Audiobooks Narrated by Tom Kruse

Bedtime Stories for Managers: Farewell to Lofty Leadership. . . Welcome Engaging Management

"In forty-two succinct, surprising essays, legendary scholar Henry Mintzberg brings management down from the clouds and onto solid ground. 'Enough of heroic leadership, it's time for engaging management!' is the rallying cry from management and leadership giant Henry Mintzberg. He establishes this theme in the first story in the book, about the CEO of a failing airline who always flew comfortably in first class, blithely unaware of the terrible things happening with his customers in coach (in this case, being served famously inedible scrambled eggs). Managing can't be about sitting where you have become accustomed, insulating yourself--it has to be about eating the scrambled eggs. So Mintzberg urges leaders to call their own call centers, work with their workers, expect extraordinary ideas from ordinary people. Be a keynote listener, not a keynote speaker. Don't say 'top management' if you won't say 'bottom management.' In this best-of collection from his popular, entertaining and irreverent blog, Mintzberg writes that he captures 'a lifetime of learning about managing and organizing and strategizing, while getting out many of the ideas that I buried in obscure publications... If some strike you as outrageous, please understand that my most outrageous ideas tend to be my truest.' This is Mintzberg at his most playful, but always with serious intent."

Henry Mintzberg (Author), Tom Kruse (Narrator)

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Completing Capitalism: Heal Business to Heal the World

"Milton Friedman's 'financial capitalism' business model, which focuses exclusively on maximizing returns to shareholders, has caused tremendous harm to people, planet, and even profits, argue Mars, Inc., executives Bruno Roche and Jay Jakub. They advocate a detailed, field-tested alternative that takes a broader view and enables businesses to do well while doing good. For the past fifty years, the business world has been dominated by the Milton Friedman 'financial capitalism' economic model, which preaches that it is the 'sole social responsibility of business to maximize profit for distribution to shareholders.' This one-dimensional focus represents a grossly incomplete view of reality-businesses need to pay attention to many other factors if they are to thrive and endure-and has resulted in increasing global economic dysfunction, widening inequality, and environmental destruction. In this new book, Roche and Jakub offer a new model that is built around detailed metrics to measure and track performance in all forms of capital, including social, human, and natural, as well as financial. And this is not simply theory: the model has been extensively field-tested in live business pilots in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. It is delivering superior measurable performance across the different forms of capital, including generating more profit than a profit maximization approach. Recent high-profile books like Capital in the Twenty-First Century have exposed the shortcomings of today's financial capitalism model, but this book goes far beyond by describing a well-developed, proven alternative."

Bruno Roche, Jay Jakub (Author), Tom Kruse (Narrator)

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Managing the Myths of Health Care: Bridging the Separations between Care, Cure, Control, and Community

"Management giant Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to health care, arguing that many of the massive issues facing health care stem from the fact that it is not a cohesive system. To heal itself, health care must become less distant and opaque and more engaging and collaborative. Mintzberg begins in part 1 by confronting myths about health care, including the following: - We have a system of health care. - Health-care institutions can be fixed with more heroic leadership. - The health-care system can be fixed by more administrative engineering. - The health-care system can be fixed by more categorizing and commodifying to facilitate more calculating. - The health-care system can be fixed with increased competition. - Health-care organizations can be fixed by running them more like businesses. Part 2 examines how health care is organized, in relation to what we know about differentiation, separation, and integration in organizations and systems in general. Mintzberg shows that in health care, the inclination has been to do an awful lot more differentiating than integrating. This has resulted in all sorts of excessive separations: curtains across the specialties, sheets over the patients, and walls and floors between the administrators. The favored form of organizing health care-the professional organization-is the source of its great strength as well as its debilitating weakness.  Part 3 then offers guidelines to reframe the core components of health care: strategy, organization, scale, ownership, management, and the 'system' itself. For example, managing has to be about care more than cure, and organizing has to favor communityship over leadership, collaboration over competition."

Henry Mintzberg (Author), Tom Kruse (Narrator)

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