Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Leadership

For his entire childhood, Jesse Cole dreamed of pitching in the Majors. Now, he has a life in baseball that only he could have imagined: he met the love of his life in the industry; they shaped Savannah, Georgia’s professional team into the league champion Savannah Bananas; and now the Bananas have restyled baseball itself into something all their own: Banana Ball.

The 25th Secretary of Defense takes listeners behind the scenes to reveal the inner workings of the Pentagon, its vital mission, and what it takes to lead it. The Pentagon is the headquarters of the single largest institution in America: the Department of Defense. The DOD employs millions of Americans. It owns and operates more real estate and spends more money than any other entity. It manages the world’s largest and most complex information network and performs more R&D than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined.

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

Ilya Strebulaev has spent the last two decades at Stanford studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making, and the reasons behind the success and failure of corporate innovation efforts. Alex Dang, a senior leader at McKinsey and Amazon, has seen up close the impact VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can have on a business’ success. Together in The Venture Mindset, they present nine distinct principles that can help anyone looking to transform their business and achieve extraordinary results, no matter the industry.

The family-owned business of Allen & Augustine has manufactured high-quality chairs for decades. Its people take pride in their work and feel loyal to their owners and management team. But this long-revered company is now at a crossroads, hurt by a tough economy, foreign competition, and a cash crunch. The air is filled with the scent of uncertainty, anxiety, perhaps even panic. Enter Ben, the ambitious young executive assigned by his firm to promote a merger that will rescue Allen & Augustine.

In 2011, Tim Cook took on an impossible task - following in the footsteps of one of history's greatest business visionaries, Steve Jobs. Facing worldwide scrutiny, Cook (who was often described as shy, unassuming and unimaginative) defied all expectations. Under Cook's leadership Apple has soared: its stock has nearly tripled to become the world's first trillion-dollar company. From the massive growth of the iPhone to new victories like the Apple Watch, Cook is leading Apple to a new era of success.

BE 2.0 is a new and improved version of the book that Jim Collins and Bill Lazier wrote years ago. In BE 2.0, Jim Collins honors his mentor, Bill Lazier, who passed away in 2005, and reexamines the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship with his 2020 perspective. The book includes the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship, as well as four new chapters and 15 new essays. BE 2.0 pulls together the key concepts across Collins' 30 years of research into one integrated framework called The Map.

The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead - and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they're mopping floors and scrubbing toilets.

The Song of Significance is a rousing contemplation on work: why it is the way it is, why it’s gotten so bad, what all of us–especially leaders–can do to make it better.

No organization is totally free from destructive friction; the forces that make it harder, more complicated and sometimes downright impossible to get things done. Drawing on years of research and featuring case studies on the likes of Uber, Netflix and Boeing, The Friction Project teaches listeners how to become 'friction fixers'. Stanford professors Sutton and Rao unpack how we should think and act like trustees of others' time. They provide friction forensics to help listeners identify where to avert and repair bad friction, and where to maintain and inject good friction.

There are enormous differences between managing and coaching. Yet many companies and organizations encourage their leaders to coach teams without ever teaching them how. Nathan Jamail, a leading consultant, professional speaker, and the president of his own group of businesses, trains coaches at several Fortune 500 companies and learned that it takes not only different skills to achieve success, but a truly effective coach needs an organizational culture that creates and multiplies the success of every motivated team member.

In this inspiring guide to discovering a vocation that feeds your heart and soul, Askinosie describes his quest to discover more meaningful work - a search that led him to volunteering in the palliative care wing of a hospital, to a Trappist monastery where he became inspired by the monks' focus on "being" rather than "doing", and eventually traipsing through jungles across the globe in search of excellent cocoa bean farmers to make award-winning chocolate. Askinosie shares his hard-won insights into doing work that reflects one's values and purpose in life.

What is strategic thinking exactly? Are we born with it, or can we nurture it? As a distinct and important capability in leaders, strategic thinking is a remarkably poorly defined, little understood concept, confined to management courses and board meetings. But in The Art of Strategic Thinking, world-renowned expert Michael Watkins shows leaders how they can benefit from it, as long as they have the tools to nurture it.

Throughout history, the concept of command—as both a way to achieve objectives and as an assertion of authority—has been essential to military action and leadership. But, as Sir Lawrence Freedman shows, it is also deeply political. Military command has been reconstructed and revolutionized since the Second World War by nuclear warfare, small-scale guerrilla land operations and cyber interference. Freedman takes a global perspective, systematically investigating its practice and politics since 1945 through a wide range of conflicts.

The Go-Giver Influencer is a story about two young, ambitious businesspeople: Gillian Waters, the chief buyer for Smith & Banks, a midsize company that operates a national chain of pet accessory stores; and Jackson Hill, the founder of Angels Clothed in Fur, a small but growing manufacturer of all-natural pet foods. Each has something the other wants.

In this New York Times best seller, College football’s most colorful, endearing, and successful pioneer, Steve Spurrier, shares his story of a life in football - from growing up in Tennessee to winning the Heisman Trophy to playing and coaching in the pros to leading the Florida Gators to six SEC Championships and a National Championship to elevating the South Carolina program to new heights - and coaching like nobody else.

Several years ago Sam Walker set out to answer one of the most hotly debated questions in sport: what are the greatest teams of all time? He devised a formula and applied it to thousands of teams across the world from the English Premier League to the NFL. When he was done, he had a list of the 16 most dominant teams ever. At that point he became obsessed with another more complex question: what did these freak teams have in common?

Ken Segall's first book, Insanely Simple, was based on observations gained from 12 years working as Steve Jobs' advertising agency creative director, first with NeXT and then with Apple. He saw firsthand that Jobs looked at everything through the lens of simplicity. His obsession with simplicity was visible not just in Apple's products. You could see it in the way the company was organized and how it innovated, advertised, sold at retail, and provided customer service.

In this essential audiobook, leading business growth strategist David Meerman Scott and fandom expert Reiko Scott explore the neuroscience of fandom and interview young entrepreneurs, veteran business owners, startup founders, nonprofits, and companies big and small to pinpoint which practices separate organizations that flourish from those stuck in stagnation. They lay out a road map for converting customers’ ardor into buying power, pulling one-of-a-kind examples from a wide range of organizations.

Brandon Webb has run life-threatening missions in the world's worst trouble spots, whether that meant jumping out of airplanes, taking down hostile ships on the open sea, or rolling prisoners in the dead of night in the mountains of Afghanistan. As a Navy SEAL, he learned how to manage the natural impulse to panic in the face of terrifying situations. As media CEO and national television commentator, he has learned how to apply those same skills in civilian life.