Smart Management

There's an 80 percent chance you're poor. Time poor, that is. Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment. How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?

Whether it's a manager who keeps moving the goal posts, an uncooperative colleague, negative friend, or critical family member, some people are just plain hard to get along with. Often, your immediate response is to shrink or sulk, become defensive or attack. But there are smarter moves to make when dealing with difficult people. This book explains how to cope with a range of situations with difficult people and to focus on what you can change.

We spend the majority of our lives making decisions, both big and small. Yet, even though our success is largely determined by the choices that we make, very few of us are equipped with useful decision-making skills. Because of this, we often approach our choices tentatively, or even fearfully, and avoid giving them the time and thought required to put our best foot forward.

We all have so much going on. We all worry about things - money, deadlines. With all this buzzing around in our heads it's often a nightmare trying to concentrate on one thing. What if someone could show you how to empty your mind of all the noise? Jamie Smart, state-of-mind specialist, can do just that - with Clarity he will show you how to get real clarity of thought. You'll learn how to clear your mind and become less stressed and more productive - and as a result, more confident in your abilities.

The Little Book of Clarity shows you how to clear your head and get things done. Based on the best-selling book Clarity, this new edition has been distilled to the essentials, getting right to the point. With no vague theory or superfluous anecdotes, this book gets you right to work on reducing stress and boosting productivity by uncovering your mind's in-built "self-clearing" capacity.

In Smart Money Smart Kids, financial expert and best-selling author Dave Ramsey and his daughter Rachel Cruze equip parents to teach their children how to win with money. Starting with the basics like working, spending, saving, and giving, and moving into more challenging issues like avoiding debt for life, paying cash for college, and battling discontentment, Dave and Rachel present a no-nonsense, common-sense approach for changing your family tree.

Data science gets thrown around in the press like it's magic. Major retailers are predicting everything, from when their customers are pregnant to when they want a new pair of Chuck Taylors. It's a brave new world where seemingly meaningless data can be transformed into valuable insight to drive smart business decisions. Data science is little more than using straightforward steps to process raw data into actionable insight. And in Data Smart, author and data scientist John Foreman will teach how you how that's done within the familiar environment of a spreadsheet.

Leaders tend to obstinately stick to the leadership style that brought them most success in the past, usually one of two extreme styles: functional leadership that focuses on operational excellence or smart leadership that focuses on growth. When a leader's focus is too functional, the organization becomes introverted and can focus too much on bottom-line profitability while missing out on top-line growth opportunities.

To help people develop their potential, to articulate and become the self that they want to be, are capable of being, and that best serves them and others in the short and long term is what we as individuals and leaders strive toward.

Jim Rogers, whose entertaining accounts of his travels around the world - studying the markets from Russia to Singapore from the ground up - has enthralled investors and Wall Street aficionados for two decades. In his engaging memoir Street Smarts, Rogers offers pithy commentary from a lifetime of adventure, from his early years growing up a naïve kid in Demopolis, Alabama, to his fledgling career on Wall Street, to his cofounding the wildly successful Quantum Fund [omit George Soros], Rogers always had a restless curiosity to experience and understand the world around him.

Using over 40 simple lessons, How to Lead Smart People shows you how to manage a team of equals with intelligence and diplomacy. Traditional skills are re-evaluated for the leader of a smart team. Split into three sections: leading yourself, leading your team and leading your organisation, the book offers advice for 360-degree management. How to Lead Smart People teaches core skills such as decision-making and delegating but also soft skills such as delivering good and bad news to team members and how to realise longer-term aims such as building trust and growing your team.

Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems - everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle. Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive.

Does it have to be this way? Can’t resist checking your smartphone or mobile device? Sure, all this connectivity keeps you in touch with your team and the office - but at what cost? In Sleeping with Your Smartphone, Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow reveals how you can disconnect and become more productive in the process. In fact, she shows that you can devote more time to your personal life and accomplish more at work. And the good news is that this doesn’t require an organizational makeover.

No organization is totally free from destructive friction; the forces that make it harder, more complicated and sometimes downright impossible to get things done. Drawing on years of research and featuring case studies on the likes of Uber, Netflix and Boeing, The Friction Project teaches listeners how to become 'friction fixers'. Stanford professors Sutton and Rao unpack how we should think and act like trustees of others' time. They provide friction forensics to help listeners identify where to avert and repair bad friction, and where to maintain and inject good friction.

The lesson seems so basic. Yet time after time, good companies stumble and lose their stride - just when they were poised for rapid growth. Why? Because their leaders treated hiring as a tedious chore. They posted an ad hoc ad. Took the first person with the right skills. Hired for immediate needs, rather than future flourishing. In Hire Smart from the Start, Dave Carvajal distills lessons gained from 20 years in the trenches, building out and staffing two enormously successful Internet startups and helping firms like Tumblr, and Shutterstock land the talent they need to reach their greatest potential.

Smart Teams will help your team to go beyond personal productivity to enhance team productivity. Building on the concepts presented in Smart Work, which focuses on personal productivity, this audiobook shows you how to turn unproductive team behaviors that create friction into "superproductive" behaviors that promote flow. Productivity is, at its core, a leadership issue - and this audiobook provides practical guidelines that help you build a culture where productivity thrives.

There is so much buzz around big data. We all need to know what it is and how it works. But what will set you apart from the rest is actually knowing how to use big data to get solid, real-world business results - and putting that in place to improve performance. Big Data shows you how to implement the same practices that leading firms have used to access new dimensions of profitability. You'll learn from clear explanations and countless examples how successful organisations large and small use the SMART model to get ahead.

The ability to make sound and timely decisions is the mark of a good leader. But when leaders with otherwise strong track records suddenly begin making poor decisions - as seen in the recent corporate scandals that rocked the business world - the impact can be widespread. In The Stress Effect, leadership expert Henry L. Thompson argues that stress is often the real culprit behind this leadership failure.

Being a manager is no easy task. You must set and meet team goals that match business objectives while also ensuring growth and development opportunities for your people. You have to be the voice of authority and a key decision-maker while simultaneously giving your employees autonomy and flexibility. How do you navigate these tensions?

Planning a Profitable Business for Dummies explains how to build a business with profit in mind, using smart pricing techniques and clear-eyed strategic planning. Whether you're just getting started in business or still recovering from lockdown losses, this book points to where extra profits might lie.