Most Popular Books by Bill Burnett

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage • “Life has questions. They have answers.” —The New York Times Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

When Designing Your Life was published in 2016, Stanford’s Bill Burnett and Dave Evans taught readers how to use design thinking to build meaningful, fulfilling lives (“Life has questions. They have answers.” –The New York Times). The book struck a chord, becoming an instant #1 New York Times bestseller. Now, in DESIGNING YOUR WORK LIFE: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness at Work they apply that transformative thinking to the place we spend more time than anywhere else: work. DESIGNING YOUR WORK LIFE teaches readers how to create the job they want—without necessarily leaving the job they already have. “Increasingly, it’s up to workers to define their own happiness and success in this ever-moving landscape,” they write, and chapter by chapter, they demonstrate how to build positive change, wherever you are in your career. Whether you want to stay in your job and make it a more meaningful experience, or if you decide it’s time to move on, Evans and Burnett show you how to visualize and build a work-life that is productive, engaged, meaningful, and more fun.

From the authors of the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life comes a revised, fully up-to-date edition of Designing Your New Work Life, a timely, urgently needed book that shows us how to transform our new uncharted work life into a meaningful dream job or company. With practical, useful tools, tips, and design ideas that show us how to navigate disruption (global, regional, or personal) and create new possibilities for our post-COVID work world and beyond. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life ("The prototype for a happy life." —Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don''t analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward. And now more than ever, we all need creative and adaptable tools to cope with the chaos caused by COVID-19. In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job, and how it can improve our experience of work in times of disruption. All disruption is personal, write Burnett and Evans, as with the life-altering global pandemic we are living through now. Designing Your New Work Life makes clear that disruption is the new normal, that it is here to stay and that it is accelerating. And in the book''s new chapters, Burnett and Evans show us step by step, how to design our way through disruption and how to stay ahead of it—and thrive. Burnett and Evans''s Disruption Design offers us a radical new concept that makes use of the designer mindsets: Curiosity, Reframing, Radical collaboration, Awareness, Bias to action, Storytelling, to find our way through these unchartered times. In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us, with tools, tips, and design ideas, how we can make new possibilities available even when our lives have been disrupted (be it globally, regionally, or personally), giving us the tools to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype our possible future.

Win the job interview using an approach that leverages insights from a Nobel Prize winning psychologist along with discoveries by behavioral economists and neuroscientists. Fundamentally, once you''ve got all the basics right such that you baseline interview will be perfect, then you need to build three peak on top of that baseline. Those peaks will define how the hiring manager evaluates the quality of the interview. With the third edition the author has added a few additional insight and practices that enhance your ability to win the interview. For the past two years Bill Burnett has been advising CEOs in transition and they have repeatedly used The Peak Interview techniques to land their next leadership role.

In this monograph, the author explains why the best salespeople ask questions, the three types of questions they ask, and how those questions influence a prospect''s decision to buy.

We talk to a lot of CEOs. If you''re a CEO (or future CEO) chances are you face the same issues our CEOs face. You worry about: top line revenue and holding onto those key customers; operating margin and how you compare to other industry participants; growth; taxes; regulation; what the competition is up to; customers and what they are going to be influenced by next; and people, your people. And when you think about your competitive advantage and what it depends upon, it is almost entirely dependent upon your people. Your people determine if you hold onto key customers; grow sales; increase margins, out-think the competition; find new opportunities; and grow the business. We know some great CEOs; and the best of them look at their people as key. What you make of your workforce is something your competition cannot copy. It''s your greatest advantage. Every penny you take home is dependent upon your people and their behavior. In your pool of talent you have a few really good contributors. The field service representative who, in talking to a customer, hears her complain about a problem she''s facing. Your rep picks up on it and says, "It''s not my area of expertise, but we have a guy in the company who knows a lot about the system you''re talking about. In two minutes he''d be able to zoom in on what your issue is and probably will know how to fix it. Can I ask him to give you a call?" Or the salesperson who calls you on a Saturday while she''s golfing and tells you she overheard a conversation in the clubhouse and it looks like you have a potential opening with a big prospect you''ve been chasing for months and she wants your okay to jump on it. Or the factory floor worker who walks in pushing a contraption he''s built in his basement that he says will increase the production throughput about 5% once it''s installed, and he turns out to be right. What worries you is that most of your employees are not like this. Most of your employees are ''good'' employees. They work hard, deliver against goal, usually achieving at or near 100%. But at 5pm when they walk out the door, they leave the job behind. They are unlikely to call you from the golf course; or see an opportunity in a client conversation; or think through a problem while on a Sunday walk. If they take anything home from work it might be anger with the boss, or a problem with a coworker, or a box of pencils. You know that these ''good'' employees are both valuable and expensive. However, you also know that the first kind of employee, the one that loves to find and solve problems, is just as expensive but much more valuable. How much more valuable are they? The Gallup Corporation found that when employees fall into that first group, they are emotionally involved and will generate two and a half times more value than the ''good'' employees. How is that value manifest? It shows up in operating margin. Towers Watson did a global study comparing operating margins in companies with different proportions of employees who fit this profile. Where this proportion was high (around 50% of workers) the operating margin was, on average, 17.5 percent of sales stronger. In a $100 million net sales company, that''s an incremental $17.5 million flowing down to the income line. Something happens to employee engagement after that first highly engaged day when the employee shows up for work on their first day. We must first figure out what it is that''s eating-away at employee engagement. The answer to that question is a little surprising. And it explains why companies have been so unsuccessful in improving employee engagement, and enjoying the big sustained boost to the bottom line that follows. In this book we show you the answer to that question. The answer creates a challenge. The challenge is surmountable and we are going to show you how to get there.

To create Advantage in the ''new normal'' market, it will take more than thinking outside the box-leaders must dive inside the box to plug-in the company''s most precious resource: its workforce.

The experiences, some humorous, some inspirational, of a mid-50s couple working as volunteers in the early years of what is now a worldwide, highly successful charitable organization.