Effective communication skills are essential in every aspect of life. When done well, communication can lead people to the mutual understanding that is needed to make progress. Unfortunately, many people feel that they do not have the confidence or skills required to talk with others. This may be due to fear of rejection, concerns about how one appears to others, or a lack of comfort talking to people one does not know. In How to Talk to Absolutely Anyone, Mark Rhodes provides a four-stage framework for personal interactions and provides practical tools to help people become better at talking to others in any environment.
Companies fail to innovate when they put more energy and resources into generating “big ideas” than they do implementing them. In The Other Side of Innovation, Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble demonstrate how the execution of an innovation initiative is just as important to the process as generating the idea itself. Drawn from their ten years of innovation research on the world’s most respected companies, the authors offer innovation leaders the framework to build teams and plans capable of facilitating the successful execution of any innovation initiative.
The HBR Guide to Getting the Right Work Done brings together more than two dozen articles on personal productivity, including many excerpts from the pages of the Harvard Business Review. The Harvard Business School Publishing collection provides advice on prioritizing work, avoiding distractions and procrastination, managing mental and emotional energy, and developing good work habits. It teaches how to delegate effectively and secure a pay raise by aligning work with corporate objectives. Readers can choose from a number of simple tools, such as to-do lists and e-mail automation, to reduce stress.
The path to success in the corporate world looks very different than in the past. Organizational structures have changed; they have become flatter, resulting in fewer management positions. Employees’ views about work-life balance have also changed, and people need varying degrees of job flexibility at different times of their lives. One potential solution to these challenges is for organizations to shift from a rigid corporate ladder for advancement to a corporate lattice where employees can move laterally and up and down over time. In Mass Career Customization, Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg describe why this model is better than traditional approaches, like flexible working arrangements, and discuss what steps companies can take to adopt the Mass Career Customization (MCC) framework.
