Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future, and more.

Regardless of what you want to accomplish, from growing your business, creating a great company culture, championing a social cause, or affecting your habits, you can’t do it alone. The people around you define your success (whatever that means for you) and they have the potential to change the course of your life.

At the very heart of all the success and failure I've been exposed to - both my own entrepreneurial journey and through the thousands of interviews I’ve conducted on my chart-topping podcast - are a set of principles that ensure excellence. These fundamental laws underpinned my meteoric rise, and they will fuel yours too, whether you want to build something great or become someone great.

Being a CEO at any of the world’s largest companies is among the most challenging roles in business. Billions, and even trillions, are at stake—and the fates of tens of thousands of employees often hang in the balance. Yet, even when “can’t miss” high-achievers win the top job, very few excel. For those who shoulder the burden of being the one on whom everyone counts, a manual for excellence is sorely needed. To identify the 21st century’s best CEOs, the authors of CEO Excellence started with a pool of over 2,400 public company CEOs.

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation - especially difficult ones - leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, it teaches listeners how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to - and approach for - overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy”.

At the height of his career at the age of 50, Arthur Brooks embarked on a seven-year journey to discover how to transform his future from one of disappointment over waning abilities into an opportunity for progress. From Strength to Strength is the result, a practical roadmap for the rest of your life. Drawing on social science, philosophy, biography, theology, and eastern wisdom, as well as dozens of interviews with everyday men and women, Brooks shows us that true life success is well within our reach.

In The 10X Mentor, available exclusively in audio via Audible, Grant Cardone—business titan, entrepreneur, real estate mogul, New York Times best-selling author, thought leader, philanthropist, and founder of the 10X Growth Conference—takes listeners underwing to teach them the fundamentals of his success, and not just modest success: We’re talking 10X success.

How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.

Your entire career depends on communication. When you can communicate effectively, you already have the foundation for being not just a good leader, but a great one…. A leader who inspires…. A leader who motivates…. A leader who is remembered. Whether you’re leading an entire organization, you’re an entry-level manager, or you’re considering beginning your journey into leadership, it all starts with communication.… And you’re about to uncover its secrets.

Start with Why has led millions of listeners to rethink everything they do in their personal lives, their careers, and their organizations. Now, Find Your Why picks up where Start with Why left off. It tells you how to apply Simon Sinek's powerful insights so you can find more inspiration at work - and, in turn, inspire those around you. Whether you've just started your first job, are leading a team, or are CEO of your own company, the exercises in this audiobook will guide you along a path to long-term success and fulfillment - for both you and your colleagues.

In Michael Bungay Stanier's The Coaching Habit, coaching becomes a regular, informal part of your day so managers and their teams can work less hard and have more impact. Drawing on years of experience training more than 10,000 busy managers from around the globe in practical, everyday coaching skills, Bungay Stanier reveals how to unlock your peoples' potential. He unpacks seven essential coaching questions to demonstrate how - by saying less and asking more - you can develop coaching methods that produce great results.

Having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie Zhuo knows the most important lesson of all: Great managers are made, not born. The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed with everyday examples and transformative insights you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.

Your organization's culture is the key to its success. Strategic planning is essential. People's competencies should be measured and their weaknesses shored up. People crave feedback. These may sound like basic truths of our work lives today. But actually, they're lies. As Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall show in this provocative, inspiring book, there are some big lies - distortions, faulty assumptions, wrong thinking - running through our organizational lives.

Every day there are moments when you must persuade, inform, and motivate others effectively. Each of those moments requires you, in some way, to play a role, to heighten the impact of your words, and to manage your emotions and nerves. Every interaction is a performance, whether you're speaking up in a meeting, pitching a client, or walking into a job interview.

For innovation and leadership guru Hal Gregersen, the power of questions has always been clear - but it took some years for the follow-on question to hit him: If so much depends on fresh questions, shouldn’t we know more about how to arrive at them? That sent him on a research quest ultimately including more than 200 interviews with creative thinkers. Questions Are the Answer delivers the insights Gregersen gained about the conditions that give rise to catalytic questions - and breakthrough insights - and how anyone can create them.

Everyone recognizes leaders with "presence." They stand out for their seemingly innate ability to command attention and inspire commitment. But what is this secret quality they exude, exactly? Executive and CEO coach Kristi Hedges demystifies this elusive trait, revealing that leadership presence is the intersection of outward influencing skills and internal mental conditioning. Using her I-Presence model, the author shows how anyone-regardless of position or personality-can strengthen their impact.

Since the first edition, NLP at Work has pioneered the use of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) in the business world to improve communication, negotiation, teamwork, and influence. With more 100,000 copies sold and now in its third edition, NLP at Work is a clear and comprehensive introduction to using NLP in the workplace, with a unique personal style and approach.

Moments of Impact is an audiobook on a mission: to eradicate time-sucking, energy-depleting workshops and meetings. In our fast-changing world, organizations have important challenges and opportunities to address - and no time to waste. Moments of Impact delivers the single most useful resource for managers and leaders who need better strategic conversation - now - to shape the future of their organizations.

Having managed dozens of teams spanning tens to hundreds of people, Julie Zhuo knows the most important lesson of all: Great managers are made, not born. The Making of a Manager is a modern field guide packed with everyday examples and transformative insights you need to be the kind of manager you wish you had.

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie educate listeners on one of the hottest trends in business development: "design thinking", or the ability to turn abstract ideas into practical applications for maximal business growth. Jeanne Liedtka's recent book, The Catalyst: How YOU Can Lead Extraordinary Growth, was named a Top Innovation and Design Thinking Book by Business Week. Tim Ogilvie has been hailed as a visionary for his pioneering contributions to service innovation, business model innovation, and customer experience design.

Design-oriented firms such as Apple and IDEO have demonstrated how design thinking can directly affect business results. Yet most managers lack a real sense of how to put this new approach to use for issues other than product development and sales growth. Solving Problems with Design Thinking details 10 real-world examples of managers who successfully applied design methods at 3M, Toyota, IBM, Intuit, and SAP; entrepreneurial start-ups such as MeYou Health; and government and social sector organizations.

Managers as Mentors is a rapid-fire listen and a provocative guide to helping associates grow and adapt in today’s tumultuous organizations. This new edition has been thoroughly revised and updated. As with previous editions there is a fictional case study of a mentor-protégé relationship running through the book, but this is augmented with six actual case studies of top CEOs who relate key mentoring experiences in their lives. This hands-on guide takes the mystery out of effective mentoring.

The small-business guru behind Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine teaches listeners how to establish lasting commitment in their employees, customers, and businesses. Why are some companies able to generate committed, long-term customers while others struggle to stay afloat? Why do the employees of some organizations fully dedicate themselves while others punch the clock without enthusiasm?

Listening is harder than it looks - but it's the difference between business success and failure. Nothing causes bad decisions in organizations as often as poor listening. But Bernard Ferrari, adviser to some of the nation's most influential executives, believes that such missteps can be avoided and that the skills and habits of good listening can be developed and mastered. He offers a step-by-step process that will help you become an active listener, able to shape and focus any conversation.