A Forbes Best Business Book. “Vital reading for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.” —Arianna Huffington
“Burnout seems to be everyone’s problem, and this book has solutions. As trailblazers in burnout research, Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter didn’t just clear the path to study the causes—they’ve also discovered some of the cures.” —Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again
“A thoughtful and well researched book about a core issue at the heart of the great resignation.” —Christian Stadler, Forbes
“Provides the path to creating a better world of work where people can flourish rather than get beaten down.” — Marcel Schwantes, Inc.
Burnout is among the most significant on-the-job hazards facing workers today. It is also among the most misunderstood. In particular, we tend to characterize burnout as a personal issue—a problem employees should fix themselves by getting therapy, practicing relaxation techniques, or changing jobs. Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter show why burnout also needs to be managed by the workplace.
Citing a wealth of research data and drawing on illustrative anecdotes, The Burnout Challenge shows how organizations can change to promote sustainable productivity. Maslach and Leiter provide useful tools for identifying the signs of employee burnout and offer practical, evidence-driven guidance for implementing change. The key, they argue, is to begin with less-taxing changes that employees nonetheless find meaningful, seeding the ground for more thorough reforms in the future.
As priorities and policies shift across workplaces, The Burnout Challenge provides pragmatic, creative, and cost-effective solutions to improve employee efficiency, health, and happiness.
Corporate social responsibility has entered the mainstream, but what does it take to run a successful purpose-driven business? A Harvard Business School professor examines leaders who put values alongside profits to showcase the challenges and upside of deeply responsible business.
For decades, CEOs have been told that their only responsibility is to the bottom line. But consensus is that companies—and their leaders—must engage with their social and environmental contexts. The man behind one of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, Geoffrey Jones distinguishes deep responsibility, which can deliver radical social and ecological responses, from corporate social responsibility, which is often little more than window dressing.
Deeply Responsible Business offers an invaluable historical perspective, going back to the Quaker capitalism of George Cadbury and the worker solidarity of Edward Filene. Through a series of in-depth profiles of business leaders and their companies, it carries us from India to Japan and from the turmoil of the nineteenth century to the latest developments in impact investing and the B-corps. Jones profiles business leaders from around the world who combined profits with social purpose to confront inequality, inner-city blight, and ecological degradation, while navigating restrictive laws and authoritarian regimes.
He found that these leaders were motivated by bedrock values and sometimes—but not always—driven by faith. They chose to operate in socially productive fields, interacted with humility with stakeholders, and felt a duty to support their communities. While far from perfect—some combined visionary practices with vital flaws—each one showed that profit and purpose could be reconciled. Many of their businesses were highly successful—though financial success was not their only metric of achievement.
As companies seek to coopt ethically sensitized consumers, Jones gives us a new perspective to tackle tough questions. Inspired by these passionate and pragmatic business leaders, he envisions a future in which companies and entrepreneurs can play a key role in healing our communities and protecting the natural world.
In this volume, Michael Jensen and his collaborators present the foundations of an integrated theory of organizations. The theory assumes that organizations are equilibrium systems that, like markets, can be influenced, but cannot be told what to do; that human beings are rational and self-interested for the most part; and that information is costly to produce and transfer among agents. The theory also treats business organizations as entities existing in a system of markets (including financial, product, labor, and materials markets) that must be considered in the formulation of organizational strategy.
Jensen argues that the cost of transferring information makes it necessary to decentralize some decision rights in organizations and in the economy. This decentralization in turn requires organizations to solve the control problem that results when self-interested persons do not behave as perfect agents.
Capitalist economies solve these control problems through the institution of alienable decision rights. But because organizations must suppress the alienability of decision rights, they must devise substitute mechanisms that perform its functions. Jensen argues that three critical systems, which he calls the organizational rules of the game, are necessary to substitute for alienability in organizations: (1) a system for allocating decision rights among agents in the firm, (2) a system for measuring and evaluating performance in the firm, and (3) a system for rewarding and punishing individuals for their performance. These concepts offer a major competitive advantage for organizations.
Entertaining and expert, The Gold in the Rings maps the Olympics' course from paragon of purity to billion-dollar profits.
The United States Marine Corps has a unique culture that ensures comradery, exacting standards, and readiness to be the first to every fight. Yet even in a group that is known for innovation, culture can push leaders to fall back on ingrained preferences. Jeannie L. Johnson takes a sympathetic but critical look at the Marine Corps's long experience with counterinsurgency warfare. Which counterinsurgency lessons have been learned and retained for next time and which have been abandoned to history is a story of battlefield trial and error—but also a story of cultural collisions.
The book begins with a fascinating and penetrating look inside the culture of the Marine Corps through research in primary sources, including Marine oral histories, and interviews with Marines. Johnson explores what makes this branch of the military distinct: their identity, norms, values, and perceptual lens. She then traces the history of the Marines' counterinsurgency experience from the expeditionary missions of the early twentieth century, through the Vietnam War, and finally to the Iraq War. Her findings break new ground in strategic culture by introducing a methodology that was pioneered in the intelligence community to forecast behavior. Johnson shows that even a service as self-aware and dedicated to innovation as the Marine Corps is constrained in the lessons-learned process by its own internal predispositions, by the wider US military culture, and by national preferences. Her findings challenge the conclusions of previous counterinsurgency scholarship that ignores culture. This highly readable book reminds us of Sun Tzu's wisdom that to be successful in war, it is important to know thyself as well as the enemy. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the Marines Corps, counterinsurgency warfare, military innovation, or strategic culture.
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