This book reflects Drucker's vitality, infinite curiosity, and interest in people, ideas, and the force behind them. His book is a personal and informal account of the rich life of an independent man of letters, a life that spans eight decades and two continents. He writes with wit and spirit about people he has encountered, including Sigmund Freud, Henry Luce, Alfred Sloan, John L. Lewis, and Marshal McLuhan.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, well-known authors and teachers, identify the causes of the knowing-doing gap and explain how to close it. The message is clear-firms that turn knowledge into action avoid the "smart talk trap." Executives must use plans, analysis, meetings, and presentations to inspire deeds, not as substitutes for action. Companies that act on their knowledge also eliminate fear, abolish destructive internal competition, measure what matters, and promote leaders who understand the work people do in their firms. The authors use examples from dozens of firms that show how some overcome the knowing-doing gap, why others try but fail, and how still others avoid the gap in the first place.
The Knowing-Doing Gap is sure to resonate with executives everywhere who struggle daily to make their firms both know and do what they know. It is a refreshingly candid, useful, and realistic guide for improving performance in today's business.
Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton Close The Knowing-Doing Gap and Win Management General's Management "Book Of The Year" for 2000
The Knowing-Doing Gap shows how insincere talk, faulty memory, irrational fear, misguided measurement, and errant internal competition can block companies from taking good things they already know and converting them into things they can do-now! The book is brash, fiery in its opinions and phrasings, willing to impose "tough love" on managers who may be too easily content with high-gloss yet merely cosmetic fads. Pfeffer and Sutton close the knowing-doing gap; open their book and you can too!"
—Management General, December 2000
In today's über-competitive climate, you can't just wing it when you graduate and count on finding a great job (or a great job finding you). It pays to figure out your interests early, so you can decide what additional schooling—and tuition debt—makes sense for your chosen field. In What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens, career authorities Carol Christen and Richard N. Bolles not only help you plan for these decisions, but also help you define the unique passions that will lead you to your dream job. With new chapters on social media and sustainable jobs—along with all-new profiles of twentysomethings who've found work in solar energy, magazine writing, and more—this new edition has all the nitty-gritty details you need to get started now. Most importantly, it's packed with the big-picture advice that will set you up to land the job that's perfect for who you are—and who you want to be.
Today's economic realities have reset our expectations of what retirement is, yet there's still the promise for what it can be: a life stage filled with more freedom and potential than ever before. Given the new normal, how do you plan for a future filled with prosperity, health, and happiness? As a companion to What Color Is Your Parachute?, the world's best-selling career book, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement offers both a holistic, big-picture look at these years as well as practical tools and exercises to help you build a life full of security, vitality, and community.
This second edition contains updates throughout, including a section on Social Security, an in-depth exercise on values and how they inform your retirement map, and the one-of-a-kind resource for organizing the sea of information on finances and mental and physical health: the Retirement Well-Being Profile. More than a guide on where to live, how to stay active, or which investments to choose, What Color Is Your Parachute? for Retirement helps you develop a detailed picture of your ideal retirement, so that-whether you're planning retirement or are there already-you can take a comprehensive approach to make the most of these vital years.
About the Author:
Howard Figler, Ph.D., was formerly the career center director at the University of Texas at Austin and director of counseling at Dickinson College
Does your family need a five-star general at the helm? A psychologist? A referee? Ken Blanchard, best-selling co-author of The One Minute Manager and Lead Like Jesus, points to a better role model: the Son of God. Joined by veteran parents and authors Phil Hodges and Tricia Goyer, renowned business mentor Blanchard shows how every family member benefits when parents take the reins as servant-leaders. Moms and dads will see themselves in a whole new light—as life-changers who get their example, strength, and joy from following Jesus at home. This user-friendly book’s practical principles and personal stories mark the path to a truly Christ-centered family, where integrity, love, grace, self-sacrifice, and forgiveness make all the difference. Tyndale House Publishers
In this hands-on guide, Michael Watkins, a noted expert on leadership transitions, offers proven strategies for moving successfully into a new role at any point in one's career. The First 90 Days provides a framework for transition acceleration that will help leaders diagnose their situations, craft winning transition strategies, and take charge quickly.
Practical examples illustrate how to learn about new organizations, build teams, create coalitions, secure early wins, and lay the foundation for longer-term success. In addition, Watkins provides strategies for avoiding the most common pitfalls new leaders encounter, and shows how individuals can protect themselves-emotionally as well as professionally-during what is often an intense and vulnerable period.
Concise and actionable, this is the survival guide no new leader should be without.
"This book can help the recently promoted cope with those frightening career moments that arise as soon as you get what you're after." -BookPage
Whether you are succeeding a much-admired boss or charged with implementing sweeping, potentially unsettling change initiatives, a new role is fraught with obstacles. To ensure that your first steps in a new job will lead to enduring success, Right from the Start lays out an action-oriented framework to follow during the early months of a transition. Dan Ciampa and Michael D. Watkins prepare you for the often-treacherous task of navigating an organization's strategy, politics, and culture so that you can smoothly and effectively get to work on your new agenda. Right from the Start combines this tactical advice with absorbing profiles of CEOs, COOs, and EVPs who candidly discuss their experiences—the successes and the failures—with transitioning to a new leadership role.
Author Biography:
Dan Ciampa is an adviser to leaders moving into new positions and on creating a culture that sustains new technology and operational improvements. Michael D. Watkins is the founder of Genesis Advisers, a leadership and strategy consultancy. Watkins is the author of The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at all Levels.
2006 'Best Of' lists:
This concise, practical book provides a roadmap that will help new government leaders at all levels accelerate their transitions by overcoming nine transition challenges, ranging from clarifying expectations to defining goals to building a team to managing personal stress. The authors also offer detailed strategies for avoiding major transition traps.
Zeroing in on the challenges faced by new government leaders, The First 90 Days in Government is the indispensable guide for anyone seeking to lead and succeed in the public sector.
The closing decades of the twentieth century have been characterized as a period of disruption and discontinuity in which the structure and meaning of economy, polity, and society have been radically altered. In this volume, Drucker focuses with great clarity and perception on the forces of change that are transforming the economic landscape and creating tomorrow's society.
The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic "right-brain" thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn't.
Drawing on research from around the world, Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) outlines the six fundamentally human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment—and reveals how to master them. A Whole New Mind takes readers to a daring new place, and a provocative and necessary new way of thinking about a future that's already here.
View the animated video for The Adventures of Johnny Bunko and check out popular books for the new graduate here.
There’s never been a career guide like The Adventures of Johnny Bunko by Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). Told in manga—the Japanese comic book format that’s an international sensation—it’s the fully illustrated story of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job.
Johnny Bunko is new to the Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early months as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to rethink his approach. Step by step he builds a career, illustrating as he does the six core lessons of finding, keeping, and flourishing in satisfying work. A groundbreaking guide to surviving and flourishing in any career, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko is smart, engaging and insightful, and offers practical advice for anyone looking for a life of rewarding work.
Watch a QuickTime trailer for this book.
Forget everything you thought you knew about how to motivate people at work, at school, at home. It's wrong. As Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others) explains in his paradigm-shattering book Drive, the secret to high performance and satisfaction in today's world is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does and how that affects every aspect of our lives. He demonstrates that while the old-fashioned carrot-and-stick approach worked successfully in the 20th century, it's precisely the wrong way to motivate people for today's challenges. In Drive, he reveals the three elements of true motivation:
*Autonomy the desire to direct our own lives
*Mastery the urge to get better and better at something that matters
*Purpose the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves
Along the way, he takes us to companies that are enlisting new approaches to motivation and introduces us to the scientists and entrepreneurs who are pointing a bold way forward.
Drive is bursting with big ideas the rare book that will change how you think and transform how you live.
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