The Clarity Advantage


Book Description

Ever wonder why some individuals effortlessly command attention and influence, while others struggle to be heard? The answer lies in mastering the art of communication. No one wants to be misunderstood. Yet, most people are unaware of how often their message is lost to verbal and non-verbal distractions and bad habits. Credibility, and ultimately influence, is easily lost with communication missteps. Influence requires credibility. And credibility requires critical thinking and clear communication. Sounds simple enough, but too often muddled messages get lost, and credibility suffers. In our on-line world, it’s never been more important. Mastering the art of communication and elevating your influence requires insights and thoughtful planning, but knowing where to start, steps to take, and pitfalls to avoid is no easy task. Don’t leave it to chance. Loaded with actionable coaching tips, The Clarity Advantage is your personal communication coach. Whether it's navigating meetings, emails, or online conversations, the authors guide you through the maze, offering insights to enhance your clarity and, subsequently, your credibility including: Vivid and relatable real-life stories illustrate the ten common pitfalls to clear communication in action. The five solid pathways to circumvent the ten communication pitfalls. These pathways not only capture colleagues' attention but also elevate your influence. Numerous practical tools and tips to help you master the 4 C’s of effective communication – critical thinking, clarity, credibility, and clout – including, to name just a few, the pocket guide to critical thinking, proven approaches to problem solving, how to unlock the powerful potential of questions, and the Crystal Rule: 10 guiding principles for trouble free communication. If you've ever felt sidelined in a meeting, struggled with unclear communication, or faced challenges to your credibility, you can elevate your influence to new heights.




The Advantage


Book Description

There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.




Making Great Strategy


Book Description

Making strategy requires undertaking major—often irreversible—decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. All leaders must formulate a clear course of action, yet many lack confidence in their ability to think systematically about their strategy. They struggle to apply the abstract lessons offered by conventional approaches to strategic analysis to their unique contexts. Making Great Strategy resolves these challenges with a straightforward, readily applicable framework. Jesper B. Sørensen and Glenn R. Carroll show that one factor underlies all sustainably successful strategies: a logically coherent argument that connects resources, capabilities, and environmental conditions to desired outcomes. They introduce a system for formulating and managing strategy through a set of three core activities: visualization, formalization and logic, and constructive argumentation. These activities can be implemented in any organization and are illustrated through examples and case studies from well-known companies such as Apple, Walmart, and The Economist. This book shows that while great strategic thinking is hard, it is not a mystery. Widely applicable and relevant for managers and leaders at all levels, especially executive teams charged with setting the course of their organizations, it is essential reading for anyone faced with practical problems of strategic management.




The Clarity Principle


Book Description

Turf wars, low morale, bad politics, and misguided strategies: these are issues that claim much of a leader’s time. But this parade of dysfunctions and messy “people” problems actually points to an organization confused about its core business, torn between competing ideas about what it is and wants to be—an organization facing an identity crisis. Strategy and leadership expert Chatham Sullivan argues that when the purpose of a business becomes confused, it is the leaders’ responsibility to restore clarity, especially in the face of tough strategic choices that have political, personal, and cultural consequences for the organization. Sullivan shows leaders how to take the decisive stand that clarifies their organization’s core purpose. Featuring compelling stories of leaders who have succumbed to and successfully resolved their organizations’ identity crises, The Clarity Principle bridges the gap between leadership and strategy and demonstrates the tremendous gains to be achieved by leaders willing to make tough choices.




The End of Competitive Advantage


Book Description

Are you at risk of being trapped in an uncompetitive business? Chances are the strategies that worked well for you even a few years ago no longer deliver the results you need. Dramatic changes in business have unearthed a major gap between traditional approaches to strategy and the way the real world works now. In short, strategy is stuck. Most leaders are using frameworks that were designed for a different era of business and based on a single dominant idea—that the purpose of strategy is to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage. Once the premise on which all strategies were built, this idea is increasingly irrelevant. Now, Columbia Business School professor and globally recognized strategy expert Rita Gunther McGrath argues that it’s time to go beyond the very concept of sustainable competitive advantage. Instead, organizations need to forge a new path to winning: capturing opportunities fast, exploiting them decisively, and moving on even before they are exhausted. She shows how to do this with a new set of practices based on the notion of transient competitive advantage. This book serves as a new playbook for strategy, one based on updated assumptions about how the world works, and shows how some of the world’s most successful companies use this method to compete and win today. Filled with compelling examples from “growth outlier” firms such as Fujifilm, Cognizant Technology Solutions, Infosys, Yahoo! Japan, and Atmos Energy, The End of Competitive Advantage is your guide to renewed success and profitable growth in an economy increasingly defined by transient advantage.




Mindwise


Book Description

Winner of the 2015 Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) Why are we sometimes blind to the minds of others, treating them like objects or animals instead? Why do we talk to our cars, or the stars, as if there is a mind that can hear us? Why do we so routinely believe that others think, feel, and want what we do when, in fact, they do not? And why do we think we understand our spouses, family, and friends so much better than we actually do? In this illuminating book, leading social psychologist Nicholas Epley introduces us to what scientists have learned about our ability to understand the most complicated puzzle on the planet—other people—and the surprising mistakes we so routinely make. Mindwise will not turn others into open books, but it will give you the wisdom to revolutionize how you think about them—and yourself.




Clarity Wins


Book Description




Big Shifts Ahead


Book Description

"Demographics determine the direction of your business. Demographic trends can be overwhelming, misleading, confusing, conflicting, and difficult to predict. Not anymore. John Burns and Chris Porter wrote this book to help make demographic trends easier to understand, quantify, and anticipate. Readers of this book will have a huge competitive advantage because they will be making decisions with facts, and they will be better able to adjust their strategies when unanticipated events shift prevailing trends."--book jacket




The Power of Clarity


Book Description

An engaging guide on how to bring clarity on both an individual and organizational level and improve workplace efficiency. Organizations are stressed. Innovation and global competition have become the source of relentless pressure and customers have never had higher expectations. Corporate efforts to improve everyday productivity and boost profits are producing diminishing returns. Yet a new frontier of enormous opportunity to improve results is hidden in plain sight. According to a Fortune 500 study, as much as 80% of working time is lost to tiresome meetings, unclear expectations, difficult decisions, and other wasteful delays. Overcoming the lack of clarity behind this waste - on both an individual and organizational basis - would reap huge rewards. In The Power of Clarity, Ann Latham exposes the unrecognized confusion and explains how to eliminate it. This fascinating guide to workplace productivity and effectiveness draws upon extensive research and case studies to demonstrate how you can get better results in far less time while also increasing confidence and commitment.