Silver Medal Winner (Company Culture) in the 2024 Axiom Business Book Awards
Post-pandemic, the whole world is being reset. With this unifying experience that challenges our identity, rules are broken; beliefs are corrected. Happiness and meaning in work and life are no longer optional. With success being redefined as we speak, what this means for leaders is they too, now need to reset their compasses urgently—for the real threat is obsolescence and irrelevance.
The time to act is now.
But with many management practices fading into irrelevance, how then, can leaders chart their paths in these complex and disruptive times?
While there is no one right way to lead and make an impact, for ‘right’ is subjective and contextual, the good news is that proven methods have been discovered—some of which will be shared in this book’s pages.
Leaders People Love features a host of accessible leadership lessons. Undergirded by a contemporary and relevant mindset, these strategies consistently yield excellent results and prove a point: becoming an effective and well-loved leader is possible if you know how.
Explore an authentic yet agile approach to discovering the best leader in you. Becoming a leader that people love to work with and for can, in turn, create meaningful workplaces where people love to come to collaborate, strive and succeed.
Chris Lee had a cushy role. For a decade, he led the Asia Pacific division of Medtronic, a multibillion dollar business and one of the world’s largest manufacturers of medical devices, and consistently produced excellent business outcomes. Then, at fifty-six, he threw all of that away to start VentureBlick, an international fundraising platform matching healthcare startups and medical investors. Why did Lee do that?
Lee takes us through his journey as one of the youngest Asian leaders in an MNC (youngest director in Merck at age twenty-seven, youngest country manager at thirty, first Asia-Pacific leader reporting to Bayer HQ at thirty-nine), how he brought Asian leadership sensibilities into multiple global companies, and reveals why he believes it’s important for corporate leaders to adopt an Asian lens and think like a maverick.
The good news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The bad news is that everyone is talking about ESG.
The cry for a more inclusive form of capitalism is growing. But the irony is we are using the same tools that caused the excesses of shareholder capitalism—incentives and regulations—to drive responsible behaviour.
Eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith propagated profit maximization as the incentive for businesses to create goods and services that society needs. He argued that free-market competition would ensure consumers get the best quality product at the cheapest price.
200 years later, Milton Friedman agreed in his seminal 1970 New York Times op-ed that the sole responsibility of business is to maximize profits ‘so long as it stays within the rules of the game’. Incentives coupled with some regulations were to henceforth safeguard societal interests.
Instead, incentives created bad behaviour. Regulations were routinely bypassed with intelligent loopholes. Despite this—to encourage sustainability today—we are again using incentives and regulations. That’s predominantly what the ESG framework focuses on. And what do we see? Rampant greenwashing and box-ticking.
To address today’s existential challenges, we need innovation of the highest order. Innovation can neither be legislated nor driven by extrinsic incentives alone. We need a values-driven revolution. We need steward leadership—the ability to create a win-win-win future for stakeholders, society, and the environment. ESG must upgrade to ESL, where the ‘L’ stands for Steward Leadership. In ESL, ‘G’ is a subset of ‘L’.
Sustainable Sustainability lays out a practical, step-by-step playbook for any commercial entity that wants to succeed at marrying profit and purpose.
https://www.sustainable-sustainability.com
Every organisation has stories about women in the workplace that live on through constant retelling: ‘Women are too emotional’; ‘Women are not interested in a career’; and ‘We are hiring the best person for the job, regardless of gender’. We need to dispel these myths that undermine women and are keeping them on a lesser footing. Here are the tools for doing just that.
Based on thorough research and made highly relevant through dozens of anecdotes from hundreds of hours of interviews, Narratives: The Stories That Hold Women Back At Work will shatter ongoing workplace gender myths. Mette Johansson, in this book, provides context and different perspectives to dispel these myths and offer women-and men-the powerful arguments and tools they need to counteract them and ensure a fairer and more competitive workplace-and a better business overall.
Written in a highly entertaining way, Narratives challenges us to take different perspectives in the gender equity debate.
When Mollie Rogers Jean De Dieu founded Emotional Inclusion® in the workforce three years ago, she was on a mission to rid emotional unwellness shame and stigma in companies. She realized that companies with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion platforms spoke of all kinds of inclusion but neglected to tackle emotional inclusion or the act of caring for the emotional realms of individuals in a measurable and sustainable manner. The robotic, productivity-driven, and bustling work culture cultivated over the years morphed what it meant to be ‘human’ and ’emotionally inclusive’ at work. The pandemic has turned the corporate landscape upside down and shed more light on the significance of emotional wellbeing. It has become more apparent now than ever that there is a need for new, evidence-backed, confidential, and medical-based workplace solutions that are more compassionate and considerate of employee wellbeing and welfare.
Part treatise and part deliberation, Emotional Inclusion® takes readers through the core of Mollie’s advocacy. The book, as she writes, seeks to ‘lift the stigma around talking about emotional wellness at work, and make Emotional inclusion the powerful new status quo’ in workplaces present and future. It discusses emotional inclusion’s organizational definition, shares personal stories on the subject, and offers steps that companies and organizations can and should take to create more emotionally inclusive workplaces that have a transformative impact on employees’ emotional wellness and productivity. In doing so, the book looks to champion courage and create an emotional inclusion movement revolution of change-together.
Are maestros born or made?
By making ideas mate, can you create new ones?
How do you develop a mindset that helps you thrive?
Can you nudge yourself into being more productive at work?
Is it possible for you to debunk bullshit from the clutter all around?
…
Find the answers to these questions and several more in Leapfrog
Leapfrog-in the context of thriving at work-is a scenario when a new entrant outperforms others. How do they achieve this? Are high performers born or made? Is there a way to nudge yourself into being more successful at work and also in life? With its six evidence-based insights, this book is poised to help you to advance your career at an incredible pace.
To begin with, the first step is to develop grit along with the ability to embrace boredom. The second practice, leaning on behavioral economics, focusses on nudging yourself to make better choices. The third practice is about being intellectually humble by accepting limits to what you know. The chapter on dancing with disciplines celebrates the magic of ideas colliding to create new ones. In a world full of noise and bullshit, you will need to curate choices to maintain a focus on what is relevant to you. The last practice helps you think like an entrepreneur and develop the ability to ask for what you want.
Based on their extensive experience of teaching and mentoring students, the authors have developed a framework called the Personal Journey Map (PJM), which will help you imbibe and implement the six practices by capturing your current repertoire, scanning the landscape ahead, and curating a path to a career in which you can prosper.
Are you tired of struggling to connect with the largest and most influential generation of consumers? Do you want to learn how to capture the attention of millennials and build lasting brand loyalty? The business world is changing, and it’s all thanks to the impact of millennials-the fastest-growing generation of consumers and trendsetters. If you want to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in this evolving landscape, you need to understand and engage with them. That’s where Marketing to Millennials comes in.
This book is the urgently needed survival guide on how to comprehend and engage with millennials. It’s based on the author’s research, presentations, and consulting work, providing you with the most current and practical insights.
Marketing to Millennials covers everything you need to know about this critical demographic, including who they are, what they value, and how they make purchasing decisions. With this knowledge, you can update your marketing methods to appeal to millennials, the most impactful group of consumer trendsetters.
This is the critical moment for businesses to understand and adapt or become irrelevant to millennials. As this generation reaches management positions, this change is only going to accelerate. You need to be prepared to unlock the powerful potential of this emerging generation, and this book is the definitive manual to help you do just that.
Don’t let the fast-paced and ever-changing marketing landscape intimidate you. This book equips you with the knowledge and tools you need to survive and thrive in the new age of business.
The world needs leaders who have the strength to be kind. The Return on Kindness challenges companies to set a higher bar and reimagine what great leadership looks like. Kindness isn’t what you think it is. Kind leaders, far from being soft or weak, are caring and tough.
The Return on Kindness makes a compelling, evidence-based case for why kind leadership is good for business and how kind leaders create value through prioritizing the mental health and wellbeing of their people. Bonnie Hayden Cheng, organizational psychologist, researcher, and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, combines extensive research, storytelling, and in-depth interviews with influential executives across a wide range of industries to reveal the transformative power of kindness in driving business success.
The Return on Kindness provides a simple but impactful RISE framework to inspire kind leadership, accompanied by practical touchpoints for successfully implementing kind leadership in organizations.
Eggs for Dinner encompasses business innovation through a touching personal journey.
This book is timely addressing the impact of COVID-19 and the essentials on how to survive in this precarious environment. Guy’s journey via Israel, Europe, the USA, Thailand, and finally the opening of the highly successful restaurant, Wild Honey in Singapore, has given him a wealth of experience in the restaurant business.
Wachs gives a vivid and touching account of growing up in Israel the son of a restaurateur, failed ventures, the rigours of hotel school in the Black Forest in Germany, and his time working in New York. Accounts of meeting movie stars to driving Russian presidents to secret locations are some of the colourful experiences he shares. His journey took him to Thailand where a successful stint in Bangkok and a move to Singapore culminated in his lifelong dream of opening his own restaurant. Surviving the worst of the pandemic focuses Wachs on the future of both his business and his personal life.
A must-read for anyone who wants to go into the restaurant business, this is also ultimately a story about navigating difficulties coping with failure and how a humble dishwasher managed to achieve his dream. While so many restaurants have become casualties of COVID-19, Wild Honey continues to be a popular destination, and the reasons for its continued success can be found in the pages of this memoir.
A pioneering book, Unfiltered: The CEO and the Coach, for the first time, opens the doors that normally shield the confidential world of coaching conversations. The book, through its candour, helps readers fully grasp the life-changing impact that coaching can have. Conceived as a leadership development book, the authors share the narratives (both individual and mutual) of their partnership over the course of five years. The resultant narrative provides not just unique insights that executives and entrepreneurs will find useful for their own development but also deep insights into how, by understanding ourselves, we move towards mastery over the world at large.
