Axiom Business Book Award Silver Medalist in Leadership • Soundview Best Business Book A “Highest Rated CEO” who has transformed his organization into a billion-dollar company and a “Top Place to Work” shows leaders how truly prioritizing employees isn’t just good for employees—it’s good for business. Imagine a company where everybody loves to work, where employees feel not just “satisfied” but truly cared for, respected, and energized. Think of the impact this would have on recruitment, retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, and overall performance. Aron Ain, the award-winning CEO of Kronos, a global provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions, believes that anything is possible when people are inspired. By embracing employee development and engagement as a growth strategy, Ain transformed his company’s culture and built a billion-dollar business. This book takes leaders and managers inside Kronos’s highly admired WorkInspired culture, showing them the surprisingly simple rules to follow to replicate that success. Ain’s inspiring guide reveals the best practices that have earned Kronos distinctions on coveted lists, such as Glassdoor’s 100 Best Places to Work, Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For, Forbes’s America’s Best Employers, and the Boston Globe’s Top Places to Work. These include over-communicating and truth-telling, trusting your people again and again, holding managers accountable for being great at what they do, allowing employees flexible schedules and open vacation time, challenging your people to put the company out of business with new and revolutionary ideas, and welcoming back boomerang employees. Many executives talk about how “their people are their greatest asset.” Ain challenges leaders to “walk the talk” and put people first, whether they oversee a team of five or an organization of 500,000. When they do, employees won’t be the only ones who thank them. Customers and shareholders will, too.

This collection of brief essays by thought-leaders, scholars, activists, psychologists, and social scientists imagines new workplace structures and policies that promote decent and fair work for all members of society, especially those who are most vulnerable. The world of work has been deteriorating for decades and the very institution of work needs to be systematically understood, critiqued, reimagined, and rebuilt. This book offers thoughtful suggestions for new work arrangements, individual strategies for enhancing one’s work life, and recommendations for innovative systemic and institutional reforms. The collection offers critical analyses in conjunction with constructive solutions on rebuilding work, providing direction and context for ongoing debates and policy discussions about work. The book will be of interest to activists, policy makers, management and leaders, scholars, professionals, students, and general readers interested work-based reform efforts and social change.

“You are meant to succeed in the work you love. Your desire will take you all the way.” — Tama J. Kieves What if everything you thought you needed to do to succeed was actually standing in the way of your success? Tama Kieves, Harvard-lawyer-turned-career-coach, has spent the last decade crossing the United States and Canada, speaking to tens of thousands of people and sharing her inspiring story of moving from a career that was killing her to a life that has uplifted her, chronicled in her first book, This Time I Dance!: Creating the Work You Love. She has mentored thousands of people who, with her help, have followed their passion, and now live their dream lives. And now she takes us to the next step in our journey… Within you is your purpose—your destiny—that will lead you to your greatest fulfillment, and your greatest success. What Kieves discovered in her own journey is that the way to success is an inspired path, not a linear one. She brings her mentoring ideas and actions together in her latest work, Inspired and Unstoppable. In this motivating book, Kieves teaches that it is only in unleashing this purpose that you can become truly happy and satisfied. Through these teachings, she will help you move into your “brilliant power.” She shares the mental and emotional impact of this journey—the fears, doubts, and boogeymen that arise—and how to become an unstoppable warrior for your life’s work and desires. This book will help you stay connected to your desires and shift your innermost thinking. When you do, inspired actions will seem to fall directly out of the sky, and onto your plate. You will naturally outpace anything any expert could ever tell you. You don’t need the steps, when you have the moves. Beautifully written, Inspired & Unstoppable also includes success stories from Tama’s life and the lives of others who have made their dreams their reality, as well as practices that will create positive momentum, and “Inspired Successisms”—delightful, quick bites of wisdom peppered throughout the book. It also includes guidelines on how to create your own “Inspired Success Circle”—a way of moving forward with the support of friends and loved ones. Practical, empowering, inspirational, galvanizing—Inspired & Unstoppable is the touchstone to (finally) living your wildest dreams and greatest desires.

Despite being a game-changer in powering human growth, discovery remains a mystery. How can it produce ahas and insights to meet the challenge of new realities and reimagine organizational management? This book lays out a process of inquiry that drives belief change and leads to discoveries, empowering leaders, groups, and the organization with a powerful tool for navigating an uncertain future. Discovery lights the intellectual spark for every breakthrough in science, technology, pharmaceuticals, and more—but fear and inertia can harden beliefs and practices that no longer fit the new realities. To counter this, discovery can be cultivated rather than suppressed, using a new, three-phase process, a management practice that consistently generates the ahas and insights that underpin all transformation. Based on years of research and real-world observation, this book inspires and equips leaders at all levels to champion this discovery process and fuel genuine, sustained change in their communities and organizations. Accompanied by a website that includes proprietary tools, audio and video clips, and a downloadable workbook, this book is an enriching resource for current and aspiring leaders and managers across industries, as well as management consultants, HR professionals, corporate educators, and business students. .

WINNER: American Book Fest Best Book Award 2020 - Business: General WINNER: NYC Big Book Award 2020 - Self-Help: General SHORTLISTED: Business Book Awards 2021 - Personal Development & Wellbeing Modern life is complicated, much more so than it used to be. Acclaimed author and social entrepreneur, Julia Hobsbawm, shows you a simpler way. The Simplicity Principle challenges the assumption that all things that are complex have to stay that way. It helps keep things as lean, simple and focused as possible. Smartphone users experience concentration interruptions every 12 minutes of the day, there are over 250 billion emails sent every 24 hours and by 2021 the internet will have created more than 3.3 zettabytes of data. Yet complexity doesn't have to dominate, complicate or clutter our lives. Based on a hexagonal model, this book shows you that it's easy to streamline and simplify both your professional and personal lives with lessons based on the natural world. For anyone who feels that life can be too much, The Simplicity Principle will help you break free of the endless choices and complexities that we face in the world today. It's time to gain control of your focus and productivity, and most importantly, KEEP IT SIMPLE.

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.