Sandy Weaver has narrated 6 audiobooks on Listento.it by 10 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 12 ratings. The most-rated is Going Horizontal.
Going Horizontal
Summary
Hierarchy in organizations is obsolete.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 an 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.
©2018 Samantha Slade (P)2018 Samantha Slade
The Critical Few: Energize Your Company's Culture by Choosing What Really Matters
Summary
In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why? The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational - that’s what makes it so hard to work with, but that’s also what makes it so powerful. For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center’s proven methodology for identifying your culture’s three most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people’s emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; and authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of “emotional intuition” or social connectedness. By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap in to a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.
©2018 PwC (P)2018 PwC
Mastering Marketing Agility
Summary
The leading authority on agile marketing shows how to build marketing operations that can pivot freely and yet remain committed to priorities. As a marketer, are you tired of chasing marketing fads and algorithm rumors that seem to change every couple of months? This guide to building the perfect marketing department will help you achieve the latest and greatest without having to rebuild your operations from scratch every time the wind shifts. Agile strategies have been the accepted modus operandi for software development for two decades, and marketing is poised to follow in its footsteps. As the audiences we market to become ever more digital, agile frameworks are emerging as the best and only way to manage marketing. This book is a signpost showing the way toward the agile future of marketing operations, explaining how every role, from social media intern up to chief marketing officer, can work in unison, responding to the market’s demanding challenges without losing focus on the big picture. You will learn what it takes for marketing agility to thrive — customer focus, transparency, continuous improvement, adaptability, trust, bias for action, and courage — along with the antipatterns that can drag you down. Most important, you will learn how to implement the systems, strategies, and practices that will truly transform your marketing operations.
©2020 Andrea Fryrear (P)2020 Andrea Fryrear
Burnout to Breakthrough
Summary
It's official. For the first time, the World Health Organization has classified burnout as a health problem. Renowned motivational speaker Eileen McDargh proposes that to tackle it, we must learn to break out of energy-draining thoughts and behaviors. Resilience, she argues, is strictly a matter of energy management - by better managing your energy, you can both build resiliency and overcome burnout. Breakthrough happens when our energy is consciously distributed to what matters most in our lives. So after a short survey that will tell you where you fit in a burnout and resiliency profile, McDargh helps pinpoint the causes of your burnout and examine the energy demands that keep you from refueling and recharging. She provides an in-depth energy analysis and gives you the keys to master the four dimensions that can give you a resilience breakthrough: head, heart, hands, and humor. McDargh guides the listener through the process of identifying energy drains and implementing strategies for handling them, whatever phase of life you are in. Her intention is to help you not only to successfully manage work and life demands but also make even larger strides in understanding how to put together a life by design and not by default.
©2020 Eileen McDargh (P)2020 Eileen McDargh
Up Is Not the Only Way
Summary
Over and over, managers hear employees asking, "Do I have a future here?" Many managers and leaders struggle with the fact that they simply cannot deliver vertical moves or promotions, for every employee who wants, or even deserves that option. Up Is Not the Only Way, introduces the concept of flexibility and agility and the multiple ways employees can grow, learn, and build a career, as the way to solve the problems of immobility, and retention. Managers need the tools for building rich dialogue about career mobility, and dynamic workplaces that demand resilient talent at all levels. The key is communicating effectively and comfortably around the topic of career options, that span a spectrum of employee engagement. From those who are ready and want to move, to those who are satisfied to stay right where they are, and even for those who have no idea what the next opportunity might be, this audiobook provides a way through these tough conversations. Up Is Not the Only Way, distills the solutions to complex issues involving engagement and retention, in a simple and practical way.
©2017 Beverly Kaye, Lindy Williams, and Lynn Cowart (P)2017 Beverly Kaye, Lindy Williams, and Lynn Cowart
The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up
Summary
What do you do when the biggest threat to your project is your boss? It’s not that your boss is out to get you. In fact, bosses generally mean well. But clueless leadership from a well-intentioned boss can sometimes cause more damage than a criminal mastermind tying your project to the railroad tracks. The Unwritten Rules of Managing Up provides refreshingly practical and candid insight into the best practices and techniques that project managers have successfully used for decades to manage a wide variety of senior-level stakeholders - ranging from perfectly competent and pleasant to downright dysfunctional and inept. While managing up is an incredibly valuable skill for virtually any type of boss (not just the difficult ones), the audiobook includes recommendations for managing six particularly challenging - and common - types of senior leaders. They are the bombastic tornado, who takes over meetings without realizing it; the wishful thinker, who regularly asks the impossible; the clueless chameleon, who can’t quite decide what he or she really wants (but still holds you responsible for delivering it); the MIA boss, who is just not around enough; the meddlesome micromanager, who hovers and insists you complete a task his or her way; and the naked emperor, who falls in love with his or her own crazy ideas. Brownlee also offers basic techniques to use with any boss, even a great one. This audiobook is not just for professionals seeking to enhance their workplace effectiveness, but also for senior leaders interested in addressing their blind spots and coaching others toward a more collaborative, results-focused leadership approach.
©2018 Dana Brownlee (P)2018 Dana Brownlee