Off The Shelf

Questions about remote work post-COVID-19? Join us to hear Kim Shepherd discuss her new book, Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices And Strategies To Engage A Remote Workforce. There are no magic wands but Kim does have some tangible recommendations and great stories. If you plan to have remote employees, work with a mixed or hybrid system, or have teams spread across different locations, this book will be your guide for the new normal. In addition, Remote Work includes case studies on how other top organizations use remote work as part of their talent strategy, e.g., Cornerstone OnDemand, AMN Healthcare, Buffer, and the United States Marine Corps. And if you’re interested in The Conference Board’s latest data on remote work, check out The Reimagined Workplace a Year Later: Human Capital Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Join Rebecca Ray as she and business strategy expert John Hagel III break down his new book 'The Journey Beyond Fear'.  In this conversation, John dives in on how to identify your fears, face your fears, move beyond your fears and how these lessons can apply to organizations and careers.  The pair also touch on the importance of cultivating your personal passions and harnessing the potential of platforms.

Join Dr. Curtis Odom, business leader and Executive Professor of Management in the D'Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, as he shares his 20 years of professional insights, lessons learned, and personal experiences about how to be a successful business leader.

What makes the writing of this book so beautifully ironic is that you will be reading the career learnings of someone who barely made it out of high school and yet found his personal definition of success as a business owner and full-time faculty member at a top business school in Boston.

This book started with a student who gave Dr. Odom the greatest gift of his career: a transcript of his academic lectures taught over a fall semester in a college classroom that encapsulated an entire career’s worth of experience. This engaged student distilled the insights from Dr. Curtis Odom lectures into simple, impactful statements that most influenced him as a student and now can be shared with the book’s readers.

How can civilian employers improve the way that they locate, hire, and retain military veterans and military spouses?  Join Rebecca Ray as she discusses this and more with Nathan Ainspan, Senior Research Psychologist with the Military-Civilian Transition Office at the Department of Defense and Kristin Saboe, Global Senior Manager for Organizational Research and Employee Listening at Boeing.  Their new book, Military Veteran Employment:  A Guide for the Data-Driven Leader draws on principles and research from industrial/organizational psychology and best practices from human resources management.  The discussion touches on the current state of veteran employment in the US and why it’s such an important issue, what separates their research from what’s been presented before, the benefits of veteran employment and the common misconceptions that civilians have about veteran employment. 

Order Military Veteran Employment:  A Guide for the Data-Driven Leader here.

Other related content from The Conference Board:

Supporting Veteran-owned Businesses, Employees, and Communities – Are Corporations Doing Enough to Help? (Podcast, November 2020)

Corporate Citizenship Watch: Supporting Military Caregivers During COVID-19 and Beyond (Webcast, July 2020)

John Mestelaar, co-leader of Innovation Institute at The Conference Board interviews Tendayi Viki on his latest book “Pirates in the Navy”. Listen in as Tendayi gives us a taste of some the insights this book provides. Tendayi endeavors to arm innovators with practice tools and guidance to navigate the choppy water of corporate politics while successfully transforming their companies.

Why does the gender gap still persist and how can we close it? In 2019, the gap between the percentage of women and the percentage of men in the workforce was the smallest on record. But despite these statistics, women remain underrepresented in positions of power and status, with the highest-paying jobs still remaining the most gender-imbalanced. The persistence of these inequalities begs the question: Why haven't we made more progress?

Join Colleen Ammerman and Boris Groysberg as they discuss their new book, Glass Half-Broken: Shattering the Barriers That Still Hold Women Back at Work, and reveal the pervasive organizational obstacles and managerial actions that create gender imbalances – as well as important strategies both leaders and businesses can use to break these barriers down.

Since employees who walk out the door can cost their organizations up to 200 percent of their annual salaries to replace, retention is one of the most important issues facing businesses today. And with so many surveys reporting that employees are not happy and not working up to their full potential, engagement is also a serious and costly issue. And yet, how many talent management books truly stand the test of time?

In its sixth edition and published in more than 20 languages, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay provides managers around the world with 26 practical engagement strategies. Join internationally renowned Dr. Beverly Kaye as she suggests simple ways for managers to get started engaging their employees, ranging from the benefits of conducting stay interviews (first suggested in Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em over 20 years ago!) to why it’s essential to always tell the truth to when it’s appropriate to question the rules. Dr. Kaye challenges organizations to think about how they can keep their best employees through internal mobility and describes how diversity and inclusion are essential components to all 26 of the engagement strategies.

Craig Carroll, leader of The Conference Board's Communications Institute, sits down for an engaging talk with Professor CB Bhattacharya, H.J. Zoffer Chair in Sustainability and Ethics, about his new book, 'Small Actions Big Difference:  Leveraging Corporate Sustainability to Drive Business and Societal Value'.

Professor Bhattacharya outlines how employees can take charge, the pathway to sustainable ownership, lessons learned from the pandemic, and driving business value. 

As we enter a new year that is sure to be filled with further disruptions, Jeff Schwartz’s new book Work Disrupted: Opportunity, Resilience, and Growth in the Accelerated Future of Work is essential reading for those looking to embrace these fast-paced changes as an opportunity to accelerate forward and flourish.  The challenge, in a nutshell, is that you can’t navigate 21st century work and careers with 20th century maps and mental models. Albert Einstein once remarked, “You can’t use an old map to explore a new world” but a lot of leaders are trying to do just that. 

As Schwartz says, this new era of “accelerated change” does not have to feel as stressful and scary as it did this past year. But it’s essential that we reframe how we face the future. To do so, he maps out the skills and practices that require fresh perspectives as we prepare our workforces, workplaces and the definition of work itself for a very different tomorrow.

You can find Work Disrupted here:  https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/human-capital/articles/digital-workforce-transformation-roadmap.html

Future growth will require that all corporations undergo… The Big Shift. The convergence of a changing demography, new technologies and a fragmented media ecosystem has transformed marketing as we know it, yet marketing to Latinos continues to lag significantly, bound by an outdated paradigm and a total market strategy that has failed to address an increasingly diverse marketplace.

Join The Conference Board Chief Marketing Officer Chiqui Cartagena as she sits down with Dr. Jake Beniflah, Marketing & Communications Senior Fellow at The Conference Board and Executive Director of the Center for Multicultural Science, to discuss his new book, The Big Shift: Redefining Marketing in a Multicultural America. This book proposes the unpopular – namely that, in order to thrive, organizations must place multicultural consumers front and center of mainstream marketing and right size the traditional cultural silo.

How are the most successful businesses creating value and igniting smart growth in a fast-paced, competitive market? In his latest book, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society, management expert and professor Erich Joachimsthaler maintains that only organizations that work to solve the immediate challenges of people today, as well as the major social and economic challenges of the future, will be the ones that continue to survive and grow.

Join our Marketing Institute Leader JP Kuehlwein as he speaks with Erich about his latest book which offers a model to help generate, facilitate, and benefit from data exchanges among multiple groups – not just from customers and stakeholders, but also from suppliers, software developers, regulators, and even competitors. And how to ensure that everyone in this field can work together to solve big, industry-wide, or complex and unpredictable societal problems to help ensure future success for both your business and the public as well.

What are the major forces and emerging trends that are set to reshape luxury over the next decade? As a younger generation is entering the luxury market, they will bring new values and demands that will redefine the very meaning of luxury. Brands will need to take seriously issues such as diversity, sustainability, and ethical production.

In his book, Future Luxe, Erwan Rambourg presents an in-depth and nuanced approach to those dealing with this changing market and its new demands, drawing on interviews with several CEOs from the largest brands, including Kering, Cartier, Puma, and Moncler, along with his own experience working over two decades in the luxury market. Join Erwan as he sits down with our Marketing Institute Leader JP Kuehlwein to discuss his book which offers powerful guidance to those both new to the industry, as well as veterans planning for continued success.

Have you ever followed your GPS device to a deserted parking lot? Or unquestioningly followed the advice of an expert—perhaps a doctor or financial adviser—only to learn later that your own thoughts and doubts were correct? Too often, we've stopped thinking for ourselves.

With stark and compelling examples drawn from business, sports, and everyday life, Vikram illustrates how we have outsourced our thinking to a troubling degree, relinquishing our autonomy. Join Vikram as he discusses his new book, which offers an indispensable guide for those looking to restore self-reliant thinking in a data-driven and technology-dependent yet overwhelmingly uncertain world.

In these unprecedented times, when numerous employees are forced to work from remote locations, many wonder how they can continue to operate successfully – even from within the tightest and most chaotic of spaces?

In her timely new book, Working From Home: Making the New Normal Work for You, author and Salesforce executive Karen Mangia explores how to make yourself vital to any organization without ever setting foot in an office building. Join Karen as she discusses her book which provides guidance on how to create a work-from-home culture designed for success and helps team managers and business executives prepare their employees for future work.

Even amid the seeming chaos, there's always that indispensable go-to person who thrives on their many working relationships with people all over the organization chart. How do they do it? In this practical book, talent guru and bestselling author, Bruce Tulgan, reveals the secrets of the go-to person in our new world of work and shows how go-to people think and behave differently, building up their influence with others, regardless of whether they have the formal authority.

Curiosity has profound implications for organizations, leaders and individuals inhabiting today’s digital reality. Pointing to practical tools and case examples, Simon Brown, one of the authors of The Curious Advantage and Chief Learning Officer at Novartis, makes the case for how curiosity can be the greatest driver of value in the new digital economy.

Visit www.Curiousadvantage.com for more info on how to listen to a dedicated podcast and how to buy the book.

What does it take for women to succeed in a male-dominated world? Shannon Huffman Polson would know, serving as one of the Army's first female attack helicopter pilots, and eventually leading an Apache flight platoon on deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina. In her latest book, The Grit Factor, Shannon shares her own life lessons, as well as the candid stories of several other elite military women, to energize and enlighten current and aspiring leaders everywhere — whether male or female.

85% of the active population in the world is disengaged from their work. The dramatic impact on health and well-being, as-well-as the global economy is colossal. Employees and employers are getting stuck in transactional relations. In this podcast Demet Tunc, Council Director at The Conference Board interviews Olivier Onghena on his book 'The Book of Noble Purpose'. Together they explore the root cause of this issue and how bringing noble purpose into our lives, our enterprises, and the society we live in will alter things for the better.

Properly valuing brain gender diversity in the workplace is a competitive advantage. In ‘All the Brains in the Business’ Kate Lanz explores how the brain works and how it impacts the performance of individuals and the teams. Moderated by Demet Tunc, this podcast highlights the importance of knowing about how to enable conditions that create optimal energy flow in the brain. Creating a brain gender friendly work place through understanding the differences in the stress response of the brain and moving from ‘survive’ to ‘thrive’ mode are the main highlights of this podcast.