Amy Edmondson
Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management, Harvard Business School; author, The Fearless Organization
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“This groundbreaking book is required reading for every job seeker.” (from Amazon)
by Phyl Terry, Marty Cagan·You?
by Phyl Terry, Marty Cagan·You?
"If you're even thinking about a job search, start here." - Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group Based on 25 years of experience working with thousands of leaders – from early-career product managers to CEOs – Never Search Alone gives readers a time-tested, multi-step process (with exercises, tools, and templates) to find the right job now. This new approach to looking for a job and building a good career focuses on three big ideas learned from helping thousands of job seekers: Never Search Alone. Because your emotional balance is the most important thing you need to manage in a job search, you need a support group of fellow job seekers that will help you turn insecurity and anxiety into hope, motivation, confidence, and accountability.Candidate-Market Fit. If product-market fit drives company success, candidate-market fit drives career success. So, before you begin interviewing and networking you need to identify precisely what you want and what the market wants. Phyl shows how this key step will help you figure out the intersection between your hopes and dreams and market realities.Four Legs to the Negotiations Stool. There are *four* legs to the negotiations stool: compensation, budget, resources, and support. The last three drive your success in the next job, which is why Phyl asks job seeker’s to emphasize that as much or even more than compensation (though, of course, they will also show you how to ask for more money). Foreword by Marty Cagan (Excerpt) For more than 20 years, I’ve encouraged people who are serious about their career to meet Phyl Terry. Yes, Phyl is one of the best-connected leaders in the industry. Yes, Phyl is a genuine human being who truly cares about you per- sonally and your career. But what really sets Phyl apart is that he understands how to harness the power of community. This book is all about scaling the magic that is Phyl. I have seen Phyl and the techniques he advocates dramatically improve the career trajectories of countless people. And not just people who are in mid-career, dissatisfied with their current job, and want to find better. These techniques are at least as valuable for new college graduates looking for that all-important first professional job. Or another very difficult but increasingly common situation: older employees who find themselves in need of a new job, yet encountering systemic ageism at every turn. Which is to say, nearly everyone in the professional workforce can benefit from the techniques in this book. And one more pro tip: it’s a good idea to learn these techniques before you need them. When you are able to find a job that you truly enjoy, that leverages your unique skills and talents, where you can receive the coaching necessary to continue to grow and develop to reach your potential, and where you can make a real contribution, you have meaningfully improved your life. My hope is that this book will help countless people to improve their lives. — Marty Cagan Founder, Silicon Valley Product Group December 2021
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“This is a compelling and much needed book. Its sage advice could not be offered (or heeded) soon enough.” (from Amazon)
by Gleb Tsipursky PhD, Howard J. Ross·You?
by Gleb Tsipursky PhD, Howard J. Ross·You?
“This book is Moneyball for management. It will help you understand your subconscious biases that can lead to bad decisions, and it will teach you the techniques to help you make better decisions.” —Gordon Tredgold, author of Fast “This well-written, go-against-the-grain book is full of practical ways to tap into your very best mental resources to make better and better decisions.” —Brian Tracy, bestselling author of Eat that Frog! Want to avoid business disasters, whether minor mishaps, such as excessive team conflict, or major calamities like those that threaten bankruptcy or doom a promising career? Fortunately, behavioral economics studies show that such disasters stem from poor decisions due to our faulty mental patterns—what scholars call “cognitive biases”—and are preventable. Unfortunately, the typical advice for business leaders to “go with their guts” plays into these cognitive biases and leads to disastrous decisions that devastate the bottom line. By combining practical case studies with cutting-edge research, Never Go With Your Gut will help you make the best decisions and prevent these business disasters. The leading expert on avoiding business disasters, Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, draws on over 20 years of extensive consulting, coaching, and speaking experience to show how pioneering leaders and organizations—many of them his clients—avoid business disasters. Reading this book will enable you to: Discover how pioneering leaders and organizations address cognitive biases to avoid disastrous decisions.Adapt best practices on avoiding business disasters from these leaders and organizations to your own context.Develop processes that empower everyone in your organization to avoid business disasters.
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“Remote Works shares practical insights gleaned from the authors’ long-standing experience working remotely in innovative tech firms, well before a global pandemic made this a common experience. Passionate advocates of remote work, Ali and Tam offer deliberate structures to make it work for you.” (from Amazon)
by Ali Greene, Tamara Sanderson, Matt Mullenweg·You?
by Ali Greene, Tamara Sanderson, Matt Mullenweg·You?
The future of work is here. You can no longer survive by copying and pasting old office techniques into a digital environment; it’s exhausting, unproductive, and unsuccessful. There is a better way! Are you ready to rethink everything you know about how remote works? Drawing on their years of experience working at remote companies DuckDuckGo and Automattic, plus dozens of interviews with leading experts, Ali Greene and Tamara Sanderson have written the ultimate playbook for managing remote teams. This book addresses challenges such as communicating effectively (with fewer meetings!), eliminating frustration over what tools to use, establishing team norms, and focusing on getting things done. You will learn how to work best remotely and create a workplace designed for freedom, flexibility, and focus. For decades, we’ve planned our lives around our work. Now it’s time to intentionally design work to fit our lives.
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“Implementing a positive employee experience and a positive customer experience takes wisdom and persistence. Fortunately, Tiffani Bova has both. This book is an invaluable, data-driven guide for leaders who are serious about growth.” (from Amazon)
by Tiffani Bova, Tom Peters·You?
by Tiffani Bova, Tom Peters·You?
A Wall Street Journal Bestseller! From the bestselling author of Growth IQ comes a guide to enhancing customer and employee experience simultaneously for unprecedented revenue growth In the war for customer acquisition, businesses invest millions of dollars to improve customer experience. They deliver packages faster, churn out new products, and endlessly revamp their UI, often putting greater strain on employees for diminishing returns. According to Tiffani Bova, this siloed focus on customer experience – without considering the impact on your staff – actually hinders growth in the long run. The most successful companies adopt an Experience Mindset that strengthens both employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) at the same time. Based on exclusive research from two Salesforce-sponsored studies of thousands of employees and c-suite executives, The Experience Mindset details exactly how your company can adopt an Experience Mindset, at scale. It’s not enough to know that happy employees equals happy customers. You must have an intentional, balanced approach to company strategy that involves all stakeholders – IT, Marketing, Sales, Operations, and HR – with KPIs and ownership over outcomes. In this ground-breaking book, filled with case studies of leading companies and never-before-seen research, you’ll learn: How people, processes, technology, and culture contribute to the “virtuous cycle” of EX and CX.Why the best companies have programs that minimize the customer’s effort as well as the employee’s effort (and how companies like Southwest and Best Buy get this right)How to effectively roll out technology solutions that boost both EX and CX (hard truth: only 20% of customer-facing employees believe technology makes their job easier. Employees want a seamless technology experience, just like your customers.)What metrics you can use to measure EX, CX, and ultimately, the effect of the two together. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Employees are the heart of your business. If you want to remain competitive in today’s marketplace, investing in people is no longer a nice-to-have, but rather a must have.
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“Whether CEO of a company, leader of a team, creator of promotional materials, or simply someone who enjoys hanging out with friends, anyone can benefit from becoming a better storyteller. This delightful book masterfully explains how. Supported by research and packed with engaging stories (of course!), The Perfect Story should be at the top of your reading list this year.” (from Amazon)
"Come for the engrossing content, and stay for the lessons that might just change how you talk, write, and lead.” —Adam Grant Learn how to take any story and make it perfect—from storytelling expert Karen Eber, whose popular TED Talk on the subject continues to be a source of inspiration for millions. What makes a story perfect? How do you tell the perfect story for any occasion? We live in a story world. Stories are a memorable and engaging way to differentiate yourself, build connection and trust, create new thinking, bring meaning to data, and even influence decision-making. But how do you turn a good story into a great story that informs, influences, and inspires? In The Perfect Story, Karen Eber—leadership consultant, professional keynote storyteller, and TED speaker—shares the science of storytelling to teach you to: Leverage the Five Factory Settings of the Brain to hack the art of storytellingBuild a toolkit of endless story ideasDefine the audience for your storyApply a memorable story structureEngage senses and emotionsTell stories with dataAvoid common storytelling mistakesUse your body to tell dynamic storiesEnsure your story doesn't manipulateNavigate and embrace the vulnerability of storytellingWithout relying on complicated models or one-size-fits-all prescriptions, this book makes storytelling accessible with practical and impactful steps for anyone to tell the perfect story for any occasion. Through interview vignettes, The Perfect Story also shares approaches from different storytellers, including the Sundance Institute cofounder, an executive producer of The Moth, the former creative director at Pixar, the TED Radio Hour podcast host, and many more. Whether you are leading a team, giving a presentation, hosting a podcast, selling a product or service, interviewing for a job, or giving a toast at a wedding, The Perfect Story will help you take your stories and make them perfect.
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“This unexpectedly engaging book is as practical as it is wise. Wedell-Wedellsborg shows us how to take off the cognitive and cultural blinders that prevent us from solving tough problems in our organizations and in our lives, and even makes it sound like fun.” (from Amazon)
by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg·You?
by Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg·You?
"The author makes a compelling case that we often start solving a problem before thinking deeply about whether we are solving the right problem. If you want the superpower of solving better problems, read this book." -- Eric Schmidt, former CEO, Google Are you solving the right problems? Have you or your colleagues ever worked hard on something, only to find out you were focusing on the wrong problem entirely? Most people have. In a survey, 85 percent of companies said they often struggle to solve the right problems. The consequences are severe: Leaders fight the wrong strategic battles. Teams spend their energy on low-impact work. Startups build products that nobody wants. Organizations implement "solutions" that somehow make things worse, not better. Everywhere you look, the waste is staggering. As Peter Drucker pointed out, there's nothing more dangerous than the right answer to the wrong question. There is a way to do better. The key is reframing, a crucial, underutilized skill that you can master with the help of this book. Using real-world stories and unforgettable examples like "the slow elevator problem," author Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg offers a simple, three-step method - Frame, Reframe, Move Forward - that anyone can use to start solving the right problems. Reframing is not difficult to learn. It can be used on everyday challenges and on the biggest, trickiest problems you face. In this visually engaging, deeply researched book, you’ll learn from leaders at large companies, from entrepreneurs, consultants, nonprofit leaders, and many other breakthrough thinkers. It's time for everyone to stop barking up the wrong trees. Teach yourself and your team to reframe, and growth and success will follow.
Recommended by Amy Edmondson
“Build Better Teams is an insightful book offering leaders a compelling and practical team building ‘code’ to optimize team performance. Starting with a riveting extreme case study of a team that hiked the entire Amazon, the book is refreshingly grounded in the academic research on what makes teams effective. The book illuminates the challenging relational work that drives great teamwork and provides a well-constructed way forward through this complexity.” (from Amazon)
by George Karseras·You?
by George Karseras·You?
High Performing Teams Foster Healthy Business Cultures and More!“Build Better Teams is an insightful book offering leaders a compelling and practical team building ‘code’ to optimize team performance.”—Professor Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business School Want to learn how to be a good leader today? Build Better Teams is an efficient tool to develop highly effective leaders along with their high performing teams in the post-Covid remote and hybrid working world. Learn how to be a good leader today! The workplace is constantly changing so learn how to navigate the changes with Build Better Teams. Most leadership management books are difficult to read, but George Karseras, executive team development coach and founder of TeamUp, has clearly laid out proven tools and examples to produce high performing teams. Learn about necessary and timely techniques to cultivate highly effective leaders at all levels of your organization. Team engagement in real-life examples! Learn how to be a good leader today! Combining over twenty years of experience in team development, Build Better Teams breaks down the historically poor track record of team engagement in organizations, references well-researched and relevant academic studies, and equips leaders with practical tools and techniques. Karseras includes stories, examples, and tips in a casual, easy to read format. These practices are great for hybrid or fully remote/virtual teams. Inside, you’ll find: Techniques and tools on how to foster high performance in your teamHow to develop a strong business culture and obtain leadership goalsHow to cultivate highly effective leadership styles and practices If you're looking for diversity training books or books for leaders like Stick Together, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, or Team of Teams, then you’ll love Build Better Teams.