Register now to join us Thursday, Dec. 9 at 11 a.m. ET for “Building a Better Boss,” an Open Your World webcast with Bob Sutton and Polly LaBarre.
Bob Sutton, renowned thinker and Stanford professor, will join MIX editorial director Polly LaBarre in a bracing conversation about what it means to be a truly great boss and how to cultivate a work culture that unleashes the best in everyone.
Sutton studies innovation and the links between knowledge and organizational action. He has trained his evidence-based lens on workplaces polluted by jerks and bad bosses. His latest books, The No Asshole Rule and Good Boss, Bad Boss, offer up fresh thinking and profoundly practical pathways forward when it comes to revitalizing the most important relationship at work: the one between you and your boss (and between bosses and the people they manage).
Bob and Polly will discuss (and invite questions on) such topics as:
- What’s wrong with how we think about and develop leaders today? How do we redefine the relationship between managers and the managed to build organizations that are truly fit for the future (and fit for human beings)?
- Diagnose your own dysfunction: what kind of a boss are you? What are the fundamental mindsets and core practices that separate the mediocre from the great?
- How do you assert control without being a control freak? Offer up wisdom and unleash others? Close the gap between talk and action?
- How do you tune into what it feels like to work for you—and set the most productive “emotional tone” in your workplace?
- What does it take to master the crucial dynamic between great performance and genuine humanity?
- What’s the best way to fight the corrosive effects of “power poisoning”—whether you’re the boss or the bossed?
About Bob Sutton
Robert Sutton is Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, where he is Co-director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization, an active researcher and cofounder in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, and a cofounder and active member of the “d.school,” a multi-disciplinary program that teaches and spreads “design thinking.” He has published over 150 articles, in places ranging from peer-reviewed journals, to the Harvard Business Review, to Esquire magazine. His books include Weird Ideas That Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation; The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Firms Turn Knowledge into Action (with Jeffrey Pfeffer); Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (also with Jeffrey Pfeffer); and The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. His new book is the national bestseller Good Boss, Badd Boss: How to Be the Best—and Learn from the Worst. Bob blogs at Work Matters.
About Polly LaBarre
Polly LaBarre is a bestselling author, speaker, and all-around storyteller who has contributed to the business conversation for fifteen years. Currently, she is the editorial director of the MIX, a pioneering open innovation project dedicated to reinventing management for the 21st century. Polly is the co-author of Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (which The Economist named a “Book of the Year” and called “a pivotal work in the tradition of In Search of Excellence and Good to Great” and has since been published in 16 countries around the world). She was a member of the original team of Fast Company magazine, where she was senior editor for the better part of a decade. More recently, Polly has served as a business and innovation correspondent for CNN.
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