Implementing and Sustaining Your Strategic Plan

What if you could become a great manager, leader, and communicator faster?  The Leader Lab  is a high-speed leadership intensive, equipping managers with the Swiss Army Knife of skills that help you handle the toughest situations that come your way.  Through painstaking research and training over 200,000 managers, authors Tania Luna and LeeAnn Renninger, PhD (co-CEOs of LifeLabs Learning) identified the most important skills that distinguish great managers from average. Most importantly, they’ve discovered how to help people rapidly develop these core skills. The result? You quickly achieve extraordinary team performance and a culture of engagement, fulfillment, and belonging.  Too often, folks are promoted without any training for the countless crucial responsibilities of the modern manager: being part coach, part player, part therapist, part role model.  The Leader Lab  serves as your definitive guide to what it means to be a great manager today – and how to become a great leader faster. This book is based on LifeLabs Learning’s wildly successful workshop series. It combines research, tools, and the playful, fluff-free style that’s made LifeLabs the go-to professional development resource for over 1,000 innovative companies around the world.  You’ll learn how to:  Quickly improve performance and engagement Handle tough conversations with confidence Identify and resolve the underlying issues holding your team back Create a culture of inclusion Spark innovation Reduce stress and burnout Finetune your coaching, productivity, feedback, one-on-one, strategic thinking, meeting facilitation, people development, and leading change skills Learn the same high-leverage skills that new managers at the world’s most innovative organizations are using to create impactful change in business and in life This interactive, accessible, and brain-friendly resource will help you and your team ramp up and reach the tipping point of managerial greatness fast.

China has gone from being a marginal to a leading power in Africa in just over two decades. Its striking ascendancy in the continent is commonly thought to have been primarily driven by economic interests, especially resources like oil. This book argues instead that politics defines the ‘new era’ of China–Africa relations, and examines the importance of politics across a range of areas, from foreign policy to debt, development and the Xi Jinping incarnation of the China model. Going beyond superficial depictions of China’s engagement as predatory or benign, this book explores how Africa is – and isn’t – integral to China’s global ambitions, from the Belt and Road Initiative to strategic competition with the United States. It demonstrates how African actors constrain, shape and use China’s engagement for their own purposes. As China seeks to protect its more established interests and Chinese citizens, it also shows how security has become a particularly notable new area of engagement. This innovative book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date guide to contemporary China–Africa relations. It will be essential reading for students and scholars working on global politics, development and international relations.

Explore why – now more than ever – the world is in a race to become data-driven, and how you can learn from examples of data-driven leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI In Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI , Fortune 1000 strategic advisor, noted author, and distinguished thought leader Randy Bean tells the story of the rise of Big Data and its business impact – its disruptive power, the cultural challenges to becoming data-driven, the importance of data ethics, and the future of data-driven AI. The book looks at the impact of Big Data during a period of explosive information growth, technology advancement, emergence of the Internet and social media, and challenges to accepted notions of data, science, and facts, and asks what it means to become «data-driven.» Fail Fast, Learn Faster includes discussions of: The emergence of Big Data and why organizations must become data-driven to survive Why becoming data-driven forces companies to «think different» about their business The state of data in the corporate world today, and the principal challenges Why companies must develop a true «data culture» if they expect to change Examples of companies that are demonstrating data-driven leadership and what we can learn from them Why companies must learn to «fail fast and learn faster» to compete in the years ahead How the Chief Data Officer has been established as a new corporate profession Written for CEOs and Corporate Board Directors, data professional and practitioners at all organizational levels, university executive programs and students entering the data profession, and general readers seeking to understand the Information Age and why data, science, and facts matter in the world in which we live, Fail Fast, Learn Faster p;is essential reading that delivers an urgent message for the business leaders of today and of the future.

Leadership is never more crucial than when corporate survival is at stake. But the days of the tough guys are over. The leaders who are driving today’s sustainable turnarounds understand that the answers to a distressed company’s problems lie almost always within the firm itself – usually at middle manager level and below. The secret is cooperation. Drawing on interviews with top company doctors and advisers, as well as on the authors’ own experience, Leading Corporate Turnarounds explores seven key leadership and management skills required for successful turnaround, and shows why quickly gaining the buy-in and trust of all stakeholders is the key to ultimate success. Written by the founding directors of the Society of Turnaround Professionals (STP), with a proposed Foreword by the Society’s Patron Sir John Harvey-Jones Considers the different drivers of turnaround, the alternatives to it, and the restructuring processes required to move beyond crisis stabilization to sustainable change Features international case studies from leading companies including BT, Virgin Express, Arthur Andersen, Parmalat, GE, Lee Cooper, New Look and IBM

Internationally acclaimed business coach and consultant Kim George provides an easy-to-master process for coaches to bring out innate greatness and achieve peak performance. George introduces a new kind of intelligence quotient, Abundance Intelligence. AQ is the key to living into greatness, moving from a mentality of scarcity to one of abundance. Using her proven four-step process, you will learn to move your clients past their illusions to embrace the abundance aptitudes of self-worth, empathy, self-expression, surrender, actualization, significance, and inquiry. Personal examples, client case studies, and profiles of highly successful individuals demonstrate how the process works and how it helps individuals live into greatness.