The People Equation

The People Equation Every business leader knows that the key to growth is innovation—if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. Deborah Perry Piscione and David Crawley argue that ultimately the key to innovation is people. After all, creativity is a uniquely human function, something that can't be automated. So how do you design an organization so that it provides the elements that will bear new thinking and bring forth bold ideas? Through The People Equation. Based on examples from their consulting work and research into successful business practices, Perry Piscione and Crawley's The People Equation enables leaders to create a culture where psychological safety is a given, risk taking is embraced, and collaboration between highly competent people is nurtured. When experiments and new initiatives look promising, Perry Piscione and Crawley's Improvisational Innovation process provides a road map to quickly develop ideas and bring them to market. All this requires upending the usual organizational pyramid and instilling a completely new mindset throughout the organization. Perry Piscione and Crawley show that in our rapidly changing world, the top is not where the really disruptive ideas are going to come from. And if people are afraid to take chances, even fail, you're never going to get those ideas—playing it safe means you'll be out of the game. The People Equation provides you with a formula for exponentially increasing out-of-the-box thinking in your organization and multiplying your chances for greater growth and success.

Teaching leaders how to focus on people development rather than product development, this book provides you with a formula for exponentially increasing out-of-the-box thinking in your organization and multiplying your chances for greater growth and success. --

Criticizes many common personnel management practices, and argues that policies such as job security and fair compensation result in greater profits in the long run.

Getting the People Equation Right outlines a proven formula for making good people decisions and avoiding hiring mistakes-a practical method for getting the right people in the right jobs and keeping them. Getting the People Equation Right shows the reader how to identify strong performance potential: people who can both do the job and who have the traits and qualities needed to excel in the job. Readers learn how to discover why current top performers perform so well and how to use that understanding to hire other top performers. The author provides intriguing insight into counter-productive job behaviors such as being harsh, authoritarian, dogmatic, permissive, inflexible or dominating. The author also shows how to identify these counter-productive behaviors in people before you hire them. Getting the People Equation Right examines five simple but powerful management practices that great managers use to retain top talent. In short, Getting the People Equation Right offers readers a practical method for getting the right people in the right jobs, together with concrete management practices that help managers retain top talent and build great places to work.

For too long, companies and their leadership teams focused primarily on their products or services. Leaders are deeply dialed in to the minutiae of their companies' operations. But veteran Silicon Valley consultant Deborah Perry Piscione says investments in new technologies or operations do not create innovations people do. For innovation to happen, organizations need to be people-centric. In this breakthrough book she shows how, by following her People Equation, every organization can develop a mindset, an organizational structure, and a product development process that will maximize creativity and innovation. Using examples from her consulting work and from her research into successful business practices, Piscione shows how to create a culture where risk taking is rewarded, mavericks are encouraged, collaboration between highly competent people is nurtured, and, when experiments and new initiatives are proposed, the response is to ask how rather than question why. This requires upending the usual organizational pyramid, giving more decision-making power to frontline workers and less to the C-level executives traditionally at the top. Once this is all in place, you can take advantage of Piscione's twelve-step Improvisational Innovation process for bringing new products and services to market. This is a comprehensive guide to harnessing the creative energy in every organization.

The #1 international bestseller from the author of The Book of Awesome that “reveals how all of us can live happier lives” (Gretchen Rubin). What is the formula for a happy life? Neil Pasricha is a Harvard MBA, a New York Times–bestselling author, a Walmart executive, a father, a husband. After selling more than a million copies of the Book of Awesome series, wherein he observed the everyday things he thought were awesome, he now shifts his focus to the practicalities of living an awesome life. In his new book The Happiness Equation, Pasricha illustrates how to want nothing and do anything in order to have everything. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, you simply have yet to unlock the 9 Secrets to Happiness. Each secret takes a piece out of the core of common sense, turns it on its head to present it in a completely new light, and then provides practical and specific guidelines for how to apply this new outlook to lead a fulfilling life. Once you've unlocked Pasricha’s 9 Secrets, you will understand counter intuitive concepts such as: Success Does Not Lead to Happiness, Never Take Advice, and Retirement Is a Broken Theory. You will learn and then master three brand-new fundamental life tests: the Saturday Morning Test, The Bench Test, and the Five People Test. You will know the difference between external goals and internal goals and how to make more money than a Harvard MBA (hint: it has nothing to do with your annual salary). You will discover that true wealth has nothing to do with money, multitasking is a myth, and the elimination of options leads to more choice. The Happiness Equation is a book that will change how you think about pretty much everything—your time, your career, your relationships, your family, and, ultimately, of course, your happiness.

“Anyone can write a blog post, but not everyone can get it liked thirty-five thousand times, and not everyone can get seventy-five thousand subscribers. But the reason we’ve done these things isn’t because we’re special. It’s because we tried and failed, the same way you learn to ride a bike. We tried again and again, and now we have an idea how to get from point A to point B faster because of it.” Three short years ago, when Chris Brogan and Julien Smith wrote their bestseller, Trust Agents, being interesting and human on the Web was enough to build a significant audience. But now, everybody has a platform. The problem is that most of them are just making noise. In The Impact Equation, Brogan and Smith show that to make people truly care about what you have to say, you need more than just a good idea, trust among your audience, or a certain number of fol­lowers. You need a potent mix of all of the above and more. Use the Impact Equation to figure out what you’re doing right and wrong. Apply it to a blog, a tweet, a video, or a mainstream-media advertising cam­paign. Use it to explain why a feature in a national newspaper that reaches millions might have less impact than a blog post that reaches a thousand passionate subscribers. Consider the phenomenally successful British singer Adele. For most musicians, onstage banter basically consists of yelling “Hello, Cleveland!” But Adele connects with her audience, pausing between songs to discuss a falling-out with her friends, or the drama of a break up. Each of these moments comes off as if she were talking directly with you, and you can easily relate. Adele has Impact. As the traditional channels for marketing, selling, and influencing disappear and more people inter­act mainly online, the very nature of attention is changing. The Impact Equation will give you the tools and metrics that guarantee your message will be heard.

“Not only does Anholt explain the challenges facing the world with unique clarity, he also provides genuinely new, informative, practical, innovative solutions. . . . The book is a must-read for anyone who cares about humanity's shared future.” —H. E. Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmaajo), President of the Federal Republic of Somalia Simon Anholt has spent decades helping countries from Austria to Zambia to improve their international standing. Using colorful descriptions of his experiences—dining with Vladimir Putin at his country home, taking a group of Felipe Calderon's advisors on their first Mexico City subway ride, touring a beautiful new government hospital in Afghanistan that nobody would use because it was in Taliban-controlled territory—he tells how he began finding answers to that question. Ultimately, Anholt hit on the Good Country Equation, a formula for encouraging international cooperation and reinventing education for a globalized era. Anholt even offers a “selfish” argument for cooperation: he shows that it generates goodwill, which in turn translates into increased trade, foreign investment, tourism, talent attraction, and even domestic electoral success. Anholt insists we can change the way countries behave and the way people are educated in a single generation—because that's all the time we have.