord of a team that contains all four. You can also figure out where you fit on the continuum of innovator archetypes.

Using vivid examples, The Innovation Code offers four steps to normalize conflict and channel it to develop something completely new. By following these simple steps, you will get breakthrough innovations that are both good for you and your customers. This is a rigorous but highly accessible guide for achieving breakthrough solutions by utilizing the full—and seemingly contradictory—spectrum of innovative thinking.

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More than ever, data drives decisions in organizations—and we have more data, and more ways to analyze it, than ever. Yet strategic initiatives continue to fail as often as they did when computers ran on punch cards. Economist and research scientist Alec Levenson says we need a new approach.

The problem, Levenson says, is that the business people who devise the strategies and the human resources people who get employees to implement them use completely different analytics. Business analytics can determine if operational priorities aren't being achieved but can't explain why. HR analytics reveal potentially helpful policy and process improvements but can't identify which would have the greatest strategic impact.

This book shows how to use an integrated approach to bring these two pieces together. Levenson presents a thorough and realistic treatment of the reasons for and challenges of taking an integrated approach. He provides details on the different parts of both enterprise and human capital analytics that have to be conducted for integration to be successful and includes specific questions to ask, along with examples of applying integrated analytics to address particular organizational challenges.

Effective analytics is a team sport. Levenson's approach allows you to get the deepest insights by bringing people together from both the business and HR perspectives to assess what's going on and determine the right solution.

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Leading futurist Bob Johansen shows how a new way of thinking, enhanced by new technologies, will help leaders break free of limiting labels and see new gradients of possibility in a chaotic world.

The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The dilemma is that we're restricted by rigid categorical thinking that freezes people and organizations in neatly defined boxes that often are inaccurate or obsolete. Categories lead us toward certainty but away from clarity, and categorical thinking moves us away from understanding the bigger picture. Sticking with this old way of thinking and seeing isn't just foolish, it's dangerous.

Full-spectrum thinking is the ability to seek patterns and clarity outside, across, beyond, or maybe even without any boxes or categories while resisting false certainty and simplistic binary choices. It reveals our commonalities that are hidden in plain view. Bob Johansen lays out the core concepts of full-spectrum thinking and reveals the role that digital media—including gameful engagement, big-data analytics, visualization, blockchain, and machine learning—will play in facilitating and enhancing it. He offers examples of broader spectrums and new applications in a wide range of areas that will become possible first, then mandatory. This visionary book provides powerful ways to make sense of new opportunities and see the world as it really is.

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Offers ten suprising leadership lessons and shows how they can improve snd enrich any leader or organization.

  • The first book to portray Mother Teresa as the realistic, pragmatic leader of one of the world's most recognized and successful global organizations

  • Offers eight surprising leadership lessons and shows how they can improve and enrich any leader or organization

  • Draws on coauthor Ruma Bose's firsthand experiences working with Mother Teresa

When most people think of Mother Teresa, they think of a saint--a spiritual hero of extraordinary humanitarian accomplishments, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. But Mother Teresa was also the leader of one of the world's largest and most successful organizations: the Missionaries of Charity. Since founding it in 1948 she has raised billions of dollars, and with over a million volunteers in more than 100 countries, it remains one of the most recognized brands in the world. How did one nun who never received any formal education in business build such an impressive global organization?

Frank, realistic, and firmly grounded in practicality, Mother Teresa's leadership style helped to inspire and organize people across the world. This book shares eight essential leadership principles drawn from Mother Teresa's example and applies them to today's business world. Authors Ruma Bose, an entrepreneur who volunteered with Mother Teresa, and Lou Faust, a leading business expert, are the first to examine her in this light--as a leader whose management style and dedication to a singular vision led to one of the world's most unlikely success stories.

Mother Teresa may have been a saint, but her spectacular success was not a product of divine providence. Her genius was the simplicity of her vision and her dedication to its implementation. It was in the way she treated her people, refusing to distance herself from the everyday work of a typical sister of the Missionaries of Charity. It was in how she handled tough choices--like accepting donations from brutal Haitian dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier. These were the principles that made her the great leader of a global organization, and they can be applied by anyone in any organization--no sainthood required.

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A better way to fight poverty: Ashe and Neilan show that savings groups are simple, extremely low cost, self-managing and spread virally "there are savings groups in 100,000 villages in 65 countries Sponsored by Oxfam America: This book was developed wit
  • A better way to fight poverty: Ashe and Neilan show that savings groups are simple, extremely low cost, self-managing and spread virally-there are savings groups in 100,000 villages in 65 countries
  • Sponsored by Oxfam America: This book was developed with Oxfam America, part of an international coalition of Oxfams operating in 90 countries-in 2005 Ashe and Oxfam, with their partner Freedom from Hunger, pioneered a program to expand savings groups worldwide.

Two and a half billion people worldwide, too poor and too rural to be served by traditional financial institutions desperately need a better way to save and borrow. Jeffrey Ashe and Kyla Jagger Neilan say the answer is savings groups.

In savings groups, members put what they can in a communal pot and make loans to individual members for needs like buying food to survive the "lean season" before the harvest, building a business, investing in livestock, or paying school fees. Once a year, the entire pot plus interest on loans is divided among the members. Unlike other poverty alleviation options, savings groups are run entirely by their members, and, they spread by word of mouth from village to village, allowing them to reach remote areas with remarkable success. By catalyzing the problem-solving capacity of the poor they avoid subsidies, debt, dependency, and high costs while reducing hunger and building assets and solidarity.

Ashe and Neilan show that applying savings group principles could revolutionize development in areas as diverse as health, agriculture, education and grassroots political empowerment. "Being organized gives us courage," as one woman said. It is their courage translated into action that explains the success of "in their own hands" development.

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