The power of gender difference, not gender equality, is a secret source for success. Some smart businesses are starting to wake up to this fact. This book explores why and how. Properly valuing brain gender diversity in the workplace is one of the biggest and largely untapped sources of competitive advantage for modern businesses. Recent advances in neuroscience provide the key to unlocking it. Modern research shows that there are gender-based differences in the brain – it’s just not as simple as a binary between a ‘male brain’ and ‘female brain’. In fact, our brains are like a mosaic where many of the tiles are available in thousands of shades on a spectrum between pink and blue. The problem is that our workplaces tend to be governed by structures, processes and cultures that are practically pure blue. All the brains in the business that are elsewhere on the spectrum cannot thrive as they might, so sources of productivity, creativity and agility go untapped. Anyone who manages people needs to understand how the brain works and the impact it has on how people work together as teams. Anyone who wants to unlock the talent and productivity of all of their people needs to understand how recent findings around male- and female-type brains should shape the way they manage. Leading applied neuroscientists and international corporate coaches Kate Lanz and Paul Brown show you why and how to access all the brains in your business.

A Top Financial Times Recommended Business Book, The Brains and Brawn Company is the grounded, clear-sighted guide you need to blend digital and traditional business functions for long-term competitive advantage Business leaders are continually told they need to embrace digital disruption wholeheartedly to thrive in the 21st Century. Legacy companies, we hear, are all doomed to fail unless they double down on the latest digital innovations, and disruptors are ordained to take over the world. Digital innovation is the answer to everything. False! Nothing in life or business is ever that simple. In The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical, venture capitalist and Stanford Business School lecturer Robert Siegel brings the digital innovation conversation back down to earth. He shows that, while important, digital is only part of the answer―and it’s never the only answer. The vast majority of successful leaders from both incumbents and disruptors focus as much on things like logistics, manufacturing, and distribution as they do on digital innovation. In fact, many established companies are successfully countering young upstarts in other creative ways, and many new organizations are learning from their older brethren. Siegel shows how to create lasting profits and growth in the smartest way possible: by creating a solid partnership between digital innovation and traditional business operations—in other words, by marrying brains and brawn. He lays out the core competencies that today’s industry leaders have mastered and explains how: Charles Schwab uses cutting-edge analytics to better serve millions of investors without violating its original code of values. Align Technology transformed orthodontia by developing creative new business models along with new products. Kaiser Permanente taps into the power of empathy to improve patient satisfaction while controlling costs. Instacart balances ownership and partnerships to balance the needs of four key constituencies. Target, Best Buy, and Home Depot found different ways to blend the best aspects of physical retail with innovative e-commerce. Desktop Metal is innovating high-volume yet affordable production methods that can revolutionize manufacturing. Filled with original research and case studies of Daimler, 23andMe, Instacart, AB InBev, Google, and many other companies, The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical provides practical, proven insights and advice for bridging the gulf between digital vs. physical, disruptor vs. incumbent, startup world vs. Fortune 500, and tech culture vs. industrial culture. The Brains and Brawn Company: How Leading Organizations Blend the Best of Digital and Physical provides everything you need to set your company apart from your competitors in real and measurable ways—and take the lead in your industry for years to come.

The long-awaited update of the classic guide to outperforming the competition using Herrmann International's trademark Whole Brain Methodology Packed with new research, updated examples, and more actionable content, The Whole Brain Business Book outlines four basic thinking styles--administrator, talker, problem-solver, dreamer--corresponding to the four quadrants of the brain and explains that many are dominated by only one quadrant. By getting out of the "brain rut" and channeling all four quadrants, business people and organizations can become more flexible, creative, and competitive. Herrmann-Nehdi uses her extensive research and experience working with her father and expert practitioners across the globe to highlight new research developments, replace outdated information, incorporate new stories and real-world examples while building on the core applications of The Whole Brain Business Book.

Leadership is a set of abilities with which a lucky few are born. They're the natural relationship builders, master negotiators and persuaders, and agile and strategic thinkers. The good news for the rest of us is that those abilities can be developed. In The Leader's Brain, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative director Michael Platt explains how.

“One of my favorite books of the year. It completely reshaped how I think about information and how and why I take notes.” —Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive A revolutionary approach to enhancing productivity, creating flow, and vastly increasing your ability to capture, remember, and benefit from the unprecedented amount of information all around us. For the first time in history, we have instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge. There has never been a better time to learn, to contribute, and to improve ourselves. Yet, rather than feeling empowered, we are often left feeling overwhelmed by this constant influx of information. The very knowledge that was supposed to set us free has instead led to the paralyzing stress of believing we’ll never know or remember enough. Now, this eye-opening and accessible guide shows how you can easily create your own personal system for knowledge management, otherwise known as a Second Brain. As a trusted and organized digital repository of your most valued ideas, notes, and creative work synced across all your devices and platforms, a Second Brain gives you the confidence to tackle your most important projects and ambitious goals. Discover the full potential of your ideas and translate what you know into more powerful, more meaningful improvements in your work and life by Building a Second Brain.

In Your Brain at Work, David Rock takes readers inside the heads—literally—of a modern two-career couple as they mentally process their workday to reveal how we can better organize, prioritize, remember, and process our daily lives. Rock, the author of Quiet Leadership and Personal Best, shows how it’s possible for this couple, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today’s overwhelming work environment but succeed in it—and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.